Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Berkeley Series in British Studies) (Volume 10) - Softcover

O'Neill, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520287835 ISBN 13: 9780520287839

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism’s founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O’Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland.  Moreover—and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism—O’Neill demonstrates that Burke’s defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke’s logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between “civilized” societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing “savage” societies from their “civilized” counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke’s argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism. 

About this title

About the Author

Daniel I. O’Neill is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy.

From the Back Cover

"Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire is a book of great originality, intellectual power and lucid argument, and a major reappraisal of Burke. The Burke who emerges from these pages is no proto-liberal who later and paradoxically became a conservative in the aftermath of 1789. On the contrary, O'Neill insists he was always a conservative and always an imperialist and that, with very few exceptions, his thought was exceptionally coherent, consistent, and systematic. This is an impressive piece of revisionism."—David Cannadine, author of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire and The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences
 
"Bold and original, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire is an important intervention in debates about the history of imperial ideology and their continuing legacy. Challenging recent scholarly trends, Daniel O’Neill presents a powerful case that Burke offered a consistent and distinctive justification of empire, one that resonated through the nineteenth century and beyond."—Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge

"Recent scholars have decided that Edmund Burke was neither a conservative nor an imperialist. Daniel O'Neill assails those views and illuminates the modern politics of empire. His book is impeccably researched, powerfully argued, elegantly written, and devastatingly persuasive. Don't miss it."—Don Herzog, author of Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders

From the Inside Flap

"Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire is a book of great originality, intellectual power and lucid argument, and a major reappraisal of Burke. The Burke who emerges from these pages is no proto-liberal who later and paradoxically became a conservative in the aftermath of 1789. On the contrary, O'Neill insists he was always a conservative and always an imperialist and that, with very few exceptions, his thought was exceptionally coherent, consistent, and systematic. This is an impressive piece of revisionism."&;David Cannadine, author of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire and The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences
 
"Bold and original, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire is an important intervention in debates about the history of imperial ideology and their continuing legacy. Challenging recent scholarly trends, Daniel O&;Neill presents a powerful case that Burke offered a consistent and distinctive justification of empire, one that resonated through the nineteenth century and beyond."&;Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge

"Recent scholars have decided that Edmund Burke was neither a conservative nor an imperialist. Daniel O'Neill assails those views and illuminates the modern politics of empire. His book is impeccably researched, powerfully argued, elegantly written, and devastatingly persuasive. Don't miss it."&;Don Herzog, author of Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire

By Daniel I. O'Neill

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28783-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Edmund Burke's Conservative Logic of Empire, 
Chapter 1 • Burke and Empire in Context, 
Chapter 2 • The New World, 
Chapter 3 • India, 
Chapter 4 • Ireland, 
Conclusion: Ornamentalism, Orientalism, and the Legacy of Burke's Conservative Logic of Empire, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Burke and Empire in Context

EDMUND BURKE WAS BORN INTO a world increasingly governed by empires and imperial rivalry. To understand Burke's conception of empire, we must begin with the definition of the term itself and what it had come to mean for the British in the eighteenth century. The English word empire is derived from the Latin imperium, whose literal meaning is "supreme power or command." Initially, imperium referred to the authority of a magistrate to act in the name of Rome and its citizens. Over time, therefore, the term became closely allied with sovereignty, originally understood as the power to apply Rome's laws. In the beginning there was a distinct division between the domestic and external realms subject to this power. However, eventually imperium (and hence empire) came to connote unlimited authority over both spheres. The "Roman Empire" thus came to be understood as a single extended territorial unit encompassing different political and cultural communities under one sovereign power, and our modern understanding of empire has inherited this broader meaning.

The terms colony (and colonialism, etc.) derive from another Latin word, colonus, meaning "farmer." Here, the etymology appropriately reminds us that colonial practices are best understood as one subset of imperial practices, involving the large-scale transfer of settler populations from the metropole to peripheral territories, where the new arrivals "planted" themselves permanently in the soil while maintaining political allegiance to their home country.

From this perspective we can see that eighteenth-century Britain was both imperial, as in the case of India (which had no large-scale British settler population), and colonial, as in the case of North America and (to a lesser extent) the West Indies. Ireland was a more difficult case to define in these terms. Unlike all of the other nodal points of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, it was technically a "kingdom by conquest," but one with a large and well-established colonial population by the eighteenth century.

As it unfolded during the 1700s, the concept of empire underwent a transformation based on the practices and interests of British policy makers. The earlier notion of imperium as sovereignty or military rule (including rule over a large geographically contiguous area) expanded to cover a wider range of interwoven phenomena. The eighteenth-century British Empire included territories marked by conquest and overseas colonization, but also those linked by new networks of commerce, often coexisting in overlapping and complex fashion. Additionally, regardless of any discrete terminological division, the British actually engaged in acts of conquest not only in the "kingdom" of Ireland but also against the Native Americans in the "colonial" context and on the Indian subcontinent in the more old-fashioned and narrowly "imperial" one. In order to understand Burke's overarching logic of empire, ther

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520287835
• ISBN 13: 9780520287839
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266