A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France [Hardcover]

Burke, Smith, Bentham, Mill, and the Enlightenment play a critical role in how we conceive of the American political predicament, which is why the names still grace undergraduate syllabi. Five to seven page papers are written by eager nineteen-year-olds, and then arguments are forgotten en masse, even as the issues with which these thinkers wrestle remain in play in the form of immigration reform, Haliburton regulation, South American agri-businesses, the task of making moral judgments across profoundly diverse societies, and the American idea of a just war.

Pitts' political project is to show how imperialism and colonialism, while inextricably tied to the Western 19th century political legacy, was a fashion that came into vogue, a system of oppression borne of contingent circumstance rather than a logical, necessary outgrowth of economic and political liberalism.

She shows how Adam Smith's work, while serving as a foundation of economic and political thought, inveighs unambiguously against colonization. Smith decried colonization as an inefficient practice that exists not for profit, generally diffused, but for the vulgar pride of the home-world masses and the material interests of a select group of private company men. Pitts details Smith's nuanced, practical arguments concerning how maintaining colonies serves as an unnecessary drain on the national economy by shunting tax dollars towards colonial military protection. In addition, Smith points out how much easier it is to countenance the immoderate abuses of oppressed laborers, from a distance. Pitts' arguments bring to mind the great shame of how Smith's "invisible hand" has gained so much esteem over the years, but his warnings against imbalanced, rapacious private interests have been lost. Thankfully, Pitts rescues these arguments and places them in the forefront.

She proceeds to discuss Edmund Burke, a fascinating figure and champion of political conservative institutions, who witnessed Indian labor degradation at the hands of the East India Company and went on to try Governor-General Warren Hastings for this malfeasance. Pitts uses the Hastings trial as a metaphor to flesh out Burke's thoughts concerning the confused array of responsibilities that belonged to the violent oppression of foreign labor with the aid of English Government arms; who is at fault/complicit? The trial splays Burke's evolving views on English Imperialism and the limits of government moral responsibility for private international acts.

Pitts then traces the trajectory of imperialism through Bentham, James Mill, and J.S. Mill. All three are attached to the term utilitarianism, but Pitts keys in on how differing accounts of the concept of progress and the ability of individuals to determine their own path to happiness, rather than violent government paternalism as a civilizing force, manifests in their three radically different approaches to the colonial enterprise.

Pitts fiercely blazes through Constant, with energy and aplomb and keen moral sense, aided, of course, by Constant's energy, aplomb and keen moral sense, and ends her treatment of Imperialism with what at first seems a loosely tethered discussion of Tocqueville. At first, I did not believe that her scholarship remained as focused during the beginning of the Tocqueville section, but then Pitts' anecdotal approach to Tocqueville gestalts in her final strokes, allowing a frightening portrait of Tocqueville to emerge. Tocqueville is portrayed as an outstanding scholar, insightful and aware of all of the degradation and oppression required to maintain French colonization of Algeria. He was sympathetic to the plight of the natives and without delusions that colonization civilizes barbarians. Still, Tocqueville baldly argues for colonization for the greater glory of France in this new world where other esteemed powers have colonies, in what amounts to a grand and awful rendition of keeping up with the Jones. Pitts ends this section successfully portraying Tocqueville as deeply humane, perceptive, artistic, and yet still, with both eyes open, severe man, advocating for imperialism. It's haunting.