Corpus ID: 144257691

Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

@inproceedings{Mehta1999LiberalismAE,
  title={Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought},
  author={U. Mehta},
  year={1999}
}

U. Mehta

Published 1999

Sociology

One takes liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Singh Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human… CONTINUE READING

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