Suchergebnisse

The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados.

This essay reconsiders British imperial administrative thought through the lens of Domenico Losurdo's «counter-history of liberalism». The liberal reflection of a select number of British colonial governors and administrators is analysed around three major imperial crises: the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By adopting a global perspective on these processes, the essay shows how the administrators of the British Empire contributed to the debates around some key notions of the modern liberal lexicon (empire, liberty, equality, citizenship, sovereignty, civilization) in a way that linked the United States independence to the French and the Haitian Revolutions, the emancipation of the West Indian enslaved to the work discipline of British labourers, and the constitutional developments in the colonies to the electoral reforms extending the franchise to the middle and the working classes in 19th-century Britain. The article especially focuses on the categories of government and order as the core concepts for a history of imperial administrative thought. Midway between theory and praxis, at the junction of state and society, and traveling from the metropole to the colonies (and back), British imperial administrators combined their speculation upon politics and society with the concrete implementation of governmental and legal techniques aimed to produce social and international order. Counter-history of liberalism; British Empire; administration; Global History; Government; Order.

Questa tesi è un'analisi storico-concettuale del pensiero politico di alcuni tra i più influenti amministratori dell'Impero britannico tra la metà del XVIII e la fine del XIX secolo. Si vedrà come gli eccezionali momenti di crisi che caratterizzarono questo secolo e mezzo della storia imperiale (la Rivoluzione americana, l'abolizione della schiavitù e il Sepoy Mutiny, ma anche l'emergere delle rivendicazioni dei lavoratori in Gran Bretagna) spinsero le figure amministrative attraverso l'Impero a ripensare alcune categorie del pensiero politico. L'obiettivo è quello di tracciare le evoluzioni nella concezione della sovranità imperiale britannica decostruendo le auto-narrazioni del liberalismo moderno, tanto le sue logiche spaziali (la scissione dello spazio imperiale in Stato e mondo coloniale) quanto quelle temporali (la concezione progressiva del tempo storico). Il pensiero politico degli amministratori appare un campo d'indagine particolarmente proficuo a questo scopo: essi – a metà tra teoria e prassi, al punto di congiunzione tra Stato e società, e in viaggio dalla metropoli alla colonia – applicarono la teoria liberale appresa in Inghilterra al governo dell'Impero, e così facendo ne portarono alla luce aporie e cortocircuiti. Alla fine della parabola del pensiero imperiale che qui si delinea, si vedrà come la crisi dell'idea di progresso si porti dietro la disillusione circa ogni rassicurante pretesa di aver neutralizzato il conflitto nello spazio domestico, espellendolo nelle colonie: il tentativo fallito della civilising mission liberale di normalizzare le gerarchie sociali e razziali in un ordine borghese stabile portò a ripensare la sovranità come un management che, fondando la riproduzione del rule of law su un gerarchico principio di governo, fronteggiasse efficientemente i conflitti su scala imperiale. Nello spazio imperiale globale di fine Ottocento, la tensione tra «home» e «abroad» pare infine risolversi, e la colonia diventa il campo di sperimentazione di strategie di governo per correggere i problemi della madrepatria. ; My doctoral thesis is a historical-conceptual analysis of the political thought of some of the most influential administrators of the British empire between the 1750s and the 1890s. The exceptional moments of crisis which characterized these 150 years of British imperial history (the American revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the Sepoy mutiny, but also the emergence of working class's claims in Britain) led administrative agents across the empire to rethink some crucial categories of political thought. This thesis is aimed at tracing the evolutions in the conception of British imperial sovereignty and deconstructing the self-narratives of modern liberalism, both in its spatial logics (the opposition between state and empire) and in its temporal logics (the teleological conception of historical time). The political thought of imperial administrators appears as a fruitful field of investigation to this end: the governors – who were midway between theory and practice, placed at the junction point between state and society, and who travelled from the metropole to the colonies – applied the liberal theory they learnt in Britain to the government of the empire, unveiling its inconsistencies and shadows. At the end of this historical reconstruction of British imperial thought, administrative figures realized the impracticable dream of neutralizing conflict at home, by expelling it in colonial dominions. Instead, their failed attempt to normalize social and racial hierarchies within a steady social order, pushed them to rethink sovereignty as a management able to successfully face conflicts on the imperial scale, by founding the reproduction of the rule of law on a harshly hierarchical power of government. In the global imperial space of the late 19th century, the opposition between "home" and "abroad" eventually collapsed, and the colony was assumed as the laboratory of experimentation of governmental strategies in order to amend metropolitan problems.

AbstractBy tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary "Plan", and his disciples (the "Spencean Philanthropists") in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence ("Spenceanism") across the British Empire and the United States. By applying Digital Humanities methods to investigate British radical history from a transnational perspective, the global reception of Spenceanism is reconstructed by examining and comparing a corpus of 275 newspaper articles through text-mining methods such as keyword analysis, co-occurrences, and sentiment analysis. These methods enable the identification of key themes in references to Spenceanism and advance hypotheses concerning both their geographical and chronological distribution: not only when and where Spence and the Spenceans were alluded to and commented upon, but also how a newspaper's geographical location may have impacted its rhetoric in a specific year and historical context. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article contributes new insights regarding the global circulation of radical ideas across the nineteenth-century English-reading world.