Book project: The Dawn of Imperial Democracy: British Progressives and the Dilemmas of Empire, c. 1880–1914

My current book project examines the moment in the late-nineteenth century when metropolitan Britain, the seat of the world’s most powerful empire, was declared to have become a democratic state. I argue that this was a pivotal moment in the history of modern democratic thought, which set the stage for the global contest over democracy’s meaning in the era of decolonisation. In its wake, it became possible to think of democracy as normatively and empirically fused to global empire—to speak of what W. E. B. Du Bois would soon call democratic despotism. This book manuscript, titled The Dawn of Imperial Democracy, traces this fateful conceptual turn and explores how progressive and radical metropolitan thinkers imagined and contested the relationship between democracy and global empire.

Peer-reviewed articles

‘Hobson on White Parasitism and Its Solutions’, Political Theory, 52/1 (2024), 120–145 – [abstract / full article / PDF ]

‘Dissolving the Colour Line: L. T. Hobhouse on Race and Liberal Empire’, European Journal of Political Theory 23/1 (2024), 85–106 – [abstract / full article / PDF]

• Winner of the EJPT’s best research article of the year, the Carlo Argenton prize, for its ‘meticulous historical research and its success in speaking to wider theoretical debates about race, hierarchy, and liberalism’ (full announcement here)