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It was a clear autumn morning in Calcutta, shortly after the holiday of Durga Puja. At the end of a narrow lane towered a giant image of the white tenarmed goddess, Shiva’s female incarnation,which had been built for the festivities out of bamboo slats, papier-mâché, and a considerable quantity of lurid paint. Earlier, I had walked through what appeared to be Calcutta’s central banana depot, where whole branches of cascading bananas were being unloaded by the truckload and stacked as high as firewood outside a mountain cabin. Another turning led into a street thick with the toasted smell of cooking oil, where men sat rolling and frying bright yellow sweets called laddoos, heaping them up, once cooked, in tall cones. But there, ahead of me, was the most unexpected sight of all: a vast Palladian villa, set off by a pair of wrought-iron gates, rising behind the cramped alleys like a painted stage set.

The Marble Palace, as this place is called, is only partly a house. Ever since it was built, in 1835, its owners, an orthodox Hindu family named Mullick, have filled their mansion with art and objects from all over Europe and have opened it to visitors—which makes the Marble Palace India’s “first museum of Western art.” I would learn more about the contents and the history of the Marble Palace on another day. But that morning, as I walked past the baroque fancies in the front garden and up the shallow steps, I had the feeling that I was wandering into an alternate, wonderfully unknown world. I sat on a high, cracked leather banquette in the Billiard Room. Plaster and marble images of Greek gods peered out from the walls, and ceiling fans like the propellers of World War II bombers loomed overhead. Though the honking city was just a few hundred feet away, the only sound here was birdsong, from a veritable aviary of wire cages in the courtyard beyond. It was like Dickens gone native.

It is so easy to dwell on the sheer cultural oddity of this kind of place, plainly the creation of individual sensibilities, and so at variance with its surroundings. But what if one tries to make sense of it on its own terms? I visited the Marble Palace in the course of my research on the cultural history of the British Empire. Most of what I had read about empire and culture drew a detailed if rather insidious picture of white European colonizers trying to supplant, appropriate, or denigrate the non-European peoples and societies they encountered. More attention was paid to how Europeans responded to non-Europeans than vice versa, and emphasis tended to be placed more on conflict than on convergence. But here was something quite different: a site genuinely embedded in the cultures of both East and West, and a vestige of empire still very much alive. What would it be like, I wondered, to enter imperial history through a gateway like this? What would empire look like from the inside out?

The Marble Palace was just one of many unexpected juxtapositions of East and West that I encountered while writing this book. There was the heart-stopping moment of finding the Mughal emperor’s letters in the back room of an archive in the French Alps, folded into narrow strips and bunched into a battered metal chest, as if untouched since being read by their Savoyard recipient two hundred years before. There was my discovering, one sunbaked noon in the deserted ruins of an Egyptian temple, the name of a longdead English diplomat scratched feebly into the stone—a sad grasp at immortality. Then there was spotting his arch rival’s signature in New York, of all places, carved on an inner wall of the Temple of Dendur, beneath the glass ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was visiting an impeccably Tuscan villa on a hillside at the edge of Florence, only to find in it a sword with a tiger-headed hilt, seized in 1799 from the South Indian city of Seringapatam during one of the British Empire’s most dramatic battles.

None of these scattered testaments—ranging across Europe and even America, as well as Britain and its former empire—is the kind of evidence that figures in most books about the British Empire. That history tends to be impersonal, sometimes doctrinaire, and often leaves out the wider context of Europe and the rest of the non-imperial world. At the heart of this book, by contrast, are these material remains and the stories behind them. Each one of these vestiges was left by a person who lived in India or Egypt, on the eastern frontiers of what became the British Empire, at a time when enduring cultural, social, and political boundaries between East and West were taking shape. These are the legacies of men and women who engaged with foreign cultures in tangible ways: as collectors of objects. Collectors bought, commissioned, traded, plundered, stole, captured, quested; they preserved and at times destroyed; they moved and coveted; they lost and remembered. In their lives and legacies, they bridged East and West, and make beguiling escorts into an intimate, little-known history of empire.

They also hold up a mirror to the larger story of how Britain itself collected an empire, in India and beyond. The century from 1750 to 1850 was a formative one for Britain and the British Empire. In 1750, Britain was an island in a sea of empires—a small island: with a population of eight million, it was only half the size of its historic enemy France, an imbalance that provoked tremendous national anxiety.¹ Britain’s colonial empire was also comparatively modest. In the Atlantic world, Spain and Portugal remained major powers. France posed a greater challenge. Though Britain’s North American colonies dwarfed neighboring New France (boasting 2.5 million settlers to New France’s paltry 70,000), France threatened to link up its settlements in the Great Lakes with those along the Mississippi, choking off the thirteen colonies and laying claim to the beckoningWest. In the Mediterranean and Middle East, Britain’s presence was minimal compared with that of France, Spain, or the Italian states. In India, it was just one of several European nations—including Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark—to maintain “factories,” or trading outposts, along the coast. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch dominated trade to east and southeast Asia (the Netherlands controlled the valuable spice islands of modern-day Indonesia); and the South Pacific, later a region of intense Anglo-French rivalry, would not be seriously explored by Britain until Captain James Cook set off on his first voyage, in 1768.

But by 1850, the world, and Britain’s position in it, looked dramatically different. Britain had become the world’s first and largest industrialized nation, with a population almost three times larger than in 1750 and now heavily urban. Unlike almost every region of Europe, it had escaped the devastations of invasion, revolution, and civil war. Within Europe, Britain enjoyed unprecedented diplomatic and political authority, as well as industrial, commercial, and financial preeminence. Overseas, few of Britain’s former imperial rivals could compete. Of the old colonial powers, France alone offered some counterweight, its empire relaunched with the invasion of Algeria in 1830. But at midcentury, the greatest challengers to British global power were still partly in the making: the United States and Russia, empires both, each racing toward the Pacific. The British Empire in 1850 encompassed a quarter of the globe, stretching from Ottawa to Auckland, Capetown to Calcutta, Singapore to Spanish Town. One in five people in the world was Queen Victoria’s subject; many millions more (in Argentina or Portugal, for instance) lived in states bankrolled and indirectly steered by Britain. With this tremendous geographical expansion also came consistency of purpose, personnel, and culture, linking the empire’s many and disparate parts. The British Empire would always have its critics, at home and abroad; it would also always be more coherent in name (or on a map) than in practice. But by 1850, many Britons had come to see the empire as a fundamental part of what Britain itself was about, a key component of national identity. The imperial sun had risen, and seemed unlikely to set.

This book chronicles Britain’s rise to global power along two eastern frontiers, in India and Egypt. Those regions were to become the geopolitical gateposts of Britain’s empire in “the East,” where British influence expanded most dramatically after 1750. They were also the cornerstones of a Western conception of “the Orient,” where Europe’s encounter with cultural difference was at its most varied and complex. My narrative unfolds at the edge of empire in time as well as in space—before the formal limits of British rule were fixed, and from the perspective of people and places on the margins of metropolitan power. This history of British imperialism is very much a history of French empire, too, and of the role played by Anglo-French rivalry in determining the shape of both nations’ interests in the East. But most of all, this book is about how real people experienced imperial expansion from within. How did it feel to live in this vast and changing world? And how does that world look different when seen through the eyes of collectors?

By investigating imperial expansion through a practice and those who indulged in it—collecting and collectors—I am deliberately taking an unconventional approach. This is partly to recover new profiles and experiences from the past. But these personal encounters also offer a different perspective on the relationship of culture and imperialism more generally. I do not interpret collecting as a transparent or programmatic expression of imperial power, the playing-out of an “imperial project.” Rather, the history of collecting reveals the complexities of empire; it shows how power and culture intersected in tangled, contingent, sometimes self-contradictory ways. Instead of seeing collecting as a manifestation of imperial power, I see the British Empire itself as a kind of collection: pieced together and gaining definition over time, shaped by a range of circumstances, accidents, and intentions.

The men and women who populate these pages are not, for the most part, the sorts of people who usually appear in history books. For one thing, they are not defined by conventional social attributes, such as occupation, religion, class, or even ethnicity or nationality. Instead, they shared a habit and interest that cut across imperial society: from princes, officers, functionaries, and traders, through to tourists, wives, artists, and adventurers. Imperial collectors ranged from household names of imperial history, such as Robert Clive and Napoleon Bonaparte, to fringe unknowns such as the minor English diplomat Henry Salt or the eccentric Irish-born soldier Charles “Hindoo” Stuart. Inevitably, who counts as a collector is somewhat arbitrary—and though some of the figures I describe here were passionately dedicated to acquiring objects, others were collectors more by circumstance, hanging on to artifacts that had crossed their paths. But they all shared one crucial characteristic: all of them used objects to advertise, hone, or shape their social personæ. Collecting was a means of self-fashioning.² In fact, the connection between collecting and self-fashioning was itself a cross-cultural phenomenon, extending from Europeans who valued art collecting as a sign of their being true gentlemen, to Indian princes who collected objects from far-off lands to enhance their personal charisma.

Imperial collectors reached across the lines of cultural difference. It is easy to speak of a “clash of civilizations” when cultures are distilled to the point of abstraction. But real people in the real world do not necessarily experience other cultures in a confrontational or monolithic way. What the stories of imperial collectors make clear is how much the process of cultural encounter involved crossing and mixing, as well as separation and division. Recovering the sheer variety of life “on the ground” in an empire, and its points of empathy, seems especially important now, when theoretical and ideological discussion of empire is prevalent but the willingness to engage with and understand other cultures often is not.

These stories also counterbalance the tendency in postcolonial scholarship to portray Europe’s imperial collision with the rest of the world as a fundamentally oppositional, one-sided affair: the sad, sordid tale of how Western powers imposed hegemony—technological, economic, military, and cultural—over non-Western societies. From Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), which emphasizes the capacity of Western discourse to define and dominate an Eastern “other”; to the influential Indian journal Subaltern Studies; to more recent work on forms of hybridity—much academic energy has gone into tracing how “the West” exerted and expressed its power over “the rest.”³ To be sure, that is in large part what European empires tried to do. But imperialism is not a one-way street, and power and culture do not always march in lockstep. Alongside trying to understand how European power got asserted over others, one should also consider how others changed and challenged it.

The archives are bursting with as-yet-untold stories of people living on the eastern edges of empire—camp followers, for example, or interpreters, or even common soldiers (about whom surprisingly little has been written), or women and children—whose experiences all warrant research. Collectors make excellent guides across imperial frontiers because of their active, tangible engagement with other cultures, and their preoccupation with status and self-fashioning. Furthermore, by moving objects to Europe, they played an active role in representing foreign cultures to a wider Western public. Many major museum collections of Indian and Egyptian objects—so often assumed to be the product of institutional plunder and appropriation—actually owe their origins to the acutely personal tastes and ambitions of individuals profiled here.

Just telling their stories, then, is the central goal of this book. But like the little mirrors stitched into an embroidered Gujarati cloth, these stories reflect back many features of the larger world in which they are set. How does the big picture look—and how does it look different—when you start small? Next to, and through, these personal histories, I also consider how the broader trajectory of British imperialism in the East was a more complex and uncertain process than traditional narratives suggest. Here, too, the image of empire that comes into view may look unfamiliar.

There was a time when people recounted the rise of the British Empire as a triumphal progress: “heaven’s command,” a sure thing, and a good one.⁴ Indeed, some still tell the imperial story in this way. Equally one-sided, though of an entirely opposing political cast, were the portrayals of empire by postcolonial nationalists, who represented the British Empire as an insidious behemoth. Neither of these attitudes earns unqualified support from serious scholars today. Yet there is still more than a hint of teleology in discussions of empire, a sense that the end was inevitable: the white man won, the burden was shouldered, the colonized shut out.⁵ This book, by contrast, stresses the obstacles to Britain’s imperial success. British expansion was hotly contested both by indigenous powers and by European rivals, notably France. It was also only questionably “British,” since Britain depended heavily on continental Europeans, and increasingly on imperial subjects, for manpower and support. Seeing the cracks and insecurities in British power helps explain why and when the empire took the peculiar forms it did.⁶

Where most accounts of British expansion tend to say little about Britain’s rivals and opponents, the overarching narrative offered here concerns the wider global context in which British power was forged, and challenged. First, the history of the British Empire must be understood together with the history of France and its empire—and specifically, as a history of Anglo-French war. For the nearly six decades between the beginning of the Seven Years War in 1756 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Britain and France fought for more than three. This was the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern “total war.” In Britain, war with France dominated politics, finance, and culture.⁷ In France, war with Britain had catastrophic consequences for the state, the economy, and ultimately the monarchy. It was also global war. Fought on multiple continents, in defense of imperial interests, it decisively affected the pace, motives, and direction of British and French imperial expansion. Even after Waterloo—when Britain’s global hegemony reached its height—France continued to influence British imperial expansion and imperial desires. In the Ottoman Empire, coveted by both powers, France, if anything, seemed to have the upper hand. Even in India, where conventional wisdom holds that French ambitions died by the 1760s, some French policy makers harbored dreams of renewal, through allies in the Punjab. In short, to write the history of the British Empire without including France would be like writing about the United States during the cold war without mentioning the Soviet Union. France vitally influenced the shaping of the modern British Empire.

The second way my big picture of the British Empire differs from most rests in its emphasis on locations where British power was informal and in the making, rather than on sites that Britain openly conquered, occupied, and ruled. Empire is a flexible term, and interpreting it in a flexible way lets one understand the whole range of mechanisms by which European powers sought and built empires over time. Egypt did not officially join the British Empire until it was made a protectorate in 1914. Even India, considered the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, was never entirely British. At the time of its independence, in 1947, a full third of the subcontinent was in the hands of nominally independent princes. And before 1857—for the whole period covered by this book—the parts of India that were “British” were ruled not by the British government directly but by the private East India Company, under partial parliamentary supervision.

Throughout this period, all of Egypt and much of India continued to be the preserve of long-established Eastern imperial rulers—the Ottomans and the Mughals. Though at times the Mughal and Ottoman régimes may have looked like window dressing to European empire, their persistence was significant for several reasons. It suggested, for one thing, just how much Britain, and to a certain extent France, derived its own imperial legitimacy from older, non-European reservoirs of power. It also meant, particularly in the case of India, that cultural fusions were embedded in the very workings of the imperial state, everywhere from legal systems and tax collection to rituals, ranks, and personnel. European powers inherited—and often purposely echoed—Mughal and Ottoman ways of ruling. Finally, as long as the Mughal and Ottoman figureheads endured, the game was not up between European powers, who continued to struggle among themselves for behind-the-scenes influence. In all these respects, British rule in Mughal and Ottoman domains took shape as something far less “British” and less formal than its later incarnations might suggest.

Over the century from 1750 to 1850, Britain “collected” an Eastern empire in India and beyond, beginning with Bengal and adding other domains from there. This is certainly not to say that there was no system, no grand narrative, to imperial expansion. Britain did not simply acquire its empire, as the Victorian historian J. R. Seeley famously remarked, “in a fit of absence of mind.”⁸ If anything, and as Seeley knew, it did so in a fit, many decades long, of war with France. But by characterizing British imperial expansion in this period as collecting writ large, I also want to suggest that it was more piecemeal, contingent, uncertain—and in many ways collaborative—than the familiar language of an “imperial project” would suggest.

Britain itself resembled an imperial collector in two important respects. Like the individual collectors described here, Britain was in some senses marginal. It was marginal to Mughal, Ottoman, and other indigenous régimes, whose material and technological resources rightly gave it pause and whose manpower easily outstripped its own. It was also, and certainly felt itself to be, marginal to other European rivals, chiefly France.

And, like other collectors, Britain used collecting to reinvent itself, to define its sense of imperial purpose. In 1750, the British Empire had been primarily Atlantic, colonial, and mercantile, bolstered by an ideology of Protestantism and liberty.⁹ This was self-consciously different from the land empires of Catholic Europe, “the Orient,” and even ancient Rome, which were widely critiqued as tyrannical, despotic, and autocratic.¹⁰ Yet the empire Britain had come to possess by 1850 was just that: a transcontinental entity formed by conquest and entailing direct rule over millions of manifestly foreign subjects. What was more, many Britons—so skeptical of land empires only a few generations before—were proud of this. For if war against France had effectively won Britain a new empire, it had also consolidated a new understanding of what Britain stood for, both as a nation and an imperial power.¹¹ Earlynineteenth-century British liberals began to articulate a new political ideology that encompassed both nation and empire in a shared set of terms.¹² Liberal reforms ensured that by the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne, in 1837, her Catholic subjects could sit in Parliament; her indigent subjects could be fed and housed (albeit not pleasantly) at state expense; and her middle-class subjects, most of them for the first time, could vote. Crucially, with the abolition of slavery in 1833, no Briton would ever again legally own—or be—a slave.

The imperial ramifications of the liberal ideal were set out most clearly in a neo-Roman vision of a British imperium that would embrace all subjects in a fold of “British” rights. This was the note so ringingly sounded in 1850 by Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Anglo-Irish, Scottish-educated, fluently multilingual, and outspokenly imperialist foreign secretary, when, leaping to the defense of an abused British imperial subject, he proclaimed: “As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”¹³ Who was the British subject in question? Don David Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, born in Gibraltar (and thus British) and living in Greece.

There was more than a little political theater in this, to say nothing of selfrighteousness. Nevertheless, Palmerston and his peers recognized a truth about imperial expansion that is easy to lose sight of now, when so much emphasis is placed on the ways in which the British Empire worked to exclude various others from an essentially white, male, Christian, empowered mainstream. Empires include people and cultures.¹⁴ When their boundaries grow, no matter how rigid they become, they contain more within. Indeed the central challenge for nineteenth-century Britain to survive as an empire, and as a nation, was to find ways of accommodating difference, especially overseas. Of course there were paradoxes here. But imperial expansion, Britishness, and cross-cultural inclusion were joined at the hip—and however awkward, stumbling, and painful their progress, they hobbled along together.

This does not mean that the British (or any other) Empire was somehow immune from racism, repression, violence, or prejudice of all kinds. But the “white man’s burden” attitude of the late nineteenth century should not be imposed over this earlier, denser, more complicated entangling of human experiences.¹⁵ The chauvinistic ethos popularly associated with the British Empire did not drive imperial expansion in the East. On the contrary, it hardened only after Europeans had for generations accrued influence in Eastern domains. It hardened in the context of global Anglo-French war. And this imperial ethos was a misleading and inaccurate construction to boot, because British hegemony was never as total as its cheerleaders (or many of its critics today) tended to suggest. Indeed, to some extent the “white man’s burden” was a piece of wishful thinking, a way of justifying and compensating for, with rhetorical and moral purpose, the fundamental vulnerabilities and contradictions embedded in British imperial rule.

I have organized my narrative of how Britain collected its Eastern empire into three chronological sections, moving from India to Egypt; they could loosely be considered to address places, powers, and personalities, in turn. The first third of the book describes in detail the sheer cosmopolitanism of late-eighteenth-century India, beginning with the East India Company’s acquisition of Bengal, and the uphill struggle of its great generalissimo—and collector—Robert Clive, to make a place for himself in British society. It then visits the vibrant North Indian city of Lucknow, just beyond the bounds of Company control, which flourished as a haven for collectors and cultural chameleons of all kinds. The middle three chapters focus on a pivotal moment in British imperial collecting: the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British capture of Seringapatam, in South India, in 1799. Though fought on different continents, and against two different Muslim opponents, these campaigns were in fact linked fronts in the same Anglo-French war. Together they marked a shift in British imperial policy toward one of active conquest, of “collecting” territory along India’s frontiers and borders. In these years, Britain and France also became imperial collectors of objects as never before; notably, the campaigns yielded the first imperial trophies to go on public display in Britain. The last portion of the book traces collecting and empire in early-nineteenth-century Egypt, where ongoing Anglo-French rivalry for political influence was channeled into an open war to collect antiquities. Finally, I reflect on some of the ways in which, even in an age of more rigid cultural stratifications, collecting on imperial frontiers—by individuals and by the imperial state—continued to subvert, manipulate, and distort cultural boundaries to enduring effect.

So familiar is the late-nineteenth-century empire of crowns and trumpets (or, more accurately, pith helmets and bagpipes), of white church steeples among the palm trees, gin and tonics on club verandas, and rubicund Englishmen attended by bevies of native servants, that it is sometimes difficult to think back to an earlier period before the ideology of an imperial “civilizing mission” was in place. This book endeavors to do just that. It steps back into a time and into places where people lived, loved, fought, and identified themselves in ways considerably more complicated than later imperial chauvinism, or even many present-day treatments of empire, might suggest.

Most of all, this book is a plea for bringing a human dimension to imperial history, a topic that is often treated in the abstract, whether by sweeping chroniclers of conquest or by postcolonial critics of imperial discourse. These collectors and their world have vanished. But the objects they collected, moved, and brought together still tender proof of their passion. In Britain and its former colonies—indeed, around the world—the artifacts give hard evidence of the human contacts that underpinned the otherwise intangible quantities of globalization and empire. In no way do I wish to make an advertisement or an apology for empire, past, present, or future. But empires are a fact of world history. The important question for this book is not whether they are “good” or “bad,” but what they do, whom they affect, and how. To the extent the history offered here seeks to reflect on a newer age of empire, it is to make an appeal for remembering the essential humanity of successful international relationships: for borrowing, learning, adapting, and giving. For collecting, and for recollecting.

1. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp. 4-10. The population anxiety was eased only by the first British census, undertaken in 1801.

2. I am influenced here by Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). The links between collecting and gentility have been investigated in detail by many scholars of early modern Europe: Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

3. The binary terms set out in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) have been modified by many scholars, including Said himself, in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. xxiv-xxvi. Cf. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1-37; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 15-18; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 4-5; Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 20-23.

4. I do not mean here to censure Jan Morris’s “Pax Britannica” trilogy (Volume 1: Heaven’s Command ), which presents probably the most vivid, detailed historical chronicle of the British Empire at its height.

5. Consider, for instance, the closing words of Angus Calder’s otherwise brilliant Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London: Phoenix, 1998), a firm Marxist indictment of British imperialism: “After Cook, it seemed that the British would go everywhere…The younger Pitt and his colleagues, like the classes whose support they mobilised, believed that markets must be captured, and could be captured, all over the globe. Despite the loss of the North American colonies, Britain was stronger than ever before. Not far behind brave explorers and honest if foolish missionaries, Manchester cotton would follow Birmingham guns” (p. 535).

6. I would certainly come in for the criticisms levied by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 309-13.

7. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York: Vintage, 1989); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1986); Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979).

8. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 12.

9. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

10. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 126-29. Many French theorists were equally suspicious of a Spanish-style empire of conquest and, for that matter, of their own state: Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. published in 1721, fictionalized a visit by two Persian ambassadors to Paris as a way of critiquing the despotic institutions of absolutist France.

11. Colley, Britons, pp. 321-24; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 109-11.

12. But see Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion” in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, esp. pp. 59-62—who detects an exclusionary strand in Locke and demonstrates how in Victorian liberal thought, a society’s level of “civilization” could become a prerequisite for inclusion. See also Bernard Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. ix-x, 28-42.

13. Quoted in Muriel E. Chamberlain, Lord Palmerston (Cardiff: GPC, 1987), p. 74.

14. This is what Partha Chatterjee influentially termed the “rule of colonial difference.” Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). Inclusion could of course sharpen hierarchical distinctions based on race or class; see Catherine Hall, “The Nation Within and Without” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179-233.

15. The phrase comes from Rudyard Kipling, whose 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” was in fact addressed to Americans, on the subject of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.