Liberalism and Its Future: Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, by Duncan Bell, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 2016

This volume collects ten essays, mostly published over the previous decade, dealing with the diverse relationships between liberalism and the British Empire. Their overriding ambition is “to probe the intellectual justifications of empire during a key period in modern history” (2). Together, they explore the interconnections between the growth of empire and liberal political thought in nineteenth-century Britain. Although the focus is on the later part of this “age of empire,” some chapters explore earlier approaches to empire while others address the resonance of liberal thought across the twentieth century and beyond.