Edmund Burke and the British Empire: Slaves, Savages, and Subjectship in Eighteenth Century Political Thought

This dissertation broadens and complicates scholarly understandings of Edmund Burke’s anti-imperialism by examining how his aesthetics and progressive historiography shaped his criticisms of imperial institutions. This project pursues one of the lines of inquiry opened by scholarship on Edmund Burke and eighteenth century anti-imperialism: the place of slavery and Amerindian dispossession in anti-imperial thought. It provides the reader with greater clarity of the complexities and the tensions in Edmund Burke’s political thought concerning the British Empire.The dissertation argues that Edmund Burke’s anti-imperial thought is ambivalent in that certain exploitative and destructive institutions in the British Empire are subjected to scathing, passionate, and sustained public criticism, while others are either publicly defended or ignored. This arises because the moral and aesthetic frameworks that motivate Burke’s criticisms of colonialism are accompanied by a progressive historiography that distinguishes between civilized and savage human beings. The distinction between the civilized and the savage result in divergent commitments to reforming unjust and exploitative imperial institutions. Most notably, the divergence between Edmund Burke’s sustained commitment to promoting justice in India, and his support of Amerindian dispossession and chattel slavery in the Americas. This dissertation also gives consideration to Ottobah Cugoano’s anti-imperial thought as a complement and challenge to Edmund Burke’s anti-imperial thought