Evil, Barbarism and Empire : Britain and Abroad, C.1830 - 2000

Evil and barbarism continue to be associated with the totalitarian 'extremes' of twentieth-century Europe. Addressing domestic and imperial conflicts in modern Britain and beyond, as well as varied forms of representation, this volume explores the inter-relations of evil, atrocity and civilizational prejudice within liberal cultures of governance. 'Genocide', 'totalitarianism', 'mass warfare': these are among the immediate historiographical coordinates that spring to mind when thinking about evil and barbarism in the context of European modernity. The aim of this volume is to begin the task of generating a new set of coordinates, ones which set established preoccupations within a more expansive interpretive framework. These coordinates are threefold: political, in terms of the discourses and practices of liberal governance; historiographical, in terms of moving beyond philosophical and empirical approaches to evil and barbarism; and chronological, in terms of the various assumptions regarding human agency, free will and time that emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment. The principal geographical focus is imperial Britain, but the volume also features essays which address colonial encounters abroad, including those of France and Germany Front Matter....Pages i-x Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents: Evil, Barbarism and Empire....Pages 1-29 Front Matter....Pages 31-31 Evil in Question: The Victorian Social and the Politics of Prostitution, 1830–1900....Pages 33-53 Terror, Spectacle and the Press: Anarchist Outrage in Edwardian England....Pages 54-72 ‘And I am the God of Destruction!’: Fu Manchu and the Construction of Asiatic Evil in the Novels of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1912–1939....Pages 73-95 Front Matter....Pages 97-97 The Politics of Italianism: Reynolds’s Newspaper, the Indian Mutiny, and the Radical Critique of Liberal Imperialism in Mid-Victorian Britain....Pages 99-125 The Victorian Lexicon of Evil: Frederic Harrison, the Positivists and the Language of International Politics....Pages 126-143 Front Matter....Pages 145-145 Evil, Liberalism and the Imperial Designs of the Catholic Church, 1867–1905....Pages 147-171 ‘Now I have seen evil, and I cannot be silent about it’: Arnold J. Toynbee and his Encounters with Atrocity, 1915–1923....Pages 172-200 Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Britain, Germany and the Treatment of ‘Native Races’, 1904–1939....Pages 201-225 Front Matter....Pages 227-227 Conrad’s Horror: Heart of Darkness and the Imaginary of Power....Pages 229-245 The Lives of Others: The Defeat of Evil or the Evil of Defeat?....Pages 246-266 Islam, Violence and the New Barbarism....Pages 267-282 Back Matter....Pages 283-290