The four essays in this collection address the history of liberalism outside Europe, at the same time as they reinscribe European liberalism in global contexts. They ask where, beyond Europe and the North Atlantic, has liberal thought flourished as a way to think about problems of state formation, political economy and social order? They take historical scholarship beyond territories that were formally “colonies” of Europe (or of Europeans) to centres of intellectual activity stimulated and challenged by the global circulation of Western liberalism: the Ottoman Empire, the kingdoms of East Asia, the colonial world, the revolutionary world. Their “global” character is less evident in their individual geographical reach, and more apparent in their individual contributions to the sum of what we know about the appearance of liberal ideas beyond their transatlantic intellectual streams. We have brought them together here in order to raise questions about both the limits of liberalism as a concept, and the conceptual frontiers of intellectual history.

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the “good society” based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D’Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly “African” liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D’Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D’Ghies's turn toward an “imperial liberalism” underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

Historians of liberalism have tended to ignore or underplay the contribution of southern Europe. However, in the 1820s this part of the world was at the forefront of the struggle for liberal values. This essay explores the relationship between constitutional culture and religion during the liberal revolutionary wave that affected Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula and Greece, by examining parliamentary debates, the revolutionary press, literature targeting the masses, religious sermons and exile writings. It argues that rather than rejecting religion, liberals strove to find an accommodation between their values and revealed truth—they were convinced that no society could survive without religious morality. In this way, they developed a variety of religious attitudes that ranged from deism to forms of crypto-Protestantism without abandoning their established religions. At the same time, although they defended individual rights and freedom of expression against the opposition of the churches, and argued for reformed and enlightened forms of religiosity, most of them considered the religious uniformity of their societies advantageous and even opposed religious toleration.

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.

The period immediately following Independence when Jawaharlal Nehru was prime minister of India (1947–64) has been described conventionally as an era dominated by “socialist” developmentalism. This article contends that an examination of the ideas of Nehru and his closest colleagues reveals a much more complex amalgam of political ideologies and sentiments. Ideas of small-scale development through local bodies and cooperative societies, typical of earlier “communitarian” liberals such as G. K. Gokhale, were blended, and sometimes contended, with visions of rapid industrialization more obviously based on the Soviet model. Nehru himself remained distinctly liberal in his political stance, musing that he could not impose further socialist measures “because most Indians were not socialists.” The article considers the importance of the events of India's partition for this ideological amalgam and the examines the ideas of key figures in Nehru's circle, notably G. B. Pant, D. R. Gadgil, P. C. Mahalanobis and S. Radhakrishnan.

From the 1680s to the 1720s German Lutheran pastors’ use of private confession and suspension from Communion as a means of disciplining wayward parishioners generated seminal theological and intellectual debates. They were driven by Pietists and secular natural law jurists and concerned ultimately the purported corruption in the early Christian church that led to the abusive, unwarranted, and centuries-long intrusion of clerical power into secular affairs. By investigating these debates, this essay reveals in new ways the constructive collision of two different intellectual predispositions—one clerical, the other legal—that propelled the early Enlightenment in Germany. Letters from the 1680s and other writings of Philipp Jakob Spener, the father of German Pietism, show how he and fellow clergymen wrestled with specific pastoral challenges regarding the disciplining of allegedly unrepentant and incorrigible sinners. Christian Thomasius, a central figure in the early Enlightenment, and other secular natural law jurists vigorously rebutted the Pietists’ claims by critically examining the practice of confession in the primitive church, thereby exposing the historical origins of priestcraft. In doing so, Thomasius highlighted affinities between his work and that of the radical Pietist Gottfried Arnold, who had indicted the clergies of Christian churches for their unjust and inveterate persecution of religious dissidents. But Thomasius also faulted Arnold for weaknesses in his biblical scholarship. Thomasius's criticism points to the special form of biblical scholarship that secular natural law jurists had helped to develop and that predisposed them to embrace radical interpretations of Scripture, a potent stimulant of early Enlightenment thought.

Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.

Liberalism in France has typically been concerned with political, rather than economic, issues. Its classic texts—those of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville—were written in the aftermath of the Revolution, and reflected on the historical and political problems that grew out of it: the nature of the modern state, the rights and duties of the individual, and the nexus of institutions that mediated their relationship. These writings defined the contours of modern French liberalism, and became a key resource for thinkers in the late 1970s, notably Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet, who were looking for ways to revitalize the liberal-democratic project. In his 1985 study of Guizot, Rosanvallon could regret that “the question of liberalism in French political culture of the nineteenth century is ‘missing’ in contemporary thought.”1 If the task of political theory was to recover this intellectual tradition, what were the terms of the recovery? Which ideas were missing from the conceptual landscape of the 1970s to inspire it?