UC San Diego

Liberalism originated and developed during the progressive expansion of European overseas empires. Through its early history, the ideology was utilized both to reinforce and attack imperial endeavors. Even where liberal ideas bolstered imperial projects, the ideology often coexisted uncomfortably with empire given its emphasis on principles such as autonomy, freedom, and equality. To overcome this tension, liberal imperialists often argued that local peoples were not sufficiently civilized to choose their political fate. This dissertation examines a different, though complimentary, approach to legitimizing empire: persuasion. Taking an influential group of eighteenth century French thinkers as my case, I demonstrate how moral anxieties about empire have been overcome by valorizing persuasion as a means to legitimate the establishment of colonies. The group included colonial administrators, politicians, and polemicists who worried about the justice of empire, particularly as it related to the treatment of the colonized. Rather than foreswearing empire altogether, however, they argued that rule could be established over local peoples by convincing locals to agree to an imperial order. Such an order, they believed, would be in keeping with enlightened or liberal principles. The central figure in the thesis is G.T. Raynal whose Histoire des deux Indes (1770) crystallized and propagated this vision. His history was among the best -selling works of the eighteenth century and shaped colonial debates in France and abroad for decades after its initial appearance. After explaining how Raynal and others came to believe that an empire founded on persuasion could work, as well as why they believed this approach to rule was legitimate, the dissertation traces how this idea persisted through the tumultuous decade after the French Revolution and shaped policy during Napoleon's military occupation of Egypt. The thesis then turns to local Egyptian observers writing in Arabic who recognized and critiqued the French ideology. One such thinker, 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, moved beyond critique to articulate a counter-theory of how rule ought to be established through persuasion. Jabarti's conclusions about the role of ethics in persuasion are a rebuke to the French and constitute a more generalizable observation about the limits of persuasion across community boundaries