Dissolving the colour line: L. T. Hobhouse on race and liberal empire

Abstract

L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) is most familiar today as a leading theorist of British new liberalism. This article recovers and examines his overlooked commentary on the concept and rhetoric of race, which constituted part of his better-known project of advancing an authoritative account of liberal doctrine. His writings during and after the South African War, I argue, represent a prominent effort to cast liberalism as compatible with both imperial rule and what he called ‘the idea of racial equality’. A properly liberal empire, he asserted, would dissolve the colour line. This article traces the arguments Hobhouse advanced to make this claim, and explores his motivations for doing so. I contend that Hobhouse drew on the idiom of race as a form of exclusionary rhetoric, to delegitimise rival accounts of liberal empire and to cast his own as properly cosmopolitan. This recovery, I suggest, offers payoffs for our understanding of both Hobhouse's political thought and, more broadly, the uses of ‘race’ in twentieth-century liberalism.

Hobson on White Parasitism and Its Solutions

“…In 1917, Lenin extracted Hobson's critique of finance capitalism from his racialized account 31. As I argue elsewhere, Hobson's friend and new liberal L. T. Hobhouse (1864Hobhouse ( -1929 offered a similar redemptive critique of empire (Tan 2022). 32.…”

“… 31. As I argue elsewhere, Hobson’s friend and new liberal L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) offered a similar redemptive critique of empire (Tan 2022). …”

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

“…Much less commonly does it consider how non-western and anticolonial thinkers themselves conceptualized progress-what it looked like and how it was theorized from the other side of the colonial divide. This remains the case in more recent works on liberalism, race, empire, and developmentalism centering philosophers such as Mill (Beaumont and Li 2022;Lederman 2022), Hobhouse (Williams 2021;Tan 2022), Smith (Ince 2021), and Kant (Williams 2021;Church 2022).…”