Global liberalisms : introduction

• Published in: Modern Intellectual History
• Main Authors: Sluga, Glenda, Rowse, Tim (R14027)
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Communication Arts (Host institution)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: U.K., Cambridge University Press 2015
• Subjects: 210399 - Historical Studies not elsewhere classified; 970121 - Expanding Knowledge in History and Archaeology; liberalism; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/uws:32151; https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000791

Forum: 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.