25 - European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century

Summary

As this volume demonstrates, Western political and social thought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a vibrant area of study. Yet scholarship has for the most part remained confined to political and philosophical developments in the European and American heartlands. This is strange because one of the most important dimensions of European thought during this period was the manner in which it achieved an international reach, and in some areas, a near hegemony over the minds of extra-European intellectuals. To an extent even greater than in the case of earlier expanding ‘world religions’, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, European stage-theory ideology, liberalism, and later, integral nationalism, ‘scientific’ racism and communism, became the currency of political debate for elites across the world. These ideas also influenced a wider range of popular movements, so that, by 1900, the leaders of anti-government protests in places as far distant as Santiago, Cape Town and Canton invoked the notion of their ‘rights’ as individuals and as representatives of nations.