In the nineteenth century, European attitudes, both among intellectuals and the public, shifted toward widespread support for imperialism, but the tensions between such views and long-standing values sometimes gave this support a tortuous and melancholy character. This was the case with two eminent liberal imperialists, both famous as champions of liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Each rejected the other’s justifications for foreign expansion and described his own country’s policies in terms so negative that they might have served better to justify opposition, testifying that there was a destabilizing tension in the backing both gave to imperial expansion. One occasion on which harsh and direct criticism of empire was voiced was expressed was at the outbreak of the “Opium War” in 1839, a conflict whose complex origins belie the old myth that it was undertaken to stuff the dangerous drug down Indian throats. The chapter ends by examining reasons why this opposition was unable to hold back the imperial juggernaut and notes that a significant number of non-European anti-imperial activists found London and Paris hospitable places for their activities.

The emergence of classical economic liberalism was much more than just a European story. Economic liberal thought found supporters among thinkers from many other parts of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom also adapted it in various ways in response to their local circumstances. This chapter highlights adaptations made by prominent thinkers from the Americas (Thomas Cooper, José da Silva Lisboa, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle, Carlos Calvo, Harold Innis), South Asia (Rammohun Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji), Africa and the Ottoman Empire (Olaudah Equiano, Alexander Crummell, Hassuna D’Ghies), as well as East Asia (Taguchi Ukichi, Yan Fu). The ideas of some of these figures also found an audience in Europe, revealing that liberal ideas flowed not just from Europe to the rest of the world but also in the other direction. Further, some economic liberals outside Europe questioned the European origins of this perspective by claiming its independent roots in their own region. In the Chinese case, the chapter also describes how a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, Chen Hongmou, developed ideas that bore some similarities to European economic liberalism without knowledge of the latter.