We are delighted to share a new review of H.G. Callaway’s Edmund Burke, the Imperatives of Empire and the American Revolution: An Interpretation, published in the latest volume of Studies in Burke and His Time. The full review can be read open access here (scroll down to p.92), and an indicative excerpt is below:
“The editor’s challenge in this volume is to inject freshness into a largely familiar collection of Burke’s writings relating to America. This he does with a textual analysis that appears to stand upon four main arguments: that the tension over the legacy of the Glorious Revolutionwas focused primarily on the relationship of liberty and representation; that Burke was a “liberal Whig” in his conception of that relationship; that the almost unforeseen consequences of the acquisition of an extensive continental empire—in 1763, but also in 1803—contorted that tension in challenging and unexpected ways; that there remains unplumbed contemporary value in grappling with these issues afresh—not least in comparing the thought of Burke and of Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that finds “poignant commonalties” to place beside the “well known contrasts” (p. xvi).”
The book is available to purchase directly from Cambridge Scholars – please click here to do so.
