Disraeli's library: The making of an imperial imagination 1804-1833

Abstract

In popular cultural memory, as well as in biographical, historical, and postcolonial studies, Benjamin Disraeli has been memorialised as the novelist and twice Prime Minister of Britain who was the country’s most fervent imperialist politician. In his 1872 Crystal Palace speech, Disraeli declared that it was the ‘second great object of the Tory Party’ ‘to uphold the Empire of England’ and the ‘Colonial Empire’. Thereafter, he took such acts as buying British shares in the Suez Canal (1875); passing the Royal Titles Act (1876) that gave Queen Victoria the title of Empress and consolidated India’s place in the British Empire; and securing Cyprus as a British protectorate (1878). This thesis argues that, while Disraeli was crucial to the development of British imperialism throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, his thinking about empire began long before his political career became viable. It further contends that Disraeli’s imperial imagination took shape around his early reading at home in his father’s library, now held at Disraeli’s home, Hughenden Manor, by the National Trust. Over three chapters which map the trajectory of Disraeli’s conceptions of and relationship to empire (British, Ottoman, and Macedonian), and of associated ideas such as East-West relationships, nation, and citizenship, this thesis demonstrates that Disraeli’s early imperial imagination was nuanced and complex: characterised by the flexibility and experimentation that we should expect from a young mind, but which has often been disregarded. This thesis draws conclusions from a wealth of original evidence. It brings together quantitative analysis of a newly created catalogue of Disraeli’s working library (a key output of the project), with qualitative analysis of the marginalia within the specific volumes themselves, to which the National Trust have granted privileged access. These materials are then bought into dialogue with other records of Disraeli’s reading (notebooks, journals, copybooks) and with his published and unpublished early writing including letters and two critically neglected literary works. Amassing and consulting this wide range of sources enables this thesis to produce the most holistic picture to date of Disraeli’s early reading and writing, in a way that brings to light an empowered imperial discourse. In doing so, this thesis responds to calls by scholars such as Edward Said, John McAleer, and Bill Bell to seriously scrutinise the relationships between culture and imperialism by asking, what did it really mean to think about empire?

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ORCID for Emma Genvieve Hills: orcid.org/0000-0001-9410-1459

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