Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900

Bell outlines the essential role of distance in the conception of political communities. Subsequently, he charts the way in which questions of scale helped to shape the nature of the fraught arguments over the American colonies following the Seven Year's War. Finally, he explore the role of technological projections in the imperial discourse of the last thirty years of the century, illustrating how the imperial federalist vision had moved from the extremes of political argument to the center, and how its panegyrists adopted new forms and deployed novel vocabularies to envisage the globe.