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Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. xii + 370.

Pitts strives to be throughout, the picture is never black-and-white. Thus, on the one hand, she censors Tocqueville for essentially sacrificing the interests of the colonized peoples to the paramount needs of offering the French people a great object of ambition for exercising national pride and undertaking a grand national unifying project. On the other hand, Pitts has ample praise for Tocqueville’s perspicacity in seeing through what he saw as the hypocrisy (or at best self-delusion) of the British about the benign character of their own empire and its benefits for the colonized peoples. It is probably inevitable that, in a book of the length and breadth of coverage of this one, some oversights may arise. The title of Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe is slightly modified. And James Mill did not die in 1838 (p. 123) but rather in 1836. But these are small details in a long book that masters an impressive range of primary texts and scholarship in English and French. But more importantly, how conclusively has Pitts proved that there was a ‘turn to empire’ in mid-nineteenth-century British and French liberalism? Recent and ongoing work on British thought on empire and imperialism has drawn attention to some vociferous liberal critics of empire in the period in question as well as later. To put it another way, how representative were Mill and Tocqueville of ‘liberalism’? But even her partial critics acknowledge Pitts’s contribution as major and some of the most fruitful avenues currently pursued by historians of political thought on empire and imperialism have been initiated in A Turn to Empire.