ABSTRACT
There was a further tradition of political analysis that, focusing as it did on the role of America in world history, set some of the founders down the road towards thinking in imperial categories. This was colonial reform, a movement founded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield around 1830. Most of the key figures in colonial reform had died before 1868. Those colonial reformers who are of interest here, those who joined the Colonial Society, had by that time moved away from Wakefield’s categories and towards Tocqueville’s. Their thinking traced out an arc, from Wakefield to Tocqueville to the broader imperialism of 1868.
