ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ideas of empire found in the History, setting them within the larger context of liberalism. It focuses mainly on Marsden's response to theories of eighteenth century physiocrats, as mediated by Abbe Guillaume Thomas François Raynal and the Scots philosopher, William Robertson. The chapter explores William Marsden response to empire, a response undoubtedly shaped by his classical education and immersion in European philosophical discourse, but principally by his Irish background and by what he learnt in Sumatra. Marsden may be regarded as among the precursors of liberalism because he offers a late eighteenth century Anglo-Irish perspective on ideas later subsumed in liberalism, and which establish a baseline for his imperial critique. Liberalism was thought, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to have developed early in the nineteenth century with the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century marking the transition from Enlightenment thought to classical liberal thought.
