Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World

by Corbeil, Patrick J.

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Title Statements

Full title :Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement : Imagining a Secular World / by Patrick J. Corbeil.

Summary

This book is the first extensive historical analysis of the relationship between empire and the Victorian secularist movement. Historians have paid little attention to the role of empire in the development of organized free thought. Secularism as it developed in Britain and its settler colonies was an overtly outward-looking, global ideology in a period marked by the rise of scientific rationalism and belief in the logic of a European civilizing mission. Recent scholarship has focused on how the empire influenced British and American atheists on the question of race. What is missing is an in-depth examination of the formation of secularist ideas about universal progress, ethics, and secular morality. Through an examination of the secularist periodical and pamphlet press, this book argues that the religious diversity of the British Empire helped to shape the ethical worldview of the secularists, providing ammunition for their critiques of Christian morality and the church and justification for their policy reform proposals both in Britain and the colonies.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2022.
Edition:1st ed. 2022

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer International Publishing
Place of Publication:Cham
Language:eng
Publication Date:2022.

The Physical Object

Description:1 online resource (X, 188 p. 1 illus. :) : online resource.

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9783030852023, 3030852024
oclc:on1294353353
LC Classification:D1-DX301
Dewey Decimal:940.903

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: "The assumption of an Indian or Egyptian Priest is just as good, to our thinking, as the assumption of a Christian Priest": Secularism and Comparative Religion, Imagining a Secular World -- Chapter 3: Grounding Non-Theological Morality: Secular Ethics and Human Progress -- Chapter 4: Sceptical Missionaries and Republican Internationalism -- Chapter 5: Secularism and the Limits of Universal Progress -- Chapter 6: Conclusion.

Subjects

Europe -- History -- 1492- Great Britain -- History Histoire sociale History History of Britain and Ireland History of Modern Europe History of religion Imperialism Imperialism and Colonialism Impérialisme RELIGION Religion -- Histoire RELIGION -- History Religious history Social conditions social history