Overview
- Argues that religious diversity of the British Empire helped to shape the ethical worldview of the secularist movement
- demonstrates how comparative religion provided ammunition for their critiques of Christian morality and church authority
- Shows the relationship between empire and the Victorian secularist movement
Part of the book series: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000 (HISASE)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Patrick J. Corbeil is an independent scholar living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement
Book Subtitle: Imagining a Secular World
Authors: Patrick J. Corbeil
Series Title: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85202-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-85201-6Published: 02 December 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-85204-7Published: 03 December 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-85202-3Published: 01 December 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-3351
Series E-ISSN: 2946-336X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 188
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Modern Europe, History of Britain and Ireland, History of Religion, Social History, Imperialism and Colonialism