My thesis is a transnational history of conservatism and empire that focuses on the U.S. context. I focus on four periods—the Confederacy, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the post-Civil Rights era—and the argument ties white supremacy to a global context of imperial expansion, slavery, segregation, and counterrevolution. There has been much scholarship about empire in political theory, and this literature typically focuses on liberalism or arguments appealing to liberal values broadly construed (such as republicanism). Though scholars have examined non-liberal imperial arguments, these discussions remain incomplete. Liberal justifications hardly exhaust imperial ideology, nor were they the most consequential in certain historical contexts. Confederates envisioned a vast empire for slavery and candidly admitted the need for domination, paternalism, and violence as the motors of civilizational progress. A more familiar and glaring example would be in Europe: fascism represented a politics of late empire during the interwar period. These are only a few examples showing how an important current in imperial thought across the globe appeals to conservative and reactionary values, and this current in the U.S. is the subject matter of my dissertation.

My thesis examines this understudied conservative ideology of empire with a particular focus on what I call counterrevolution, which I use as a term of art. Counterrevolution is a conservative ideology. It refers to the restoration of domination in the face of a revolutionary threat, but also the creation of a new post-revolutionary social order that can stabilize society. Core to the idea of counterrevolution, as I understand it, is the attempt to adapt the theories of their revolutionary opponents to craft a new social order. These include attempts by proslavery intellectuals to theorize a kind of corporatist enslaved empire, or attempts to argue for the Jeffersonian farmers’ republic as a replica of socialism during the Great Depression American South. What distinguishes the figures of my dissertation is an attempt to absorb a new revolutionary status quo and opposite it at the same time.

As a consequence, my dissertation looks to revolutionary moments and their counterrevolutionary responses, especially the Haitian Revolution, Reconstruction, the post-WWI communist revolutions, and the civil rights movement. As I argue, the history of counterrevolution is intertwined with the history of empire: the counterrevolutionaries of my dissertation looked to practices of territorial expansion, coercive labour, or regimes of spatial segregation to theorize a society that can render revolution impossible.