Edmund Burke, Native Americans, and the Burkean Imagination

Abstract

Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire.
By Daniel I. O’Neill. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.
272p $34.95 paperback.

I didn’t want to agree with Dan O’Neill’s interpretation of Edmund Burke in his excellent new book, but I found myself persuaded that Burke was considerably less admirable on colonialism than some scholars have recently suggested and that many of us may want to believe. In this response, I nonetheless want to suggest that Burke’s work holds within it useful resources for meaningful forms of anticolonial thinking. I will suggest specifically that we can extract a Burkean method for thinking across difference that is consistent with key portions of O’Neill’s evidence (94–110), even as it requires extrapolation from it.