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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Patrick J. Corbeil, "Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Description: Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. Patrick Corbeil 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 a...