A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world. Macaulay and the Enlightenment sheds new light on both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the life and ideas of this most famous of nineteenth-century British historians. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a prominent representative of mainstream British liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was also a Member of Parliament and government minister, and famously spent several years as a member of the governing council in India, where he promoted legal and educational reforms. One of the book's key contributions is the investigation of Enlightenment influences on the more well-known aspects of Macaulay's thought: history, politics, social and economic issues, religion, revolution and colonialism. The book also offers new revelations about Macaulay's attitude towards women, and provides insight into his views on art, nature and animals. In this study, Macaulay emerges as a more subversive, at times even radical, figure than previously assumed. The book thus emphasizes the transformation of Enlightenment ideas into early nineteenth-century liberalism.

About the Author
Nathaniel Wolloch is an independent scholar from Israel. He has published widely on the intellectual history of the long eighteenth century. His most recent book is Moderate and Radical Liberalism: The Enlightenment Sources of Liberal Thought (Brill, 2022).

Reviews
No one else has brought all the different strands of Macaulay's intellectual and general biography together as fully, objectively and skifully as Wolloch does here. * Jonathan Israel, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Study. *



Book Information
ISBN 9781783277254
Author Nathaniel Wolloch
Format Hardback
Page Count 428
Imprint The Boydell Press
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Weight(grams) 818g