Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power »

Robert E. Sullivan is Associate Professor of History and Associate Vice President, University of Notre Dame.

On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas.

His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters.

Perhaps best known in the West for his classic History of England, Macaulay left his most permanent mark on South Asia, where his penal code remains the law. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay’s mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay’s writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay’s distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness.

Devoting his huge talents to gaining power—above all for England and its empire—made Macaulay’s life a tragedy. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I would be surprised if the excellent recent film The Young Victoria didn't stir up a new wave of interest in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who were smiled at throughout most of the twentieth century but now, with greater historical perspective, are acknowledged to have been impressive figures.

The most influential historian of Victoria's own time was Thomas Babington Macaulay, author of the bestselling History of England from the Accession of James II (1848-59). Macaulay was the key formulator of the so-called "Whig interpretation" of history, extolling the British system of constitutional monarchy as established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and connecting that system with the success and perceived historical mission of the British Empire, at that time at its zenith. John Clive produced an excellent psychobiography of Macaulay in the 1970s, but only treated the historian's early life. Now Robert E. Sullivan's Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) has given us a fine new study of Macaulay. Sullivan explains Macaulay's preeminence as a narrative historian, his tremendous cultural influence, and the way that "Above all, Macaulay sold the British Empire." Special emphasis is given to the years Macaulay spent in India, where he was instrumental in launching English as the subcontinent's second language, created the penal code, and managed "the re-creation of its British bureaucracy for the benefit of the classically educated alumni of the ancient universities."

--From Brooke Allen's "READER'S DIARY" column on The Barnes & Noble Review

• Contents


• Introduction

1. Heir


2. Star


3. Legislator


4. Sinister Prophet


5. Statesman


6. Empire Builder


7. The Last Ancient Historian


8. The Lion


9. Baron Macaulay of Rothley


10. Procrastinator


11. Praeceptor Gentis Anglorum


12. A Broken Heart

• Envoi: Immortal


• Abbreviations


• Notes


• Acknowledgments


• Index