Dr Benjamin Tan

I am a political theorist and intellectual historian at the Popular Government in Global Perspective project. My writing and teaching is in the history of modern political thought, especially in the overlapping histories of democratic thought, empire, and race. I completed my PhD in 2025 at the University of Cambridge, where I also held a Junior Research Fellowship and an affiliated lectureship at the Department of Politics and International Studies.

My dissertation-turned-book project - titled The Dawn of Imperial Democracy - examines the debates that erupted in the late-nineteenth century when the world's most powerful empire, Britain, was declared to have become a democratic state. It explores how socialist and progressive thinkers imagined and contested the relationship between democracy and global empire. I argue that this was a pivotal moment in the history of modern democratic thought, which shaped the origins of social democracy in Britain and set the stage for the global contest over democracy's meaning in the era of decolonisation.

I have published award-winning work on the history of modern liberalism, race, and empire. I am also undertaking newer projects on (1) historical debates on the idea of multi-racial democracy in the twentieth-century ‘British world’, through decolonisation, and (2) the conceptual history of ‘racism’.

• History of political thought
• Empire and anti-colonialism
• Race and racism
• Democratic theory