How should we think of the relationship between liberalism and empire? Can the turn to history help us "decolonize" liberalism today? And what is the role of utopia in Anglophone visions of empire?

These are questions we discussed with Dr Duncan Bell, Reader in Political Thought and International Relations at Cambridge, who is a leading authority on modern British and American ideologies of empire.

What are political traditions and how do they come into existence? Was Edmund Burke really a conservative and what does it mean for us to think of him as such? And what can history tell us about political identities today?

Dr Emily Jones – a research fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge – talked to us about her own biography, her research and her views on how to do intellectual history and what we can learn from it.

What does it mean to think about politics philosophically? How did Renaissance and early modern thinkers address that question? And in what ways is a historical lens helpful to think about the theory of politics today?

These are some of the questions we discussed with Dr Sophie Smith, who is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at University College.