The book recommendations to begin with:

Uday Mehta Singh – Liberalism and Empire

Theodore Koditschek – Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination

Seth Koven – Slumming

Stephen Toth – Beyond Papillon

Seth Koven addresses your question particularly in his examination of upper class Londoners reaction to the poverty of the East End. He notes that the poorer areas of London had long held an attraction for upper class men seeking dangerous pleasures, but the 19th century, industrialization and the byproduct of an even more concentrated class of the poor and destitute, transformed the relationship between the upper and lower class. “Slumming,” the practice of touring the more decrepit haunts of the East End and giving charity or pity or whatever else, had become a popular practice. So popular in fact that there were organized tours so that society ladies could ride taxis and observe rather than tromping about. This practice has been variously described as predatory, indicative of the patent carelessness of the rich, motivated by real social concern, a boon to the lower classes who received unprecedented attention, and everything in-between. Seth Koven concerns himself primarily with the domestic implications of the practice, but the same ideals of liberalism and social policy which informed the work of “poor reformers” can be found in the broader policies of general Empire.

Essentially the social and moral polemics about slums and the policy which arose therefrom can be understood as liberal Empire in minutiae. Naturally, slums were places of profound material and human want, and this provoked the sympathy of the elite. However, their reaction to these slums was a tendency to romanticize them and exaggerate the brutality of life or the sexual immorality of the poor. The ways that the elite of London would describe the poor among them is analagous to the way that 19th century liberal Empires would describe their colonial holdings: hopelessly lost without the guiding hand of superior civilization. You are of course familiar with the “white man’s burden?” This is much the same. Liberal Empires such as France and England framed their interaction with their colonies as a civilizing mission, whereby they were uplifting a people who would otherwise be lost within themselves.

The basic thought which informed this discourse was that the colonized were simply morally inferior to the English (or the French as the case may be.) Their moral inferiority was a consequence of the retarded progression of their civilization. Where in the imperial center certain groups like women, criminals, idiots, and the poor would be excluded from political participation on the basis of their inability to behave rationally, the same logic would be applied abroad to entire societies.

The ways in which liberal imperialists sought to correct this deficiency (or even the reasons by which they thought there was a deficiency or thought the deficiency was worth correcting) are naturally disparate and I think beyond the scope of this response. However, there is one example which I believe will be of particular interest to you.

France in the first half of the 19th century had experienced enormous social dislocation. The rise, and fall and rise and fall again of Napoleon coupled with the Bourbon restoration, coupled with changing economic factors due to industrialization, coupled with an urban explosion driven by recession in the countryside, coupled with the July revolution created quite some social distress. At the very same time that King Louis-Philippe came to power France acquired material control of the Algerian coast. Though Louis-Philippe had not sought Algeria, it did present an immediate opportunity for him.

The demographic shift of which I spoke earlier had cast poor workers out of their traditional role in the countryside into the more intensely crowded and competitive cities carried with it fears about the moral state of the lower classes. These were fed in no small part by what Stephen Toth notes as an “unprecedented wave of crime …” where the “twelve years between 1825 and 1837 saw a 39 percent growth in the number of criminal offenses.”

In seeking a response to the problems of moral decay among the lower classes many French intellectuals called for a reformatory traditionalism in the form of agricultural colonies. Because of the value placed in work, discipline and the natural curative nature of agricultural life, these agricultural colonies were viewed as the perfect method by which to separate the redeemable poor from career criminals. However, as evidenced by the flood of poor peasants to cities, the advocated style of subsistence farming was no longer economically viable within France.

In both the interest of justice and empire, France looked to its colonies as a possible repository of the convicted poor. There they could do double service by improving the infrastructure of the colony, and improving themselves through work. Then, upon completion of their term, they could take up the mantle of a reformed and self-sufficient citizen by settling overseas. The agricultural colony could therefore reform not only the penitent criminal, but the land itself.

Since this seems like a homework question: the daily reminder to not plagarize