The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900

Chapter 1
Introduction: Building Greater Britain
When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate
the whole Empire together and call it England, we shall
see that here too is a United States. Here too is a
homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion,
and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.
--J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883)

A firm and well-compacted union
of all the British lands would form a state
that might control the whole world.
--Charles Oman, England in the Nineteenth
Century (1899)
The history of modern political thought is partly the history of the attempt to confront increasing global interdependence and competition. The Idea of Greater Britain focuses on an important but neglected aspect of this chronicle: the debate over the potential union of the United Kingdom with its so-called settler colonies--the lands we know now as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, as well as parts of South Africa--during the late Victorian age. Straddling oceans and spanning continents, this polity was to act, so its advocates proclaimed, as a guarantor of British strength and of a just and stable world. I explore the languages employed in imagining the settler empire as a single transcontinental political community, even as a global federal state, with the intention of contributing to the history of imperial thought and Victorian intellectual life. I seek to shed light on the ways in which the future of world order--the configuration and dynamics of economic and geopolitical power, and the normative architecture justifying this patterning--was perceived in an age of vital importance for the development of politics in the twentieth century and beyond.
The quest for Greater Britain was both a reaction to and a product of the complex evolution of nineteenth-century international politics. The turbulent economic and political conditions of the era engendered profound anxiety, leading to the belief that a colossal polity was indispensable for preserving strength in a world in flux. In this sense it was reactive. But it was a product in the sense that the communications technologies facilitating increasing levels of economic interdependence also generated the cognitive shift that was necessary for people to conceive of the scattered elements of the colonial empire as a coherent and unified political unit, and even as a state.1 In the last three decades of the century, a significant number of commentators responded to the widespread perception that the world was both shrinking and becoming increasingly competitive, and that this was a world in which Britain was losing (or had already lost) its midcentury preeminence.2 A strong and vibrant Greater Britain was one of the most prominent solutions offered to the crisis of confidence in national supremacy. The debate signaled an important moment in the reconfiguration of national consciousness in a late Victorian world subject to the vicissitudes of international relations and a transfiguration of the prevailing norms of domestic political culture. It was driven in part by the perceived need to theorize and construct a bulwark against the encroachment of a powerful set of global challengers, most notably Germany, the United States, and Russia. As such it illustrates the disquieting effect that the impending loss of great power status had on a generation of thinkers. But the debate also constitutes a chapter in the intricate story charting the advent of democracy. Seen by many in Britain as a world-historical development, the emergence and spread of democracy (at least among the so-called civilized) was regarded as inevitable, as the culmination, whether intended or not, of many of the social, economic, and political trends of the previous two centuries, and it spawned a constantly mutating blend of optimism and anxiety. Imperial commentators reacted in divergent ways. For some, the spread of the Anglo-Saxon peoples across the face of the earth was the main engine of global progress; Greater Britain was, as such, a virtuous agent of democratic transformation. It foreshadowed the future. The majority, however, were more skeptical, and more nervous: the arrival of democracy prompted apprehension, and sometimes even fear. It was unclear what sort of path it would carve through the modern world, and in particular how both empire and state would be reconfigured. This group often saw Greater Britain as a counterrevolutionary response, capable of taming the transition to democracy. These concerns provided the fertile soil in which ideas about Greater Britain blossomed, flourished, and finally wilted.
The dates that I have chosen for the title of the book--namely c.1860- 1900--act as a rough guide rather than a precise measure for the range of materials covered. In some chapters I reach further back in time, exploring dimensions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century imperial thought, while in the conclusion I discuss some developments in the early twentieth century. The bulk of the text, however, focuses on the closing decades of Victoria's reign. Both the proximate cause of the explosion of interest in Greater Britain, and the shifts in the perception of the planet that helped underpin the idea of an integrated global polity, can be traced principally to the 1860s. The early 1870s saw a surge in proposals for an imperial federal system; during the 1880s this turned into a flood. From the mid-1890s confidence in the project of transforming the constitutional structures of the empire began to decline, as legislative success eluded the imperialists, as the leaders of the colonies displayed limited enthusiasm for such ideas, and as imperial priorities were increasingly focused on southern Africa. The war in South Africa (1899-1902) redirected imperial political thought in numerous ways, and it is for this reason that I stop at the turn of the century. Tracing the changes, as well as the various lines of continuity, would require another book.
The remainder of this introduction sets the scene for the following chapters. In the next section I explore some of the meanings of the term "Greater Britain." I then examine the role of the imperial federation movement within the wider discourse of Greater Britain and locate the book in relation to recent work in the history of political thought and imperial history. The final section provides an outline of the arguments presented, and a breakdown of the individual chapters.
The Boundaries of Imperial Discourse: Imagining Greater Britain
During the 1830s and 1840s the relationship between the rapidly expanding settler colonies and London came under increasing scrutiny. The Canadian rebellions (1837-38) marked a watershed, catalyzing interest in conceding limited self-government to the settlers. The late 1840s and 1850s saw many of them granted "responsible government," which meant, in essence, the creation of limited representative institutions.3 It was generally assumed that such changes would eventually result in the independence of the colonies; the point of reform was to push such a moment far into the future and to make sure that when it came the terms of separation would be amicable. "Every colony," argued the radical politician J. A. Roebuck in 1849, "ought by us to be looked upon as a country destined, at some period of its existence, to govern itself," a point echoed in 1856 by Arthur Mills, an esteemed Tory colonial commentator, who stated that "to ripen those communities to the earliest possible maturity-- social, political, and commercial--to qualify them, by all the appliances within the reach of a parent State, for present self-government, and eventual independence, is now the universally admitted object and aim of our Colonial policy."4 During the 1860s, however, many watchful observers perceived an imminent threat to the empire. This trepidation resonated throughout sections of the British elite for the remainder of the century, shaping the debate over the aims and the structure of Greater Britain.
Two distinct but related fears helped to generate and sustain the debate. From the 1860s onward many imperial thinkers were concerned with the potential impact of a socially and morally corrosive "materialism" on the population as a whole, and on the Liberal party in particular. While this fear was sharpened by a growing awareness of the constraints on British global power, the chief source of alarm was domestic.5 It was widely thought that under the pernicious influence of Cobdenite "Manchesterism" (as well as the rigor of Gladstonian fiscal prudence), the newly enfranchised middle and working classes would become increasingly selfish and introverted. Their sense of patriotism would evaporate. To such people, the empire would seem a burden rather than a source of greatness. Had not Adam Smith and many of his disciples derided the value of the colonies? Claiming to follow in his footsteps, the radical polemicist Gold-win Smith made a strident intervention in political debate with The Empire (1863), a collection of essays demanding the emancipation of the colonies. Gesturing in his direction, one exasperated imperialist complained that there "have been springing up of late years a number of half-political charlatans, half ignoramuses, who are contending that the colonies are of no use to the mother country."6 It was feared that this attitude would lead invariably to either benign neglect or explicitly "anti-imperial" legislation. In either case, the empire faced a dangerous challenge. Then, secondly, during the 1880s apprehension was heightened by further turmoil over democracy, Irish Home Rule, and mounting economic and geopolitical competition. This was the decade in which "socialism" came to be seen as an imminent threat to the body politic and in which the global political horizon darkened perceptibly. The two fears inspired intense disquiet about the future stability and greatness of the polity.
A number of options were canvassed, and the period witnessed rivalry between diverse conceptions of empire.7 During the 1870s Benjamin Disraeli propounded a vision of a military empire focused on Asia, stressing the value of India, the danger of Russia, and the imperative of bringing "civilization" to "backward" peoples. It was this particular rendition of a long-standing theme in British imperial thought and practice that served as the target of Gladstone's successful Midlothian campaign (1879-80).8 Throughout the last three decades of the century, however, the focus increasingly shifted to the "Anglo-Saxon" empire. Grandiose visions of colonial unity found emotive and symbolic expression in poetry, prayer, song, and major architectural projects, as well as through the more conventional media of political thought.9 A small minority continued to advocate independence for the settler colonies, most notably Cobden, Bright, and Goldwin Smith;10 others recommended limiting reform to minor tinkering, such as conferring more honors on colonial statesmen. Many still believed, even if they did not seek to support, an argument that since self-government had been awarded to the settler communities, it was inevitable that they would eventually become independent. Decreed by fate, this process should be left to follow its natural course.11 The most persistent, ambitious, and from the perspective of political thought, the most interesting response, however, was the demand for a united Greater Britain.
During the late nineteenth century political theorizing was, as Jose Harris has observed, "virtually a national sport of British intellectuals of all ideological and professional complexions."12 Debate over the empire was no exception and it drew in a wide range of participants. Who were the proponents of Greater Britain, and what was their intended audience? Most of the figures examined in this book can be classified, to employ Stefan Collini's felicitous phrase, as "public moralists."13 They formed part of the elite class of academics, businessmen, lawyers, politicians, and journalists--often combining several of these roles simultaneously--who shaped public debate in London, the imperial metropolis. Some were prominent colonial politicians who entered the metropolitan intellectual fray only occasionally. A further category comprised the stalwarts of the organizations central to imperial debate--in particular the Colonial Society (founded in 1868)14 and the Imperial Federation League (1884-1893)-- who served as propagandists and prophets of a new world. Virtually all of the high-profile advocates were men; this was a heavily gendered discourse. The colonial unionists generated a vast amount of material, penning hundreds of books, pamphlets, speeches, and essays published in the leading periodicals of the day.15 It is on these sources that I mainly focus. Although the movement itself stretched around the globe, with outposts located in the towns and cities of the empire, the debate centered on London, for it was considered vital to fight and win the ideological battle in the heart of the imperial system. The proponents of Greater Britain, and in particular the imperial federalists, represented one of a large number of competing and intersecting movements aiming to challenge and transform the way in which the British empire (and state) was understood. Expounding their views in the most high-profile outlets in British political culture, they succeeded in drawing the support, as well as the opprobrium, of some of the leading thinkers, public commentators, and politicians of the day.
Greater Britain meant different things to different people; therein resided both its wide appeal and ultimately one of its chief weakness. The term was employed in three main ways. Firstly, it could denote the totality of the British empire, the vast ensemble of disparate territories coloring the map of the world red.16 Secondly, it could refer to the settlement colonies, which by the 1870s were growing very rapidly in population, economic power, and strategic importance. And thirdly, it could mean the "English-speaking," or Anglo-Saxon, countries of the world, encompassing not only the settlement empire but also the United States. This conceptual multivalency reflected conflicting views over the future direction of the empire, and it exposed some of the fault lines running through the political thought of the period. Although all three modulations circulated widely, the most frequent usage was in reference to the settler colonies. In his pioneering Short History of British Colonial Policy (1897), H. E. Eger-ton argued that "The Period of Greater Britain" commenced in 1886.17 This was to place the starting point at least fifteen years too late, however, for intense argument over the future of the settler empire began in earnest in the early 1870s, drawing its terminological inspiration from Charles Dilke's best-selling travelogue Greater Britain (1868).18 Some thinkers preferred other labels for the colonial empire. The celebrated historian J. A. Froude named this incipient polity "Oceana," in a deliberate republican echo of James Harrington's utopian vision. Another commentator suggested the creation of the "United States of England." Francis de Labillli�re, one of the most prolific advocates of colonial unity, referred to a global "Federal Britain."19 The most common appellation, however, was "Greater Britain." The writings of Dilke, who soon rose to national prominence as a radical politician and strategic thinker, exemplified both the conflicting visions of political destiny common at the time and the inconsistency of imperial vocabulary. In Greater Britain he initially employed the term as a synonym for the British empire as a whole, although later in the book he declared that it should be confined to the "Englishspeaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed lands." In his Problems of Greater Britain (1890), he observed that the elements of the empire "vary infinitely in their forms of government, between the absolutism which prevails in India and the democracy of South Australia and Ontario," but he also lamented that "in popular usage" the term "Greater Britain" was "applied . . . chiefly to the English countries outside of the United Kingdom remaining under British government."20 This was problematic because he thought that discussions of the past, present, and future of Greater Britain ought to recognize the vital role of the United States.
The historian J. R. Seeley employed the term "Greater Britain" throughout The Expansion of England (1883), the most influential account of colonial unity in the late Victorian age. Like Dilke, Seeley started by defining it very broadly, as encompassing four "great groups of territory" inhabited "either chiefly or to a large extent by Englishmen" and subject to the sovereignty of the Crown--Australia, Canada, the West Indies, and the Cape Territories--as well as India. Nevertheless, throughout his writings he was keen to stress the radical difference between the colonial empire and the empire in India, and to highlight the primary importance of the former. And as with Dilke, his definition of Greater Britain underwent a number of shifts. At one point in The Expansion of England, he claimed that Greater Britain was (with a few minor exceptions) racially homogeneous, and as such it could not incorporate India. Later in the same book he argued that there were actually two separate Greater Britains, one composed of the colonial empire, the other of India, and that they were antithetical in important respects:
The colonies and India are in opposite extremes. Whatever political maxims are most applicable to one, are most inapplicable to the other. In the colonies everything is brand-new. There you have the most progressive race put in the circumstances most favourable to progress. There you have no past and an unbounded future. Government and institutions are all ultra-English. All is liberty, industry, invention, innovation, and as yet tranquillity.
India, composing the other "Greater Britain," displayed the opposite characteristics; "it is everything which this is not." Indeed, "India is all past and, I may almost say, has no future." His priorities, as well as the main focus of his concern, were clear: "When we inquire then into the Greater Britain of the future we ought to think much more of our Colonial than our Indian Empire."21 This theme was woven through the imperial discourse of the time; the colonial empire was seen anew as a space for transformative moral and political action, for the shaping of a patriotic imperial citizenry, and for the salvation of the endangered "mother country." To generalize about the role of "the empire" during the Victorian era is to miss the vital point that many contemporaries envisioned multiple empires, governed by different political systems, subject to assorted dreams and demands, and as a consequence holding diverse places in both their affections and schemes of political thought.
For Seeley, the material foundations of this global polity had already been laid in the previous decades, even centuries, of imperial expansion. But during the eighteenth century, the crucial period in the physical expansion of empire, "the idea that could shape the material mass was still wanting." All empires at the time, including the British, were "artificial fabrics, wanting organic unity and life." It was only in the late nineteenth century, and for reasons explored throughout this book, that Greater Britain came to be seen as an "organic unity." The first and most important step on the road to building Greater Britain was a cognitive one, involving a transformation in the way that people imagined the empire. "If Greater Britain in the full sense of the phrase really existed," insisted See-ley, "Canada and Australia would be to us as Kent and Cornwall."22 Once this shift in political--as well as spatiotemporal--consciousness was achieved, the nature of imperial policy could be redirected. And all of humanity would benefit, for it was argued that a just and peaceful world order depended on the British to regulate and police its affairs.
Traditionally viewed as the keystone of empire, India played an ambiguous role in the debates over Greater Britain. While few colonial unionists demanded withdrawal from India, and though they often displayed the arrogant self-satisfaction about its possession so common among the Victorians, they tended to stress that in the long term it was of less importance for the greatness of Britain than the settlement empire. There were a handful of suggestions to incorporate India into an expansive federation, albeit on very different terms from the settler colonies, but they were peripheral, at least until the years following the First World War.23 Greater Britain was to be an Anglo-Saxon political space, a racial polity. "It is hard to see," the historian Charles Oman proclaimed, how India "could be fitted into the scheme." Froude, meanwhile, argued that the "colonies are infinitely more important to us than even India--it is because the entire future of the English Empire depends on our availing ourselves of the opportunities which those dependencies offer to us."24 Greater Britain was more important because it was seen as British; the settlement colonies were an extension of the British (or more commonly English) nation, constituting an "empire of liberty" that was to be transmuted into a single postimperial global formation. Important though it was to them, India was still an imperial possession, still alien. In a sense, though, the attention lavished on the Anglo-Saxon world represented a strange obfuscation of actually existing political conditions, for imperial activity in Asia and in particular in Africa was reaching new levels of intensity. This was, after all, the era of the rapacious "Scramble for Africa," the fateful period in which the European powers, Britain foremost among them, carved up the remaining territory of that vast continent. What is perhaps most surprising about the intellectual life of the closing decades of the nineteenth century is the relative lack of attention paid, at least in metropolitan political discourse, to theorizing what J. A. Hobson later termed the "[e]arth hunger" of the "new imperialism."25
Due to its unique combination of size and wealth, the difficulty of governing it internally and defending it externally, and the prestige attached to it, India remained an overriding concern for policy-makers.26 The future of the settlement empire never fully supplanted the importance of India in the political calculations of Britain's ruling elite. I am not trying to replace one set of grand generalizations about Victorian political culture with yet another one--we have too many of those already. Instead, I want to complicate the picture, stressing that discussion of Greater Britain engaged and energized people across the political spectrum, including many of the leading public intellectuals of the day, and that in analyzing the contours of imperial discourse it is possible to illuminate some important and underappreciated aspects of Victorian political thought.
The creation of a global federal polity underpinned by a single nationality (or race) and governed by elective parliamentary institutions, represents one of the most audacious political projects of modern times. For much of the post-Renaissance period the legacy of Rome shaped conceptions of empire. Cicero, nearly two millennia before, had spoken in De Republica (51 ACE) of his compatriots as those "whose empire now holds the whole world."27 In the sixteenth century the Spanish had briefly, in a similar vein, laid claim to dominion of the globe, dominus totius orbis. The drive for Universal Monarchy was motivated by the same impulse. In these bombastic claims, however, "universal" often meant little more than the lands of Europe, or perhaps the Mediterranean or Atlantic worlds.28 (The only substantive tradition to claim true global dominion was that of the early modern canonists, determined to expand the temporal regulation of divine universality--and here the brute facts of geopolitics and the limitations of technology rendered their vision a fantasy.) In the nineteenth century the inheritance of Rome confronted that most potent of modern ideological developments, nationalism, and this was to have a profound influence on both the justification and practices of empire, as the increasingly self-conscious national states of Europe exported their regional ambitions throughout the world.29 It is this genus of nationalistic imperialism that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue has been dissolved by the corrosive forces of capital, migration, and technology, to be replaced by a formless, borderless postmodern global empire--an implausible argument that exaggerates the transformation of the state, but one symptomatic of the sense of radical novelty felt by many at the end of the twentieth century.30 The tension between the demands of universality and the claims of the particular helped structure Victorian imperial discourse. On the one hand, the "civilizing mission" was anchored in an ancient notion of the prerogative, even obligation, of the most advanced societies to bring light to the dark corners of the earth. On the other, it was never seriously proposed that this meant, literally, global dominion, and the coexistence of various competing empires was taken for granted. The idea of a polity that would simultaneously dominate the earth and offer it stability and leadership, a beneficent Greater Britain, seemed to awkwardly straddle the two positions, expansive yet circumscribed, global and yet necessarily bounded.