ANTI-IMPERIALISM: THE STATE OF PLAY

This book focuses on the development of three issues in late nineteenth-century Britain: the emergence of explanations of the origin of the British empire; justifications for its continuation; and criticisms of its consequences. These questions were not initially perceived as being of earth-shattering importance. Indeed, Britons were famously described in 1883 by the historian Sir John Seeley as having acquired their overseas possessions ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. But others would come to disagree strenuously with this judgement. To one of our leading protagonists, the best-known critic of imperialism, John Hobson, the empire ‘was in actual history mainly the accumulation of quite clearly conceived pieces of political power, personal prestige, and trading profits. There was no absence of mind in the makers of its several parts, or even in the gradual bringing together and extension of these parts.’ Creating and enlarging the empire, in this view, had been in someone's interest – in whose interest was what Hobson aimed to discern – if perhaps not the nation's as a whole. And by the time Hobson intervened in this debate, during the Boer War, the nation's mind had become very much concentrated on the issue.

Explaining and justifying this empire were, however, two different if interwoven tasks, while criticism was a still more distinctive matter. That there was some relationship between Britain's commercial and financial system and imperial expansion had long been recognised.