Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

In 1883, John Seeley, the Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, published a history of the British Empire. Within two years The Expansion of England had sold 80,000 copies. He chastised his fellow historians for not recognizing that much of ‘the history of England is not in England but in the Americas and Asia’ and yet denied there was any logic to imperial expansion. ‘We seem, as it were,’ he infamously declared, ‘to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ Just twenty years later, John Hobson decisively challenged this view of Britons as accidental imperialists in Imperialism: A Study (1902). Hobson had long been preoccupied with the inadequacies of classical liberal economics to either explain or remedy the unemployment and poverty caused by the Great Depression. When covering the South African War as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian, he became convinced that Britain's imperialism was a product of its economic problems at home. Far from being accidental, he argued, imperialism was a consequence of Euro-American economies competing with each other to find new markets for goods and capital that were either not in demand at home or offered too minimal a return on investment. Over the next two decades, Vladimir Lenin and John Maynard Keynes developed his interpretation in different ways to explain the outbreak of World War I and the deepening economic crises of the 1920s. The political and economic crisis of 1931 finally brought an end to Britain's dogged attachment to free trade and the gold standard and deepened the British economy's structural dependence upon the Empire. At that point, only the rarefied circle of imperial historians at Cambridge, where Seeley had left his stamp, could still believe that imperialism had no logic.

Seeley's The Expansion of England was timely; it was published just prior to a period of dramatic growth for the British Empire. As Britain competed with its rival European empires to claim African territories, it annexed 2.5 million square miles in the decade after the Congress of Berlin (1885). At the end of World War One, when the Treaty of Versailles assigned some of the former colonies of the defeated German and Ottoman empires to Britain in 1919, the British Empire reached its zenith.