Conclusion to Part III: A Liberal Empire?

Summary

It has always been easier to define liberalism by what it is not rather than what it is. Never a coherent programme of governance, it emerged in modern Europe and its offshoots as an expression of the rights of individuals against arbitrary, absolutist governance. Rights of Assembly, representative government, free trade and trial by an independent judiciary had, initially, to be won in Britain through radical agitation. By no coincidence, this occurred at the very time that its governing elites were consolidating a vastly expanded empire in the wake of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. During our first snapshot of that empire’s governance, in 1838, a liberal order was just emerging in Britain, the new prosperity gained from colonialism being as much a part of that process as the Reform Act of 1832 or the agitation against the Corn Laws. By the mid nineteenth century, British liberals believed in free trade as an economic principle, and as the appropriate response to colonial famines, first in India, then in Ireland and the Cape Colony. The 1867 Reform Act consolidated liberal governance in Britain by extending the franchise again, at the same time that arbitrary rule over black people in Jamaica was condoned. In the mid 1870s, a new feature was added to Britain’s liberal dispensation as Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Tory’ government intervened in housing, working conditions and the education of the workforce.