Chapter 7 - ‘Great’ versus ‘small’ nations: size and national greatness in Victorian political thought

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As should be obvious from other chapters published in this volume, there was a near-consensus among Victorian political thinkers that not all nations or states were equal members of an international community. Rather, a distinction was made, quite explicitly and routinely, between ‘civilised’ European and Christian nations, to which the rules of international law or international morality applied, and ‘barbarians’, who could not claim the same treatment. In this chapter I focus on another distinction about which there was a near-consensus, at least for most of the Victorian period, a distinction that applied to nations within the so-called ‘civilised’ world: that between ‘great’ and ‘small’ nations.

From at least the middle of the nineteenth century, once the revolutions of 1848 had brought the issue of ‘nationality’ to the foreground of European politics and political thinking, through to the 1920s, when, in the aftermath of the treaties that followed the end of the First World War the new international settlement was being vividly debated, one of the issues that attracted considerable attention on the part of political thinkers was that of the scale or size of nations.