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The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Andrew S. Thompson
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Extract

The forthcoming General Election will turn, we are told, mainly on the popularity of Imperialism. If this be so, it is important that voters should make up their minds what Imperialism means.

(George Bernard Shaw)

Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Fabian Society in October 1900. Shaw recognized what many historians have subsequently failed to see: the meaning of imperialism inside British politics was not fixed. Rather, the terms “empire” and “imperialism” were like empty boxes that were continuously being filled up and emptied of their meanings. Of course, the same was true of other political concepts: the idea of patriotism, for instance, was constantly being reinvented by politicians. But the idea of empire was all the more vulnerable to this sort of treatment because it was sensitive to changing circumstances at home and abroad and because it had to take account of a colonial as well as a British audience. Furthermore, the fact that opinion in Britain was widely felt to be ignorant or indifferent to the empire meant that politicians had to be particularly careful in deciding what sort of imperial language to use.

This article will consider what contemporaries meant when they spoke of empire, how its meaning varied between different political groups in Britain, and whether it is possible to point to a prevailing vision of empire during the period between the launch of the Jameson Raid in December 1895 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 2: Twentieth-Century British Studies , April 1997 , pp. 147 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1997

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References

1 Fabianism and the Empire: A Manifesto by the Fabian Society (London, 1900), p. 1Google Scholar.

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16 This was a recurring theme of India (the newspaper of the BCINC) during and after the Boer War. The purpose of the paper was to provide a continuous commentary on Indian affairs in the British press. Its paid circulation was quite small, but advanced proofs were sent to editors and nearly one thousand free copies were distributed to politicians and political associations.

17 Few records of the ISAA survive and most of those that do are printed. Its four successive chairmen were George Wyndham, Geoffrey Drage, Alfred Lyttelton, and Gilbert Parker. The ISAA organized public meetings in working men's clubs, distributed large amounts of political literature, and formed three branches in Manchester, Newcastle, and Scotland. Its general council and colonial parliamentary committee were overwhelmingly Conservative in complexion. See Thompson (n. 6 above), chaps. 2, 3.

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21 There is an interesting parallel between the work of Milner as high commissioner in South Africa (January 1897–March 1905) and Wyndham as chief secretary for Ireland (November 1900–March 1905): both men saw themselves protecting minority British populations who looked to the British government for support.

22 George Wyndham to Alfred Milner, April 28, 1899, Milner Papers, dep. 209, fols. 123–26, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

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27 Annual Report of ISAA (1903–4); ISAA pamphlet no. 9, South Africa: Orange River Colony Land Settlement Scheme for Country Settlements, n.d., Drage Papers, Christ Church Library, Oxford University.

28 Such as the South African Colonisation Society and British Women's Emigration League. See the Annual Report of ISAA (1904–5).

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35 The Fabian Society was not a large organization, and its peak membership in this period was 2,700 in 1913. The Fabian strategy was not therefore to mobilize mass support. Rather the Society exerted influence through its publications, through the work of its members in local government, and through the relationships the Webbs cultivated with officials, journalists, and politicians at their “political salon” in Grovesnor Road. See McBriar (n. 10 above), chaps. 8–9.

36 Fabianism and the Empire (n. 1 above), p. 98.

37 Minutes of members' meetings, February 23, 1900, Fabian Society Papers C39, Nuffield College Library, Oxford University; Fabian News (February 1900), Fabian Society Papers, Nuffield College.

38 Extract from Daily Chronicle, in the minutes of the Fabian Society members' meeting, February 23, 1900, Fabian Society Papers C39, Nuffield College.

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41 Fabianism and the Empire, p. 7.

42 Semmel, esp. pp. 29–31. For a fuller discussion of the legacy of Darwinism for theories of war and human aggression, see Crook, P., Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the “Origin of Species” to the First World War (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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44 McBriar (n. 10 above), chap. 4. Given the importance Fabians attached to the environment, they were inclined to support the Lamarckian view that habit produced modifications of structure in organisms and that these modifications were inherited by progeny. Crook, p. 73.

45 Minutes of the Fabian Society members' meeting, March 10, 1899, Fabian Society Papers C39, Nuffield College. Paul was a leader writer for the Daily News.

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51 The Society approached the publishers on a number of occasions between 1901 and 1903 and offered to buy back the remaining stock at a reduced price. See Minutes of the Fabian Society executive committee, May 10, 1901, October 28, 1902, and June 12, 1903, Fabian Society Papers C8, Nuffield College.

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58 Spence Watson, p. 289. Birrell was chief secretary for Ireland, January 1907–July 1916.

59 For an earlier use of the word “imperialism” to discredit the foreign policy of the Disraeli government, see the account of Robert Lowe's writings in Koebner and Schmidt (n. 3 above), pp. 148–50. Birrell, like Lowe, sought to evoke the association of the word “imperialism” with foreign—particularly French—despotism.

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65 Ibid., pp. 35–42.

66 Ibid., pp. 51–66.

67 The IAPC merged with the International Arbitration and Peace Association in 1899. Robert Spence Watson was its president and G. H. Perris its secretary. Perns was a journalist and leading spokesman of the peace movement. Its most influential members included John Clifford, Sydney Olivier, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson.

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72 Radicals felt imperial expansion to be aggressive for a variety of reasons, including its ready resort to overwhelming military force, the bellicose mentality that fed it, and its alleged tendency to provoke rival foreign powers. For a sustained assault on the meaning of “Imperialism,” see Hobhouse, L. T., Democracy and Reaction (London, 1904), pp. 28–56Google Scholar. Hobhouse felt that “the promise of Imperialism”—a wider and nobler sense of national responsibility—had been destroyed by the policy or “performance of Imperialism”—the hard assertion of racial supremacy and material force. Britain, he argued, had consistently deviated from the Liberal principles of empire, and imperialism had therefore come to mean the lust for rather than love of empire. As a result, Hobhouse found it difficult to put a positive construction on either word.

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77 Spence Watson, p. 238.

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91 Stephen Howe comments on the implications of Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to empire for subsequent anticolonialist thinking. He shows how the limited, conditional, and restricted criticism of empire in an earlier period hampered the Left in building a coherent and consistent campaign for disengagement from empire in the years after 1918. See Howe, S., Anti-colonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford, 1993), p. 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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95 The official membership of the Navy League was recorded at 12,000 members in 1901, 20,000 members in 1908, and 127,000 members in 1914. Coetzee (n. 5 above), pp. 25, 138; Navy (September 1914).

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114 See here the response of Lord Curzon discussed in Mehrotra, S. R., India and the Commonwealth, 1885–1929 (London, 1965), pp. 243–44Google Scholar. Curzon's complaint about the marginalization of India in Edwardian imperial discourse can also be explored in Curzon, G. N., The Place of India in the Empire: Address Delivered before the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh, October 19th, 1909 (London, 1909)Google Scholar.

115 While I have sketched the main lines along which this vision was developed, there is little doubt that different social groups managed to inflect imperialism with further meanings. Empire may have been used by the lower middle class to counter status anxieties, see Price, R., “Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle-Class Patriotism, 1870–1900,” in The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914, ed. Crossick, G. (London, 1977)Google Scholar. For ardent imperialists anxious about the consequences of a terminal decline in Christian belief, such as Cecil Rhodes, imperialism could become a sort of surrogate faith. The call for universal military training from the “Diehards”—those politically active peers from the landed classes—was made with a view to lowering class barriers and dampening social antagonisms as well as protecting the empire, see Phillips, G., The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (London, 1979)Google Scholar. Finally, one might consider the extent to which the imperial business community was particularly susceptible to moralizing empire through the idea of a civilizing mission, thereby downplaying the other purposes their capital served (such as Patrick Hannon and Alan Burgoyne of the Navy League and Lord Lovat of the ISAA). This accretion of meanings helps to explain why empire was picked up with varying degrees of enthusiasm by different groups. Conservative propaganda usually resisted these accretions: the fear was that they would confuse the main vision of empire.

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