The early 1870s were a time of premonition and foreboding in Victorian Britain. In continental Europe, Germany had emerged as a powerful new empire under Prussian leadership, crushing its neighbours and establishing its dominance in a succession of mid-century wars. Further east, a reforming tsar was steadily modernising Russia and threatening British power in Asia, while, across the Atlantic, the United States of America had emerged from its bloody civil war as a powerful, economically dynamic and rapidly developing federation.
As storm clouds gathered over the Victorian economy, heralding the onset of a long recession, novelists prophesied alien and threatening worlds. In The Battle of Dorking (1871), George Tomkyns Chesney imagined German invasion and British defeat, spawning a genre of futurist war fiction. That same year, the former colonial secretary Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race, a proto science fiction novel about a subterranean master race called the Vril-ya who drew their power from a mysterious energy and threatened to return to the surface and destroy humanity. Bulwer-Lytton's book, ranging over numerous Victorian scientific and cultural preoccupations and critically satirising feminist and democratic political thought, was a publishing sensation.1
Victorian intellectuals were similarly preoccupied. The leading theorist of British imperialism, the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley, delivered a lengthy lecture in 1871 to the Peace Society in which he surveyed the long centuries of European war and put forward a startling remedy. Incessant conflict in Europe could only be overcome, he argued, by creating institutions of a higher authority, including an executive solely vested with the power to levy force: a federal United States of Europe. The powers of Europe should follow the path staked out by the Americans, who had created a ‘gloriously successful’ federation. America had found ‘a higher political unit for mankind … a name greater than that of State … a virtue beyond patriotism’. ‘That union of nations’, Seeley argued, ‘which here is a wish, a Utopia, a religion, has advanced a great step towards practical reality on the other side of the Atlantic.’ Should Europeans emulate the American achievement, federation would ‘rise like a majestic temple over the tomb of war’.2
In the history of political ideas, precursors of the concept of the Anglosphere can be located directly in these late Victorian imperialist preoccupations, most notably in the idea of a ‘Greater Britain’, of which J. R. Seeley was to become the leading proponent in the 1880s. Just as the idea of federation had appealed to Seeley as a means to ending European war, so too it occupied a central place in the imagination of an influential group of politicians, historians and peripatetic intellectuals who gathered around the idea of cementing the unity of Great Britain with the ‘white’ settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa. For these thinkers, the example of the USA showed that federation over great distances was now both possible and desirable. To hold its own in an era of large states, population growth and global interconnectedness, Great Britain needed to draw closer to its settler colonies, whether in imperial political unity, racial solidarity or both: opinion would divide on the practical schemes for imperial federation, but diverse currents of thought would coalesce around the vision of a Greater Britain that would secure the pre-eminence of the British Empire and its future.
Seeley's most famous exposition of this argument was laid out in two series of lectures, entitled The Expansion of England. The lectures contain the aphorism that was to become a leitmotif of imperial study, that Britain had acquired an empire in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. By this, Seeley meant that the real course of the empire's historical development had not been adequately grasped. In Hegelian fashion, Seeley argued that the secret of English history was to be found not in the domestic politics of her kings and queens, courtiers and ministers but in her expansion, by war and commerce, into a great imperial power. What unified England's history over the centuries that spanned the Elizabethan and late Victorian ages was her struggle, waged successively with the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, for military mastery and commercial supremacy over vast imperial dominions. England had become the dominant ‘oceanic power’ and the English a ‘great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space’.3
Greater Britain – an ‘old utopia’ – had come within reach, Seeley argued, because of steam, electricity and the ‘abolition of distance by science’. Russia and the USA had already shown that political union over vast areas was possible. Technological and industrial advance enabled England to unite with her settler colonies. These were not possessions, but ‘part’ of England, populated by millions of Englishmen ‘of our own blood’. Greater Britain, he argued, was a ‘world Venice, with the sea for streets’.4
Seeley's recourse to English racial unity split the British Empire in half, reflected in the structure of his lectures themselves, the latter parts of which dwelt at length on the place of India in the historical narrative he had set out. India's ‘enormous native population’, he argued, ‘has no tie of blood whatever with the population of England’ and could not therefore be assimilated to Greater Britain. Its place in the empire was a contingent one. India had lain in ‘a state of wild anarchy’ when Britain had taken possession of it. It was not a political community or a country with a nationality in any meaningful sense; indeed, it was not India at all. That is why its conquest ‘cost England no effort and no trouble’. But, in turn, that meant that its place in the empire was instrumental, not intrinsic. Should India develop ‘a universal feeling of nationality, at that moment all hope is at an end, as all desire ought to be at an end, of preserving our Empire.’5
In making a distinction, common in late Victorian Britain, between the settler colonies, united by race with the mother country, and the countries of the subject populations of empire, Seeley and his contemporaries anticipated the fin-de-siècle drawing of a ‘global colour line’, dividing the white from non-white world.6 It was a line that was to haunt British policy-makers as they scrambled to acquire territories in Africa and the Middle East and were faced with claims to equality of citizenship from subject populations. It would deepen further as the settler colonies became dominions and then independent states, divided by history, status and power from the rest of the Commonwealth.
But, in the late nineteenth century, the idea of Greater Britain was more than an imperialist ideology of race. It gave expression to powerful currents of growth and integration, culturally and economically, of what historians have called the ‘Anglo-world’.
The Anglo-world was not a single state, at least not after the American colonies won their independence from Great Britain in 1783. It was, according to James Belich – the historian whose pioneering work has done most to shape our understanding of it – an English-speaking world that, like the Arab or Iberian worlds, was ‘divided and sub-global, yet transnational, inter-continental, and far flung’, comprising ‘a shifting, varied but interconnected mélange of partners and subjects … lubricated by shared language and culture’ in which people, goods and ideas circulated with relative ease.7
As such, the Anglo-world is best thought of as distinct from, but related to, both the wider British Empire and what has been called the ‘British world system’, the global economic and political system created by the growth and consolidation of the British Empire.8 It includes the white settler societies of ‘Greater Britain’ but also the USA, with which the UK had deep economic and ideological ties in the nineteenth century. As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn).
The nineteenth century witnessed explosive population growth in the Anglo-world. From 1790 to 1930, the number of English speakers grew sixteenfold, from 12 million to 200 million, far outstripping population growth anywhere else in the world.9 This demographic surge was underpinned by mass migration from the British Isles to the USA and the settler societies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the course of little over a century after the end of the Napoleonic wars, 25 million people migrated from the United Kingdom to these countries and the smaller enclaves of the Empire.10 The USA was the most popular destination, particularly for Irish migrants, and drew two-thirds of people leaving the British Isles up until the end of the nineteenth century. Australia became another favoured destination after the discovery of gold in the 1850s and 1860, as did New Zealand in the 1880s. Migration to South Africa was smaller in scale, despite its late nineteenth-century mineral and gold booms, while Canada became the primary magnet at the turn of the twentieth century for British migrants, drawn to the rapid economic growth of its prairie towns. Although the USA remained the preferred destination for the Irish migrants, the dominions together took nearly 60 per cent of British emigrants in the years running up to the First World War. These were peak years for mass migration to the ‘Old Commonwealth’, as it would later become known.11
Migration on this scale was made possible by the revolutions in transport and communications that took place in the Victorian age. The growth in power and speed of steamships dramatically reduced the cost, in time and money, of long-distance travel. Merchant fleets were dominated by the British, which carried something like a half of the world's shipping by the end of the nineteenth century. The advent of the railways, beginning in Britain in the 1830s, opened up vast land masses to migration and trade, and these new rail networks also reached their fullest development in the Anglo-world: the top five nations in terms of rail miles per capita in 1875 were the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Meanwhile, the invention of the telegraph collapsed distances in time and space, as cables laid overland and undersea brought near-instantaneous communication.12
The ‘Anglo-diaspora’, argues Belich, was different to other mass migrant communities. It ‘began earlier, was more permanent, and its migrants went to reproductions of their own societies, not someone else's.’13 Land grants, assisted passage, charitable endeavour and government campaigns all played their part in promoting migration, as did the extremes of famine and deprivation. But, once established, settler societies became enmeshed in complex networks of interaction with the ‘mother country’. Money, people, goods and services all flowed back and forth along these networks, leading to the creation of powerful political and cultural ties, with distinctive patterns for Scots, Welsh, Irish and English emigrants.
Economic historians have begun to quantify the new cultural economy of Greater Britain. After 1850, consumerism spread and intensified in the English-speaking world and ‘British’ tastes began to develop in colonial markets, helping to drive trade flows with the United Kingdom. A sense of shared Britishness – both shifting and complex and predominantly white and exclusionary – engendered trust and reciprocity between ‘home’ and the settler world, as well as helping to shape consumption preferences. Strong personal ties and attachments increased the consumption of British goods in the settler world. While intra-empire trade was underpinned by a common currency, shared language and preferential agreements, cultural ties generated an economic growth premium within the Anglo-world, cementing a transnational material culture.14 Hard power – in the form of British naval supremacy and armies of intervention – guaranteed its security.
While these waves of migration, and the economic networks they helped create, grew exponentially in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, proponents of a Greater Britain had antecedents upon which they could draw. Schemes for the political unity of the colonies of the British Empire circulated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These ranged from proposals that the settler colonies send MPs to the Westminster parliament, to arguments for imperial conferences or councils, to political unity in an imperial federation. Rarely did these ideas advance beyond pamphlets, speeches and private correspondence between politicians, however. Their popularity waxed and waned, depending on circumstances. The Canadian rebellions of 1837–8 prompted anxious debate about how to reconcile self-government in the colonies (or ‘responsible government’) with the unity of empire, which returned to the fore as representative government spread to Australasia and free trade legislation removed restrictions on colonial trade. This was to be a fault line in the British state that returned with a vengeance over Irish Home Rule and which lives on in the contemporary debates about the future of the United Kingdom. Yet it failed to generate serious support for colonial representation in the House of Commons or any other substantive measure of federation. Empire federalism was a recurrent theme in Victorian politics, but it never translated into a political project that stood much chance of success.
Only in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when it gathered force around the idea of Greater Britain, would imperial federalism become an identifiable, if diverse, political movement.15 The Imperial Federation League was the institutional expression of this movement. Founded in 1884, its proponents were the ‘most vocal, innovative and ambitious, as well as the best-organized advocates of Greater Britain’.16 Its goal was ‘to secure by federation the permanent unity of the Empire’. At its peak, it numbered over 100 MPs among its members and boasted the future prime minister Lord Rosebery as its longest-serving president. It published a monthly journal and had branches and members throughout Great Britain and the settler colonies. Yet, although it agitated successfully for colonial conferences, the first of which was held in 1887, government ministers rebuffed its federalist ambitions, and it disbanded in acrimony in 1893. The ambiguity and political flexibility of the idea of imperial federation was both a source of strength and a weakness, enabling different currents of opinion to marshal behind a vision of the unity of empire, only to crumble into disunity once practical proposals needed support, particularly when these concerned imperial tariff preference. This was a lesson that would be learnt by future campaigns inspired by federal and ‘constructive’ imperialist ideals – for tariff reform and increased resources for the Royal Navy.
Greater Britain theorists also had ideological antecedents in mid-Victorian Anglo-Saxonism – the belief in an Anglo-Saxon race with a unique history and destiny. The foremost Victorian Anglo-Saxonist was the Oxford historian Edward A. Freeman, whose racial accounts of English history lauded the ‘Teutonic greatness’ of the Anglo-Saxons and attributed England's constitution to ‘our forefathers in their old lands of Northern Germany before they made their way into the Isle of Britain’, from where, ‘transplanted to a new soil, it grew and flourished, and brought forth fruit richer and more lasting than in brought forth in the land of its earlier birth.’ Freeman's histories were Whiggish versions of Anglo-Saxon supremacism: ‘The continued national life of the people’, he argued, ‘notwithstanding foreign conquests and internal revolutions, has remained unbroken for fourteen hundred years.’17
Freeman was highly influential in shaping racial accounts of Greater Britain and the idea that the USA and Britain's white settler societies formed a ‘moral community’ of the English-speaking peoples. He rejected imperial federation, which he saw as a contradiction in terms, in favour of a common citizenship of the Anglo-Saxon race.18 The Liberal politician Charles Dilke, who did most to popularize the term ‘Greater Britain’ after the account of his journeys in the British Empire of that title was published in 1868, believed in the existence of different national types, which reflected prevailing environmental and social conditions in Canada, the USA and so on, but held that each was founded in a ‘Saxondom’: ‘That which raises us above the provincialism of citizenship of little England is our citizenship of the greater “Saxondom” which includes all that is best and wisest in the world.’19
As Duncan Bell notes, in The Idea of Greater Britain, late Victorian thinkers such as Dilke would slip between biological and constructivist conceptions of race, on the one hand stressing historical determinants of the evolution of societies, and on the other expounding the virulent ‘scientific racist’ views that gained ground in the second half of the nineteenth century. Either could be used to justify the violent suppression of non-white native populations. As the history of Victorian imperialism amply documents, the settler societies were murderous ones. Indigenous populations were exterminated and their lands expropriated. But, as Bell notes, ‘the presence of xenophobia and the role of racism was also indicated by an act of silencing.’ Advocates of Greater Britain often simply didn't register the presence of indigenous people in the settler societies of Canada, New Zealand, Australia or South Africa, and gave little thought to French or Boer settler groups. These lacunae persisted in Anglospheric discourses throughout the twentieth century. Where Dilke and other leading theorists of Greater Britain, such as J. A. Froude, did refer to other ‘races’, it was often simply to place them in a racial hierarchy and to note that their ‘weakness’ or ‘inferiority’ would render them eventually extinct.20
Anglo-Saxonism also inflected views on the relationship between Greater Britain and the USA. Ever since the American colonies had achieved their independence, the USA had held an ambivalent place in the British imperial imagination. It was an object of both awe and fear – a lesson in what might happen if Great Britain neglected her ties with her settler colonies, which might follow America's lead and cut loose from the mother country, but also a source of profound admiration. America had shown how liberty and self-government might be combined in a federation stretching over a vast expanse.21 It had ‘emphatically refused to submit to disintegration’, argued Seeley, and had ‘proved’, in the words of the Canadian imperial federalist George Parkin, ‘that immense territorial extent is not incompatible with that representative system of government which had its birth and development in England, and its most notable adaptation in America.’22
The USA's economic dynamism was undeniable. Massive capital investment, a surge in technological and infrastructural development, and an urban population boom propelled American economic growth in the Gilded Age. Output quadrupled between 1860 and 1900, led by explosive manufacturing growth in the industrial North East. This was the era in which America unveiled a new model of capitalism to the world – of powerful modern corporations deploying leading-edge technologies and organizing production in proto-Taylorist industrial plants – which laid the ground for the global hegemony it would achieve in the twentieth century.
It was also an era in which the US and British economies were deeply integrated. Capital investment flowed freely from the City of London across the Atlantic to finance expansion and growth. Between 1865 and 1914, over £800 million of British capital was exported to the USA, one-fifth of all its global capital exports.23 In return, American agriculture fed the British market. Grain, meat and cheese were exported to Britain in huge quantities. In 1890, a quarter of Britain's meat and, by 1900, some 70 per cent of her grain imports came from the USA. John Bull was increasingly being fed by Midwestern farmers.
For Anglo-Saxonists such as Cecil Rhodes, here were grounds for a new Anglo-American Empire:
The idea gleaming and dancing before one's eyes like a will-of-the-wisp at last frames itself into a plan. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?24
Journalists, historians and social reformers argued in similar vein, proposing that empire federation should embrace America in a ‘Pan-Saxon Alliance’ of the English and American people. H. G. Wells would later call this a ‘great synthesis of the English-speaking peoples’, with its ‘head and centre’ in the ‘great urban region developing between Chicago and the Atlantic’.25
Rhodes was to pursue his vision with ruthlessness and ferocity in Southern Africa. Others were less convinced. The Oxford historian, journalist and influential liberal critic of empire Goldwin Smith believed that schemes for political union, whether of Great Britain and her settler colonies or a new Anglo-America, were a chimera. The colonies should be granted their independence, not bound together into an unnatural and unworkable federation. Their unity was to be sought, as with the ties between Great Britain and America, in a distinct Anglo-Saxon civilisation, bound together by blood, language, history and culture. National emancipation for the colonies would provide the foundation upon which a new Anglo-Saxon multilateralism could be built, ‘a moral federation of the whole English-speaking race throughout the world.’26
There was a racial core to Smith's thought which emphasised that political equality in a democratic, self-governing nation was impossible when a territory was inhabited by people of different races who were not socially equal. Writing after the victory of the North in the American civil war, an event in which he rejoiced, Smith asked: ‘How can there be real political equality without social fusion? And how can there be social fusion whilst the difference of colour and the physical antipathy remain?’27 Self-government required a fusion of race and nationality in sovereign states, an argument that was to recur frequently in twentieth-century British political thought, most controversially in the figure of Enoch Powell.
Smith's views found an echo across the Atlantic. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie waxed rhapsodic about the racial unity of the USA and Great Britain but saw the British Empire, and the possession of its white colonies, as a barrier to Anglo-Saxon alliance. The colonies should be granted independence, paving the way for Canada to unite with the United States, in turn facilitating a transatlantic alliance of North America and Great Britain – a union of the English-speaking peoples that would henceforth exercise world leadership. Such an alliance would be so powerful that it would have no competitors. War would cease. Racial utopia would lead to global peace.28
While Carnegie was dreaming of world peace under Anglo-Saxon tutelage, Great Britain and the USA were groping towards coexistence in the geo-political spaces of the late Victorian imperial order. As ever, Britain's primary concerns were the balance of power in Europe and the protection of India, the jewel in the crown of empire. But it had significant interests in the USA's immediate neighbourhood – in Canada, the Caribbean and South America. For its part, the USA was flexing its hemispheric muscles, increasingly assertive of the Monroe Doctrine that the New World was its bailiwick and out of bounds to European power. Although its elites were still divided between powerful expansionist and isolationist impulses, the USA was beginning to exert an international role in the promotion of its exports and extra-territorial corporate interests. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that John Hay, the US secretary of state, set out the country's new Open Door policy by which it demanded the right to transport and sell its goods in the spheres of influence being carved out by the world's imperial powers in China and other markets.
Relations came to a head between the two powers twice before the turn of the century. The first concerned a border dispute between Britain and Venezuela over which the USA in 1895 demanded powers of arbitration, to which the British government acceded. A potential crisis was averted, but the tacit result was that Britain accepted the legitimacy of the Monroe Doctrine. The status of the USA as a new regional hegemon was then starkly confirmed by the Spanish–American War of 1898, in which it had British support. This short war, in which the USA won a crushing victory, killed off the vestiges of Spanish power in the Caribbean. At the end of the nineteenth century, the USA either annexed or drew into its emerging informal empire a string of Pacific and Caribbean islands: Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines.
The second episode was the Boer War of 1899–1902, which generated considerable hostility towards Britain in the USA. Anti-imperialist sentiment and support for the underdog Boers ran high, provoking a public backlash against the British Empire. Three hundred Americans volunteered to fight alongside the Boers, among them a contingent of Irish-Americans who seized the opportunity offered by the war to take up armed struggle against the British state. Here was a conflict that bore the hallmarks of the same liberation war that had given birth to the American Republic itself, and which could not be readily filtered through the categories of race. Yet, as the Boer War wore on, anti-British sentiment receded. The USA backed the British Empire, reciprocating the support Britain had offered in the war with Spain. Relations between the two countries improved. The 1890s saw a rapprochement established between Great Britain and the USA that would endure into the twentieth century.
The international relations theorist Srdjan Vucetic has attributed this to the propagation of a strong sense of racial identity by Anglo-Saxonists – a discursive construct which shaped the practices and strategies of each state and which would underpin the Anglosphere in the twentieth century.29 Varieties of Anglo-Saxonism certainly circulated within the intellectual and political elites of both countries in this era. Teddy Roosevelt, hero of the Spanish–American War, who would become the twenty-sixth president of the USA, was strongly influenced by the Teutonic race histories of Edward A. Freeman. He championed the conquest of the American West – a ‘great epic feat in the history of our race’ – and the settlement of Australia as great events of world history. He read and warmly reviewed Charles Pearson's influential tract National Life and Character, which, in a dystopian reversal of Greater Britain boosterism, warned of impending race competition for Europeans from the populous ‘black and yellow races’. This warning spoke directly to the fears of American politicians about rising Japanese economic power abroad, as well as Southern segregationists and nativist opponents of Chinese migration at home.
Yet the interests of the USA and Great Britain could not always cohere on the basis of imagined racial kinship. America was becoming more diverse in the 1890s, its population infused with a surge of migration from Southern and Eastern Europe. After the 1898 war with Spain, it had begun to embrace a more expansionist, if not classically imperialist, foreign policy. In 1904 Roosevelt enunciated a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Henceforth, he argued, ‘in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of … wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.’30
This would lead it to challenge British supremacy on the seas. If the USA was to police the Western hemisphere and secure its new Open Door foreign policy objectives, it would require a stronger navy. Drawing on the influential theories of the naval officer and historian Alfred T. Mahan, Roosevelt consistently advocated the importance of sea power in international relations, and he expanded the capabilities of the US Navy throughout his presidency. This would culminate in the cruise of the Great White Fleet of 1907–9, a worldwide tour of sixteen battleships of the US Atlantic Fleet that drew massive crowds to witness a breathtaking demonstration of US power and ambition. A little over a decade and a world war later, the US government would dramatically consolidate the build-up of naval power that Roosevelt had started. At the 1921–2 Washington Conference, the United States secured a programme of disarmament of the British, US and Japanese fleets that would fix the ratio of British and American capital ships at parity, ending the British Empire's claims to ‘absolute naval dominance’. According to the historian Adam Tooze, ‘Never before had an Empire of Britain's stature so explicitly and consciously conceded superiority in such a crucial dimension of global power.’31
This divergence in power and interests mirrored the trajectories of the British and American economies after the turn of the twentieth century. Although the City of London remained the ‘switchboard’ for international business transactions and Britain's massive overseas investments and merchant shipping cemented her place at the centre of the world's financial flows, the USA also developed its own deep capital pools, while its explosive economic growth meant that American farmers and manufacturers could increasingly supply burgeoning domestic markets, as well as the new export opportunities promoted by the Open Door foreign policy.32 Great Britain would increasingly look to her dominions for her food supply, and her emigrants would follow a similar path. In the Edwardian era, American GDP per capita overtook Great Britain's, and by the time the First World War broke out the USA was the richest and biggest economy in the world. Relations between the two powers would now follow a new dynamic.
The career of one politician – Joseph Chamberlain – symbolises more than any other the challenges and choices Great Britain faced in this era. A Birmingham industrialist who rose to prominence as a pioneering municipal reformer and champion of education in his home city, Chamberlain was a radical liberal who broke with his party over Home Rule for Ireland and became a Unionist colonial secretary in the Salisbury government elected in 1895. He had long been attracted to imperialist thinking and is said to have sent his son Austen to study at Cambridge University because J. R. Seeley held a chair there.33 Chamberlain was greatly influenced by the publication in 1883 of Seeley's Expansion of England, and he refracted significant events of that period – the death of General Gordon in Khartoum, and Bismarck's annexation of the Cameroons – through its imperialist lenses. He became deeply preoccupied by the fate of the British Empire.
Chamberlain also absorbed Seeley's federalism and the latter's admiration for the USA, seeing the answer to Irish nationalist demands in significant devolution of local government to Ireland or, more expansively, in a federal system of ‘Home Rule all-round’, with an imperial legislature at Westminster. In Chamberlain's political thought, federation was the key to solving both the internal and the external pressures on the United Kingdom – the means by which it would remain united and closely tied to its settler colonies. But there was a racial element too: in opposing Gladstone's plans for Irish Home Rule, Chamberlain evoked the spectre of an island divided into ‘two nations, two races and two religions’. He would not countenance coercion against Ulster's Protestant community, yet would readily do so against Ireland's majority Catholic population. In the end, Unionist deference to the unitary constitution prevailed over a federal solution. Chamberlain would prefer alliance with ‘English gentlemen’ in the Tory Party to one with Irish nationalists.
Imperial federation would continue ‘to haunt his mind and dog his steps for the remainder of his life’, however.34 In the late 1880s, he took up the post of chief commissioner in the USA to adjudicate a dispute over fishing rights in North American waters. While in Canada, he would extol the virtues of its federal constitution, arguing that it might yet become a ‘lamp lighting our path to the federation of the British Empire’. In the run-up to the 1895 general election, after which he became colonial secretary, he would increasingly fuse the themes of social reform and imperialist unity, stressing that his unionism meant a commitment both to an undivided empire and to the welfare and union of all the social classes of the community. This was to become the basis of his later campaign for tariff reform. It also established a template for Eurosceptics in the twenty-first century: the powerful yoking together of geo-political ambitions with promissory notes of social reform for the working classes.
As colonial secretary, Chamberlain energetically promoted public investment and loan schemes for the development of Britain's colonies, particularly to finance infrastructural development in newly acquired African colonies. He increasingly brought the economic management of the empire into the state's orbit rather than leaving it to private companies – presaging a more self-consciously activist role for the imperial government. This was to find its fullest expression in his proposals for tariff reform. Already, by the 1880s and 1890s, Canada and a number of individual Australian colonies (Australia was to become a federation in 1901) had introduced tariff protections, which also fell on British exports. The settler colonies appeared to be developing their own national economic and political agendas, which troubled imperial unionists. Chamberlain began to advocate for an imperial Zollverein, in which the British Empire would become a preferential trade area, surrounded by high tariff walls. These tariffs would help pay for the defence of the empire, obviating the need for direct imperial taxation.
Having failed to persuade the cabinet to back his proposal, Chamberlain resigned from Balfour's administration in 1903 to prosecute his campaign in the country at large. Launching it in Birmingham, he argued that his scheme for imperial preference would not apply to Indian or any other ‘native fellow subjects’ but only to ‘our own kinsfolk’ – that ‘white population that constitutes the majority in all the great self-governing Colonies of the Empire.’ This population was growing through emigration and the economic development of newly settled territories. When critics pointed out that free trade with other nations exceeded imperial trade, tariff reformers replied that colonial trade was growing faster and was worth more to Great Britain – an argument that would be echoed a century or so later by Eurosceptic advocates of trade with the Anglosphere against the European Union.
The campaign for tariff reform ultimately foundered on the rocks of free trade, commitment to which dominated Great Britain's political economy, and also on working-class hostility. The commercial, financial and shipping interests centred on the City of London all opposed tariff reform, as did the cotton, coal and shipbuilding businesses. Working-class support was readily neutered by the fact that, since foodstuffs constituted the bulk of imports from the settler colonies, tariff reform would simply put up the price of food on the kitchen table. Free traders contrasted their ‘big loaf’ of bread with the ‘little loaf’ working families would get under imperial preference. Chamberlain's cross-class political appeal to imperialism abroad and radicalism at home failed him at this point. At the start of his campaign, he held out the promise of using tariff revenues to pay for new state pensions, but somehow, ‘during the summer of 1903, Chamberlain let this grand design slip between his fingers.’ Instead, he promised compensatory abolition in duties on sugar and tea so as to balance the working class household budget. ‘Having promised to produce social reform like a rabbit out of his fiscal hat, Chamberlain was left with an empty hat.’35
Chamberlain's belief in the importance of imperial unity had been fortified by the experience of the Second Boer War – ‘Joe's War’. A mighty empire had taken nearly four years to subdue a small force of guerrillas. It had been a profound shock, stimulating calls for social reform to improve the well-being and physical strength of British soldiers. But it had also nurtured popular imperialist sentiment and strong fellow feelings towards ‘kith and kin’ compatriots from the settler colonies, some 50,000 of whom had fought alongside British Army troops. In the midst of the war, at the 1900 ‘Khaki’ election, the Conservatives had been returned to office and, a few years later, Chamberlain launched his tariff reform campaign. Imperial preference, it has been said, was ‘born on the veld’.36
Edwardian South Africa was also to prove the nursery of a new generation of imperial federalists, whose thinking formed a bridge between late Victorian imperialism and the era when the British Empire came to an end after the Second World War. This was the group of young Oxford graduates brought together by Chamberlain's ally and commissioner to South Africa, Alfred Milner. ‘Milner's Kindergarten’, as his protégés became known, was recruited to serve Milner, and then his successor Lord Selborne, in the administration of the defeated Afrikaner republics. They were a tightly knit group, among whose number were Lionel Curtis, a writer, pamphleteer and later fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; the MP and future colonial secretary Leo Amery (perhaps best known for shouting ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, across the floor of the House of Commons to the Labour MP Arthur Greenwood during a debate on the invasion of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War); Philip Kerr, the future Lord Lothian, who later served as Lloyd George's private secretary, under-secretary of state to India and Britain's ambassador to Washington; and a clutch of future governor generals, city businessmen and influential journalists (at the eclectic fringes of the kindergarten were also to be found the imperial architect Herbert Baker and the novelist John Buchan).
This group, with Curtis holding the pen, drafted the Selborne Memorandum of 1907, which laid out the case for the unification of South Africa in a new federation. Self-government had been promised in the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the Boer War, but the questions of how power would be shared, and to whom the franchise would extend, had been deferred. The Selborne Memorandum argued that unification was the only means by which the economic and political divisions within the country could be solved and the full freedoms of self-government enjoyed. In the background was a conviction that Britain's future interest would be secured by a rising British settler population, despite the fact that unification would in the short term hand political supremacy to the Boers. But the memorandum was ultimately directed at the white population, British and Boer, as a whole: without unity, it argued, the ‘native question’ and the political and civil rights of black African and Indian populations could not be addressed.