INTRODUCTION

When we turn to the central section of this book, involving a movement which would eventually embrace thousands of persons, and whose impact on Britain's foreign and domestic policy is undisputed, various problems confront us. Not least is the fact that relatively little has been written on socialist attitudes towards empire in this period. As in other countries, socialism revived in the 1880s in Britain because of economic decline and growing domestic poverty. The working classes were not greatly concerned with international relations, and it was hard enough to sell them socialism as the antidote to their own problems. Consequently it has been commonly asserted that, as James Hinton has written, British socialism ‘had little distinctive contribution to make to the formulation of foreign policy’. Contemporary sources also sometimes betray an occasional hint of this disinterest; a writer in the Labour Leader in 1897, for instance, reflected that ‘few of the foreign questions which continually agitate England are really worth taking sides about’. Hence too we can note the singular omission of any treatment of colonial and imperial questions in an otherwise definitive statement of socialist intent published in 1897, Forecasts of the Coming Century, which included essays by George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Tom Mann and William Morris.