Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-20T07:03:02.010Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN IN VICTORIAN IMPERIAL THOUGHT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2006

DUNCAN BELL
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Abstract

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article has benefited greatly from the questions raised by audiences in Berkeley, Cambridge, Oxford, and Warwick. I would like to thank the following (in no particular order) for commenting insightfully on earlier drafts: Michael Freeden, Peter Mandler, Gareth Stedman Jones, Casper Sylvest, Peter Cain, David Cannadine, David Armitage, Jeanne Morefield, Jennifer Pitts, Karuna Mantena, Richard Tuck, Istvan Hont, Heather Ellis, Ged Martin, Polly Low, Emma Reisz, Oswyn Murray, Quentin Skinner, Brian Young, Jon Parry, and the anonymous referees for this journal. All the usual disclaimers apply.