After mercantilism

From the 1830s onwards, the Victorians gradually transformed their sprawling legacy of war and mercantilism into a world-system much of whose fabric survived into the late 1940s. Yet they did not do so to a conscious plan, nor under the influence of a master ideology. Victorian imperialists were drawn from different interests and classes. They were driven by motives that were at times contradictory. Rival visions of empire pulled them in different directions. Nor could they count on a source of irresistible power to carry them forward wherever they chose. British firepower and capital formed a limited stock for which, at any one time, there were competing demands. The scope for enlarging British influence or territory was not just a function of British wishes or needs. It also depended upon many factors and forces outside the control of – perhaps even unknown to – British interests and agents. Hence, much of their handiwork followed the law of unintended consequences. However clear-sighted the prophet, it would not have been easy to foresee the path followed by British expansion between 1830 and 1880. It would have been harder still to envisage the societies that it helped to create both overseas and at home in the British Isles. The imperial system that the Victorians made emerged by default not from design.