There should be no need for another Smuts Inaugural. Eric Stokes should be with us still. His early death robbed us of a star in our firmament. His sparkling English Utilitarians and India, The Zambesian Past, and following his return to Cambridge, to India and to Kipling, The Peasant and the Raj have been lodestars to very many of us. On so many personal grounds it is hard to accept he is gone. The first Smuts Professor graces our company still. Nicholas Mansergh's superb edition of the British documents on The Transfer of Power in India is currently crowding the footnotes. He and I share debts to Keith Hancock; still the doyen of our limb of the profession; and in the fulness of his days Smuts' biographer.

But, as my title implies, it is to another luminary to whom I refer. For precisely a century lay between the publication of John Richard Seeley's Cambridge lectures on The Expansion of England and my assumption of the Smuts Chair; and my purpose here is to ruminate upon what has happened in the interval. Seeley, so we were lately told, was the first truly notable Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. The History Faculty named its Library after him, and on 24 April 1945 successfully recommended to the University that it should teach a course on The Expansion of Europe, that it has done ever since, which is essentially still based on Seeley's perspectives.

It is astonishing to recall that as Seeley lectured, Britain's African empire had scarcely begun.