Shadows of Empire

The Anglosphere in British Politics

Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509516643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

The idea of an alliance between Britain and its old Commonwealth colonies has recently made a remarkable comeback in the context of Brexit. Based on belief in a special bond between the English-speaking peoples of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it has been dubbed the 'Anglosphere' by supporters and 'Empire 2.0' by critics. In this book, leading commentators Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce trace the historical origins of this idea back to the shadow cast by the British Empire in the late Victorian era. They show how leading British political figures, from Churchill to Thatcher, consistently reworked it and how it was revived by a group of right-wing politicians, historians and pamphleteers to support the case for Brexit. They argue that, while the contemporary idea of the Anglosphere as an alternative to European Union membership is seriously flawed, it nonetheless represents an enduring account of Britain's role in the world that runs through the heart of political life over the last century. Shadows of Empire will be essential reading for everyone interested in British politics and post-Brexit foreign policy.

1
The Origins of the Anglosphere

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

Greater Britain

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

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 spe...