‘The British World’ and the politics of empire

The so-called ‘British World’ is a significant concept and topic of controversy in British imperial history. In its divisiveness, it also sheds new light on the political dynamics of empire in the nineteenth century. While most commonly associated with recent scholarship on British colonies of white settlement, invocations of a British World also speak to wider colonial claims for equality and inclusion. This essay explores these meanings before providing an overview of key ways in which inequality and tension between the component parts of empire – the settler colonies and colonies under authoritarian rule – occupied a central place in imperial politics. To this end, it traces evolving ideas about political economy and political morality. While it observes seeming contradictions between theory and application around questions of free trade, labour, mobility, and political inclusion, it suggests that, far from contradictions, these inequalities were at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and trajectory of the British Empire.

Introduction

Between 1783 and 1914, the British Empire expanded its reach to all inhabited continents. Only a few decades after the loss of the 13 North American colonies, patterns of conquest, annexation, and migration and settlement brought diverse peoples and territories under formal British rule, with finance and commerce underpinning the further tentacle-like spread of British influence (Darwin 2009). Yet, as recent approaches have stressed, the historical trajectory of the British Empire reflected patterns of friction and inequality within and between its component parts and populations (Lester 2002; Burton 2015). This emphasis speaks, among other concerns, to the emergence of the so-called ‘British World’ as a standing framework for reorienting imperial history that has sought to disentangle the self-governing colonies of white settlement from the ‘subject’ colonies (i.e. colonies under authoritarian control) as objects of historical analysis. From its emergence in the early 2000s, the British World model has spurred ongoing debate about method, scope, and ethics (Vernon 2016; Pincus et. al. 2019).

The following sections explain the contours of this controversy and then explore ways in which we might incorporate the British World framework and attendant critiques into understanding nineteenth-century British imperial politics as a whole. Settler colonialism and the political dynamics of a diverse empire were integral to developments in British political economy and ideas about moral and democratic reform. Systemic inequalities informed the political and strategic vulnerabilities of the British Empire as it entered the age of imperial war in 1914. This essay ends by highlighting past claims for political inclusion that challenged settlerism by invoking a shared imperial political culture.

Competing historical approaches to ‘the British World’

The notion of a British World has been the subject of much scholarly controversy. In its most common usage, ‘the British World’ is a neologism emerging from the field of British imperial history in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when historians of the so-called settler empire, or self-governing colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, set out to frame their field as separate from the emphases that practitioners of ‘new imperial history’ placed on colonial difference, cultural chauvinism, and the marginalisation of indigenous and colonised peoples (Buckner & Francis 2005; Kennedy 2018). Stating the agenda, Bridge and Fedorowich wrote that while ‘[for] two generations the major thrust of imperial historians has been to develop an understanding of the processes behind the acquisition, administration, and exploitation of the non-white empire and subsequent decolonisation’, postcolonial approaches ‘exploring the notion of the colonial “other” have virtually nothing to say about the encounters millions of British migrants had with earlier generations of people who were curiously very much like themselves but also quite different’ (Bridge & Fedorowich 2003, 12). Beyond such initial formulations, other scholars have contributed to a broader project by examining networks of migration, trade, and information that developed among ethnically English, Scottish, Welsh, and (to an extent) Irish diasporas, and the explosive growth of those diasporas in the nineteenth century (Magee & Thompson 2010; Belich 2009).

The British World approach has generated constructive pushback along several lines. Critics see the framework as reviving outdated versions of imperial history that prioritise the development of self-governing settler colonies at the expense of holistic accounts of empire. Although yielding fresh insights for national histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (as well as the complicated case of South Africa), the tendency of ‘British World’ scholars to isolate settler colonies from wider imperial dynamics risks obscuring connections between and across British territories and sidesteps questions of power and politics which defined a complex imperial system (Bright & Dilley 2017). Moreover, critics caution that the ‘British World’ hinges on a subjective and contested identifier (‘British’), while forgoing rigorous analysis of the multiple meanings and contingencies inherent in that term. Still others contend that any framework needs to take seriously the claims made by colonial constituencies beyond settler groups on so-called ‘British’ political and constitutional traditions (Behm 2015; Kumarasingham 2018). Historians are left, then, debating the extent and nature of the British World and whether the term should be attached narrowly to the history of settler states or to the fuller breadth of empire.

These contemporary debates are significant not just because they reflect disagreements about the study of the British Empire but because they carry on the legacies of tensions which themselves have imperial roots. Acknowledging the British World as a controversial, indeed malleable concept and framework, the following sections explore projects of white settler colonial development, as well as ideas and practices that appealed to more radically inclusive ‘British’ political traditions and rights, namely those claimed by non-white colonial subjects in the face of racism and segregation across the empire. The tension between these phenomena lay at the heart of British imperial politics.

‘The British World’ and imperial political economy

The rapid transformation of the British Empire went hand in hand with changing political and economic paradigms encompassing trade, labour, and emigration. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the empire of settlement lay diminished; penal settlements in the South Pacific were hardly compensation for the loss of 13 prosperous North American colonies. Reform and consolidation followed. In 1791, the Canada Act established the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. Colonial officials founded Port Jackson, later Sydney, Australia, in 1788. Over the next few decades, ‘transportation’ from Britain – the contemporary term for the ongoing forced emigration of convicts and those classified as undesirables – bore out the moral assumptions that increasingly underpinned domestic and imperial policy: individuals would thrive in the pursuit of thrift, hard work, and spiritual atonement, but deviance demanded harsher correction by state and society. Transportation stood akin to banishment, and until the 1820s and 1830s, social pressures only yielded slow growth in internal migration not yet seeking an overseas outlet (Hilton 1986; Richards 2018). In this climate, voluntary emigration from Britain to Canada and the South Pacific remained relatively modest until the 1840s.

Debates about trade, labour, and emigration tracked major intellectual shifts. Liberal political economy gathered sway in the 1820s and 1830s, moving away from a Malthusian vision of population growth only checked by scarcity and crisis to one in which policy intervention and elite stewardship were key. Utilitarian and Benthamite thinkers developed models in which the rational pursuit of wealth underpinned human behaviour and economic systems were self-correcting: if configured intelligently, economic systems, it was supposed, could harness profit-driven, competitive individualism toward potentially unbounded growth (Winch 2009). With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, ‘free trade’ achieved the status not just of national policy but of a civic religion which saw unprotected commerce as a prerequisite for global peace and harmony (Trentmann 2008). Yet free trade developed in the context of imperial expansion. Well before the start of the century, market access and revenues had melded with geopolitics and the rise of military authoritarianism to fuel British conquest in South Asia, a process which reached its culmination in the 1840s (Bayly 1989). In the mid- and late nineteenth century, as historians have observed, free trade principles coloured ambitions for commercial dominance in China and South America and incursions into sub-Saharan Africa, many of which were backed by military force (Gallagher & Robinson 1953; Semmel 1970).

Colonial crises, meanwhile, cast doubt on the prospect of boundless growth and further muddied the meaning of ‘free trade’. The end of protection for sugar imports from Caribbean colonies set off a firestorm over the ‘abandonment’ of white West Indian planters as well as Canadian timber producers. The Great Famine which ravaged Ireland in the mid- and late 1840s prompted both defensive responses that blamed the Irish for their own sufferings and soul-searching that England’s nearest colony should have been the victim of such novel and now seemingly deadly experiments in political economy. In the context of global depression in the 1870s and 1880s, Australia and Canada erected tariffs protecting their nascent manufacturing sectors. India, meanwhile, ‘was wedged open by imperial fiat’ and kept in deficit to Britain until the interwar years, forced to absorb the largest share of Britain’s textile exports while paying so-called ‘Home Charges’ from profits in overseas markets to pay for the maintenance of British rule (Darwin 2009, 182; Tomlinson 2013).

But free trade as a component of racial and progressive discourse came to look rosier in the context of changing settler colonial politics. Nineteenth-century Britain outpaced the world in the speed and extent of urbanisation, and in terms of the demographic uprooting underpinning the growth of cities (Vernon 2014). These patterns met with public alarm and a range of proposed interventions. One was the turn toward ‘high agriculture’, a set of reforms which sought to restore economic productivity and moral direction to farming in Britain (Daunton 2007). This phase occurred against the backdrop of increasing settler incursions onto indigenous lands in Western Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Motifs invoking settler resilience, ingenuity, and innate capacity for transforming the ‘waste spaces’ of the world into agrarian Edens became a dominant feature of mid-Victorian political thought (Belich 2009; Cain 2010). Connected to this pattern were racialised ideas about labour. In the aftermath of emancipation in 1833, British commentators’ facile expectations that statutory freedom would bring childlike gratitude on the part of former slaves and benevolent paternalism on the part of planters dimmed quickly. While liberal political economy held that abolition would give rise to individualistic industriousness, this model wilfully ignored entrenched systems of social and economic inequality that had taken root under slavery and were perpetuated through the apprenticeship system (1833–38), property restrictions, and political alienation (Drescher 2002; Holt 1991). As British colonial commentators linked crisis in the Caribbean to wider struggles between imperial or settler and indigenous populations, the contours of racialised labour took new shape. The British Government in India introduced the ‘indenture system’ for recruiting ‘coolie’ labour to fill the vacuum left on Caribbean sugar plantations after emancipation (Kumar 2017). Chinese immigration to goldfields in settler colonies, especially Australia and Southern Africa, prompted racist persecution and exclusionary legislation between the 1850s and 1890s (Ngai 2021). Settler and metropolitan attitudes took up a common refrain. While white labour became synonymous with improvement, settlement, and investment, imperial planners as well as immigration restriction campaigners depicted non-white labour as fundamentally transient, possibly dangerous, and requiring strict control. These exclusionary or exploitative regimes emerged alongside new ideas about emigration and social reform.

Mass migration was a defining phenomenon of nineteenth-century global history. The largest population outflows originated in Europe and East Asia (McKeown 2004). The United Kingdom yielded approximately one-third of the 51.7 million emigrants leaving Europe between 1815 and 1930. Some 11.4 million departed from Great Britain and 7.3 million from Ireland before the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. To the sometimes consternation of British policymakers and emigration campaigners who sought to channel ‘excess’ population to the far reaches of the British Empire, the majority of UK migrants during this period headed for the United States. British migration to settler colonies as opposed to elsewhere hovered around 35 per cent between 1850 and 1900. Only with the growth of institutionalised support and denser ties between migrants and the metropole did the figure destined for imperial destinations exceed half, reaching 64 per cent from 1901 to 1913 and 71 per cent between 1920 and 1929 (Harper & Constantine 2010).

Trends in emigration both influenced and reflected interventions in political economic thought which promoted British migrants from perilous appendages of metropolitan society to agents of supposed world historical change, as the next section will explain. Despite a racialised market, labour was supposedly ‘free’ in that it could be bought and sold openly; competition for dignified and increasingly lucrative opportunities would compel individual industriousness, and competition for wages would increase profits. As Malthusian thought gave way to the prospect of indefinite growth, early Victorian campaigners such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield came forward with schemes for the organised movement of British settlers – to New Zealand, as per Wakefield’s design, or to the Australian colonies. Canada and Southern Africa also competed with the United States in various settlement initiatives. Although no sustained, centralised British programme for assisted emigration ever materialised, influential policymakers and Cabinet officials repeatedly returned to the prospect of supported emigration drives, and colonial governments recurrently introduced planned incentives and assistance for emigration well into the twentieth century (Malchow 1979).

‘The British World’ and imperial political morality

Political economic concerns reflected wider ideological and moral developments linking imperial events to domestic politics and political culture. Recent scholarly gestures to an ethnically defined ‘British World’ refer back to what contemporaries at the time variously and successively referred to as the ‘colonial empire’, the colonies of settlement, the self-governing colonies, ‘Greater Britain’, and (in a term formalised by the Colonial Conference of 1907) ‘the Dominions’. The idea of ‘Greater Britain’ in particular is of crucial interest to historians seeking to understand the dynamics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire (Bell 2007). ‘Greater Britain’ was popularised by Liberal MP Charles Dilke’s eponymous 1867 account of his travels throughout the British Empire and the United States. Yet the term quickly became shorthand for Britain’s white settlers, its core meaning whittled down by ongoing imperial contention. Contemporary preoccupations around ‘Greater Britain’ hung on questions about the prospects and perils of democracy, the correct understandings of liberty and virtue, and the racial and gendered boundaries implicit in these political formulae.

Mid-Victorian imperial historians and their later acolytes wrote about the evolution of imperial self-government in parallel with ‘Whiggish’ accounts of English and British domestic constitutional development (Behm 2018). This framework celebrated the creation of representative assemblies in the Australian and Canadian colonies between the 1830s and 1860s and New Zealand during the 1850s, the confederation of Canada (1867), the Australian federation (1901), and the Union of South Africa (1910) – albeit preceded in all these cases by decades of restructuring, reversals, expropriation, and war. To imperialists and Britannic nationalists (who often occupied the same ideological ground, and could be found throughout the empire), these events revealed a supposedly special trajectory by which England had expanded into a ‘Greater Britain’ rooted in a supposedly singular capacity for self-governance, parliamentary deliberation, and love of ‘fair play’. The same figures pushed aside contrasting evidence, such as the resurgence of British authoritarianism in India following the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, and the stripping of representative governance from Jamaica after the 1865 Morant Bay Revolt, and they drew starker theoretical lines dividing India and the ‘subject empire’ from the settler colonies (Seeley 1883; Metcalf 1995; Holt 1991; Drayton 2011).

Questions of virtue and citizenship underpinned a politics of empire that increasingly turned to ‘settlerism’ as a moral pillar and solution. Historian James Belich suggests that settlerism was in and of itself a distinctive ideology born from three prior late eighteenth-century revolutions: the American, the French, and the Industrial. Settlerism’s major innovation was to embrace a radical vision of the future with universal appeal. Where emigrants were once seen as failures, or at best as a necessary expulsion, they became (in Cain’s words) nineteenth-century ‘heroes or heroines battling triumphantly with elemental forces’ (Belich 2009; Cain 2010, pg. 103). Settlerism, at its core, relied on contested ideas of gender as well as political citizenship. The masculine settler should be self-made and upwardly mobile in the sense that he served as a vessel of Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, or ‘Greater British’ virtue: industrious, self-mastering, and jealous of his liberties and his community. The feminine complemented the masculine by providing the tempering and educative influences necessary to raise new generations in distant lands.

Historians have explored the ways in which race and gender informed Victorian morality across the empire, with metropolitans and settlers alike increasingly defining British virtue in relation to stereotypes of backwards, childlike, or servile races (Burton 1994; Hall 2002; Lake 2012). Settlerism held an often antagonistic position toward indigenous and non-white rights and resistance. It constructed and amplified political divisions between the English-speaking and the light-complexioned population and those deemed ‘other’ by virtue of their ethnicity, language, or any number of technicalities. Bound up with both contemporary scholarship and popular belief, categories such as ‘British’ and ‘white’ increasingly reflected the politics of imperial inequality and friction.

The politics of empire

The idea of ‘Greater Britain’ may have seemed to contemporaries the opposite of imperial authoritarianism in the so-called subject empire. In reality, these phenomena were intertwined. Settler colonial institutions and discourse in the nineteenth century developed in fundamental relation to problems of rule and rights in both minority- and majority-indigenous societies (Lester 2002). Across the nineteenth century, various constituencies fought to articulate their place in a diverse imperial system. Three phases of contention are particularly revealing: the mid-nineteenth century, the 1880s and 1890s, and the years leading up to the First World War.

Between the 1840s and 1860s, settler-indigenous wars defined imperial governance in New Zealand, while violent conflicts between the Xhosa and British settlers at the African Cape occurred in the 1840s and 1850s and flared again in the late 1870s. Perhaps most significantly, British military and political authority faced a profound crisis as it struggled to subdue armed revolt across the north of the Indian subcontinent over 15 months in 1857 and 1858. The ‘Indian Mutiny’ (as it was called) drummed up responses in both Britain and the settler colonies emphasising supposedly different civilisational trajectories for India and the self-governing realms, and framing Indians and other ‘subject races’ as a liability to the development of the British Empire more broadly (Mantena 2010; Bender 2016). Governor Edward Eyre’s brutal crackdown on protestors and civic leaders in Jamaica in October 1865 prompted further empire-wide controversy and instigated a profound divide in British political society, highlighted by rival extra-parliamentary committees formed to prosecute or defend Eyre. On one side were the well-known liberals of the ‘Jamaica Committee’ who accused Eyre of arbitrary despotism and murder. Eyre’s ‘Defence Committee’, meanwhile, appealed to the judgement of the ‘man on the ground’ and valorised authoritarianism (Hall 1996).

Twenty years later, an erstwhile member of that Defence Committee launched a new manifesto on behalf of the so-called man on the ground. ‘The people at home in England, knowing nothing of the practical difficulties […] have obliged their ministers to step between the colonists and the natives: irritating the whites […] and misleading the coloured races into acts of aggression or disobedience’, wrote J. A. Froude in Oceana (1886), a bestselling contemporary meditation on British imperial politics. ‘[W]e first protect these races in an independence which they have been unable to use wisely, and are then driven ourselves into wars with them by acts which they would have never committed if the colonists and they had been left to arrange their mutual relations alone’ (Froude 1886, 4–5). 

Froude’s position captured the difficulties around questions of imperial federation and organised emigration, as well as the tenor of anti-indigenous racism as it merged with Asian exclusion throughout the settler colonies. The period after 1880 saw further political divergence. In India, the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 to advocate for increased representation in the empire. Yet these years also saw the passage of anti-Asian legislation in Australia, Western Canada, and Southern Africa. Caught up in these latter exclusionary regimes were British subjects of Indian origin such as Mohandas Gandhi, who arrived in Natal in 1893. The period also saw organised settler efforts to limit the mobility, education, and political and economic rights of indigenous peoples across the empire. The overarching aim of discrimination was to create ‘white men’s countries’, culminating in immigration restrictions that accompanied the Australian Act of Federation in 1900–01 and the enshrining of European superiority in the Union of South Africa of 1910 (Lake & Reynolds 2008). While racial discrimination remained an issue of contention at the imperial level, the UK Cabinet tended to look the other way when confronted with settler colonial intransigence, as at the Colonial Conference of 1897.

Gandhi’s radicalisation in the face of settler discrimination and what he called ‘imperial betrayal’ fed into a third and critical phase in the politics of the British World up to 1914. Anticolonialism, ranging from moderate demands for inclusion and representation to increasingly violent separatist protests, placed the charge of hypocrisy at the door of the British imperial state. The distance travelled by moderates in particular is telling. In Britain and India, imperial nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji demanded political incorporation along constitutional lines and criticised the immiserating effects of ‘un-British rule’ (Naoroji 1901). In South Africa, where the formal Union of 1910 followed reconstruction from the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), indigenous African activists formed the South African Native National Congress in 1912. Founding member Solomon Plaatje voyaged to London in 1914 to canvass support for ‘true Imperialism’ which would strike down restrictions on indigenous land rights and grant Africans a ‘Magna Carta’ along lines celebrated in British political tradition and also claimed by the Indian minority in South Africa (Plaatje 1916). Amidst ongoing trans-imperial strife over Joseph Chamberlain’s assault on the idea of ‘free trade’ (1903) and Irish Home Rule, early twentieth-century anticolonial challenges indicated rising levels of discomfort and disillusionment with a polarised politics of empire. Even as the legatees of ‘Greater Britain’ continued to debate the content and scope of imperial citizenship (Gorman 2007), vast inequalities and the strains of global war augured a new kind of crisis.

Conclusion

The concept of ‘the British World’, while controversial, nonetheless illuminates key patterns in the nineteenth century. It evokes the significance of settler colonies as contemporaries saw them as a field for political and economic experimentation and domestic and imperial reform. It highlights competitive or antagonistic relations between parts of the British Empire where ‘settlerism’ developed in sustained, if not wholesale, opposition to inclusive, polyglot, multiracial visions of British political community.

These aspects of ‘the British World’ lead to further reflection on the breadth of imperial mobilisation during the First World War, the escalation of anticolonial demands during the interwar years and patterns of imperial collapse from the 1940s to the present day. Indeed, the British World framework begs questions about the very nature of decolonisation. Hopkins (2008) has raised the question of when, indeed if, empire ended in formally designated Dominions such as Australia and Canada, which had formed the vanguard of white settler empire. Ward (2016) has suggested reading ‘decolonisation’, in historical context, in terms of distinctly European efforts to disentangle metropolitan from other imperial constituencies and their colonial predicaments. Other scholars have noted the awkward and ambivalent role that the United States has historically played in ‘the British World’ (Bright & Dilley 2017). All of these questions remain alive in contemporary debates and scholarship about the Commonwealth, the nature of the British constitution, and the position of a so-called ‘Global Britain’ after Brexit. Far from clear-cut imperial nostalgia, these ongoing struggles reflect the deepest legacies of political contestation and divergent, sometimes far-reaching visions of a just and comprehensive postcolonial settlement (Saunders 2020). In the light of exclusionary immigration politics and patterns of racial persecution and violence which have haunted Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the persistence of segregationist ideals across the former empire, historical debates over the nature and very existence of ‘the British World’ testify to enduring struggles over rights, difference, and belonging.

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