Greater Britain: The rise and decline of a Victorian idea, 1865-1939

This dissertation examines the lives and works of five British intellectuals and politicians who explored the idea of a “Greater Britain”—a popular phrase in Victorian society that loosely described both the British Empire and the English-speaking world. Sir Charles Dilke, a young English radical and friend of John Stuart Mill, coined the term in a popular work of travel literature first published in 1864. At the time, hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh, and Scotsmen were emigrating from Great Britain to the colonies and the United States. Dilke was one of many intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who noticed this phenomenon and who discussed its political, social, economic and military importance. Dilke's Greater Britain helped to renew public interest in the British Empire and influenced the political debate on matters as diverse as self-government for Ireland, federation for Australia and South Africa, and the nature of British rule in India.; Dilke, along with the Oxford biographer James Anthony Froude, the Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley, and the Radical imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, were the most celebrated popularizers of this theme. At a time when Britain's status as a great power was in relative decline, they raised significant questions about the wisdom of Britain's longstanding commitment to a diplomatic policy of “splendid isolation.” In developing a public consciousness of Greater Britain, they also strengthened the cultural and sentimental ties within the English-speaking world and laid the groundwork for the foundation of the British Commonwealth in the twentieth century. At the same time, they were unable to resolve the inherent contradictions between empire and self-government, particularly in Ireland and Africa. This conflict between political freedom and imperial security led some thinkers in late Victorian Britain to question the morality of the imperial idea. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the most prominent of these imperial critics, the economist J. A. Hobson. Celebrated in their day, these five thinkers have been neglected by historians, none of whom has analyzed their work as a unique intellectual and historical contribution to imperial studies.*; *Originally published in DAI Vol. 60, No. 8. Reprinted here with corrected title.