Building Greater Britain
© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1 Introduction: Building Greater Britain When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it England, we shall see that here too is a United States. Here too is a homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion, and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space. —J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883) A firm and well-compacted union of all the British lands would form a state that might control the whole world. —Charles Oman, England in the Nineteenth Century (1899) The history of modern political thought is partly the history of the at tempt to confront increasing global interdependence and competition. The Idea of Greater Britain focuses on an important but neglected aspect of this chronicle: the debate over the potential union of the United King dom with its so-called settler colonies—the lands we know now as Austra lia, Canada, New Zealand, as well as parts of South Africa—during the late Victorian age. Straddling oceans and spanning continents, this polity was to act, so its advocates proclaimed, as a guarantor of British strength and of a just and stable world. I explore the languages employed in imag ining the settler empire as a single transcontinental political community, even as a global federal state, with the intention of contributing to the his tory of imperial thought and Victorian intellectual life. I seek to shed light on the ways in which the future of world order—the configuration and dy namics of economic and geopolitical power, and the normative architec ture justifying this patterning—was perceived in an age of vital impor tance for the development of politics in the twentieth century and beyond.
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