Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

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Indians, and other subaltern colonial groups to follow suit. Steadily,

separatist fever would spread, until the Empire was dismantled. In the

end, even Anglo-Saxon settler coloni es would defect, either casting

their lot with the USA or setting up white republics of their own. From

this perspective, the danger of Irish Home Rule was substantive but,

even more, symbolic. It would start a cascade of departing dominoes,

which would ultimately leave Britain naked, alone, and reduced to a

second-rate power.

Chamberlain’s mounting concern over the fate of the Empire repre-

sented itself as a major re-orientation in his (and many other entrepre-

neurs’) thought. Hitherto, the Empire had mainly served as a

playground for aristocrats and Evangelicals. Chamberlain himself had

initially risen to wealth and power by focusing his energies on the

manufacturing center of Birmingham: in his twenties, he had become

rich as a leading screw manufacturer. Then, in his thirties, he had taken

local politics by storm, pressing schemes for the municipalization of

gas and water provision that improved the urban environment, while

simultaneously raising revenue to support other local government activ-

ities. In 1880, when Chamberlain shifted his attention from local to

national politics, he mused that the change of venue would be justiﬁed

only if he could accomplish, on an imperial scale, the sort of trans-

formative reforms that he had already effected in his home town. Like

many entrepreneurs, he was worried about mounting competit ion in

foreign markets, and he envisioned a solution in the cultivation of inter-

imperial trade. Inspired by his friend Dilke’s synoptic sketch Greater

Britain he accepted Gladstone’s offer of a seat in the Cabinet as

President of the Board of Trade.

Yet as Chamberlain wrestled with the complex cross-currents of

imperial politics during the 1880s, he tried to understand what reform

on this scale might mean. To some extent, he seemed to embrace the

racial-cum-evolutionary vision, which bifurcated the Empire into

(active) Anglo-Saxon agents and (passive) evolutionary objec ts.

Greater Britain was the in-gathering of “ kindred races with similar

objects,” who would draw on their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage to

join together in a “true democracy,” spanning their dispersed home-

lands around the globe. By contrast, the colored dependencies were

peopled by races that were as yet incapable of self-government, accord-

ing to Chamberlain. Such races should be ruled paternalistically and

Marsh, Chamberlain, 233.

Marsh, Chamberlain,1–131, especially 128–9; J. L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain

(London, 1932), I: 3–284.

Chamberlain and Seeley 335

protected from extreme exploitation, but their lands should be managed

from London, as “undeveloped estates” that could be turned into

proﬁtable conce rns through a judicious mixture of private investment

and central government control. In places like the Caribbean, affairs

were being mismanaged by “half-breeds,” whom Chamberlain dismissed

with contempt. When the Irish engaged in intimidation or demanded

Home Rule, they revealed the underlying fracture of two unequal races

cohabiting on a single unhappy isle. “To put a race which has shown all

the qualities of a dominant people under the other, which has always

failed in the qualities which compel success,” he contended, “is an

attempt against nature [which] can only lead to disaster.”

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to make too much of comments like

these. Race was a casual rather than an essential element in Chamberlain’s

thinking. It did not provide him with his core vision of how Greater Britain

should be governed and organized. This came, by his own admission,

from a book by the Cambridge hist orian J. R. Seeley. No longer preoccu-

pied with the life of Jesus, Seeley was ready, by 1883, to weigh in on more

worldly themes. The result was The Expansion of England, a tome that

elaborated a series of university lectures that the author had delivered over

the previous two years. Chamberlain, so it turned out, was not alone in

admiring this volume, which sold a remarkable 80,000 copies in the ﬁrst

two years. As late as 1919, 11,000 copies were still being sold. The success

of Seeley’s volume is all the more impressive inasmuch as the author made

no efforts to court popularity, openly proclaiming his contempt for

romantic, narrativ e histories in the style of Macaulay that sacriﬁced intel-

lectual substance for gratiﬁcation of form. The Expansion of England,he

bracingly warned, was intended to be analytical and scientiﬁ c, rather than

attractive and picturesque. History, according to Seeley, should study

problems rather than periods, and it should seek to discover law-like

regularities in its dat a, rather than simply amassing a plenitude of undi-

gested facts.

When the data of modern English history were approached in this

manner, according to Seeley, one over-mastering pattern presented itself:

the steady expansion of the English/British state, as Wales was absorbed in

the sixteenth century, and Scotland, Ireland, Virginia, and Barbados were

added in the seventeenth. During the eighteenth century other parts

of America and India were conquered, which paved the way for the

Marsh, Chamberlain, 132–481, quotes on 285, 294, 219, 411, 546–7.

Marsh, Chamberlain, 176–8; Garvin, Chamberlain, I: 494; SEE; Deborah Wormell, Sir

John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980), 48–109, 154; C. A. Rein, Sir John

Robert Seeley: A Study of the Historian (Wolfeboro, 1987), i–xxix, 1–48.

336 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

annexation of the rest of India, Australasia, Canada, South Africa, and

other parts of Africa and Asia during the nineteenth.

In sharp contrast to

many of the other writers whom we have recently considered, Seeley

denied that this expansion of England was the result of any inherent

superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. On the contrary, it was contingent

and largely circumstantial, the product of England/Britain’s success in a

competition with four other potentially expansive states – Portugal, Spain,

the Netherlands, and France – each of which was trying to gain control of

the system of trans-oceanic trade and colonialism that was crystallizing

between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In an unde rhanded swipe

at Froude, Seeley stressed the paltry performance of the Tudors during

the early stages of this global contest. England (bulked up as Britain)

emerged as a real player only during the seventeenth century, when the

small size of the Netherlands placed it at a disadvantage, while Portugal

and Spain went into irreversible declines. The result was to leave only two

viable eighte enth-century contenders: Greater Britain and Greater

France.

Between 1689 and 1815, the decisive struggle between these

two global rivals played itself out, and Seeley’s account of their contest is

his book’s tour de force . He begins by pointing out the obvious (but

strangely neglected) fact that France and Britain were at war for

more than half of this period (sixty-four years). While each of the seven

wars encompassed during this time had its own unique set of issues,

disputes, and protagonists, they were all part of a larger conﬂict for

dominance of the world-spanning trading and imperial system that was

just then taking shape. Britain’s sustained victory in this early modern

“Hundred Years War,” he contends, laid the foundations for the Pax

Britannica of the ninetee nth century.

“History,” according to Seeley, “should not merely gratify the read-

er’s curiosity about the past”; it should also “modify his view of the

present and his forecast of the future.” Not only had the British state

steadily expanded over the course of three centuries; it had undergone a

series of structural reorganizations, which enabled it to adapt to the

changing conditions of severa l successive epochs. Now again, at the

time of writing, Seeley saw the need to take advantage of modern

transport and communication technology, to weld Greater Britain into

a uniﬁed super-state that would be able to hold its own with Greater

Russia and the United States during the coming twentieth century. The

distinction between the ﬁrst (mercantilist) and second (liberal) empires

is implicitly played down in Seeley’s account. The Pax Britannica of the

SEE, 43, 106–60.

SEE, 98–140.

SEE, 20–6.

Chamberlain and Seeley 337

1815–75 period, grounded in open competition and the spread of free

trade, did not turn out to be the opening of a new eirenic era as early

Victorian liberals had hoped. Rather, it had been a temporary interlude

in which Britain preached laissez-faire because it served her interest, and

no other power was in a position to insist otherwise. But in the late

nineteenth century all this was changing. The great powers were all

protecting their ﬂedgling industries with tariffs, and Britain might soon

feel the necessity of following suit. Empire could no longer be based on

a liberal philanthropic mission. It was coming to constitute the most

promising framework around which the commerce of the future might

crystallize.

This synoptic vision of an economically and politically integrated

Empire was clearly compelling to Chamberlain and to Seeley’s many

other readers, who spanned the political spectrum, from Liberals to

Unionists and to traditional Tories. No utopian, Seeley understood the

difﬁculties that impeded federation and that would prevent even a suc-

cessful federation from evolving into an integrated super-state. The

strength of his argument lay in its appeal to history, which could be read

as a trajectory that was headed in the direction of competing world

empires. In the eighteenth century, Seeley pointed out, the thirteen

North American colonies had been lost to Greater Britain because

neither the technological, political, nor ideological conditions for such

an entity existed at that time. Yet, once freed, these colonies had

embarked on their own project of super-state creation on a continental

scale. Now that the Americans had proven such an entity to be possible

the British had another chance to replicate the same feat. Having learned

how to mollify her Anglo-Saxon colonists with grants of self-government,

she had now to gather them in through the railroad, telegraph, and

steamship, and rally them round the Union Jack. Once Chamberlain

resurfaced as Colonial Secretary during the 1890s, he gave considerable

thought as to how this goal might gradually be accomplished. In the

end, he concluded that success would require abandoning the entire

free trade system, either turning the Empire into one vast customs

union, or embarking on even more drastic tariff reforms.

But why was it necessary to limit self-government within this imagined

super-state of the future to the Anglo-Saxons? In fact, there was no

inherent reason for such a limitation, even though both Seeley and

Chamberlain took it for granted. In their minds, “Greater Britain” was

equated with Anglo-Saxon democracy, while compulsory Unionism was

SEE, 1, 74–5, 161–78; Wormell, Seeley,75–133; Rein, Seeley,49–84.

SEE, 64–5, 147, 158; Marsh, Chamberlain, 299–405.

338 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

deemed essential for Ireland and the “colored colonies.” To appreciate

how this inference was accomplished, it is necessary to focus on some of

the deﬁciencies of Seeley’s account. His entire argument rested on the

assumption that the nation-state was the only meaningful actor on the

stage of geo-politics, and that this state could be reiﬁed as a single

uniﬁed collective agent, which completely reﬂected the interests of its

constituent individuals, classes, and groups. For this reason, Seeley

believed that viable states had to maintain a broad ofﬁcial religion, and

had to be limited, for the most part, to a single ethnicity. With the

exception of the slave plantations, which he denounced, and Ireland,

which he ﬂagrantly ignored, Britain’s eighteenth-century Empire came

sufﬁciently close to meeting these conditions that his account can be

made to seem generally plausible, without running afoul of fundamental

facts. By Seeley’s own time, however, this ethnic homogeneity no longer

prevailed, although the “predictive” part of his book never registers the

change. Thus, with the exception of India, the entire Empire is identi-

ﬁed as essentially Anglo-Saxon. In passing, Seeley does acknowledge

that the Empire contains, in addition to many Celts, “a good many

French and Dutch and a good many Caffres and Maories,” but these

are br ushed off as of no great ethnological consequence, “and may be

admitted wi thout marring the ethnological unity of the whole.”

Given the thoroughly multi-ethnic character of South Africa, the West

Indies, West Africa, Canada, and even New Zealand, this is a remark-

able evasion. Either ethnic cohe sion is not really necessary for a viable

polity, or none of these colonies should be allowed self-government

by Seeley’s own rule. Here Seeley’s lapses are particularly instructive,

since they probably reﬂ ected the attitudes of his many middle- and

upper-class Victorian readers, who were neither virulent racists nor

adherents of multi-ethnic democracy. Like Seeley, such people found

it easy just to ignore the whole question, to equate Greater Britain with

ethnic Anglo-Saxons, and to dismiss serious demands for self-rule by

subject peoples either as dangerous experiments likely to lead to disorder

or as naive utopian philanthropic delusions that a beleaguered Empire

could not afford.

This characteristically Seeleyan pers pective comes out even more

clearly in his handling of India, a subcontinent with a population

nearly three times the size of all other parts of the Empire combined.

Seeley certainly cannot be accused of ignoring India, which occupies

32 percent of his text. Moreover, much of what he has to say about the

SEE, 46–50, quote on 50; Wormell, Seeley,36–8, 77–9, 129–30, 140.

Chamberlain and Seeley 339

place is sensible, if unoriginal. He denies that the fact of English

conquest reﬂected any racial superiority, since he shows that the

English came in under conditions of crisis (resembling the European

Dark Ages), when Indians welcomed any force that could maintain

public order. Moreover, the arms with which Englishmen triumphed

were largely Indian, so that “India can hardly be said to have been

conquered at all by foreigners; she has rather conquered herself.”

Seeley believed that British rule was essentially benevolent and was, in

any case, accepted by the Indians, since they did not act when the 1857

Rebellion gave them the chance to kick the British out. Here Seeley’s

evasions become the most telling feature of his account. He is too astute

to deny categorically that modernization might produce an Indian

national identity, and he even hints that this would not be an impro-

bable outcome. But instead of following the lead of the bhadralok

liberals, taking responsibility for such a future and making plans for

reforming the Empire to accommodate this change, he thro ws up his

hands and declares ignorance of what is to come.

The wisest men may easily be mistaken when they speculate on such a subject.

The end of our Indian Empire is perhaps almost as much beyond calculation as

the beginning of it ... A time may conceivably come when it may be practicable

to leave India to herself, but for the present it is necessary to govern her as if

we were to govern her for ever.

For a historian as sharp and intellectually curious as Seeley, this is a

remarkable attitude to take. India might someday become independent,

but instead of starting to think about how to keep her in the Empire,

we must continue to rule her despotically and arbitrarily, thereby ensur-

ing her departure when independence takes place. The non sequitur is

even more remarkable when we remember that Seeley’s whole aim in

writing was to save the Empire, and that little as he may have known

about Banerjea, Dutt, and Naoroji, he surely knew that they too shared

the same aim. Why then were leading British le aders like Chamberlain,

and opinion-makers like Seeley, so preoccupied with the twentieth-

century Empire of the future and yet so oblivious of the multi-national

resources that it would require? Well aware of the growing presence of

nascent colonial nationalism, they did absolutely nothin g to foster the

inter-racial imperial citizenship that would be needed in a democratic

multi-national Empire. No doubt, part of the answer lies in a kind of

unconscious racism, a visceral distaste for men of a different color, who

could not be relegated to the status of evolutionary objects, but whom

SEE, quotes on 193–4, 202.

340 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

they did not like to recognize as fellow citizens similar to themselves. Yet

closely connected with this unconscious racism (and perhaps subsisting

at its very core) was a refusal to recognize the historical narrative of

this other. If Seeley, for example, in subsequent editions of Expansion,

had taken account of the work of Banerjea, Naoroji, or Dutt, he would

have been obliged to transform his book. With his triumphant narrative

of the rise of Greater Britain, he would have had to juxtapose less happy

recitals of dispossession and oppression, in Ireland, India, and many

other places as well. Instead of simply equating the imperial common-

wealth with the expansion of England, he would have had to consider

the contribution of other national stories, from medieval Ireland,

Ancient India, and other times and places too. Finally, he would have

been obliged to complicate his analysis of imperial capitalism with

Naoroji’s disturbing evidence of the drain.

Here indeed, we encounter a remarkable irony, since m en like Seeley

and Chamberlain prided themselves on being consummate realists, in

contrast to what they saw as the irresolute idealism of the Gladstonian

mentality. Yet from our perspective, more than a century later, it is

Gladstone and the Liberals who followed him into the multi-national

wilderness who seem the better realists, more accurately grasping the

imperial challenges that lay ahead. Gladstone was neither a great histor-

ian nor a philosopher, but he had the sense to see that the progress

narrative had encountered complications and contradictions. This did

not necessarily mean that it was ﬁnished, but did indicate that it could

no longer be dictated from the metropole alone. Other voices were now

audible, from Ireland and from India, and liberalism needed to incor-

porate the stories that they told. The commanding imperial histories of

a Seeley (and the pol icies of a Chamberlain), which subordinated all

other progress to England’s advance, were, for all their seeming sophis -

tication, pre-emptive strikes that did not so much silence the voice

of colonial others as deafen British ears to the amplifying colonia l

sounds.

5 The strange death of liberal imperialism

While J. R. Seeley never registered the work of R. C. Dutt or any other

Indian historian, Dutt carefully read and considered Seeley’s book. Praising

Seeley as “one of the most thoughtful writers of the Victorian age,” he

demurred at the Englishman’s claim that Indians required English

Wormell, Seeley, 167–75; Rein, Seeley,70–1.

The strange death of liberal imperialism 341

domination to bring them the beneﬁts of national unity. In particular, he

caviled when Seeley condoned the feverish annexations of Lord Dalhousie,

who seized eight large Indian kingdoms during a viceroyalty of as many

years. “Lord Dalhousie was the last of the Old Imperial School of rulers

who believed that the salvation and progress of the Indian people were

possible only by the destruction of their autonomy and self-government ...

He lived to see the East India Company abolished, and the Doctrine of

Lapse disavowed by his sovereign and Queen.”

In 1905, when Dutt composed this hopeful passage, he was actually

writing under the shadow of another authoritarian Viceroy, G. N. (now

Lord) Curzon, who had ignored his open letters on the cause of Indian

famines, and seemed determined to undermine whatever limited

autonomy and self-government Indians had left. Most egregious

among Curzon’s despotic moves was his pla n to defy a vast outpouring

of Calcutta public opinion by partitioning Bengal at least partially along

sectarian lines. Although the Indian Secretary, John Morley, made a

show of consulting him in London, Dutt could see that Curzon’s cynical

maneuver to separate Hindus from Muslims represented the real

thrust of British policy. Hell-bent on disenfranchising and marginalizing

bhadralok liberals, Curzon was prepared to play with ﬁre in hopes of

turning his vision of a religiously fractured subcontinent into a self-

fulﬁlling prophecy. As he contemplated this scheme to polarize Indian

opinion, Dutt had to wonder whether his own lifelong commitment to

Greater British imperialism had been a mistake.

Following Scott and

Macaulay, he had embraced the centrist notion that moderation is the

handmaiden of progress, that the manly course requires the repudiation

of extremes. Yet where had this moderation gotten him in the end? As a

harder-edged generation of younger nationalists grew up around

him, Dutt found it ever more difﬁcult to counter their anti-British

attitudes, or even to explain why their campaigns for swadeshi (economic

self-reliance) were anything but the logical consequence of his own

books. For these young men, Curzon’s partition plan was really the

last straw – proof positive that the strategy of moderation had failed.

Yet Dutt could not help but be alarmed at their “extremist” responses –

organizing angry mass meetings, and mounting a boyc ott of British

DEHI, II: 31–2. See also R. C. Dutt, “Presidential Address,” in R. C. Dutt, Romesh

Chunder Dutt (New Delhi, 1968), 197–234.

GLD, 297–374, 456–85; Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long

Road to Independence (New York, 1997), 83–101; David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial

Statesman [1994] (New York, 2003), 271–361.

342 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism

goods. Taken aback by these militant measures, Dutt could see that they

were likely to backﬁ re and play into reactionary British hands.

I am not aware that the extremists have any deﬁnite aims and aspirations, which

they themselves can, or do, believe in. I do not know of any men of real

inﬂuence, resource, or substantial stake in the country who have ever joined

the so-called extremist leaders ... The movement has no foundation in the

hearts of the educated people. It was born of that feeling of bitterness and

despair, that unreasoning hostility against the British, which seven years of

retrograde and unsympathetic and ungenerous administration generated in the

country ... The movement will die a natural death with the return of a sym-

pathetic administration, and substantial concessions to a loyal nation.

These words might be dismissed as the dying gasps of a superannu-

ated leader, unable to adapt to Young India’s post-imperia l turn. But

Dutt was not entirely mistaken in his belief that Indi a ’s youth remained

attached to the English Constitution. Even in the face of Curzon’s

hostility, the generation born at the turn of the century still looked to a

future of imperial federation, in which Indi a would join the Dominions,

with Home Rule and a Parliament of her own. In the classrooms of

Calcutta University, the histories of Green and Stubb s remained on the

syllabus and – for all their anglocent rism – could still be read as silent

reproaches to the expansionary bombast of Seeley. “Educated Indians

with their newly acquired sense of politics took to these subjects as

ducks take to water,” reported the stu dent Nirad Chaudhuri. “The

craze for constitutional history and law which prevailed in our m idst”

led many of his classmates to fancy themselves as, “if not Jeffersons, at

least Sieyeses.” Individualistically roused by this aspiration from their

ascriptive status, these Bengali studen ts were driven by the refusal of

British imperial citizenship to a new-found collective sense of Indian

national autonomy.

In the end, most of these patriots settled down, becoming lawyers,

small businessmen, or minor ofﬁcials and pinning their fading hopes

for a constitutional future to the rising stars of Nehru, Jinnah, or the

charismatic Gandhi. For Chaudhuri himself, the road to citizenship was

paved by a continued attachment to Stubbs and Green. Green’s appeal

lay in his “literary quality.” That of Stubbs struck a deeper nerve.

“A combination of technical power with an historical mind” drew the

young Indian into a lifelong engagement with the history of medieval

GLD, 399–438, quote on 464.

Nirad Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian [1951] (New York, 1989),

324, 327.

Chaudhuri, Autobiography, 344.

The strange death of liberal imperialism 343

England, and fostered “reverence to the great medievalists , Stubbs,

Round, Vinogradoff, Maitland.”

Had Chaudhuri grown up in Britain he would likely have settled down as

a history professor, with a specialized ﬁeld, a steady job, and a stable

identity. In the highly politicized atmosphere of interwar India, his fate

was more problematic. Brought up in a reformed Brahmo family and

steeped in English literature as a child, he had been nourished on the

heady mix of Shakespeare and Bengali poetry that had fueled so many

syncretisms during the nineteenth century. No longer quite able to believe

that such histories could save the British Empire, Chaudhuri opted for the

Rankean ideal of absolute objectivity. Utterly voracious in his quest for

positive knowledge, the young man “swallowed complete sets of the English

Historical Review and of the Revue Critique as others swallow light novels.”

Annoyed by the one-sided nationalism of so many of his compatriots, he

touted the equal signiﬁcance of all times and all places, setting his hand to

the study of ancient Greece, Rome, and Islam as well as modern German,

Italian, and French history. By no means immune from masculinist fanta-

sies of revolutionary self-assertion, and eager to give the lie to racist taunts of

effeminacy, Chaudhuri took up the history of war and armaments, which he

pursued in great detail and with avid expertise. Not even content with the

conﬁnes of the human experience, he set himself a course of private reading

in chemistry, geology, and evolutionary biology.

Conducive as they may have been to a rich inner life, these heroic bouts

of autodidactic profusion did little to advance Chaudhuri’s worldly pros-

pects. After winning ﬁrst place in Calcutta University’s BA Honors List,

he was mentally exhausted by his study for the MA and, to the surprise of

everyone, failed his exam. Although he could easily have retaken the test,

Chaudhuri refused to avail himself of so philistine an option, permanently

blighting his employment prospects and forec losing acad emic work. It

was almost as though his eclecticism was too precious and too person al to

sully with the taint of careerist ambition. His history had become a kind of

private universe: a solipsistic sphere of compensatory achievement, where

encyclopedic feats of recollection and reconstruction could substitute for

the bold strokes of purposive action that were still denied to Indian men in

the public, political realm.

As he pursued this idiosyncratic path of self-realization through

self-narration, Chaudhuri’s History crystallized into the form of an

autobiography. As the last chapter to this Apologia pro vita sua, he appended

“An Essay on the Course of Indian History.” In this sketch, the history of

Chaudhuri, Autobiography,3–353, 434–56, quote on 325.

Chaudhuri, Autobiography,46–390.

344 From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism