2. The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism Introduction
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, moral justifications of Empire, paradoxically, receded from the forefront of debates about the nature and purpose of imperial rule. At the height of British imperial power, an ethically orientated theory of imperial legitimacy, exemplified in the liberal model of Empire that had become prominent in British imperial discourse since the early nineteenth century, retreated in political significance.
Since the origins of Empire in India, major British political thinkers struggled to make sense of the ‘strange’ and ‘anomalous’ character of British rule in India [1] and to construct a politically legitimate and morally justifiable framework for imperial rule. British India was considered to be an unprecedented and contradictory political formation; in Henry...
3. The Liberal Empire and British Social Policy: Citizens, Colonials, and Indigenous Peoples, circa 1880-1914 I. In this paper I shall focus on an unusual moment in the longer history of British Liberalism, when very active support among Liberal statesmen for defence and maintenance of the British Empire came at a time when those same statesmen were also sponsoring a series of social, fiscal, medical, constitutional and ‘citizenship’ reforms whose long-term impact on British society and culture was to outlast the empire itself. Prior to the1900s both ‘imperial defence’ and state-directed ‘social reform’, while never wholly absent from Liberal concerns, had nonetheless played relatively muted (and to some degree mutually exclusive) roles in the policies of Liberal governments; a fact that makes their simultaneous emergence to the forefront of Liberal politics in the...
4. L'invention du patriotisme impérial : usages politiques des fêtes d'Empire en Grande-Bretagne, 1877-1938 L’importance accrue des rituels royaux lors des dernières décennies du règne de Victoria est bien connue des historiens. Comme le souligne Eric Hobsbawm dans L’Invention de la tradition, la Grande-Bretagne, à l’instar des autres pays européens, voit alors apparaître des «traditions inventées», parmi lesquelles celles des grandes occasions royales (couronnement, funérailles, jubilés). Lié à un contexte de profondes et rapides transformations politiques, économiques, culturelles et sociales, ce processus d’invention est défini par Hobsbawm comme la «production de rituels» dont l’objet symbolique et «idéologique» est de «se référer à un passé réel ou inventé» [1] . Dans le même ouvrage, David Cannadine examine le cas de la monarchie britannique dans lequel il établit un contraste net entre le «nadir...
5. George Orwell, l'Empire et l'opinion publique britannique «On Britain’s colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries» (Rajani Palme Dutt, The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire, 1953).
L’itinéraire politique d’Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, est marqué par une extrême complexité qui, selon ses détracteurs, confine à la contradiction, selon ses apologues, illustre un refus méticuleux du dogmatisme [1] . La dimension anti-coloniale de l’auteur de 1984 constitue pourtant un des fils conducteurs de son œuvre. Celle-ci est bien sûr liée à la biographie du romancier et essayiste: né en Inde en1902, Orwell est issu d’une famille qu’il eût sans doute lui-même qualifiée de «Blimps», en référence à ce personnage créé car le caricaturiste David Low (1879-1963) et qui symbolise la classe moyenne...
6. Un empire écossais ? L'Écosse et le monde britannique, 1815-1931 «Les marchands de Bombay sont tous écossais», écrit à la fin de l’ère victorienne l’homme politique libéral Charles Dilke, inventeur du concept de Greater Britain. «Dans les colonies britanniques», poursuit-il, «du Canada jusqu’à Ceylan, de Dunedin à Bombay, pour chaque Anglais qui a fait fortune seul, on compte dix Écossais. Il est étrange, à dire vrai, que l’Écosse ne soit pas devenue le nom qui désigne le Royaume-Uni [1] ». Ainsi, Dilke, à l’image de certains de ses contemporains de renom, comme l’écrivain Anthony Trollope ou l’historien James Froude, ne manque pas de remarquer le succès des Écossais dans l’entreprise collective que constitue l’Empire britannique. L’Écosse de cette époque joue-t-elle effectivement un rôle exceptionnel dans l’élaboration d’un monde...
7. Britain's Middle Eastern Policy, 1900-1931: Dual Attractions of Empire and Europe Britain’s ambiguous position on the edge of Europe has long been the source of much debate. For many observers the country’s insular and maritime situation means that it is essentially non-European, different from the continentals, closer in national temperament and practical interests to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world or the Empire-Commonwealth; that its physical proximity to Europe is outweighed by other stronger bonds elsewhere. From such staunch imperialists as Joseph Chamberlain to today’s Eurosceptics, many have believed that Britain is more naturally at home in the world of the Empire-Commonwealth, a world of its own making, than in the fundamentally alien Europe. Language, culture, family ties and economic, financial and commercial interests have all, at one time or another, been...
8. The Significance of 1931 for British Imperial and International History Continuity and discontinuity in British interwar history
The twenty years that separate the First World War from the Second are almost invariably treated as a unity by scholars of British and British Imperial history, for reasons that on the face of it seem compelling. Britain was the only major European power to escape invasion or defeat in the First World War. Almost uniquely it entered the inter-war period with its institutions strengthened by the ordeal and survived the post-war upheavals largely unscathed. Its economic performance in the1920s was disappointing, being marked by slow growth and high unemployment, features aggravated by the world economic slump which began in1929. Yet the slump in Britain was briefer and less severe than almost... ]]>2010-05-28