I

Darwin's book is of special significance because it is an attempt at grand synthesis by a leading imperial scholar. His approach is, in many ways, resolutely traditional; his historiographical heroes are Gallagher and Robinson and their influence is evident throughout, especially when he is examining the role of India in determining the attitudes of British statesmen to imperial policy.Footnote ¹ At the same time, Darwin acknowledges the weight of Cain and Hopkins's arguments about the economic foundations of the imperial estate and the significance of the huge flows of foreign investment which were crucial in building Britain's global influence and sustaining a much larger and longer-lasting ‘informal’ empire than Gallagher and Robinson allowed for.Footnote ² Darwin accepts that the fundamental source of empire was Britain's economic dynamism. That underlay the naval strength that ensured security across the oceans. It also released the great pulses of trade, capital, and migrants of all sorts from settlers to merchants and missionaries, which made Britain into the only state with a truly global reach before the Second World War. Empire was one product of that cosmopolitan surge. The restless expulsion of economic, political and cultural energy brought control over India, which provided key markets and the command of an army that transformed Britain into a leading military power. It also gave birth to the ‘British World’, those settler communities in Australasia and Canada and South Africa whose rapid economic growth made them important elements in Britain's global system and whose expanding sense of Britishness made them instinctive defenders of the motherland in times of crisis. India and the emergent Dominions were the twin foci of overseas power: despite the time and effort taken up by the Scramble, tropical Africa never had the same importance.

The choice of the main title of the book is puzzling. It derives directly from Adam Smith's complaint that Britain's overseas territories, especially those in America, were ‘not an empire but a project of an empire’.Footnote ³ Smith was claiming that the empire cost more than it brought in benefits but Darwin is not interested in whether or not the empire ‘paid’ in this sense. Besides, a project is a plan; and Darwin is adamant that there was never an accepted plan of empire nor could there be. Empire arose from what he rightly calls Britain's ‘chaotic pluralism’ (p. 3) which created a ‘world system’ (the phrase is Gallagher's) of which the empire was never more than a part, if a very substantial one. So the main title is misleading and the secondary one much better in introducing the reader to Darwin's text. What is emphasized there is not the role of governments in shaping and commanding the empire but the contingency of the whole process which sometimes left the ‘official mind’ with little actual power or room for manoeuvre.Footnote ⁴

A glance at the extensive notes and the bibliography is enough to show that much of Darwin's information comes from primary sources and that helps to give the book its unique value. As befits an expert on the subject, his survey of decolonization is masterly. His extensive coverage of the interwar period is particularly welcome as is his demolition of the idea that the empire was fatally wounded by the end of the First World War. Darwin is clear that Britain never had the kind of hegemony that the United States possessed, if only briefly, after 1945. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the survival of its global network, and of the empire it contained, depended upon the fortunate (and fortuitous) fact that no other great power had the strength to overthrow it. In fact, after 1918 the defeat of Germany, the exhaustion of France, and the partial withdrawal of both Russia and the United States from the international scene left Britain relatively stronger in great power terms than it had been in 1914; and the Great Depression and the empire's response to it did not undermine that. No one power was able to dominate Europe, command its resources, and thus threaten the imperial centre itself, until Germany did so in 1940. At that point, the British world system began to fall apart. The Second World War opened up Britain to attack and defeat by Japan and undermined its prestige in Asia; drained its overseas economic strength and made it financially and militarily dependent on the United States; forced it to concede independence to India in return for immediate aid; and led the Dominions, despite their wholehearted support throughout the war, to begin to look elsewhere for markets and for protection.

Nonetheless, it must be stressed that what Darwin presents is an individual, occasionally idiosyncratic, interpretation of the imperial experience rather than a nicely nuanced discussion of the scholarly literature. For example, he begins his discussion of Canada with Confederation in 1867, which is odd because ignoring its origins means that the intimate interplay between politics and finance that lay behind Confederation is omitted.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, his account of the background to the occupation of Egypt in 1882 is subtle and thought provoking but it does not deal with the alternative explanations on offer; and the section on the origins of the South African War of 1899–1902 dismisses a few discredited views but does not confront a larger and more plausible set of rival interpretations developed by scholars over the last twenty years. His book is a very welcome addition to the conversation on empire and it will influence opinion and research for a long time: but it is not, and was probably never intended to be, a definitive work. It is a pity that a book so intelligently constructed and argued, and containing such a wealth of material, has such a poor index.

II

Darwin's emphasis on economic power and the white settled colonies leads neatly into a discussion of Magee and Thompson's book which investigates the economics of the ‘British world’ between 1870 and 1914. As James Belich has shown so vividly, this was part of an emerging ‘Anglo’ world of settlement in which London and New York were the twin poles:Footnote ⁶ but the British communities were also strongly marked off from the United States whose unique cultural trajectory was defined partly by its republican anti-colonialism. Within the British community, there grew up an intricate network of economic connections, with the motherland at its centre, derived from these shared cultural bonds but which also played a part in re-shaping them too. The British frontier offered to the common man the chance of greater wealth, freedom, and independence than was available to most of them at home. That helped to create a more egalitarian sense of Britishness in Australasia and Canada than was available at home, some of which was transmitted back to Britain itself and helped to stir the imagination of working men there about the possibilities of economic progress and social and political improvement. The ‘social capital’ created by a common sense of kinship generated trust and encouraged co-ordinated action. It instilled in participants a strong sense of duty and thus helped to overcome the principal-agent problems that often bedevilled economic relationships with foreigners. Many of these trust communities were initially created in Britain but many others were formed on the frontier. At the heart of the process were family networks which were the main impetus behind the flows of information, goods, capital, and remittances (Magee and Thompson stress the importance of the latter in maintaining and strengthening connections) that moved across the various British boundaries. These migrant groups were critical in promoting trade with Britain: per head of population, British settlers bought far more from Britain than did Americans, where trade was restricted by tariffs, or Argentinians despite the enormous investments made by Britain in the latter after 1870. As their populations and incomes grew, the emerging Dominions' share of British trade rose significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century though deep Australasian depressions, not discussed in the book, retarded growth somewhat after 1885.

The British settlements became magnets for British capital. Modern research has made it plain that these ‘kith and kin’ communities could borrow more cheaply in London than could the rest of the empire or non-empire white nations like the United States. In chapter V, Magee and Thompson argue that this was due largely to the asymmetry of information available to investors. They prove, from their detailed studies of British press coverage, not only that the amount of information available on the British communities was much greater than on other empire or foreign ones, but that the former were much more likely to attract positive reviews. They conclude that the bias in information was the reason why the Dominions got their capital at subsidized rates. However, Magee and Thompson sometimes undermine the strength of their message about biased reporting. They admit that the very positive image of the Dominions might simply be a reflection of the fact that they were actually the safest places to put British savings. Investments in the emerging Dominions were certainly more secure than those in countries like Turkey or China, where ‘law and order’ was a problem. But they even had advantages in this regard over non-empire white nations, a reflection of the Britishness of the Dominions that Magee and Thompson so rightly emphasize. Although at times dazzled by the possibilities of new frontiers and prone, as Belich has shown, to bouts of frenzied overinvestment, the migrant communities inherited from Britain the kind of Gladstonian moral discipline that made default almost unthinkable. Repayment of Australian debt after the 1893 banking crisis was much more certain than it was from the Argentinians who went through a similar crisis then. Moreover, common institutional structures made investors more confident of their returns: the complexities and unfamiliarity of its institutions sometimes discouraged investment in the United States and could inhibit repayment of debt. Not surprisingly, therefore, British investors were inclined to think of the Dominions as more reliable partners than others because they were part of their own cultural community, and interest rates were adjusted accordingly.Footnote ⁷ One other reason for favouring Dominion investments, not discussed by Magee and Thompson, was the widespread, if erroneous, perception in Britain that the population of the white settler areas would grow exponentially and that a white ‘Greater Britain’ would rival the United States in terms of wealth and power in the twentieth century.

III

Darwin emphasizes the geopolitical context of Britain's imperial power and the constant fear that war might overthrow the empire. That provides a link with Caspar Sylvest's new work on liberal internationalism, which he defines as a movement of thought dedicated to finding ways to overcome the anarchy that existed in the international world. It began, he argues, as an attempt to reach agreement on the moral foundations of an international order of peace and of justice that would eventually find practical expression in universally accepted institutions. The bulk of the book is taken up with the pre-1914 period and discusses ‘three intellectual languages’ of liberal internationalism, the first derived from legal thought and practice, the second from philosophy and emerging social science, and the third from historical study. He also notes two other languages, stemming from psychology and from economics, but omits them from his discussion without giving any reason for his decision. As for the economic dimension, Sylvest understands well enough that the idea of free trade carried an enormously important charge in Britain at the time. For many liberal minds, the interdependence that free trade encouraged was a great moralizing force, vital to the growth of mutual understanding between nations and to the cause of peace. In practice, discussion of the economic element pervades Sylvest's analysis of his three chosen languages: and the literature produced on the subject recently is comprehensive enough to give him an excuse for not giving it centre stage.Footnote ⁸

Sylvest's outline of the debate shows that it was overwhelmingly concerned with the moral and intellectual basis for internationalism before 1914. In explaining the ideas of international lawyers in Victorian Britain, for example, he shows how they talked of international law as an ethical project, a product of emergent civilization, rather than suggesting practical ways of enforcing it. The sociologist Herbert Spencer had a similar approach. Social evolution would eventually ensure world prosperity and peace as the ‘militant’ societies that still dominated most of human life gave way to burgeoning ‘industrial’ ones like Britain where freedom could flourish. But although Spencer warned that militancy had not been fully eliminated even in advanced societies and there might be periods of regress in future, he offered no institutional means of aiding the forces of progress. It was the Great War that created an urgent need to translate ideas into action in order to prevent a repeat of its horrors. In that way, liberal internationalist ideologies were transformed into the rules of the League of Nations after 1918 and later strongly informed the character and actions of the United Nations after 1945.

Liberal internationalism was wary of democracy as the rule of the ignorant over their betters. It had also to come to terms with the tensions between the universalism that liberalism implied, the forces of nationalism, and the brute fact of empire. Although liberal internationalism included a whole range of positions from Cobdenite non-intervention and anti-colonialism at one end to Palmerstonian assertiveness at the other, a broad middle-ground consensus emerged that had Gladstone as its chief political spokesman. Democracy was to come slowly and only when the masses had demonstrated their moral capacity for the responsible use of power, that is, when they were ready to accept the liberal agenda both domestically and globally. In the present state of the world, the possibility that defensive wars might be necessary was accepted. Non-interventionism was rejected if the cause was deemed a just one, and empire was embraced as a part of the liberal project while ‘imperialism’ – associated with Disraeli and based on the militancy that Spencer had identified as the chief threat to liberal society – was condemned.

What is striking is how much liberal internationalism was informed by the whig vision of history: most liberal thinkers and statesmen believed that ‘continuous improvement was part of the history and moral nature of the English’ (p. 27) and that they had a duty as well as a right to bring the benefits of their civilization to others. Thus Henry Sidgwick, despite his customary academic caution, accepted the civilizing mission as good and necessary, and distinguished between civilization and barbarism in order to justify it. Similarly, James Bryce thought of civilization and progress in the British manner and believed in nationalism as a force for progress because British institutions, and the virtues they embodied, had flourished in such circumstances. Like Sidgwick, he thought that the world would evolve in peace and in prosperity if it had the good sense to accept the British way of living. Distanced from his intellectual peers by his Catholicism and by his German ancestry and learning, Acton had a greater understanding of British hypocrisy and of Britain's tendency ‘to annex with the greed of Russia’.Footnote ⁹ Yet even he lauded Britain's moral superiority, took Gladstone as his political guide, and accepted that Britain had a right to civilize. Liberal internationalism was the export version of Britain's domestic self-image. It reflected a much broader feeling: Magee and Thompson are, like Darwin, clear that one extremely powerful force knitting the British world together was its sense of its own cultural superiority, based on a conviction that British ‘character’ gave its people an ethical edge over others. Koditschek and Greene have much to say about the basis of Britain's image of itself and how exclusionary it could be.

IV

Koditschek's main theme is nineteenth-century attempts to imagine a global form of Britishness but he leaves out of account the debate about white imperial unity dealt with recently by Duncan Bell.Footnote ¹⁰ Much of the book is taken up with Britain's changing attitudes to India, and to a lesser extent Ireland, as seen through the eyes of British historians such as James Mill, Macaulay, Froude, Freeman, and those statesmen and administrators who were influenced by them. Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting and novel aspect of the book is its sensitive study of the response to British imperialism of a clutch of Indian intellectuals including Rammohun Roy, Romesh Dutt, Keshul Chandra Sen, and Surendranath Banerjea. The volume edited by Greene, which has nine other contributors each with an area responsibility, is concerned with ‘the transmission, application, adaptation and operation of English ideas of liberty’ in various parts of the empire ‘especially as they involved consensual government, trial by jury, and the rule of law’ (p. ix) The essays lack a comparative dimension. Belich on New Zealand is a partial exception, though his essay is more about the influence of liberty on economic growth than liberty itself. Greene's introductory essay makes up for that, though even he cannot quite capture the rich variety of outcomes in the different localities. He accepts that the impact of liberty was different in each imperial society but points to matters such as: the links made between property and the exercise of liberty; conflicts between the metropole and the local British; disputes within colonies over federal and national jurisdiction; and the relations between the British abroad and indigenous populations, as examples of issues that arose in numerous places.

As extensions of Britain itself, white colonies took their version of its liberties with them and fought hard and successfully to gain representative government and effective local independence. In these cases, it was not just the Britishness of the colonies that persuaded British governments to act but the fear that dilatory responses might lead to the colonies following the United States' route out of the empire. This threat was most obvious in the case of Canada but it was influential elsewhere too. The United States took its own brand of British liberty into independence and later became a transmitter of it: as Waterhouse's essay in Greene shows, the constitution created at Australian federation in 1900 was closer to the eighteenth-century model inherited from Britain by the United States than it was to the contemporary British one that had evolved away from it.

Greene claims that liberty for Britons was seen ‘not just a condition enforced by law, but the very essence of their national identity’ (pp. 3–4). Yet ‘liberty’, like ‘empire’, is an ‘essentially contested concept’,Footnote ¹¹ and not subject to precise and agreed definition. It also changes meaning over time. As Travers says in his excellent essay in Greene on the fortunes of British liberty in India, ‘the meanings of liberty, like the meanings of empire itself, would not stay still’ (p. 219). In those circumstances, ideas of liberty could become power tools, giving advantages to certain groups on the grounds that the excluded did not understand ‘ordered liberty’ and would act tyrannously or anarchically if given the chance. Refusing to allow certain groups liberty was, therefore, tantamount to saying that they were uncivilized. Such were the arguments used by British settlers and their governments in the emergent Dominions to justify their harsh treatment of their aboriginal populations, as the essays in Greene on North America and Australia demonstrate.

Koditschek demonstrates how James Mill and Macaulay identified Britain as the country that had discovered the possibilities of unlimited moral and material progress, a process hitherto hidden from the imagination of mankind. They believed that Britain's success was the result of its moral character, its ability to combine liberty with order in a manner that released the energies of its people, giving them the capacity to change their own society continually, and the vitality to spread across the globe. So, progress was a matter of learning to do what the British did; and, as empire accumulated, the idea that Britain had a mission to civilize the world and to shake older civilizations out of despotism and stagnation grew along with it. In his essay on Milton, Macaulay argued exhilaratingly that the cause of British liberty ‘was fought for no single generation and no single land’ but was of universal import. So, the civilizing mission in India and Ireland involved sweeping aside the local culture and establishing a British way of life as quickly as possible.

‘Liberal imperialism’ was, however, Janus-faced. It implied, on the one hand, that the conquered were capable of progress; at the same time it treated their own civilizations with contempt and branded those who supported them as morally inferior. The Indian Mutiny and the Governor Eyre controversy in Jamaica dented the optimism of Mill and Macaulay's readers about the pace of change. The civilizing mission was not abandoned but was now expected to proceed at a slower pace. Maine's emphasis on the depth and strength of traditional cultures captured the imagination and guided the policies of administrators such as Lyall and Cromer who thought of the civilizing process in terms of centuries rather than generations.Footnote ¹²

Few of the imperial elite were biological racists. Even Froude, who thought of British greatness in Carlylean rather than liberal terms and was sure that the ascendancy of the strong over the weak was providential, believed that Irish peasants and West Indian blacks would become energized and enlightened if subject to a very long period of British control. Extreme racism was, however, a fact of life amongst British settlers, plantation owners, and traders. That proved a barrier to attempts prompted by liberal statesmen such as Gladstone to allow native populations more control of their own destinies. At one point. Koditschek seems to assume that the Indian Civil Service (ICS) shared these extreme views and also argues that the ‘entire force’ was hostile to the Indian National Congress (pp. 290, 292). In practice, although arrogant and patronizing, the ICS was not as racist as were British settlers; and although politically and socially conservative, it did produce a few radical reformers such as William Wedderburn, who twice became president of the Indian National Congress, and Henry Cotton, who is discussed by Claeys.Footnote ¹³ Sometimes, too, Koditschek's account is insufficiently nuanced: Macaulay's essays on Clive and Hastings present both as transitional figures, emerging out of a corrupt past and tainted by it, but laying the foundations for the incorruptible administrators of his own time such as Elphinstone and Metcalfe. Both essays are illustrative of Macaulay's belief, which Sylvest notes was widely shared, that British character was in a continuous state of improvement and that the tasks of empire were vital to that improvement.Footnote ¹⁴

Many of the emergent native middle class, whether in India or the West Indies, were attracted by British rhetoric about ordered liberty, were keen to collaborate with the British in establishing it in their own countries, and looked to the day when their moral progress would entitle them to independence. Their hopes were frustrated, partly by the conservatism of their own native elites, partly by the arrogance of most British officials. The latter were constrained by the racism of many British residents: but there is no doubt that they feared the Western-educated natives as a threat to their own control and were quick to dismiss most of them as dangerous agitators who had no understanding of the needs of their own people. Travers's essay in Greene's collection gives an excellent account of British resistance to sharing power in the Indian context. Despite such constant hostility, as Koditschek shows, Banarjea committed himself to making India a part of a global Greater Britain, invoking the liberal values that he had read in Macaulay. The Indian National Congress that he helped to found faithfully followed that path until the 1930s; and, when interest in imperial federation began to develop in the 1880s, Romesh Dutt wanted India included in the movement. The collaborators were often generous in acknowledging what Britain had brought to India: Nirad Chaudhuri, despite his frustration with the British failure to recognize Indians' capacity for independence, still believed that ‘all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British Rule’. Nonetheless, only marginal changes took place before Britain was forced to recognize Indian independence in the 1940s because of the exigencies of war. Most Britons' self-definition precluded the possibility of imagining an empire that treated Africans and Asians as equals – except in a future that was far enough away to make no demands on the present.

As Girard points out in his contribution to Greene, apart from racist assumptions about the natural inferiority of the local peoples, one key reason why the British settlers felt that they could dispossess the natives was that the latter had different ideas about property and liberty, a subject that Claeys also discusses in some detail. For the British, one important sign of the right to liberty was the accumulation and efficient use of individually owned property. On the other side, aboriginal populations often had communal views of property and did not develop it in the European manner so it was assumed that they could be rightfully dispossessed.Footnote ¹⁵ In a wider context, lack of movement towards European ideas of civilization was used as an excuse to prevent Indians and West Indians from obtaining the franchise. In this case, the British argued that, since the rule of law had replaced the despotism of previous rulers, even the humblest Indian was ‘free’ even if he had no direct part to play in government. Sometimes, the threat from the ‘other’ was perceived as so great by British settlers that they were willing to give up their hard-won local liberties and hand control back to London for fear that they might otherwise be overwhelmed by the native masses. Greene's essay on the West Indies shows how whites decided, in the 1860s, to hand back political powers they had held for two centuries on this ground. Something similar happened in eighteenth-century Ireland where the English Protestant settlers became so afraid of the Catholic locals that they elected to be incorporated into the British state.

V

The two major themes highlighted in this review are the economics of imperial expansion and British attitudes to their subject peoples. Claeys's book offers a new perspective on debates about both issues on the left of British politics. He betrays some impatience that J. A. Hobson's Imperialism: a study, first published in 1902, gets so much academic attention and claims that this obscures much earlier thinking that anticipated Hobson's ideas, whether about the role of finance in sparking imperialism, the effect of imperialism on national economic evolution and national character, the kind of economic and social regime that might appear if imperialism was jettisoned, and the rights and wrongs of the civilizing mission. Claeys admits that the Cobdenite background to Hobson's famous essay has been traced and he largely ignores it here.Footnote ¹⁶ What he offers, amongst other things, is a thorough study of socialist opinion on empire from the 1870s onwards, including close analysis of the thinking of Hyndman, Bax, Blatchford, and the Fabians amongst others. Here he is following a path trodden by a number of previous scholars, including Bernard Porter, whose pioneering work he acknowledges; but his own contribution has a range and thoroughness not previously matched in the literature.Footnote ¹⁷ However, what is really new is Claeys's emphasis on the importance of the Comtean positivist contribution to the British critique of imperialism from the 1860s onwards. He gives a detailed exposition of the anti-imperial thought of its major figures – Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Edward Beesley – and of some of its lesser known but attractive ones such as Malcolm Quin. He also demonstrates how much of the socialist critique of empire was influenced by positivist thought.

Claeys points to a set of essays, published in 1866 under the title International policy, which he says is ‘far and away the most important pronouncement of Positivist diplomacy’ (p. 62). What was remarkable was the stress on the unity of the whole human race, which for the positivists meant that all societies, whatever level of development they had reached, were entitled to respect rather than being written off as ‘savage’ or ‘backward’. These societies were still described as ‘uncivilized communities’ which might need European moral ‘guidance’; but positivists insisted that they had a right to autonomy and should not be coerced by the free trade imperialism that Britain had often forced upon the weak. Spurred on by such positivist thinking, Henry Cotton, a member of the Indian Civil Service, advocated a steady increase in the number of Indian administrators and looked to eventual British withdrawal. Later, in response to African partition, the positivists argued that ‘protectorates’ might be necessary to avoid exploitation but that what was needed was a ‘Protectorate of the West’ as a whole, an earlier call for a League of Nations than was made by the liberal internationalists that Sylvest considers. The precocity of this approach to imperialism is shown by the number of socialists who clung to the idea that Britain had a mission to civilize. Moreover, Claeys makes a strong case that the positivists were more advanced in their thinking here than Hobson since he, like the white settlers discussed in Greene and many socialists such as the Fabians, assumed in Imperialism that no societal group had the right to prevent the development of its ancestral lands if incapable of utilizing them efficiently – the judgement of efficiency being based on current European values.

Claeys goes on to argue that many positivists, and officials and administrators influenced by them, not only identified capitalism, rather than aristocracy, as the chief source of imperialism – thus setting a trend that was followed by socialist thinkers – but also anticipated some of Hobson's more complex economic arguments, including his attempts to link underconsumption and imperialism. In 1871, John Cruikshank Geddes, a magistrate in India who had married Congreve's sister, argued that the British need to export capital was the key to understanding its position in India. He was also an originator of the ‘drain theory’ taken up by Indian nationalists such as Dutt. Later, positivist responses to the Egyptian occupation of 1882 took for granted that it was an example of ‘bondholder imperialism’ and many socialists followed suit: the idea of ‘financial imperialism’ was well embedded in thinking on the left of politics before Hobson began to pay imperialism critical attention in the late 1890s.

Claeys claims that Hobson must have been as much influenced by positivism as he was by the Cobdenite radical tradition. He is right to say that some of those Hobson respected and learned from, such as William Clarke and L. T. Hobhouse, had strong affinities with positivism, but a more direct influence is hard to detect. On the other side, Hobson did frequently mention Cobden as a figure of inspiration; and a claim has recently been made that Hobson was even more Cobdenite than previously believed.Footnote ¹⁸ As for the value of Hobson's thought, Imperialism has a comprehensiveness of indictment and a greater power of sustained critical analysis than any other single anti-imperial contribution before 1914; and his argument that imperialism was an outcome of under-consumption and over-saving, though flawed, was better thought out than anything that preceded it.Footnote ¹⁹ But it is fair to add that Hobson probably would not have become so famous a critic of imperialism had he not been taken up by Lenin: and Claeys has proved beyond doubt that positivist theorizing has been badly neglected and is of great value in its own right.

Yet it may be that even positivist ideas had been anticipated to some degree. In his essay on South Africa in Greene, Saunders shows the efforts made in the early nineteenth century to liberate the local Khoi peoples by bringing them within the purview of British law; and there were brave souls who ‘called for people beyond the frontier to be seen as equals, with whom treaties could be signed, rather than treated as enemies’ (p. 278). Similar opinions were expressed in India and the West Indies at this time if only by a few. Given that, it would be a worthwhile exercise to compare positivist anti-imperialism with some of the earliest versions of liberal imperialism, especially those derived from Burke and Bentham, both of whom had a more generous view of the capacities and potential of Britain's conquered subjects than did the Mills and Macaulay.Footnote ²⁰

VI

Claeys points in his conclusion to the fact that the main principles of positivist thinking on imperialism and internationalism are now widely accepted. Yet imperialist attitudes linger on. British governments no longer have civilizing missions but they still have an itch to intervene in ‘failed states’ like Iraq and Afghanistan.Footnote ²¹ Whatever one thinks of that, it must be admitted that the British tradition of liberty has had staying power. As Kelly points out in Greene's edited volume, despite centuries of imperialist repression as an independent state, Ireland adopted a constitution that was clearly derived from its British heritage, and the same can be said of India. However, it remains the case that, in Africa and Asia as well as in Ireland, the British were reluctant to admit that promising liberty meant granting independence eventually. The latter was forced on them as their power waned rather than being offered spontaneously; and, as such, it was often done quickly and without proper preparation. Those who decolonized often had similar attitudes to Africans, Asians, and the Irish as their colonizing forebears.