Liberty and Empire: Rome, the Machiavellian Dilemma, and the Greek Solution

In European terms, the British Empire was a relative latecomer in the field. Starting rather ignobly with piratical raids on the imperial possessions of others, notably the Spanish and Portuguese, in the sixteenth century (a buccaneering tradition that may be said to have continued throughout the history of the British Empire), it continued with colonial settlements in North America in the seventeenth century and rich acquisitions among the Caribbean islands. The rivalry with the Dutch maritime empire was usefully solved, at least in part, by inviting the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange to become king of England, thus bringing incalculable benefits to England in terms of Dutch military and financial expertise.Footnote ⁴ Buoyed by the success of “the military-fiscal” state, the British in the eighteenth century took on the French, the most powerful European state, and routed them in North America, the Caribbean, and India.Footnote ⁵ Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War—the “first world war”—as the leading imperial power in the world.

Despite the loss of some of the North American colonies—Canada to the north, of course, remained British—the British steadily expanded their empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. In the late nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa,” Britain took the lion's share. At its zenith, after the First World War, with the acquisitions of the League of Nations Mandates in the Middle East and further gains from a defeated Germany in Africa, the British Empire occupied almost a quarter of the world's land surface and incorporated a quarter of the world's population. It was the largest, most far-flung, empire ever in the world. Britain held onto this empire until beyond the middle of the twentieth century, divesting itself of it in what still seems an incredibly short period of time—the two decades of the 1950s and the 1960s—and, relative to most other empires both ancient and modern, with remarkably little violence and bloodshed.Footnote ⁶

It was inevitable, given this history and the magnitude of the accomplishment, that the British Empire and the British experience more generally would be compared with Rome and the Roman Empire. For all educated Europeans, right up to the nineteenth century and beyond, the Greek and Latin classics remained the backbone of their thought. They all had at least a smattering of Latin, if not Greek. The classics were what they resorted to when they wished to draw lessons from the past, in the spirit of historia magister vitae. They provided the basic principles of politics and a host of saws and maxims for everyday life. For the purposes of both private and public discourse among the educated classes, familiarity with classical writers was assumed—especially the Latin writers, Lucretius, Sallust, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Horace, Tacitus, Terence, and Juvenal.Footnote ⁷

The British had created the greatest empire of modern times, indeed of all times; what more fit comparison—indeed the only comparison—than the greatest empire of ancient times, the Roman Empire? And what better guide than the ancient writers themselves, commenting on the rise and possible decline of Rome? But there was the rub. The great Roman Empire did decline.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, it had “fallen”—at least as generally understood by Europeans, neglecting (despite Gibbon's extensive treatment of it) the thousand-year continuation of the empire in the East. Was that then too to be the fate of the British Empire? Were all empires, like Rome, doomed to die? Charles Maier has spoken of the “melancholy of empire,” “the intimations of mortality that tinge its triumphs.” The literature of empire is “always shadowed by intimations of loss and renunciation. Empires are epics of entropy. … Ultimately the lights will go dim on the imperial stage and the curtain will descend.”Footnote ⁹ Of all the lessons taught by Rome, that seemed the most profound and the most tragic.

European thinkers—British among them—were mesmerized by Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1531), in which he showed the collapse of republican liberty and virtù in the Roman Republic after the victory over Carthage. The key vice, as portrayed by Machiavelli and as understood by his followers both at the time and until well into the nineteenth century, was “luxury,” which had fostered individual selfishness and undermined the civic spirit of the Republic. One consequence was the rise of independent military adventurers careless of the state and willing to pursue their own glory. Asking why there was a general decline in liberty and patriotism in the ancient world, Machiavelli attributes this to the Roman Empire, “which, with its armed forces and grandiose ideas, wiped out all republics and all their civic institutions”—including its own, hence, its eventual downfall.Footnote ¹⁰Libertas and imperium (liberty and empire) seemed permanent and irreconcilable antagonists. The dilemma was that, in the early modern republican tradition, in order to flourish, a commonwealth required both liberty and grandezza (greatness). Machiavelli's analysis of the causes of Rome's decline seemed to suggest that the pursuit of greatness (or empire) would inevitably undermine liberty.Footnote ¹¹

“Luxury,” and its possible corrupting effects on society, was a leading theme of much political and moral speculation of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in England. It was one of the arguments for restraining the growth of commerce, seen as the cause of and spur to luxurious consumption.Footnote ¹² Two linked strands of thought brought about a reassessment of this classical republican view. One—gaining ground especially in eighteenth-century thought in the writings of those such as Montesquieu—was the argument that the peaceful pursuits and more modest ambitions encouraged by le doux commerce were preferable to the fanatical passions and ruinous desire for glory that had devastated Europe in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹³ The other, associated especially with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, was the view that republican virtue and civic patriotism were appropriate for relatively small and simple societies of the martial kind but were inappropriate for larger, richer, and more complex societies of the commercial type. Republics such as Sparta and Rome were able to maintain a high state of public commitment, Hume argued, because they were frequently at war, and “this public spirit, this amor patriae, must encrease, when the public is almost in continual alarm, and men are obliged, every moment to expose themselves to the greatest dangers for its defence.” Hume quotes Livy on the greater public spirit of the earlier republic as compared with Livy's own times—“‘Adeo in quae laboramus,’ says he, ‘sola crevimus, divitias luxuriemque’” (so has our growth been limited to the only things for which we strive—wealth and luxury).Footnote ¹⁴ But wealth and luxury, countered Hume, can be advantageous to societies: “industry and arts and trade encrease the power of the sovereign as well as the happiness of subjects,” for they create surplus wealth that can be employed by the sovereign to increase the welfare of the commonwealth as well as to pay for the troops that can enhance the power of the state. Modern societies must be commercial; they must encourage the self-interested pursuit of wealth, for only then will come that general growth in the prosperity of states and the well-being of individuals.Footnote ¹⁵

While this did not entirely resolve the dilemma of liberty and empire, it did at least mean that commerce was not necessarily something to be feared, as undermining the free institutions of the state. In fact, as both David Armitage and Anthony Pagden have shown, this problem was one that had been faced by English thinkers as early as the seventeenth century, particularly in the context of a comparison of the Spanish and British Empires. The squaring of the circle of empire and liberty was accomplished by distinguishing between commercial empires—like the Venetian and the Dutch and the English—and empires of conquest such as the Spanish Empire in the New World or the “Universal Monarchy” of the French on the European continent. An “empire of the seas” could provide grandezza without the need to depend on large armies. Maritime empires could enrich nations without undermining stability and liberty. As the Marquis of Halifax put it in the 1660s, “our situation hath made greatness abroad by land conquests unnatural things to us. … We are a very little spot in the map of the world, and made a great figure only by trade, which is the creature of liberty.”Footnote ¹⁶

Such a significant rethinking and reorientation of the relationship among empire, commerce, and liberty—a formidable problem for much early modern thinking on the question of empire—also brought the possibility of another set of comparisons with the classical world. In thinking about empire, Rome naturally predominated, with generally melancholy consequences. But had not Greece also had an empire, of sorts—not just the Athenian empire but a wider maritime empire created by the system of Greek colonies across a wide swath of the ancient world? Might that not be a more helpful, and hopeful, comparison for modern empires based on trade and industry? Such a thought struck the Baron de Montesquieu. In his Consideration of the Causes of Grandeur and Decadence among the Romans, he had followed the standard Machiavellian account of the causes of Rome's decline. Expansion and empire had expunged liberty, leading to corruption and despotism. By the time he came to write the Spirit of the Laws, he had come to see things rather differently. Machiavelli, he declared, was no longer relevant. England had shown that one could have liberty and empire, by eschewing overseas conquest and opting instead for planting colonies. Colonies allowed England “to extend its commerce more than its domination.” Its empire was defended by its navy, not by a standing army, and navies were not a threat to the liberty of the subject.Footnote ¹⁷

In reflecting on commerce and colonies, Montesquieu referred to the founding of colonies by the Greeks and the great benefit this conferred on Greece. “Her immense colonies formed an immense circle round her; and there she beheld, in some measure, the whole civilized world. Did she penetrate into Sicily and Italy, she formed new nations. Did she navigate towards the sea of Pontus, the coast of Asia Minor, or that of Africa, she acted in the same manner. Her cities increased in prosperity in proportion as they happened to have new people in their neighborhood. And what was extremely beautiful, she was surrounded on every side with a prodigious number of islands, drawn, as it were, in a line of circumvallation.”Footnote ¹⁸ Montesquieu did not link the Greek colonies directly to the English ones, although he often remarked on the maritime spirit shared by both the English and the Greeks, and his analysis of the different forms of empire—land and maritime—allowed one to see the parallel. Certainly many English, as well as other, thinkers did make the connection. Thus was added Greece to the classical comparisons that came so naturally to European thinkers in their reflections on the fate of their own empires. If Rome was inescapable, if nevertheless the parallels and lessons to be drawn from Rome were troubling, then might not Greece offer an alternative, and more reassuring, model of empire?

A number of points need to be made here concerning the use of Rome and Greece as contrasting role models of empire. First, it was inevitable, in drawing on Greece and Rome for comparison, that statesmen and thinkers would impose their own versions of the histories of these two societies. All historical comparisons involve selectivity, but classical parallels were especially in need of trimming and filtering. This may have been because the histories of Greece and Rome were, in one sense, so familiar, so much part of the furniture of the minds of educated Europeans. That very familiarity meant that every statement about Greece and Rome could be questioned by reference to a varied storehouse of knowledge about the classical world. Different authors—a Plato or a Demosthenes, a Virgil or a Tacitus—would give one very different views of what Greece and Rome had accomplished, some praising the achievements, others censuring the failings. That was indeed why there could never be any agreement about the meaning of either the Greek or the Roman experience. The Greeks were at one time, and in one aspect, exemplars of liberty and intellect; at another time, and from another aspect, they spelled the failure to find an adequate and lasting solution to their political problems. The Romans could be alternately the carriers of the civilizing mission to the world and the prime expression of imperial brutality and oppression.Footnote ¹⁹

The problem, and its attempted solutions, can be seen clearly in the use made by European thinkers of the Greek and Roman experience. What one had to do, in effect, was to create different models, or ideal-types, drawn from a selective reading of Greek and Roman history. This is the second thing to note about Greece and Rome as role models. It meant that there would be significant silences or omissions, a perhaps deliberate ignoring of important exceptions and qualifications. Thus the Greek model of empire might avoid reference to the short-lived (and oppressive) Athenian empire and concentrate instead on the Greek pattern of colonialism—a more benevolent construction—as the essential form of empire. Similarly, the Roman model of empire might concentrate almost exclusively on Rome's far-flung rule over foreign peoples and ignore its own style of “internal colonialism,” the planting of colonies of Romans and Italians in strategic areas throughout the empire. In the debates as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particular models of Greece and Rome tended to crystallize and dominate in particular countries, although there was always the potential for subversion and contestation of the models so constructed. To some extent what was in play was a game of “Greeks and Romans,” the rules and elements of which were made up from selective appropriations of the histories of those countries. But it was a game played in earnest; one could score telling points by summoning up either to one's side, just as one could add force to one's argument by drawing on comparisons with what were widely regarded as the most important and influential civilizations for Europeans to reflect on.

These considerations have to be borne in mind in the following treatment of “Greece and Rome” in the British Empire. In the debates about empire, “Greece” and “Rome” have to be seen as particular signifiers, markers of particular styles of empire and imperial rule, alternative possibilities in a “field” (in Bourdieu's sense) of empires as known from the familiar history of the ancient world. Because they were so well known, and because they were generally regarded as the joint parents of European civilization, Greece and Rome could be treated heuristically as antithetical examples or exemplars, regardless of their actual, “messy,” reality (a parallel instance would be the use, equally common in European thought, of Athens and Sparta as contrasting models). This could mean a radical simplification and abbreviation of the actual experience of the two societies, together with a distinct tendency to idealize the chosen model and to caricature the other.

If “Greece” and “Rome” were essentially tropes, figurative or metaphorical symbols, they could be employed without drawing attention to, and perhaps in obliviousness of, the wider significance of the choice. Thus in the case of Greece as a model, the idealization of the practice of creating autonomous colonies could hide the implication that this would leave colonists free to treat their territories and its indigenous peoples as they liked, without the interference of the metropolitan power. “Greece,” in other words, could stand as a model of nonintervention in the internal affairs of the colonies. So, for example, William Gladstone, an ardent advocate of the Greek model, as a member of the House of Commons’ Select Committee on Aborigines in 1835–36 opposed intervention by the imperial power to protect indigenous peoples.Footnote ²⁰ This was to have considerable significance in the use of the Greek model to promote the Dominion idea in the British Empire, as we shall see below. Since that idea applied particularly to the “white” colonies, it clearly had implications for the way in which the European colonists would be allowed to deal with their indigenous peoples, be they Australian Aboriginal peoples, New Zealand Maoris, or the indigenous population of South Africa.

“Rome,” similarly and contrariwise, might stand for a resolutely interventionist and even assimilationist stance. It was Macaulay, one of the most vigorous popularizers of the Roman idea of empire, who penned the famous (or notorious) “Minute on Indian Education” of 1835, in which he recommended the wholesale anglicization of the Indian middle class.Footnote ²¹ More generally, the espousal of Rome as a model, as with Disraeli, indicated a commitment to empire as a central and enduring concern of British policy. “Rome” meant empire in a way that “Greece” did not and could not, given their respective histories. Adherents of the Greek model, such as John Stuart Mill, were inclined to regard empire as a temporary necessity, or perhaps as an honorable although burdensome responsibility, and looked forward to its disappearance as colonies grew to maturity and were given their freedom. Those with an eye on Rome saw empire as a noble aspiration and goal, one that the British were especially suited to pursue and promote. As to the Romans, according to Virgil (Aeneid 1, 278–79), so too to the British was empire given “without end, with no bounds in space or time.” Whatever the burdens and sacrifices, Britain, as the new Rome, had a duty to maintain the empire for as long as humanly possible, to continue Rome's civilizing mission in the world. Here too, as with the Greek model, there were assumptions that hid a more intractable reality: the limits to assimilation and resistance to it, the dependence of the empire on local peoples for its day-to-day running and much of its financial base, and the unwillingness of many of even the best educated of the natives to accept the role allotted to them in the “civilizing mission” of the British Empire. But it was, as with the Greek case, precisely this sleight of hand, this polished surface, that gave the parallel its power.

One final point. What follows is a certain kind of exercise in intellectual history. It is only incidentally concerned with the actual evolution and working of the British Empire. The British Empire, as John Darwin has recently emphasized, was a fantastically heterogeneous entity, displaying many discrepant and even contradictory features at different times and in various places.Footnote ²² It could be highly interventionist and authoritarian in some parts, as at times in India, and in others benignly permissive or even indifferent to what was taking place, as in several of the white colonies. What was thought and proposed in the metropole did not always reflect the realties on the ground in the far-flung empire, nor were policies devised in London necessarily translated as intended into practices in the various localities. All this has been true of most empires; it is simply that, in an empire on the scale of the British, these features were magnified many times over.

So ideas about empire, especially ones drawing on comparisons with ancient models, are only one way of approaching so complex a subject. Moreover, being ideas, they necessarily tended to engage those mainly at the top of society, those with the leisure and resources to devote to them or in positions of power from which they could think about applying them. Nevertheless, metropolitan thought about the empire—even in the sometimes rarefied and scholarly terms in which it might be framed—was not an irrelevant and inconsequential exercise, a game played out only in London clubs and Oxbridge colleges. The people engaged in it, such as Gladstone, Disraeli, Dilke, Cromer, Curzon, and others, were some of the most powerful and influential men in the kingdom. Moreover, they were themselves no mean thinkers and scholars, aware of, and often in contact with, other scholars and thinkers such as Macaulay, Grote, the Mills, Freeman, Froude, and Seeley. From the other side, scholars and thinkers were unusually active in political life: Macaulay, J. S. Mill, and George Grote were all Members of Parliament; James Bryce was Irish secretary and ambassador to the United States; John Morley, Alfred Milner, C. P. Lucas, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, and Alfred Zimmern all moved easily between politics, literature, and the academy. As with all educated men of the time, the classics provided a common point of reference, a shared culture from which they could all draw in thinking about and acting in the empire. And being who they were, what they thought mattered, even though that thinking as always was filtered through and mediated by the practical realities of politics at home and in the empire.

“Rule, Britannia, rule the waves!” Greece in the British Empire

Adam Smith begins the famous chapter “Of Colonies” in the Wealth of Nations (bk. 4, chap. 7) with a comparison of Greek and Roman colonies. The Greek states, he says, all of which were constrained by the small extent of their territory, sent out their surplus population in the form of self-governing colonies to all parts of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. “The mother city, though she considered the colony as a child, at all times entitled to great favour and assistance, and owing in return much gratitude and respect, yet considered it as an emancipated child over whom she pretended to claim no direct authority or jurisdiction. The colony settled its own form of government, enacted its own laws, elected its own magistrates, and made peace or war with its neighbours as an independent state, which had no occasion to wait for the approbation or consent of the mother city.” Very different was it with the Roman colonies. Rome, too, proposed to solve the problem of its “surplus” population—in this case the poor who threatened the security and property of the rich—by establishing colonies in the adjacent lands.

Both forms of colonization, says Smith, have their rationales and justifications. But he notes a significant difference in the outcomes. The Greek colonies rapidly progressed “towards wealth and greatness,” rivaling and even surpassing their mother cities: “Though posterior in their establishment, yet all the arts of refinement, philosophy, poetry, and eloquence seem to have been cultivated as early, and to have been improved as highly in them as in any part of the mother country.” This he attributes principally to the autonomy granted them. The history of the Roman colonies by contrast was “by no means so brilliant.” Their progress was at best sluggish, for reasons the opposite of those that had allowed the Greek colonies to thrive, above all that “they were not always at liberty to manage their own affairs in the way that they judged was most suitable to their own interest.”Footnote ²⁴

The European colonies in America and the West Indies, thought Smith, resembled the Greek ones in mostly being settled on good land with thinly scattered populations. But the “natural” advantage this gave them was fatally undermined by the Roman method of rule, in making them wholly dependent on the mother state. This had been particularly true of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies. Their progress therefore had, like the Roman colonies before them, been “languid and slow.”Footnote ²⁵

Only the English colonies, in Smith's view, had managed to escape this fate. Although the mercantilist policies of the British government were as misguided and unproductive as those of other European states and although, at the time of writing, such policies were becoming an oppressive burden on the colonies, a long-standing practice of benign neglect had allowed the American colonies to be more or less self-governing. Like the Greek colonies, and for the same reasons, the British American colonies had accordingly thrived. In the context of the revolt of the colonies against the attempts by the British state to reimpose strict control, Smith proposed that, instead of going to war with the colonies, the British government should confirm the long-standing practice of colonial autonomy. The colonies should be given their independence or, alternatively, be invited to send representatives to an “imperial parliament,” so that their consent to taxation and other measures would be through their own representatives, as in the mother country.

Smith had no hope that either of these options would be taken up. Of the first, freeing the colonies absolutely, he stated that “no nation ever voluntarily gave up the dominion of any province, how troublesome soever it might be to govern it, and how small soever the revenue which it afforded might be in proportion to the expense which it occasioned. … The most visionary enthusiast would scarce be capable of proposing such a measure with any serious hopes at least of its ever being adopted.” But he allowed himself to dream.

After the loss of the American colonies, something of what Smith had hoped for did indeed come about. Despite another war with Britain in 1812, trade between the former colonies and the mother country increased by leaps and bounds. Cultural and personal ties remained and were further developed by the mass migration of Britons of all classes and regions to the United States—the favored destination of British migrants right until the beginning of the twentieth century. Smith's proposal of an imperial federation, incorporating all English-speaking colonies in a “British Commonwealth” of free but interlinked nations, became one of the dominant ideas of empire in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain and the British Empire.Footnote ²⁷ What we might call the Greek conception of the British Empire, whether or not so called, had a long and influential life.

Greece was indeed all the rage in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as in Europe more generally. Adam Smith was not the only one to reject the Roman model of dependence and despotism. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment in general had seen in Rome a warning, an example not to be imitated. They appreciated the great contribution of Rome to civilization, to law, literature, and the arts. But they were struck more by the later excesses and cruelties, the gradual extinguishing of republican liberty and virtue. Rome, and the Roman Empire especially, came to spell corruption and decay. Empire in the Roman mould meant death and destruction. This was the lesson taught not just by Gibbon and Montesquieu but by a host of other Enlightenment writers, such as Kant, Condorcet, and Diderot. Typical was the expression of Johann Gottfried Herder: “Rome disturbed the peace of the world for more than a thousand years; and half a world of savage nations was requisite for the slow restoration of its quiet.”Footnote ²⁸ The course of the French Revolution, with the movement from republic to Napoleonic empire, seemed almost a carbon copy of Rome's evolution and taught the same lesson of a state conceived in liberty and ending in despotism over its own and other peoples.

Greece, by contrast, spelled life, light, and liberty. Goethe and Schiller praised its achievements to the sky. The Romantic poets, such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley, were in love with ancient Greece, Athens especially, and frequently drew the contrast between the grace and creativity of the Greeks and a rigid and militaristic Rome, obsessed with order and discipline. The Greek War of Independence attracted enthusiastic support from artists and intellectuals—Byron gave his life for the cause—precisely because, rightly or wrongly, they saw in the Greek rebels the modern incarnations of the old Greek heroes of Homer and in a free Greece the return to Europe of its captive parent.Footnote ²⁹

So far as the British Empire was concerned, the eighteenth-century legacy that characterized it as “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free”—in contrast to the Catholic, territorial and despotic empires of its Continental rivals—was well fitted to the adoption of the Greek model.Footnote ³⁰ Its emphasis on freedom allowed it to link itself to the cult of Athenian democracy that was given powerful impetus by the publication of George Grote's monumental History of Greece (1846–56) at the midcentury. Grote's work achieved great popularity, and its interpretation of Athenian democracy was freely drawn on in the political debates of the period.Footnote ³¹ In a period where hostility to the empire and to colonialism had gained strong support in influential quarters—especially among free-trade Cobdenites—Greece could be used to counter Rome, liberty to oppose empire. But Greece could also be annexed to the imperialist's cause. Like Adam Smith, Grote waxed enthusiastic about the Greek system of colonization, in allowing the colonies their autonomy and so ensuring that ties with the mother country remained strong and enduring.Footnote ³² Greece therefore offered an alternative model of empire to that of the Romans, one that was admirably adapted to the commercial, informal, looser style of empire that seemed to be the dominant form of the future.Footnote ³³

The British in the middle and later nineteenth century, having learned something from their experience with the North American colonies, sought to establish a friendlier, more equal, tie with their colonies. Canada was given something like internal autonomy following the Durham Report of 1839, and in 1867 full Dominion status—allowing more or less complete self-government—was granted. New Zealand was given representative institutions in 1852 and Dominion status in 1907. The Australian colonies were allowed to select their own form of government in 1850 and in 1900 were joined together in a federation with Dominion status. The South African case was complicated by the rivalry between Afrikaners and the British, but the two British colonies achieved self-government in 1872 (Cape Colony) and 1893 (Natal) and together with the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State (granted self-government in 1907) were combined as the Union of South Africa in 1910—again as a Dominion within the empire.

India and, later, the African colonies complicated the picture even more and were not easily fitted into the emerging paradigm of benign, lightly exercised, supervision (hence, as we shall see below, the return of Rome). But for the English-speaking colonies, there began to develop the view that something like the Greek experience might well be replicated in the British Empire. Arthur Mills could write confidently in 1856 that the “model of Colonial policy most frequently and prominently exhibited for the emulation of modern states is that of Greece.” James Mill, the influential utilitarian philosopher, argued that the Roman model of colonial domination was “so very defective” and that the Greek style of colonization, based on self-governing communities with strong cultural and affective ties to the mother country, was the better alternative. His son John Stuart Mill also praised the Greek colonies for their success in generating freedom, order, and progress and urged that the British follow their example. The Greek model was further popularized by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the colonial reformer particularly active in Australia and New Zealand, whose writings influenced William Gladstone as well as a host of other Victorian statesmen and thinkers. Also important in promoting the Greek form of colonization was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841) was widely read and frequently drawn on in public debates. “The promotion of successful colonization,” wrote Lewis, “is … one of the best means of advancing and diffusing civilization, and raising the general condition of mankind; and whoever can devise or carry into execution any effectual means for facilitating and improving it, is amongst the greatest benefactors of his race. But there is nothing in the colonial relation which implies that the colony must be a dependency of the mother-country; nor generally is it expedient that such a relation should exist, even in a newly founded settlement.”Footnote ³⁴ Lewis followed Adam Smith closely in advocating that colonies should be given as much independence as possible, and he explicitly drew on the Greek model of colonization to show that colonies flourished best—to the benefit also of the mother country—in these conditions.Footnote ³⁵

It is perhaps not surprising that, as a philhellene and devoted student of Greek thought, it was Gladstone who should emerge as the strongest and most passionate advocate of the Greek form of colonization.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, although it would run the danger of oversimplification, the Greek model of the British Empire might be said to have become a Liberal preserve, as opposed to the Roman model of the Conservatives, taking their cue from Disraeli. Thus, the Greek-Roman contrast fits into the well-publicized and, in later constructions, legendary rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli in British political life.

As early as 1855, Gladstone had essayed a detailed analysis of British colonial policy and had held up the Greek experience as an example to emulate. “And what was the principle of Greek colonization? It may be summed up in one word—it was perfect freedom and perfect self-government. … The notion of interference by the mother country, the notion of the mother country undertaking to show to those colonies how they should regulate their own affairs—those notions which have been so pernicious to us, and of which we are only now and by slow degrees getting rid—were totally unknown to that remarkable people.” On the basis of that principle, a thriving network of Greek communities had grown up, founded on the “union of heart and character,” sharing the same laws, religion, manners, and institutions, yet with “no direct political connection, no direct administrative connection.” As an example of the success of the Greek system of colonization, Gladstone singled out the Sicilian colony of Syracuse, a city that grew to a population of “no less than 1,200,000, a greater number of persons than at present compose the population of the magnificent capital of France.” The prosperity and vitality of Syracuse showed not simply “the immense material results that followed upon the principle of free colonization” but also the great “moral results.” It was the strongest proof of the principle that “the unity of action and affection, and the great increase of influence and power which followed upon the extension of their race, was best obtained by abstaining from any attempt at interference with them, and by allowing the colony to grow and thrive under the light and warmth of the sun of heaven.”Footnote ³⁷

Gladstone returned to this theme during the agitation over “the Eastern Question” in the late 1870s. Thundering against the “Imperialism” of Disraeli and his followers, as revealed in the machinations of the Congress of Berlin (1878), Gladstone opposed to the policy of “aggrandizement” and “political subordination” a view of the British Empire that saw as its goal “to rear up free congenital communities.” The parallel with Greece was specifically drawn. “What we want from our colonies,” he insisted, “is something better than ‘food for powder’. To give birth and existence to these states, which are to form so large a portion of the New World, is a noble feature in the work and mission of this nation, as it was of old in the mission of Greece.” Gladstone considered “the sentiment of empire” to be “innate in every Briton,” which in its “normal action” could give rise to such creations as the American colonies, “the grandest monument ever erected by a people in modern times, and second only to the Greek colonization in the whole history of the world.” But it was a sentiment that could also run to “rank excess,” and it was this “domineering excess” that had cost Britain its American colonies. If Britain were to continue in that vein—as Gladstone feared was the case under the Conservatives—then it might be better for Britain to give up its colonies altogether. For “we prefer their amicable independence to their constrained subordination. The substance of the relationship lies, not in dispatches from Downing Street, but in the mutual affection, and the moral and social sympathies, which can only flourish between adult communities when they are on both sides free.”Footnote ³⁸

As understood by its British adherents, it is clear that the Greek model was not anti-imperial in any simple sense; it opposed not empire as such but a particular conception of empire. For those who took up and promoted the idea of a “Greater Britain,” perhaps within an “Imperial Federation,” it could be the inspiration of a future empire bound still to Britain by ties of race and culture—a “Greater Britain” similar to Magna or Maior Graecia, “Greater Greece”—but, as in the Greek case, made up of self-governing communities.Footnote ³⁹ That was an attractive and liberal position with regard to the white colonies made up largely of Europeans with a relatively thin stratum of natives. But what of the Indian and African possessions, which came to loom increasingly large in the Victorian imagination and which posed quite different problems of management and assimilation? Here, it seemed, Rome might supply some food for thought—a warning, certainly, but also perhaps some answers.

Reenter Rome: Imperium et Libertas

The Greek model never entirely disappeared from discourse about the British Empire and colonies, partly because philhellenism always remained a strong strain among the British intelligentsia.Footnote ⁴⁰ It might be said to have dominated, in fact if not in form, thinking about the colonies in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century—among those, that is, who did not simply want to be rid of the colonies as a nuisance and an expense. In the last part of the nineteenth century, however—from about the 1870s—Rome returned with a vengeance. This partly reflected a change in the nature of the British Empire or at least a change in emphasis. The colonies of British settlement—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa—continued their more or less steady evolution toward self-government. Their relation to the home country, Britain, was theorized through the concept of “Greater Britain,” which saw them all—Britain and the colonies—sharing a common British nationality although retaining a good deal of individual independence.Footnote ⁴¹ For some, although not all, thinkers of this kind, political unity was to be sought in some sort of Imperial Federation. While, as we have noted, the Greek conception could continue to find champions among these thinkers, increasingly many of them preferred to look to a more modern example, the United States of America. To Sir John Seeley, the United States, with its well-defined federal structure, seemed to offer a more satisfying model of the Imperial Federation than did the Greek colonies, with their total political separation from the mother country.Footnote ⁴²

But the “white colonies” were not the only part of the British Empire. The historian Edward Freeman, in an extended comparison of “Greater Greece” and “Greater Britain,” noted the similarities as well as the differences between the two concepts. He was hopeful that, with the advance in modern transport and communications, Greater Britain could replicate on a larger, global, scale what the Greeks had attempted so successfully within the confines of the Mediterranean basin. Freeman left no doubt of his preference for a “commonwealth” of peoples—Greek style—over a unitary centralized “empire,” a term that for him (as for Seeley) sprang from the Roman example and generally carried Roman overtones.

But Freeman noted one glaring difference between Greater Greece and Greater Britain. The peoples that the Greeks had merged with in their colonization, in Sicily, southern Italy, and Asia Minor, had on the whole been not so very different from the Greeks themselves and had been able to absorb Greek culture relatively easily and to become in effect Greeks. But with Greater Britain, or the “British Empire” (a term Freeman disliked, pointing out that the queen was empress of India only, not the rest of her dominions), things were very different. The most populous part of the empire consisted of Indians, a people with an ancient civilization but with a religion and customs markedly alien to the Europeans of the other parts of the empire. Their assimilation into the common English-speaking civilization of Greater Britain was highly problematic.Footnote ⁴³

Freeman noted the tendency of the proponents of Greater Britain and of an Imperial Federation to ignore India. “India, so present to every mind in every other argument, India, the choicest flower of the Empire, the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown … seems suddenly to be forgotten.”Footnote ⁴⁴ For Freeman, Greater Britain without India (or, for that matter, the United States) was impossible; Greater Britain with India seemed equally impossible. The Greek model of colonization seemed to founder on this formidable obstacle. Faute de mieux, at least for some imperialists, Rome seemed to offer a more helpful parallel.

But the turn, or return, to Rome could take a more positive form. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British government took over the administration of India from the East India Company. In 1877 Benjamin Disraeli, the most imperially minded of British statesman, had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India, and, although the queen never herself visited India, elaborate ceremonies in her name began to be part of normal British rule in India. The Queen's Golden (1887) and Diamond (1897) Jubilees were attended with full imperial pomp and circumstance. In 1875 Disraeli effectively secured the Suez Canal for Britain, thereby establishing the lynchpin of Britain's Far Eastern policy. India became ever more important to the empire, and the “Great Game” to stall Russian designs on India became an increasingly important part of British foreign policy.

India differed from the white colonies in that there was no permanently settled European population of any size. The same was true—with some exceptions in East Africa—of most of the new African territories acquired by Britain in the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century. Once more, the conceptions of empire that seemed suitable for the union of “English-speaking peoples” proved problematic when applied to the empire as a whole, with its non-European peoples and cultures. Hence it was that John Seeley, the most prominent advocate of “Greater Britain,” excluded India from his scheme as laid out in his influential The Expansion of England (1883).Footnote ⁴⁵ The African colonies seemed even more remote from the conception of a “family of nations” linked by common ties of blood and culture.

Rome, with its great far-flung empire, ruler of many peoples and many lands, once more seemed the natural parallel to the British Empire as it reached its greatest extent and the height of its power. Virgil, scorned by the Romantics, once more returned to favor. Frequently, the stirring words from the Aeneid—clearly contrasting Greeks and Romans—were once more quoted: “Others shall fashion bronzes so fine that they seem to breathe; shall carve great statues, plead with more eloquence, and calculate the movements of the heavens. The Roman will have a different task: to rule peoples with imperium and accustom them to peace, to spare the conquered and put down the proud.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The British would be the new Romans; the British Empire would be the new Roman Empire. Seeking to assuage the fear that this would lead to the corruption and loss of liberty that had, in the eyes of so many thinkers, disfigured the Roman Empire, Disraeli, in a deliberate and calculated misquotation from Tacitus, assured the people of London in an address at the Guildhall in November 1879 that this would not be so, that the pax Britannica, like the pax Romana, would mean peace and freedom. “I know [the citizens of London] will not be beguiled into believing that in maintaining their Empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Libertas. That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry. It is one from which Her Majesty's advisers do not shrink.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The turn from Greece to Rome—or at least the rehabilitation of Rome—can perhaps be dated from as early as 1850, starting with the famous speech in which Lord Palmerston, defending what many took to be his high-handed action in the Don Pacifico affair, had declared that the crucial question was “whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.”Footnote ⁴⁸ One of the constant themes of the comparison between Rome and Britain related to the whole question of imperial citizenship. A favorite quotation was from the late fourth-century poet Claudian, who proclaimed that Rome had “received the conquered into her bosom and like a mother, not an empress, protected the human race with a common name, summoning those whom she has defeated to share her citizenship and drawing together distant races with bonds of affection.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Just as the Emperor Caracalla in AD 212 proclaimed that all free men, throughout the empire, were citizens of Rome, so the British Empire held out the promise that eventually all its subjects would become equal citizens of the empire. Eventually—perhaps too late—they delivered on that promise, in the British Nationality Act of 1948. But late or not, and as imperfectly as it was practiced, the ideal of citizenship, and the pride and protection that came with it, remained one of the central points of comparison between the Roman and the British Empires: pax Romana, pax Britannica; civis Romanus, civis Britannicus.Footnote ⁵⁰

Another early herald of the return of Rome was the popular success of Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, published in 1842. As an old India hand, with a decisive influence on Indian education and administration, and as an ardent believer in the civilizing effects of the classics, Macaulay was particularly well placed to see the British Empire in the image of Rome. In the Lays of Ancient Rome, he laid out the virtues of heroism and patriotism that had made Rome so great and that he firmly believed underlay the English national character as well. It was Macaulay who, in the 1850s, was most responsible for making knowledge of the classics—a “liberal education”—central to the examination for admission to the new Indian Civil Service.Footnote ⁵¹ Men who understood the Roman Empire, and were shaped by its culture, would be the best suited to govern the British Empire. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the firm reimposition of imperial control, Macaulay's Lays increased its popularity tenfold, becoming, as Robert Sullivan says, something like “a surrogate national epic.”Footnote ⁵² It portrayed the imperial character suited to the rule of nations of varied cultures and customs, not simply of those linked by kith and kin to the homeland. Rome, not Greece, therefore provided the better parallel for a British Empire that included India and other non-Western societies.

Of course the comparisons and parallels were not all flattering—far from it. For critics of empire—and there were many—the old lesson still seemed the important one: imperium or libertas (empire or a free commonwealth). Plenty of commentators drew on the old literature, native and foreign, from Machiavelli through Gibbon, Hume, and Smith, to warn of the dangers of empire on the Roman model.Footnote ⁵³ Popular novels, such as those of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, dwelled almost droolingly on the luxury, vice, and decadence of the Roman Empire after a relatively early date. Parallels were drawn between the plebs of London and the plebs of Rome and the stratagems used by the Romans—panem et circenses—to deflect criticism and avoid dealing with the problems of want and poverty. Empire and conquest were, as with Rome, ways to keep the proletariat contented and to turn their ire outward, toward other peoples and lands. J. A. Hobson, the most influential critic of imperialism at the turn of the century, saw the British Empire imitating the Roman in being increasingly governed by a “moneyed oligarchy.” He warned: “As time went on, this moneyed oligarchy became an hereditary aristocracy, and withdrew from military and civil service, relying more and more upon hired foreigners: themselves sapped by luxury and idleness, and tainting by mixed servitude and licence the Roman populace, they so enfeebled the state as to destroy the physical and moral vitality required to hold in check and under government the vast repository of forces in the exploited Empire. The direct cause of Rome's decay and fall is expressed politically by the term ‘over-centralization’, which conveys in brief the real essence of Imperialism.” The “new Imperialism,” said Hobson, “differs in no vital point from the old example.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This was the repeated refrain of those alarmed by the continuing expansion of the British Empire. Would the British Empire go the way of Rome? Would it destroy the liberties of its home population? Would it leave a legacy of despotism and militarism?Footnote ⁵⁵ Or would it, as the admirers of both the British and the Roman Empires claimed, be rather a force for progress in the world, an agent of cosmopolitanism and the arts of civilization? Had Virgil or Tacitus been more prescient?

Between the extremes of adulation of Rome and its denigration were those who undertook a more scholarly and systematic examination of the similarities and differences between the Roman and the British Empires. Chief among these, and appearing almost simultaneously on the eve of the First World War, were the Earl of Cromer's Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910), Sir C. P. Lucas's Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912), and James Bryce's The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1914).Footnote ⁵⁶

All three writers agreed that the comparison between the two empires was both apt and instructive. Greece, said Cromer, was no true parallel because “the conception of Imperialism, as we understand, and as the Romans … understood the term, was wholly foreign to the Greek mind. The Greek language did not even contain any expression to convey the idea.” Moreover, “the undisciplined and idealistic Greek, with his intense individuality, was far less suitable to carry an Imperial policy into execution, than the austere and practical Roman. … Perforce, therefore, we turn to Rome, and here surely, if it be true that history is philosophy teaching by example, some useful lessons are to be learnt.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Lucas agreed. He found some parallels with Greece but—echoing Seeley—remarked that “we look in vain to Greece for a political system including within it states bearing such relations to each other as exist between the self-governing Dominions and the United Kingdom.” He noted that “when we speak of British lands and peoples beyond the seas, and of their relation to the Motherland, we nearly always use words which are of Roman origin. Colony, dependency, plantation, province, state, possession, dominion, empire, all directly or indirectly come from the Romans. … All or nearly all the terms which indicate the political status of Greater Britain and its component parts are a legacy from Rome.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Bryce discerned an important parallel in the globalizing, civilizing effects of both empires: “As Rome was the principal agent [of world civilization] in the earlier, so has England been in the later effort. England has sent her language, her commerce, her laws and institutions forth from herself over an even wider and more populous area than that whose races were moulded into new forms by the laws and institutions of Rome.”Footnote ⁵⁹ What also struck all thinkers forcefully was the extent to which, due to the immense speeding up of transport and communications brought about by the railway, the steamship, and the electric telegraph, the spread of English civilization had been quicker, more direct, and more widespread than in the Roman case. Modern science and modern technology had unified the British Empire in a way not possible for the Romans.Footnote ⁶⁰

Thus, while recognizing the similarities, and pointing to the lessons that could be learned from them, all three thinkers were equally at pains to stress the differences. This did not undermine the point of the comparative exercise. The Roman example indicated the areas that needed to be examined, the problems, and the possible solutions. For all the differences, it was, they were convinced, the only truly relevant comparison for the British. Questions of administration, of far-flung frontiers and the need to protect them, of the assimilation of diverse peoples and policies of citizenship, of the possible causes of decline and the steps taken to avert it—all these seemed as important to the British as to the Romans. The Romans had been there before; their experience was invaluable even if, and perhaps especially because, they had ultimately failed to preserve their empire. What that meant was that the British situation dictated different answers to the same questions.

The British Empire, all agreed, was larger and more diverse by far than the Roman one. Lucas noted that “one British Province alone (Canada)” was “about double the size of the whole Roman Empire.”Footnote ⁶¹ Cromer also pointed to the much greater dimensions of the British Empire, with 410 million subjects—“constituting about one-fifth of the population of the globe”—compared to no more than 100 million people in the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, in the time of Trajan, which, again, amounted to no more than 2.5 million square miles compared to the 11.5 million square miles “over which the British flag flies.”Footnote ⁶²

But it was not just the sheer numbers that marked the greatest difference: it was the character of the vast majority of Britain's empire. For Cromer as for the other thinkers—unlike the earlier exponents of the Greater Britain idea—it was not the Europeanized, white, colonies that should be the center of attention. Whether those went their own way or remained part of the British “commonwealth of nations,” they would still be essentially British by virtue of their race and culture. Moreover, in terms of numbers they constituted a relatively small minority of the total number of British subjects in the British Empire. Cromer estimated that Europeans, including those in the United Kingdom itself, amounted to no more than about 55 million people, out of the total 410 million British subjects. Of the remainder, 305 million were Indians and other Asiatics, and 48 million Africans. Here was the heart of the empire and the one that presented it with its most formidable challenge. “The great Imperial problem of the future,” said Cromer, “is to what an extent some 350 millions of the British subjects, who are aliens to us in race, religion, language, manners, and customs, are to govern themselves, or are to be governed by us.”Footnote ⁶³ Or as Lucas put it, the British Empire—unlike Rome—was in reality “two empires”: one made up of the white Dominions, the other centered on India. The one included people of British origin and culture; the other, people of radically different customs and religion. The one part was on its way to self-government; for the other, the future was highly uncertain, but separation was the least likely or desirable outcome.Footnote ⁶⁴

For all our thinkers, indeed it was India, the “jewel in the Crown,” that was both the greatest glory of the British Empire and at the same time its greatest conundrum. Rome too had governed a large number of diverse peoples, in an empire stretching from northern Britain to the Euphrates. But over time it had merged with those peoples, so that eventually individuals from provinces as far afield as Spain and Syria were attaining the highest offices in the state, including the imperial throne itself. In this way, said Bryce, “the provinces revenged themselves upon their conquerors. In the end, Rome ceases to have any history of her own, except an architectural history, so completely is she merged in her Empire.”Footnote ⁶⁵

This fusion was impossible for the English in their empire. “The English are too unlike the races of India, or any one of those races, to mingle with them, or to come to form, in the sense of Claudian's words, one people with them.” That was for Bryce as for the other thinkers the fundamental difference between the British and the Roman cases. “The relations of the conquering country to the conquered country, and of the conquering race to the conquered races, are totally different in the two cases compared. In the case of Rome there was a similarity of conditions which pointed to and ultimately effected a fusion of the two peoples. In the case of England there is a dissimilarity which makes fusion of her people with the peoples of India impossible.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Bryce concluded that “one of the greatest problems of this age, and of the age which will follow, is and must be the relation between the European races as a whole on the one hand, and the more backward races of a different colour on the other hand.” But in the face of this he, like Cromer and Lucas, remained remarkably confident about the future of the British Empire and of its ability to manage this problem of difference in India as elsewhere. While Seeley looked forward to the time when India would be independent, leaving Greater Britain to develop as a more integrated entity, for Bryce, Cromer, and Lucas Indian independence (except in a very distant future) was likely to prove an unmitigated disaster for the Indians as much as the British—indeed more so for the Indians than the British.Footnote ⁶⁷ Britain had a duty to maintain the empire. Rome had fallen, they generally agreed, not through the barbarian invasions but from internal causes: corruption and mismanagement, population decline, overtaxation of the cultivator. There were lessons to be learned here in the government of the British Empire. Like the Romans, said Lucas, the “English have shown in a marked degree constructive genius”; one could trust “the British instinct” for the continuation of the empire as a force for progress and betterment in the world.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rome had once been the instrument of that progress; in a far-reaching translatio imperii it was Britain, on a greater and grander scale by far, that had now taken up the torch.

Coda: The Return of Greece?

Lucas's idea of the “two empires” had in essence been enunciated many years earlier, linked to a comparison that was to achieve considerable popularity in later years. In 1869 Sir Charles Adderley had distinguished between the “Grecian” elements in the British Empire—the increasingly self-governing settlement colonies of British descent—and the “Roman” elements, those non-European parts that were more or less despotically governed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Like Seeley he worried about the place of India in the empire, necessarily governed on different principles from the Dominions. Later, in the 1940s, the classical scholar Gilbert Murray gave a somewhat different twist to this distinction, asserting that “at home England is Greek, in the Empire she is Roman.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Again, though, there were the anxieties about the corrupting effects of Roman-style imperial rule and a preference for the Greek way of doing things.

The comparisons with Greece and Rome did not cease with the First World War and its imperial aftermath. The members of the “Round Table” group of imperialists, most of whom were classically educated, kept the comparison—again with a penchant for Greece—alive in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁷¹ As late as 1941, the constitutional expert Arthur Berriedale Keith was proclaiming that the British Empire—he preferred the term “British Commonwealth”—had always been run on “Greek,” cooperative, principles and not on “Roman,” coercive, ones.Footnote ⁷² One could say indeed that, as the commonwealth idea grew in strength in the twentieth century, the Greek model of the British Empire returned with considerable power.

But there is no room here to follow that later development in detail. Suffice to say that, like Rome, although not for the same causes or in the same way or perhaps with the same consequences, the British Empire fell—or, at least, it came to an end. It had lasted for nearly four hundred years, almost exactly the same amount of time as the Roman Empire in the West. And here a new irony appeared, and a new parallel, or at least one couched in a different manner from the past. In the period after the Second World War, as the British Empire was wound up—with astonishing speed—the “American empire” seemed ready and willing to step into the breach. America offered itself as the new Rome, policeman of the world and the global carrier of modernity. It, too, wanted to claim Rome's mission, as defined by Virgil (and it, too, worried about the corrupting effects of empire). But if America was the new Rome, might Britain now be the new Greece? Just as the Greeks acted as a cultural leaven within Roman society, a civilizing force, might not the British be able to play the same role in relation to the Americans? Discussing America's leadership of the Allies in 1944, Harold Macmillan observed to Richard Crossman: “We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in the American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run [Allied Forces Headquarters] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”Footnote ⁷³ This seems a delicious coda to the whole story of the British Empire and of the varying roles at different times played by Greece and Rome in that story.