Patriotism was a highly contested concept in the nineteenth century. Mira Matikkala's study of a number of late-nineteenth-century British thinkers, politicians, and publicists who refused to accept the designation of “antipatriotism” their opponents ascribed to them on account of their opposition to “imperialism” makes for fascinating reading. They were opposed to British “imperialism” but refused to accept that this made them less patriotic than the “imperialists” and instead insisted that they were the “real” patriots. Matikkala attempts to question the widespread belief that there was no anti-imperialist movement in Britain. She argues that, while there was not an “official,” organized movement, the picture was more complicated. The absence of an organized and recognizable movement she attributes to the diversity of the whole “ideology” in the sense that their common anti-imperialism aside, the people she discusses differed about everything else they believed. However, she argues that “anti-imperialism was able to unite people who otherwise had little in common.” She maintains (convincingly, with impressive evidence) that “at some point or another they all were in contact with each other, some more and some less closely. In this sense there was an anti-imperialist network in Britain, although it was not official or formal in any kind” (17).

The criterion for inclusion is claimed to be a concentration on people Matikkala calls “active publicists.” She focuses most on the idiosyncratic poet and ex-diplomat Wilfried Scawen Blunt; the philosopher Herbert Spencer; the propagandist for India, William Digby; the Liberal MPs John Morley, Henry Labouchere, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson; and the Liberal Unionist MP, Leonard Courtney; plus the British positivists (“Comtists” would have been a better designation), particularly Frederic Harrison, Edward Beesly, and Richard Congreve. And, finally, attention is paid to a number of “New Liberals,” in particular William Clarke.

It is important to define the terms involved in the debates at the time, and Matikkala does this well. According to her, “imperialists” regarded imperialism as “wide-ranging and unspecified ‘empire patriotism’ or ‘empire pride.’” As a result, they considered anti-imperialism to mean “opposing this ‘empire patriotism,’ thus signifying unpatriotic rejection of the British empire.” Anti-imperialists, however, defined the concept very differently. For them, imperialism constituted “only one aspect of the British empire. This aspect amounted to militarism, authoritarianism, irrational and emotional jingoism, and anti-constitutionalism.” And while they were vociferously critical of this negative aspect, the anti-imperialists generally were in favor of the self-governing settler (or colonial) empire (145). The anti-imperialists were thus in favor of the empire to the extent that it created colonies such as Canada, for instance. What they objected to was not the “empire” per se, but what they called “imperialism,” by which they understood the conquest and subsequent retention of already thickly populated foreign dependencies by force (the most prominent example being, of course, India).

The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 (“The Debate on Economy and Imperial Expansion”) contains chapters on debates about the economic effects of the empire, both for Britain and for the dependencies. Part 2, “The Ethics of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism,” focuses on debates on “Englishness” and “patriotism.” Part 3 is titled “The Constitutional and Political Debate on the Empire” and contains extremely interesting chapters on debates on the nature of the British empire, the involvement of British anti-imperialists with Egyptian and Indian nationalists, and the impact of India and Africa on domestic British politics.

Matikkala discusses the proposal of the British Comtists to break large states into smaller republics (84–85) and Richard Congreve's opposition to large states (206). This idea was typical of the international thought of Auguste Comte himself and of his followers as an organized movement. Yet Comte and Comtism are not discussed or even briefly introduced in the book. It would have been relevant to mention alongside the proposal to break up existing European states into smaller-scale republics that this applied only to the distribution of what Comte called “temporal power” in those states. However, there would also be the “Spiritual Power,” which would be a single one, uniting the whole “West” (and based, of course, in Paris). Similarly, Matikkala speaks of the Positivists’ proposal for joint European protectorate in Africa (106), without connecting it to the broader idea of “the West,” but this was all part of their overall international vision and already propagated by them as early as in 1866. The last paragraph of the (short) conclusion raises a similar question too (206–7). It is strange in its emphasis on the centrality of Positivism to British anti-imperialism (correctly emphasized), which is absent from the rest of the book. Several Positivists are extensively discussed, but Positivism as such is not given the limelight in the rest of the book that it is given only in the last paragraph. The Comtist “religion of humanity” is mentioned here, in the concluding paragraph, for the first time. Yet it was very much related to the Comtists’ anti-imperialist stance and overall international thought.

Some closely related works published in recent years are absent from the bibliography. The reason seems to be that the book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation without much engagement with literature published after the thesis was submitted. Thus, recent books by Duncan Bell and Gregory Claeys do not appear in the bibliography, although Bell's doctoral dissertation has been consulted and is cited. This is a shame, because an engagement with that extremely interesting recent scholarly output would have made this impressively well-researched and well-thought-through study even more fascinating. It is, in any case, indispensable reading for anyone interested in British attitudes toward the empire and imperialism.