:The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900

Abstract

In this illuminating contribution to British political thought Duncan Bell analyzes the intense debate over the future of the empire that took place during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. The focus of that discussion was the closer union of the United Kingdom with the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Supporters argued that only by closer union could the British both offset the growing political, strategic, and economic challenges emanating from such newly emergent powers as the United States, Germany, and Russia and contribute to the general stability of world order. Such ideas were not new, but they had not been taken very seriously in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their new appeal owed much to the technological advances that had shrunk time and space and fundamentally altered the perception of what was possible. A political union in some supraparliamentary form across oceans and continents now seemed feasible with the advent of the telegraph and the steamship.