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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The idea of an alliance between Britain and its old Commonwealth colonies has recently made a remarkable comeback in the context of Brexit. Based on belief in a special bond between the English-speaking peoples of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it has been dubbed the 'Anglosphere' by supporters and 'Empire 2.0' by critics. In this book, leading commentators Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce trace the historical origins of this idea back to the shadow cast by the British Empire in the late Victorian era. They show how leading British political figures, from Churchill to Thatcher, consistently reworked it and how it was revived by a group of right-wing politicians, historians and pamphleteers to support the case for Brexit. They argue that, while the contemporary idea of the Anglosphere as an alternative to European Union membership is seriously flawed, it nonetheless represents an enduring account of Britain's role in the world that runs through the heart of political life over the last century. Shadows of Empire will be essential reading for everyone interested in British politics and post-Brexit foreign policy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1: The Origins of the Anglosphere
Greater Britain
The Anglo-World
Imperial Federalism
Anglo-Saxondom: Race and Nationality
Pan-Saxonism
Anglo-America
Imperial Politics: Joseph Chamberlain and Tariff Reform
Milner’s Kindergarten and the Round Table Movement
From Empire to Commonwealth
Lineages of Greater Britain
Notes
2: After Empire: The Rise of the ‘English-Speaking Peoples’
Churchill’s Empire
Britain Victorious … but Diminished?
Anglo-America
The History of the English-Speaking Peoples
European Union
Conclusions
Notes
3: A Parting of the Ways: Britain and the Commonwealth in the Post-War World
Keeping Afloat: the UK and the Commonwealth after the Second World War
The Halting Turn to Europe
The End of the Anglo-World
Nixon’s Shock Therapy
Notes
4: The Powellite Interlude: Sovereignty, Decline and the Return to England
The Remaking of Powell
English Nationalism
Immigration
The Politics of British Nationality
The Anglosphere Reborn?
Conclusions
Notes
5: The Anglosphere in the Late Twentieth Century: Retreat and Thatcherite Reinvention
Early Days and Emerging Priorities
Anglo-America
The Commonwealth
Europe
Evaluating Thatcher
The New Right Anglosphere
Intellectuals of the Anglosphere: Robert Conquest and James C. Bennett
Conclusion
Notes
6: The Eurosceptic Anglosphere Emerges
Looking through ‘Five Eyes’: The Politics of the Anglosphere
From the ‘End of History’ to Iraq
Rescuing the Anglosphere
Towards the EU Referendum
Notes
7: Brexit: The Anglosphere Triumphant?
After the Referendum
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce 2018
The right of Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1660-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1661-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Duncan Bell, Andrew Gamble, Gavin Kelly, Guy Lodge, Robert Phillipson, Richard Toye, Ben Wellings and Jon Wilson for their astute and informed comments on an earlier draft of this book. It has been much improved by their insights. Toby Salisbury gave the draft a very thorough and careful final check, and we are very grateful to him for his efforts. Any remaining errors and omissions are our responsibility alone.
Our commissioning editor at Polity, George Owers, has provided extremely valuable guidance and support throughout the writing and publication of the book, and we are very grateful to him for his enthusiasm and insight. More generally, we are in the debt of numerous scholars who have made important contributions to the fields of enquiry upon which we touch, and whose work has shaped and informed our own thinking.
Our thanks also go to a number of colleagues at the universities of Bath and Cambridge for their support and friendship during the writing of this book. Nick Pearce would like to thank Pat and John Asher for putting him up – and putting up with him – over the last couple of years, thereby making possible this endeavour. Michael Kenny would like to thank Ben Wellings and Andrew Mycock, with whom he organised a major conference on this topic hosted at the British Academy in 2017.
Finally, this book is dedicated with love to Rebecca, Hal and Erica; and to Becky, Euan, Orla and Luke.
Bath and Cambridge, September 2017
Introduction
Virtually every visitor to London spends some time in Trafalgar Square, the capital city's most important public space. Laid out in the nineteenth century, it forms an imperial crossroads, where the City of London comes up from The Strand to meet Westminster at the top of Whitehall and where, to the south west, the Mall leads off to Buckingham Palace, passing underneath Admiralty Arch, once the official residence of the First Sea Lord. At its heart stands Nelson's Column surrounded by imperial lions, a monument to Great Britain's iconic admiral whose famous victory during the Napoleonic Wars gives the square its name.
Set into the walls in the north east corner are a group of 1876 Imperial Standards, measures of the inches, feet, yards, perches, poles and chains, that were once used throughout the British Empire. Flanking the square to the east and west are the imposing buildings of what were once two of the most important dominions of the empire: Canada House, where the Canadian High Commission is based, and South Africa House, now the diplomatic home of the Republic of South Africa. A little way out of the square, towards Piccadilly, is New Zealand House, a fine post-war office tower, while down at the Aldwych end of The Strand are Australia House, opened by King George V at the end of the First World War, and India House, designed by the late imperial architect Herbert Baker. Sandwiched between them is Bush House, once the headquarters of the BBC World Service, whose portico bears the inscription ‘To the friendship of English-Speaking peoples’. It holds two male statues symbolising Anglo-American partnership, commissioned by its American developers. Bush House was officially opened on 4 July 1925 – to mark American Independence Day.
If there is a symbolic headquarters for ‘the Anglosphere’, it is here, in Trafalgar Square and its environs. This is a term of relatively recent coinage, first used by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age, published in 1995. But in the last two decades it has achieved much greater prominence in political discourse to denote a group of English-speaking nations that share a number of defining features: liberal market economies, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and a history of Protestantism. It is most routinely applied to the United Kingdom and her former settler dominions Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This grouping has even come to acquire its own acronym – CANZUK. In many accounts of the Anglosphere, the net is cast more broadly to embrace the United States, once also home to settler colonies from Great Britain and a partner to the CANZUK nations in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence and security alliance. Wider still, and often controversially, the Anglosphere has in recent times been used to embrace a new set of potential members, including India, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as English-speaking countries of Africa and the West Indies, all of which were formerly part of the British Empire. Closer to home, the Republic of Ireland is sometimes included as well.
The Anglosphere has an inherently flexible, ambiguous and often elusive reach in geographical terms, and that is part of its political appeal. But at its core there sit the countries represented in the imperial geography plotted around Trafalgar Square. In this book we explore the emergence and history of this idea in British politics and show how the Anglosphere, and the family of concepts to which it belongs – including ‘Greater Britain’, ‘the English-speaking peoples’, ‘Anglo-America’ and ‘the Old Commonwealth’ – have played an integral role in British politics and political discourse since the late nineteenth century. The complex patterns of thinking that have coalesced around these terms, we argue, enabled leading political actors at different points in the twentieth century to craft influential visions of, and ideas about, Britain's role and place in the world. These exerted significant influence over the ways in which politicians envisaged the main dilemmas facing Britain in the years after 1945 and exercised an important influence upon some of the key decisions made in response to them. The fluid and evolving lineage of thinking associated with the Anglosphere has been directed to different political ends at various junctures, but was especially important, we will suggest, in giving sustenance and shape, in recent years, to the Eurosceptic conviction that the UK's future lies outside the European Union (EU) and involves the resumption of alliances based on deep cultural affinities with other English-speaking countries.
The Anglosphere is a concept with a long historical lineage. Its origins lie in the late Victorian era, when historians and politicians debated what held the British Empire together, particularly those ‘kith and kin’ colonies where ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had settled, and whether stronger forms of political, economic and military unity were needed to secure the empire against the threats posed by the rise of rival powers, the USA among them. The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). Then, as the ‘short twentieth century’1 came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Anglosphere was reinvented once more, becoming a potent way of imagining Britain's future as a global, deregulated and privatised economy outside the EU. In this guise it forms an important part of the story of how Britain came to take the historic decision, in the summer of 2016, to leave the EU.
In this book we offer an account of some of the main political uses to which the idea of the Anglosphere has been put over the last century or more in British politics. We show how notions of an English-speaking international community were integral to some of the most important political projects pursued in the last century, including arguments for imperial federation; Joseph Chamberlain's pursuit of social imperialism; Winston Churchill's attempt to promote British influence in the face of imperial decline; and the coalescence of a powerful current of Eurosceptic opinion which culminated in the campaign for Brexit. We show too how even hardened Anglosphere sceptics, such as Enoch Powell, offered arguments about the national character and provenance of the English which reflected the continuing influence of this pattern of thinking.
Our own study of this theme follows in the footsteps of many historians, political analysts and commentators, and we draw numerous insights from these works. There is a small specialist literature devoted to understanding the intellectual genesis and constitution of Anglosphere ideas in the Victorian era. Duncan Bell, in particular, has provided a rich and sophisticated account of these ideas and supplies an enlightening map of the various schemes of imperial federation to which it gave rise.2 Other scholars, such as International Relations expert Srdjan Vucetic, have illuminated the racialised character of ideas about an English-speaking civilisation in world politics and observed the intimate relationship between the Anglosphere and nostalgic ideas about empire, a focus that is echoed in the work of various ‘post-colonial’ critics.3
Others have noted the enduring power of the bonds of trust and mutual understanding exhibited in the relationships between some of these countries in a variety of policy spheres, exploring the coordination of intelligence services and military authorities,4 and highlighted the striking readiness of some Anglosphere countries to respond to American calls for military alliance in recent conflicts, most notably the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars.5 One or two studies have explored the enduring and shifting role played by notions of ‘Anglo-America’ in British politics in the modern period. Andrew Gamble has supplied an immensely suggestive analysis of the power and growing appeal of this form of imagined community to parts of the political establishment in recent decades.6 How this category relates to other similar, but also distinct, terms such as the Anglosphere is a complex question. Andrew Gamble depicts ‘Anglo-America’ as a more encompassing point of reference and uses ‘Anglosphere’ to refer specifically to the countries of the ‘Old Commonwealth’.
There is no agreed definition of these terms to fall back upon in order to determine which should be employed to characterise the patterns of thinking about the Anglophone peoples to which we draw attention. Our own preference is to use the Anglosphere as a label to signify arguments which reference – sometimes very loosely and interchangeably – the values, peoples or histories of the core five countries of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. But we also analyse the political use of the term for other countries – notably Ireland and India – which represent challenging and important cases of resistance to incorporation into Anglophone topologies. As we shall see, in certain British political discourses, clear and racialised boundaries are drawn between nations and groups considered to be within the Anglosphere and those outside it; in other versions, the boundaries of the concept are kept deliberately ambiguous and fluid, often for particular ideological reasons.
We tend to use ‘Anglo-America’ to refer more concretely to arguments and appeals that reference these two particular countries in ways that may not include others, and we employ terms such as ‘Old Commonwealth’ or the dominions to signal references to Australia, Canada and New Zealand in particular (although South Africa also plays an important role in our account in the first part of the book). These semantic issues illustrate the fluid, and often elusive, nature of the terminologies that have been used to evoke these distinct, but also intersecting and overlapping, forms of imagined community.
Gamble and a number of other academic observers have noted the growing density, in recent decades, of links between British politicians and their American, Australian and Canadian counterparts across the political spectrum.7 The political Anglosphere is an important, but insufficiently explored, dimension of British politics. Its potency is well illustrated by the pivotal role played by the small group of Anglo-American politicians, pundits and media figures who alighted upon the Anglosphere idea in the 1990s, and became influential and passionate advocates of it.8 We explore some of their activities and ideas in chapters 5 and 6 and point to connections between what often looked like esoteric and marginal endeavours and the growing legitimacy and appeal of Eurosceptic arguments within the British Conservative Party.9 This, we suggest, forms an important, if overlooked, pre-history to Brexit.
While our own study builds upon many of the insights into this subject within this diverse literature, we make two claims for the distinctiveness of our approach. First, we examine the Anglosphere as a shifting and malleable pattern of political thinking and practice that runs through the heart of British politics from the late Victorian era to the present day, demonstrating how the Anglosphere evokes and gives form to one of the most enduring and influential imaginary horizons in British political life, from the zenith of empire, through decolonisation to the present day. Second, we situate this idea in relation to the different political-economic configurations which have given structure to and, in turn, been shaped by its political uses over the course of its history. We argue that the Anglosphere is not best understood as an idea whose meanings and implications were forever fixed at the point when it was first invented, in the late Victorian period, and is not – or not just – a predictable kind of neo-imperial fantasy that crops up periodically at times of national crisis.
Previous analyses of this tradition have not engaged sufficiently with the specific and changing ways in which the English-speaking community of nations has been imagined and characterised in British politics. The various meanings and implications of these ideas are anchored in the ideological character of the traditions of thinking that have deployed and appropriated this dream. While the Anglosphere and its conceptual cousins are today assumed to be the natural mindscape of conservative politicians and pundits, these are ideas that have at different points in their history been framed in progressive political terms. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, the Anglosphere did become the imaginative landscape of sections of the political right, and this has had important consequences for debates about the UK's relationship with the European Union. The tendency to explain this emergent pattern of discourse as a symptom of colonial nostalgia, or as the recurrence of an ingrained pattern of neo-imperial fantasy, has resulted in the neglect of the particular role which Anglosphere ideas have played in justifying and making more appealing neo-liberal, Eurosceptic visions of Britain's future.
Our inclination is to view discourses of the Anglosphere as the source of recognisable patterns of thinking and practices that enable political actors to construct ideas about Britain and how it should understand and approach its relations with other parts of the world. In focusing on how different political figures have given meaning and coherence to the stories about the UK that they have told, we are necessarily drawn to placing emphasis upon the circumstances they inhabited and the various pressures they faced. We highlight in particular the impact of long-range developments such as the steady decline of the British Empire and the rise to global pre-eminence of the USA during the middle years of the last century.
Our study also draws attention to the predominantly Unionist, and particularly English, political provenance of many Anglosphere ideas. In the late Victorian period, ideas about Greater Britain were strongly intertwined with beliefs about the unity of Anglo-Saxon Protestant peoples, which largely excluded Irish Catholics and other groups of British subjects. The decline of territorial politics in the UK after the Irish War of Independence rendered these cleavages less potent in British politics. But, in the wake of the end of empire and Britain's entry to the EEC, the growth and development of Scottish nationalism and a new series of conflicts and demands generated by devolution within the UK have sharpened their salience. The contemporary Eurosceptic notion of the Anglosphere garners little support in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland. Its strongest supporters are English conservatives, and it is with them that it is now most commonly associated. We explore some of the historical reasons for why this is the case in the chapters that follow.
The Anglosphere concept is inherently transnational in meaning and scope. It can, and should, be studied in relation to the different national cultures of the countries to which it pertains – in which, it should be noted, the history of the British Empire and the idea of a benign ‘Anglo’ heritage are highly contested. Our focus in this volume, however, is primarily upon its employment and implications within the British political realm, as we consider the appeal and character of such thinking in this national context above all. This is partly because of constraints of length, but it also reflects the conviction that, while the Anglosphere concept has been construed and understood in similar ways in its constituent countries, to gain purchase upon its particular constitution and meanings, and to grasp the different audiences to which it is – more or less successfully – directed, it is vital to consider its operation within the discursive contexts associated with distinct political cultures and national histories. Our primary focus is upon Britain. And in this context we argue that the Anglosphere is a vital, overlooked part of the complex story that has led up to Brexit.
Notes
1
Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
1914–1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994).
2
Duncan Bell,
The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1869–1900
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
3
Srdjan Vucetic,
The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
4
Richard Aldrich and John Kasuku, ‘Escaping from American intelligence: culture, ethnocentrism and the Anglosphere’,
International Affairs
, 88/5 (2012), pp. 1009–28.
5
Srdjan Vucetic, ‘Bound to follow? The Anglosphere and US-led coalitions of the willing, 1950–2001’,
European Journal of International Relations
, 17/1 (2011), pp. 27–49.
6
Andrew Gamble,
Between Europe and America: The Future of British Politics
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and João Carlos Espada,
The Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe
(London: Routledge, 2016).
7
Ben Wellings and Helen Baxendale, ‘Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere: traditions and dilemmas in contemporary English nationalism’,
Journal of Common Market Studies
, 53/1 (2015), pp. 123–39.
8
See, in particular, James C. Bennett,
The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
9
Daniel Hannan,
How We Invented Freedom & Why it Matters
(London: Head of Zeus, 2013); and Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, ‘The rise of the Anglosphere: how the right dreamed up a new conservative world order’,
New Statesman
, 10 February 2015.
1The Origins of the Anglosphere
The early 1870s were a time of premonition and foreboding in Victorian Britain. In continental Europe, Germany had emerged as a powerful new empire under Prussian leadership, crushing its neighbours and establishing its dominance in a succession of mid-century wars. Further east, a reforming tsar was steadily modernising Russia and threatening British power in Asia, while, across the Atlantic, the United States of America had emerged from its bloody civil war as a powerful, economically dynamic and rapidly developing federation.
As storm clouds gathered over the Victorian economy, heralding the onset of a long recession, novelists prophesied alien and threatening worlds. In The Battle of Dorking (1871), George Tomkyns Chesney imagined German invasion and British defeat, spawning a genre of futurist war fiction. That same year, the former colonial secretary Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race, a proto science fiction novel about a subterranean master race called the Vril-ya who drew their power from a mysterious energy and threatened to return to the surface and destroy humanity. Bulwer-Lytton's book, ranging over numerous Victorian scientific and cultural preoccupations and critically satirising feminist and democratic political thought, was a publishing sensation.1
Victorian intellectuals were similarly preoccupied. The leading theorist of British imperialism, the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley, delivered a lengthy lecture in 1871 to the Peace Society in which he surveyed the long centuries of European war and put forward a startling remedy. Incessant conflict in Europe could only be overcome, he argued, by creating institutions of a higher authority, including an executive solely vested with the power to levy force: a federal United States of Europe. The powers of Europe should follow the path staked out by the Americans, who had created a ‘gloriously successful’ federation. America had found ‘a higher political unit for mankind … a name greater than that of State … a virtue beyond patriotism’. ‘That union of nations’, Seeley argued, ‘which here is a wish, a Utopia, a religion, has advanced a great step towards practical reality on the other side of the Atlantic.’ Should Europeans emulate the American achievement, federation would ‘rise like a majestic temple over the tomb of war’.2
Greater Britain
In the history of political ideas, precursors of the concept of the Anglosphere can be located directly in these late Victorian imperialist preoccupations, most notably in the idea of a ‘Greater Britain’, of which J. R. Seeley was to become the leading proponent in the 1880s. Just as the idea of federation had appealed to Seeley as a means to ending European war, so too it occupied a central place in the imagination of an influential group of politicians, historians and peripatetic intellectuals who gathered around the idea of cementing the unity of Great Britain with the ‘white’ settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa. For these thinkers, the example of the USA showed that federation over great distances was now both possible and desirable. To hold its own in an era of large states, population growth and global interconnectedness, Great Britain needed to draw closer to its settler colonies, whether in imperial political unity, racial solidarity or both: opinion would divide on the practical schemes for imperial federation, but diverse currents of thought would coalesce around the vision of a Greater Britain that would secure the pre-eminence of the British Empire and its future.
Seeley's most famous exposition of this argument was laid out in two series of lectures, entitled The Expansion of England. The lectures contain the aphorism that was to become a leitmotif of imperial study, that Britain had acquired an empire in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. By this, Seeley meant that the real course of the empire's historical development had not been adequately grasped. In Hegelian fashion, Seeley argued that the secret of English history was to be found not in the domestic politics of her kings and queens, courtiers and ministers but in her expansion, by war and commerce, into a great imperial power. What unified England's history over the centuries that spanned the Elizabethan and late Victorian ages was her struggle, waged successively with the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, for military mastery and commercial supremacy over vast imperial dominions. England had become the dominant ‘oceanic power’ and the English a ‘great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space’.3
Greater Britain – an ‘old utopia’ – had come within reach, Seeley argued, because of steam, electricity and the ‘abolition of distance by science’. Russia and the USA had already shown that political union over vast areas was possible. Technological and industrial advance enabled England to unite with her settler colonies. These were not possessions, but ‘part’ of England, populated by millions of Englishmen ‘of our own blood’. Greater Britain, he argued, was a ‘world Venice, with the sea for streets’.4
Seeley's recourse to English racial unity split the British Empire in half, reflected in the structure of his lectures themselves, the latter parts of which dwelt at length on the place of India in the historical narrative he had set out. India's ‘enormous native population’, he argued, ‘has no tie of blood whatever with the population of England’ and could not therefore be assimilated to Greater Britain. Its place in the empire was a contingent one. India had lain in ‘a state of wild anarchy’ when Britain had taken possession of it. It was not a political community or a country with a nationality in any meaningful sense; indeed, it was not India at all. That is why its conquest ‘cost England no effort and no trouble’. But, in turn, that meant that its place in the empire was instrumental, not intrinsic. Should India develop ‘a universal feeling of nationality, at that moment all hope is at an end, as all desire ought to be at an end, of preserving our Empire.’5
In making a distinction, common in late Victorian Britain, between the settler colonies, united by race with the mother country, and the countries of the subject populations of empire, Seeley and his contemporaries anticipated the fin-de-siècle drawing of a ‘global colour line’, dividing the white from non-white world.6 It was a line that was to haunt British policy-makers as they scrambled to acquire territories in Africa and the Middle East and were faced with claims to equality of citizenship from subject populations. It would deepen further as the settler colonies became dominions and then independent states, divided by history, status and power from the rest of the Commonwealth.
But, in the late nineteenth century, the idea of Greater Britain was more than an imperialist ideology of race. It gave expression to powerful currents of growth and integration, culturally and economically, of what historians have called the ‘Anglo-world’.
The Anglo-World
The Anglo-world was not a single state, at least not after the American colonies won their independence from Great Britain in 1783. It was, according to James Belich – the historian whose pioneering work has done most to shape our understanding of it – an English-speaking world that, like the Arab or Iberian worlds, was ‘divided and sub-global, yet transnational, inter-continental, and far flung’, comprising ‘a shifting, varied but interconnected mélange of partners and subjects … lubricated by shared language and culture’ in which people, goods and ideas circulated with relative ease.7
As such, the Anglo-world is best thought of as distinct from, but related to, both the wider British Empire and what has been called the ‘British world system’, the global economic and political system created by the growth and consolidation of the British Empire.8 It includes the white settler societies of ‘Greater Britain’ but also the USA, with which the UK had deep economic and ideological ties in the nineteenth century. As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn).
The nineteenth century witnessed explosive population growth in the Anglo-world. From 1790 to 1930, the number of English speakers grew sixteenfold, from 12 million to 200 million, far outstripping population growth anywhere else in the world.9 This demographic surge was underpinned by mass migration from the British Isles to the USA and the settler societies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the course of little over a century after the end of the Napoleonic wars, 25 million people migrated from the United Kingdom to these countries and the smaller enclaves of the Empire.10 The USA was the most popular destination, particularly for Irish migrants, and drew two-thirds of people leaving the British Isles up until the end of the nineteenth century. Australia became another favoured destination after the discovery of gold in the 1850s and 1860, as did New Zealand in the 1880s. Migration to South Africa was smaller in scale, despite its late nineteenth-century mineral and gold booms, while Canada became the primary magnet at the turn of the twentieth century for British migrants, drawn to the rapid economic growth of its prairie towns. Although the USA remained the preferred destination for the Irish migrants, the dominions together took nearly 60 per cent of British emigrants in the years running up to the First World War. These were peak years for mass migration to the ‘Old Commonwealth’, as it would later become known.11
Migration on this scale was made possible by the revolutions in transport and communications that took place in the Victorian age. The growth in power and speed of steamships dramatically reduced the cost, in time and money, of long-distance travel. Merchant fleets were dominated by the British, which carried something like a half of the world's shipping by the end of the nineteenth century. The advent of the railways, beginning in Britain in the 1830s, opened up vast land masses to migration and trade, and these new rail networks also reached their fullest development in the Anglo-world: the top five nations in terms of rail miles per capita in 1875 were the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Meanwhile, the invention of the telegraph collapsed distances in time and space, as cables laid overland and undersea brought near-instantaneous communication.12
The ‘Anglo-diaspora’, argues Belich, was different to other mass migrant communities. It ‘began earlier, was more permanent, and its migrants went to reproductions of their own societies, not someone else's.’13 Land grants, assisted passage, charitable endeavour and government campaigns all played their part in promoting migration, as did the extremes of famine and deprivation. But, once established, settler societies became enmeshed in complex networks of interaction with the ‘mother country’. Money, people, goods and services all flowed back and forth along these networks, leading to the creation of powerful political and cultural ties, with distinctive patterns for Scots, Welsh, Irish and English emigrants.
Economic historians have begun to quantify the new cultural economy of Greater Britain. After 1850, consumerism spread and intensified in the English-speaking world and ‘British’ tastes began to develop in colonial markets, helping to drive trade flows with the United Kingdom. A sense of shared Britishness – both shifting and complex and predominantly white and exclusionary – engendered trust and reciprocity between ‘home’ and the settler world, as well as helping to shape consumption preferences. Strong personal ties and attachments increased the consumption of British goods in the settler world. While intra-empire trade was underpinned by a common currency, shared language and preferential agreements, cultural ties generated an economic growth premium within the Anglo-world, cementing a transnational material culture.14 Hard power – in the form of British naval supremacy and armies of intervention – guaranteed its security.
Imperial Federalism
While these waves of migration, and the economic networks they helped create, grew exponentially in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, proponents of a Greater Britain had antecedents upon which they could draw. Schemes for the political unity of the colonies of the British Empire circulated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These ranged from proposals that the settler colonies send MPs to the Westminster parliament, to arguments for imperial conferences or councils, to political unity in an imperial federation. Rarely did these ideas advance beyond pamphlets, speeches and private correspondence between politicians, however. Their popularity waxed and waned, depending on circumstances. The Canadian rebellions of 1837–8 prompted anxious debate about how to reconcile self-government in the colonies (or ‘responsible government’) with the unity of empire, which returned to the fore as representative government spread to Australasia and free trade legislation removed restrictions on colonial trade. This was to be a fault line in the British state that returned with a vengeance over Irish Home Rule and which lives on in the contemporary debates about the future of the United Kingdom. Yet it failed to generate serious support for colonial representation in the House of Commons or any other substantive measure of federation. Empire federalism was a recurrent theme in Victorian politics, but it never translated into a political project that stood much chance of success.
Only in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when it gathered force around the idea of Greater Britain, would imperial federalism become an identifiable, if diverse, political movement.15 The Imperial Federation League was the institutional expression of this movement. Founded in 1884, its proponents were the ‘most vocal, innovative and ambitious, as well as the best-organized advocates of Greater Britain’.16 Its goal was ‘to secure by federation the permanent unity of the Empire’. At its peak, it numbered over 100 MPs among its members and boasted the future prime minister Lord Rosebery as its longest-serving president. It published a monthly journal and had branches and members throughout Great Britain and the settler colonies. Yet, although it agitated successfully for colonial conferences, the first of which was held in 1887, government ministers rebuffed its federalist ambitions, and it disbanded in acrimony in 1893. The ambiguity and political flexibility of the idea of imperial federation was both a source of strength and a weakness, enabling different currents of opinion to marshal behind a vision of the unity of empire, only to crumble into disunity once practical proposals needed support, particularly when these concerned imperial tariff preference. This was a lesson that would be learnt by future campaigns inspired by federal and ‘constructive’ imperialist ideals – for tariff reform and increased resources for the Royal Navy.
