"Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption": The Chartist Press Reports the Empire

Although the Chartist movement is often seen as focused on domestic reforms, Chartist newspapers and journals of the 1830s and 1840s extensively commented upon various aspects of the expanding British empire, including slavery and abolition, Christian missionary activity, emigration policy, and the colonial wars of the era. This essay argues that the Chartist press developed wide-ranging criticism of several facets of the colonial system, describing the empire as "the outworks of the citadel of corruption," an integral part of the hierarchical structures which disenfranchised and impoverished the working classes in Britain. The Chartist press appropriated Orientalist discourse as a way to characterize metropolitan elites and colonial administrators, rejected the notion that missionaries offered moral and social uplift to indigenous populations, and celebrated foreign resistance to British aggression. This radical working-class archive can help us better understand the extent to which imperial expansion was contested in Victorian Britain.