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  • Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain by Mira Matikkala
  • A. Martin Wainwright (bio)
Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain, by Mira Matikkala ; pp. viii + 288. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011, £59.50, $100.00.

For nearly a generation, historians have backed up Linda Colley’s central assertion in her seminal article, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument” (Journal of British Studies 31.4 [1992]), that wars and imperialism played a crucial role in uniting the regional identities of the British Isles in contrast to the Other that British soldiers and merchants encountered abroad. Mira Matikkala complicates this narrative of the construction of British identity by focusing on opposition to imperialism during its height in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to Colley, she argues that late nineteenth-century England had two identities, one imperial and the other constitutional. Matikkala builds on Miles Taylor’s “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century” (The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19.1 [1991]), which argues that late nineteenth-century British radical opinion was concerned with the detrimental effects that British imperialism—and the authoritarianism and militarism associated with it—were having on the constitutional structure of British government and domestic society. In doing so, however, Matikkala distinguishes between the anti-imperialist sentiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The former, she argues, was culturally chauvinist in its assumption of the superiority of British culture and institutions: “the sole fact that anti-imperialists were against imperialism because it was ‘un-English’ implies a sense of cultural superiority.” The latter, on the other hand, emphasized the injustice of “the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised” (5).

Since Matikkala’s emphasis is on the public debate over imperialism, she focuses on published sources, such as books, pamphlets, and articles from the period, rather than private correspondence. She divides her treatment of the subject into three parts. The first focuses on the economic debate, in which she identifies two major strains of thought opposing imperialism. One, beginning with Adam Smith and extending through Richard Cobden and John Bright, argued pragmatically that the costs of empire outweighed the benefits. The other, including William Digby and the Indian-born member of parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, argued morally that Britain was draining the Empire, particularly India, of its resources. Ironically, therefore, although both arguments opposed empire they arrived at opposite conclusions regarding [End Page 503] its financial effects. The second part, focusing on the intellectual debate, distinguishes between old liberals, such as Herbert Spencer and John Morley, and new ones, such as William Clarke and John Atkinson Hobson. Both groups opposed international intervention, but the former did so in the context of supporting small government both at home and abroad. The latter, however, saw government intervention as necessary for providing justice at home. Some in this group were indistinguishable from socialists in their attitude toward empire. The final part explores the practical political aspects of anti-imperialism. Both pro- and anti-imperialists claimed to be the true English patriots, the former defending Britain’s interests abroad, and the latter its constitution at home. Matikkala highlights the limits of late nineteenth-century anti-imperialism, which often paradoxically supported emigration to the settler colonies but opposed the extension of empire in tropical Africa and Asia. Anti-imperialists regarded the dominions as pioneering extensions of British kinship networks which bore English characteristics of legal justice and liberal government. By contrast these same critics regarded the tropical Empire as largely militaristic imposition of authoritarian rule, a rule which threatened to subvert Britain’s liberal constitution much as Julius Caesar had used his conquests in Gaul to subvert the Roman Republic.

Matikkala’s conclusion is rather short and leaves a significant question unanswered: were there really two types of English identity during this period or was the older constitutional one an English identity, and the newer imperial one a British identity? If the latter was the case, then Matikkala’s book does not challenge the Othering aspects of Colley’s thesis as much as may first appear. Moreover...

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