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Great
Britain during Victoria's reign was not
just a powerful island nation. It was the center
of a global empire that fostered British contact
with a wide variety of other cultures, though
the exchange was usually an uneven one. By
the end of the nineteenth century, nearly one-quarter
of the earth's land surface was part of
the British Empire, and more than 400 million
people were governed from Great Britain, however
nominally. An incomplete list of British colonies
and quasi-colonies in 1901 would include Australia,
British Guiana (now Guyana), Brunei, Canada,
Cyprus, Egypt, Gambia, the Gold Coast (Ghana),
Hong Kong, British India (now Bangladesh, India,
Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Ireland, Kenya,
Malawi, the Malay States (Malaysia), Malta,
Mauritius, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Singapore, Somaliland (Somalia), South Africa,
the Sudan, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Trinidad
and Tobago. Queen Victoria's far-flung
empire was a truly heterogenous entity, governed
by heterogenous practices. It included Crown
Colonies like Jamaica, ruled from Britain,
and protectorates like Uganda, which had relinquished
only partial sovereignty to Britain. Ireland
was a sort of internal colony whose demands
for home rule were alternately entertained
and discounted. India had started the century
under the control of the East India Company,
but was directly ruled from Britain after the
1857 Indian Mutiny (the first Indian war of
independence), and Victoria was crowned Empress
of India in 1877. Colonies like Canada and
Australia with substantial European populations
had become virtually self-governing by the
end of the century and were increasingly considered
near-equal partners in the imperial project.
By contrast, colonies and protectorates with
large indigenous populations like Sierra Leone,
or with large transplanted populations of ex-slaves
and non-European laborers like Trinidad, would
not gain autonomy until the twentieth century.
As
Joseph Chamberlain notes in The True Conception
of Empire, the catastrophic loss of the
American colonies had given rise to a certain
disenchantment with empire-building. But despite
a relative lack of interest in the British
imperial project during the early nineteenth
century, the Empire continued to grow, acquiring
a number of new territories as well as greatly
expanding its colonies in Canada and Australia
and steadily pushing its way across the Indian
subcontinent. A far more rapid expansion took
place between 1870 and 1900, three decades
that witnessed a new attitude towards and practice
of empire-building known as the new imperialism
and which would continue until World War I.
During this period Britain was involved in
fierce competition for new territories with
its European rivals, particularly in Africa.
It was becoming increasingly invested, imaginatively
and ideologically, in the idea of empire. It
found itself more and more dependent on a global
economy and committed to finding (and forcing)
new trading partners, including what we might
call virtual colonies, nations that were not
officially part of the Empire but were economically
in thrall to powerful Great Britain. All of
these motives helped fuel the new imperialism.
British expansion was not allowed to progress
unchallenged — the Empire went to war
with the Ashanti, the Zulus, and the Boers,
to name a few, and critics like J.
J. Thomas and John Atkinson Hobson (NAEL 8, 2.1632-34) denounced imperialism as a
corrupt and debasing enterprise — but
it progressed at an astonishing pace nonetheless.
The
distinction between imperialism and colonialism
is difficult to pin down, because the two activities
can seem indistinguishable at times. Roughly
speaking, imperialism involves the claiming
and exploiting of territories outside of ones
own national boundaries for a variety of motives.
For instance, Great Britain seized territories
in order to increase its own holdings and enhance
its prestige, to secure trade routes, to obtain
raw materials such as sugar, spices, tea, tin,
and rubber, and to procure a market for its
own goods. Colonialism involves the settling
of those territories and the transformation — the
Victorians would have said reformation — of
the social structure, culture, government,
and economy of the people found there. Thomas
Babington Macaulay's "Minute
on Indian Education" gives us a good
sense of this kind of interventionist colonialism
at work.
The Empire did not found colonies in all of
its possessions, nor were colony populations
necessarily interested in anglicizing the indigenous
peoples they shared space with, as is clear
from Anthony
Trollope's dismissive assessment of
the Australian aborigines. But in general Great
Britain was able to justify its expansion into
other peoples lands by claiming a civilizing
mission based on its own moral, racial, and
national superiority. As we see from the selections
by Edward Tylor and Benjamin
Kidd, late-Victorian science sought to
prove that non-Europeans were less evolved,
biologically and culturally, and thus unable
properly to govern themselves or develop their
own territories. Other writers like W.
Winwood Reade and Richard
Marsh described the imperfectly evolved
colonial subjects as fearsome cannibals and
beasts, hardly human at all. Thus they were
patently in need of taming, and taking on this
job was "The
White Man's Burden" in Rudyard
Kiplings famous phrase.
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