ESP Technology, Space, and Empire

Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 17701900
Author(s): Duncan S. A. Bell

Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 523-562
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Journal of Modern History 77 (September 2005): 523562
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All rights reserved.
Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in
British Political Thought, 17701900*
Duncan S. A. Bell
Christs College, Cambridge University
The inventions of science have overcome the great difculties of
time and space which were thought to make separation almost a
necessity, and we now feel that we can look forward, not to the
isolated independence of Englands children, but to their being
united to one another with the mother-country, in a permanent fam-
ily union. (W. E. FORSTER)
1
I. INTRODUCTION: TIME, SPACE, EMPIRE
The British empire is back in vogue. Driven partly by the boom in postcolonial
writing, and partly by the present debate over global political order, it is once
again a burgeoning eld of historical study.
2
However, there are deleterious
gaps in this revival, most notably in the exploration of imperial political
thought. While a number of pioneering historians have dissected early modern
ideologies of empire, the analysis of nineteenth-century British colonial the-
ories remains inadequate; moreover, the most impressive studies of Victorian
political thought have made the question of overseas dominion tangential to
the exploration of domestic intellectual movements and culture.
3
This is illus-
* I would like to thank the following for their comments and advice on earlier drafts
of this essay: John Burrow, David Cannadine, Nicholas Canny, John Dunn, Michael
Freeden, Istvan Hont, Stuart Jones, Peter Mandler, Peter N. Miller, Maria Neophytou,
Andrew Porter, David Reynolds, Casper Sylvest, Moshik Temkin, Richard Tuck, and
the anonymous reviewers for this journal.
1
W. E. Forster, comments made in Imperial Federation: Report of the Conference
held July 29, 1884, at the Westminster Palace Hotel (London, 1884), 27.
2
A. G. Hopkins, Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial Past, Past
and Present 164 (1999): 198244; The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols.,
ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 199899); and Linda Colley, What Is Imperial History
Today? in What Is History Today? ed. David Cannadine (London, 2002), 13248.
3
On empire, see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cam-
bridge, 2000); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and
International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999); Anthony Pagden, Lords of
All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500c. 1850
(New Haven, CT, 1995); and Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intel-
lectual History of English Colonisation, 15001625 (Cambridge, 2003). For British
524 Bell
trative of a wider problem: both contemporary political theoristswho display
a collective indifference to empire
4
and intellectual historians tend to focus
on ideologies relating to civil society and the domestic dimensions of the state.
5
Yet, historically, ideologies of empire have not been sui generis but rather
important constituents of broader currents of political thinking; to examine
them in isolation (or to disregard them altogether) is to lose much of the scope
and force not only of the ideas themselves but also of social and political
theory in general.
The history of modern political thought is in part a history of the attempt
to confront increasing global interdependence and competition. One of the
most important elements in this confrontation, and one rarely explored, con-
cerns the manner in which the globe itself was perceived and the variable ways
in which particular conceptions of nature have placed theoretical limitations
on envisioning political communities. The history of globalization is as much
a history of the perception that the world is shrinking as it is a history of
increasing economic interdependence; the conceptual and the material are, as
ever, interwoven. In order to analyze shifts in the perception of the globe, and
the consequences that follow for the political imagination, this essay grapples
with the transformation of British visions of the Anglo-Saxon colonies. Con-
sequently, it charts attitudes toward the North American colonies in the late
eighteenth century and then, during the nineteenth century, toward the ex-
panding territories in what we know now as Canada, Australia, and New Zea-
land.
6
In particular, it focuses on a neglected aspect of imperial thought: the
debate over the potential federation of the United Kingdom with its settler
colonies during the late Victorian age. At its most innovative and ambitious,
nineteenth-century political thought, see John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity
and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1988); John Burrow, Stefan Collini,
and Donald Winch, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983); Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political
Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 18501930 (Oxford, 1991); Michael Freeden,
The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); Peter Clarke, Lib-
erals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978); and H. S. Jones, Victorian Political
Thought (London, 2000).
4
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British
Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), 7.
5
The latter tendency, though, is beginning to change: Duncan S. A. Bell, Interna-
tional Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn? British Journal of Politics
and International Relations 3 (2001): 11526; and David Armitage, The Fifty Years
Rift: Intellectual History and International Relations, Modern Intellectual History 1
(2004): 97109.
6
Owing to its more diverse ethnic composition, the question of the South African
colonies is more complex and was regarded as such at the time; I do not include it in
this analysis. For a general overview, see Christopher Saunders and Iain R. Smith,
Southern Africa, 17951910, Oxford History of the British Empire, 4:597624.
Dissolving Distance 525
this vision took the form of a planetary Greater British state.
7
The second half
of the nineteenth century saw political commentators responding frenetically
to the awareness of an increasingly hostile world, a world in which Britain
was losing (or had already lost) its midcentury preeminence.
8
It became a
commonplace between about 1870 and 1900 to promulgate the idea of a fed-
eral imperial polity.
9
The debate signaled an important moment in the recon-
guration of national consciousness in a late Victorian world subjected to both
the vagaries of globalization and a transguration of the prevailing norms of
domestic political culture. In tracing these developments, this article elucidates
a set of theoretical disputes and conceptual shifts that allowed such a novel
mode of political organization to be imagined and theorized seriously in the
rst place; it is a study in the cultural and cognitive preconditions for the
conception of a global polity. As such, it can be seen as a contribution not
only to British intellectual history but also to the history of global conscious-
ness.
In particular, then, I engage one of the most persistent (yet overlooked)
themes in the evolution of political theory, namely, the multiform problems of
creating and governing an integrated political structure over great distances.
The organizing argument is that during the course of the long nineteenth cen-
tury it became increasingly possible, because increasingly feasible, to theorize
the construction of a global polity. During the late eighteenth century we wit-
ness the rst halting steps in this prolonged process, embodied in the belief in
7
On imperial federation as a claim to statehood, see, from divergent perspectives,
J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883), pt.
1; Charles Oman, England in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1899), 258; and A. V.
Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th ed. (London, 1915),
lxxxiv. Of course, this did not apply to the many less ambitious schemes for federation;
see the discussion in Duncan Bell, Building Greater Britain: Empire, Ideology, and the
Future of World Order, 18601900 (forthcoming).
8
The terms Britain and England were often used interchangeably during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, in large part because of the long-standing dominance
of the English, and this practice continued throughout the period under discussion in
this article. See Eric Evans, Englishness and Britishness: National Identities, c. 1790
1870, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant
and Keith Stringer (London, 1995), 22343; and Paul Langford, Englishness Identied:
Manners and Character, 16501850 (Oxford, 2000), 1115.
9
Seymour Cheng, Schemes for the Federation of the British Empire (New York,
1931); John Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity, 18681895 (London, 1938); John
Kendle, Federal Britain: A History (London, 1997), chap. 3; Michael Burgess, The
British Tradition of Federalism (Leicester, 1995); Ged Martin, Empire Federalismand
Imperial Parliamentary Union, Historical Journal 15 (1973): 6593. Note that in this
article I will be focusing mainly on what Martin therein calls supra-parliamentary
federalism, as opposed simply to colonial representation at Westminster.
526 Bell
(and desire for) a transatlantic British imperial union. But ultimately it was a
cluster of later technological innovations that provided the catalyst for the
transformation in political consciousness: some of the most spectacular engi-
neering triumphs of the Victorians, most notably the ocean-traversing steamship
and especially the submarine telegraph, precipitated a fundamental restructur-
ing of imperial political thought. The communications revolution transformed
the manner in which future political possibilities were (and could be) envi-
sioned. Technology impacted not only on the material structures of social and
political life but also on the cognitive apprehension of the worldon the
modes of interpreting and reacting to the natural environment and the political
potential contained therein.
The eighteenth century witnessed the birth pangs of globalization, at least
in the sense that it was recognizednot only by the political economists, who
had long noted the phenomenon, but by the governing classes alsothat many
of the communities of the world were becoming increasingly interdependent,
that actions in one place had far-reaching and often unanticipated effects in
another, and that the whole planet was becoming a single space for economic
exchange and political action. Political consciousness was being revolution-
ized. This shift in perception was to have a monumental impact on the con-
ception of the empire and the later evolution of imperial political thought. The
Seven Years War (175663) had been the rst truly global war, and many
commentators recognized it as such. A further dimension of this new global-
izing sensibility lay in the inadvertent transformation, from the 1750s onward,
of the spatial scope of moral responsibility by the cold mechanisms of the
market.
10
The spread of global capitalism inculcated altered perceptions of
causation in human affairs
11
and an increasing awareness of the multiple and
complex webs of connection spanning the planet. Increasingly, the British
empire was regarded, at least by some observers, as a semi-integrated political-
economic system, and in the years following the crushing victory over France
the idea of a pan-Atlantic British community bound by the political technology
of virtual representation was frequently proposed.
12
Edmund Burke sug-
gested that the Thirteen Colonies and Britain comprised one great nation, with
10
Thomas L. Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,
pts. 1 and 2, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 33961, 54766. See also the
debate over this issue in Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalismand
Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992).
11
Haskell, Capitalism, pt. 1, 342.
12
On the competing visions of empire during this period, see H. V. Bowen, British
Conceptions of Global Empire, 175683, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History 26 (1998): 127; and P. J. Marshall, Britain and the World in the Eighteenth
Century: IV, The Turning Outwards of Britain, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, ser. 6, 11 (2001): 115.
America branded that most growing branch, while Arthur Young argued in
1772 that the American colonists and those residing in the home islands con-
stituted one nation, united under one sovereign.
13
There were also numerous
proposals for parliamentary representation of the colonists. The period sawthe
articulation of a powerful, albeit minority, discourse of transatlantic British
identity, stressing the commonality of legal and political traditions and in par-
ticular the centrality of constitutional liberty.
14
However, theorists of economic
integration and the diffusion of (limited) political rights continually ran into
the difculties presented by the vast distances separating the component com-
munities of the (settler) empire. Indeed, it was Burke, as we shall see, who
was the most eloquent theorist of the spatial limitations imprinted by nature.
The practical problem was so acute that, as Ian Steele has argued, the British
government struggled to spread the message of military cessation and had
difculty controlling the transition between war and peace throughout the At-
lantic world.
15
The era stretching from the middle of the eighteenth century to the turn of
the nineteenth, then, saw an increasing sensitivity to the pervasiveness of
global interconnections. Many of the key idioms of political theory were also
in a state of ux. For our present purposes, the most signicant transition
related to the understanding of federalism. The tortuous debate over the new
American constitution saw the emergence of the idea, so prominent in The
Federalist (178788), of a national federal state. Confederation had, in post-
Renaissance political thought, been regarded as a weak form of governance,
prone to instability; this new mode of national federation, in practice as much
as in theory, promised something different.
16
This vision was to be of central
13
Edmund Burke, Speech at Bristol Previous to Election (1780), in The Writings
and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. W. M. Elofson with John A. Woods (Oxford, 1981),
3:464; Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British
Empire (London, 1772), 1.
14
See esp. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in
the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 16071788 (Athens,
GA, 1986); and Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in
the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). However, it should be
remembered that during the course of much of the century, Britons displayed a high
degree of indifference to the colonies: Jacob M. Price, Who Cared about the Colonies?
The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British Society and Politics, circa 17141775,
in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Ber-
nard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 395437.
15
Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 16751740: An Exploration of Communica-
tion and Community (New York, 1986).
16
On shifts in the language of federalism, see the comments in J. G. A. Pocock,
States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspec-
tive, in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock
528 Bell
importance to the later British imperial federalists, who drew repeatedly on
the example of America. These general shifts in material conditions and po-
litical imagination acted as a generative backdrop for the mid- and late
nineteenth-century transformation in the understanding of the geographical
limitations of statehood. They created an intellectual and political environment
in which such theoretical innovations could emerge and ourish.
What was novel in the late Victorian era was the belief in the possibility of
a single global (federal) state ruling over a homogeneous worldwide nation.
This required as its condition of possibility the belief that distance had been
dissolved, that the world had shrunk to a manageable size. Before about 1870
a global polity was never considered as a feasible political option, barely g-
uring in argument; afterward, it became a common demand. John Edward
Jenkins, a radical Australian and a keen advocate of federation, observed in
an inuential 1871 essay: It is likely that I shall be met with the familiar
sneer that I have dreamed a magnicent dream.
17
And yet, he continued, the
dream could nally be translated into reality with the necessary political will,
for the world had changed irrevocably and along with it the manner in which
empire and state could be envisaged. Many others were to share his dream.
As with the question of the necessity (if not the purpose) of imperial fed-
eration itself, views on the nature of distance transcended party political and
theological divisions between individuals; rather, what mattered was their rela-
tive optimism concerning the present and future opportunities engendered by
new scientic developments. This was as much a matter of sensibility, and of
imagination, as of partisan political conviction. But the reaction to technolog-
ical change was not unequivocal: at every stage there were dissenters, skeptics,
critics. Technology may inuence the broad outlines of political-economic
developmentit may even occasionally shape it by establishing the bound-
aries within which certain modes of existence or political forms are considered
widely plausible and desirablebut it does not fully determine it. Nor does
it propel it in a unilinear direction. The technological shift was a necessary
but not sufcient condition for the imagining of a global state. The conditions
of sufciency were provided by the well-known permutation of social, cultural,
and political ruptures that transformed Britain during the nineteenth century,
by the shifting patterns of European and international trade and politics, and
by the rise of democracy and fear of domestic unrest. In this article, though, I
am concerned primarily with the preconditions that allowed for the recasting
(Lawrence, KS, 1988), 5578; Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern
World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 17761814 (Madison, WI, 1993).
17
[John Edward Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, Contemporary Review 16 (1871):
185.
of political thought rather than the specic developments that triggered or
directed it.
18
Although the role of technology in the practices of imperialism has received
considerable attention from scholars, its impact on imperial political thought
has been largely overlooked.
19
Historians have focused traditionally on the
relationship between technology and the economic or administrative aspects
of imperial governance (and often expansion). Lewis Pyenson, characteristi-
cally, suggests that it is essential to concentrate on how science has been used
to further the overseas political goals of imperial nations in their colonies and
spheres of inuence.
20
What this mode of analysis neglects is the fundamental
prior effect that the shifting perception of the plasticity of nature, of the world
itself, had on the political imagination; it is the cognitive apprehension of
political possibilities that is sidelined in the focus on efciency and adminis-
tration. Technological change was not important simply because it helped to
meet imperial goals but because it reshaped the very identity and direction
of the goals themselves. Political theorists, meanwhile, have tended to gen-
eralize about the indispensable function of technology in the constitution and
legitimation of modernity, the manner in which technical rationality and the
immanent drive to master nature have stripped humans of their individuality
and freedom of action.
21
While this argument may be plausible at a rareed
18
I explore these political issues in detail in Bell, Building Greater Britain, chap. 1.
19
For example, neither the most comprehensive account of imperial federation nor
the most recent exposition of the idea of Greater Britain give technological change a
sufciently prominent place. See Cheng, Schemes; and Andrew Thompson, Imperial
Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 18801932 (London, 2000), chap. 1.
20
Lewis Pyenson, Science and Imperialism, in Companion to the History of Mod-
ern Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (London, 1996), 928. This perspective pervades the
work of Daniel Headrick, the most prolic writer on empire and technology: Daniel
Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nine-
teenth Century (New York, 1981), The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in
the Age of Imperialism, 18501940 (Oxford, 1988), and The Invisible Weapon: Tele-
communications and International Politics, 18511945 (Oxford, 1991). For a more
expansive conception of the role of science, see Richard Drayton, Science and the
European Empires, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 23 (1995): 503-
11; and also the essays in Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise,
ed. Roy Macleod, special issue, Osiris, 2nd ser., 15 (2000). None of these recent in-
terventions specically engage the topics under discussion in this article.
21
Robert B. Pippin, Technology as Ideology: Prospects, in his Idealism as Modern-
ism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997), 185233; Langdon Winner, Autonomous
Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA,
1977); and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London,
[1944] 1997).
530 Bell
level of abstraction, it does not help to disentangle and situate the often con-
tradictory conceptions of the limits placed by natureand challenged by tech-
nologyon the boundaries of political association during the modern era. This
problem is brought into sharp relief in the analysis of the transformation of
nineteenth-century imperial discourse.
This article is structured as follows. In the following section I outline the
essential role of distance in the conception of political communities; subse-
quently, I chart the way in which questions of scale helped to shape the nature
of the fraught arguments over the American colonies following the Seven
Years War. This debate foreshadowed the concerns of the later empire fed-
eralists, and some of the foremost thinkers involved in the dispute, notably
Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, were called upon routinely as authoritative
voices throughout the subsequent decades; they set the tone as well as the
terms for much nineteenth-century theorizing. Moreover, at least one of their
contemporaries, Richard Price, pregured the later debate over federation
proper. Section III charts developments in the subsequent decades. It argues
that debate over the constitutional conguration of the settler empire dropped
out of view until the 1820s, but nonetheless this period witnessed a series of
material and conceptual transformations that provided the backdrop for the
resurgence of imperial debate in the middle decades of the century. It then
sketches the diverse ways in which midcentury thinkers wrestled with ques-
tions of colonial governance and suggests that the positions that they assumed,
as well as the general drift of policy itself, were often related directly to dif-
fering conceptions of the present and future impact of technology. In the nal
section I explore the role of technological projections in the imperial discourse
of the last thirty years of the century, illustrating how the imperial federalist
vision had moved from the extremes of political argument to the center, and
how its panegyrists adopted new forms and deployed novel vocabularies to
envisage the globe. This discursive shift followed from a wildly optimistic
interpretation of science and technology as agents capable of ameliorating the
problems that distance posed to community.
II. THE ETERNAL LAW: EMPIRE, GOVERNANCE, AND THE
VICISSITUDES OF DISTANCE
Spatiality is an often overlooked, yet central, theme in the history of political
thought. The obstacles embodied in particular congurations of time and
physical spaceand in particular the relative difculty taken to traverse or,
perhaps more importantly, communicate across great distanceshave pre-
sented a recurring problem for the political imagination.
22
At the dawn of
22
One of the most useful accounts of the role of distance in political practice is
Western philosophical reection, Aristotle wrote in the Politics that the ideal
size of the polis was attained only when the number of citizens encompassed
by it was capable of self-sufciency (autarkia) while still living within an area
capable of being kept under surveillance.
23
Likewise, what J. G. A. Pocock
labels the politics of extent has played a constitutive role in the evolution
of and debate over republican conceptions of politics.
24
Traditionally, only
small republics were considered feasible, until Montesquieu suggested that a
confederation (a republique federative) could provide a potential answer to the
problem of scale, a solution reiterated (and extensively recongured) to mo-
mentous effect in The Federalist.
25
Modern globalization discourse implicitly
places concerns about scale center stage, and breathless paeans to the collapse
of space and time, and even the end of geography, in the age of the satellite
and the World Wide Web are frequent.
26
As emphasized below, even the lan-
guage of contemporary globalization, replete with claims of radical novelty,
often simply replicates the way in which the Victorians articulated their un-
derstanding of global dynamics.
There are various reasons why distance has been thought to present prob-
lems for the identity of political communities, and a number of them are evi-
dent in the arguments explored in this article. Some refer simply to adminis-
trative reach. In the days before efcient state agencies existed, it was often
extremely difcult for a central political body to maintain control over the
outlying districts of its territory; the greater the distances involved, the greater
the problems. However, as we shall see, there was a further set of assumptions
about the nature of political communities and the preconditions for statehood
that underlay the imperial federation debates, and they played a pivotal though
Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australias History
(Melbourne, 1977).
23
Aristotle, Politics 1326b11, trans. T. Sinclair, rev. T. J. Saunders (Harmondsworth,
1981), 405. Earlier, Plato (Laws 737e ff.) had advocated an even more specic ideal
size for the community, which was to be composed of 5,040 citizen farmers, in addition
to their families, slaves, and some resident aliens. The idea of the necessarily bounded,
self-contained political community also played an important role in the political thought
of early modern Europe, and it continues to do so. See also Tuck, The Rights of War
and Peace, chaps. 1 and 2.
24
J. G. A. Pocock, The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom: The William
Jovanovich Lecture at Colorado College, October 14, 1987 (Colorado Springs, 1987).
25
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M.
Cohler (Cambridge, 1989), bk. 9, 13138; and Publius (James Madison), Letters 10
(November 22, 1787) and 51 (February 6, 1788), in The Federalist, with the Letters of
Brutus, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge, 2003), 4046, 25155. For another potential
solution, see David Hume, The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, in his Essays,
Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 51233.
26
See David Held et al., eds., The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge,
2001), esp. the essays by David Harvey and Manuel Castells.
532 Bell
often subterranean role in the arguments over a global polity. The conceptual
presupposition shared by both the allies and adversaries of federation was
straightforward: a durable polity required a high degree of social, cultural, and
political homogeneity.
27
This was an idiom central to political thought from
the seventeenth century onward, and it retained its power in the nineteenth
century; as Alexis de Tocqueville had written in Democracy in America (1835),
A certain uniformity of civilization is not less necessary to the durability of
a confederation, than a uniformity of interests in the States which compose
it.
28
Distance, so the critics of imperial federation claimed, rendered such
homogeneity void or only partial. For them, distance was a continuing threat
to the identity and bonds of citizenship, for the necessary complex of shared
values, ideals, and, in a Victorian idiom, individual and national character
were all too often dissolved by detachment from the mother country. The
proponents of a global polity believed instead that distance had been dissolved
through a technological revolution.
Debate over the feasibility (and indeed desirability) of a federal Greater
Britain during the late Victorian age should be understood as an echo, albeit
a highly distorted one, of an intricate series of arguments that raged a century
earlier. Following the Treaty of Paris (1763), which attempted to draw a veil
over the bloody Seven Years War, there was a heated, largely futile intellectual
skirmish over the manner in which the empire was to be governed. The war
had seen the size and nature of the empire transformed dramatically, and this
challenged the previously dominant mercantile notion of the maritime, com-
mercial colonial system, which stressed the importance of the colonies for
wealth generation and which understood wealth generation itself as the key to
security in an increasingly competitive world.
29
The inherent tension between
the traditional metropolitan-centered understanding of community and national
interest, on the one hand, and the embryonic, devolved, and increasingly in-
dividualistic conception of liberty and rights propounded by the disaffected
colonists, on the other, led ultimately to the dissolution of the bond between
Britain and its American territories.
30
It was a debate whose contours, dynam-
ics, and outcome were to resonate powerfully over the coming century.
27
J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861), is the
best-known Victorian articulation of this view. There were of course exceptions, notably
Lord Acton, Nationality, in the Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears
(Indianapolis, 1985), 1:40939.
28
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London,
[1835] 1862), 1:188.
29
See Malachi Postlethwayt, Great Britains True System (Farnborough, [1757]
1968); and also the comments in Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Com-
petition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), and
Pagden, Lords of All the World, chap. 7.
30
Peter Miller, Dening the Common Good: Empire, Religion, and Philosophy in
In order for the full complexity of the debate to be grasped, it needs to be
understood in the context of a series of arguments revolving around the scope
of individual reason and common interest, the limits of religious toleration,
the meaning and practice of political representation, and so forth. For our
present purposes, however, it is useful to isolate one of the key elements,
namely, the role that distance played in theorizing the most suitable form of
connection. This was a matter of great importance, upon which Thomas Paine
had commented plaintively that even the distance at which the Almighty hath
placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority
of one over the other, was never the design of Heaven.
31
Adam Smith, whom his friend David Hume described as being very zeal-
ous in American affairs,
32
considered the colonial system both economically
and morally unjustiable. He argued that the colonies had thrived despite them-
selves, that their wealth developed in spite of their being colonies, not because
of it. One of the crucial reasons for their success was distance, which allowed
them to escape the chains of domination to a degree unimaginable in past
empires. In the plenty of good land, the European colonies established in
America and the West Indies resemble, and even greatly surpass, those of
antient Greece. In their dependency upon the mother state, they resemble those
of antient Rome; but their great distance from Europe has in all of them al-
leviated more or less the effects of this dependency. Their situation has placed
them less in the power of their mother country.
33
The problems of commu-
nication and political administration between Europe and the immensely re-
mote
34
American and West Indian colonies allowed the colonists greater in-
dependence than had traditionally been the case, and this distance consequently
spawned healthier conditions for wealth generation. Nevertheless, Smith re-
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994). On the intellectual history of the rev-
olution, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1967); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Po-
litical Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975).
31
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth,
1986), 87.
32
David Hume to Adam Smith, February 8, 1776 (Letter 149), in The Correspon-
dence of Adam Smith, ed. E. Campbell Mossner and I. Simpson Ross (Oxford, 1977),
186. Hume was a critic of the war and of the empire in general: David Hume, Of the
Balance of Power, in Essays, 339, 340. Hume also comments on the problems of
governance over distance on p. 341.
33
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.
W. B. Todd (Oxford, 1976), bk. 4, chap. 7, 567 (and 56871 ff.). Cf. Steele, The English
Atlantic. Emma Rothschild also notes the weight placed on questions of distance in
Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Prov-
inces, Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004): 6, 13, 1516.
34
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 559. Smith also noted the problems engendered by
governance over distance in a letter to John Sinclair of Ulbster, October 14, 1782 (Letter
221), in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, 262.
534 Bell
mained skeptical of the economic and (interwoven with this) moral utility of
the colonial system. Although the British colonies enjoyed greater liberties,
both civil and commercial, than those of the other European powers and the
Antients, Smith argued, they nevertheless embodied a manifest violation
of the most sacred rights of mankind.
35
Moreover, their mercantile trading
system distorted the British economy dangerously, exposing it to potential
destruction.
36
Overall, folly and injustice marked European colonial policy, Smith con-
cluded, and ideally the whole system should be abolished. This would not lead
to great economic losses in the long run, as the colonial advocates claimed,
for the natural affection between the colony and the mother country would
quickly revive, and the two nations could develop an extensive and pros-
perous relationship, based on free trade and friendly sentiment.
37
However, the
pride of nations would not allow them to advocate such a radical policy of
separation, and Smith therefore proffered some recommendations for modi-
fying the existing administrative structures of the empire.
38
He argued that it
was essential for the colonists to help pay for the defense and administration
of the colonies; however, in a discussion over the manner in which the levels
of taxation were to be decided upon and the monies raised, he noted the geo-
graphical impossibility of coordinating this process across such a large and
fragmented political system. The distance of the colony assemblies from the
eye of the sovereign, their number, their dispersed situations and their various
constitutions would render it very difcult to manage them in the same manner,
even though the sovereign had the same means of doing it.
39
Once again, the
sheer size of the empire precluded it from operating as a unied polity should.
Moreover, the fact that there was no sentimental bond between the various
colonists (itself primarily a function of distance)indeed, that they were
strangers to one another
40
made it highly unlikely that such a dispersed
35
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 582.
36
See esp. ibid., 60617.
37
Ibid., 617. In an unpublished document, Smith presented an incisive analysis of
his view on the war with the Americans. He included the suggestion that, assuming
the war led to the dissolution of the colonial bond, and in the event that natural affec-
tions did not revive quickly enough, it might be benecial to hand Canada over to the
French and Florida to the Spanish, so as to surround the Americans with potential
enemies and thus force them into alliance with their old rulers. See Smiths Thoughts
on the State of the Contest with America, February 1778, ed. David Stevens, in The
Correspondence of Adam Smith, 37785. This plan had also occurred to Samuel John-
son, Taxation no Tyranny, in The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. D. Greene (NewHaven,
CT, 1958), 10:451.
38
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 61617; cf. ibid., chap. 5, sec. 3, 94647.
39
Ibid., 619.
40
Ibid., 622.
mode of governance could ever work. As a result, Smith argued that London
must be the focus of decision making, and it was thus necessary to have the
colonies represented in parliament. Drawing on the example of the Dutch
confederation, he proposed the union of Great Britain with her colonies,
41
a
veritable United States of Britain. He believed, in other words, that a form of
constitutional federal union
42
cemented with American political representa-
tion would be the most suitable compromise solution to the crisis. While he
was aware that the Americans would still regard distance from the seat of
government as a problem, he did not think that this predicament would endure,
for as the population of the United States grew, so would the size of its rep-
resentation, and the seat of power would shift across the Atlantic.
43
Writing
over a century later, J. Shield Nicholson, professor of political economy at the
University of Edinburgh, claimed that Smith had formulated the most denite
and most practicable scheme ever yet published of Imperial Federation.
44
At
the time, however, it seemed far from practicable, and Smith remained under-
standably pessimistic about the possibilities of such a solution being accepted
widely. Unfortunately . . . the plan of constitutional union with our colonies
and of American representations seems not to be agreeable to any considerable
party of men in Great Britain. The plan, which, if it could be executed, would
certainly tend most to the prosperity, to the splendour, and to the duration of
the empire, if you except here and there a solitary philosopher like myself,
seems scarce to have a single advocate.
45
While Smiths ideas certainly suggest a form of constitutional union, they
cannot be seen as promoting the idea of an intercontinental British state pred-
icated on strong and resilient communal bonds. Indeed, the logic of Smiths
argument is that such an entity would be impossible, owing to the fact that the
diffused nature of the empire rendered its members as strangers to one an-
41
Ibid., 624.
42
Smith, State of the Contest with America, 383.
43
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 62526. Note, however, that this did not mean the
British parliament itself would migrate across the Atlantic but rather the body respon-
sible for coordinating the united states, the assembly which inspects and superin-
tends the affairs of the whole empire (620).
44
J. Shield Nicholson, Tariffs and International Commerce, in Britannic Confed-
eration: A Series of Papers . . . Reprinted from the Scottish Geographical Magazine,
ed. A. S. White (London, 1892), 122.
45
Smith, State of the Contest with America, 382. As J. G. A. Pocock has noted,
apart from a few Scots who remembered Andrew Fletcher, there was no language of
confederation/federation available to British political thinkers at the time; J. G. A.
Pocock, Political Theory in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 17701790: (2) Empire,
Revolution, and the End of Early Modernity, in Varieties of British Political Thought,
15001800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1993), 296.
536 Bell
other. Smith sought colonial representation in order to generate taxation, and
he had no desire to forge an ocean-straddling Greater British polity. Smith,
however, was not a lone voice in the wilderness; there were other solitary
philosophers arguing for radical solutions. Thomas Pownall advocated a
scheme of American parliamentary representation, at least in the early editions
of The Administration of the Colonies (176477), arguing that the colonies
and Britain were bound by a common commercial interest and that together
they formed a grand marine dominion.
46
The colonies were to be self-
governing entities within the British imperium.
47
Following a different line of
reasoning, Lord Kames, in his Sketches of the History of Mankind (1774),
suggested a consolidating union similar to that which had linked Scotland
and England in 1707.
48
These were very ambitious schemes, sketching the
ghostly outline of an incipient transoceanic (though not planetary) polity, but
they were also marginalas much signs of desperation at the loss of British
prestige as of plausible propositions for government policyand Smith had
been correct to claim that those in favor of American representation, let alone
anything more radical, occupied a sparsely populated and deeply unpopular
ank on the spectrum of opinion.
49
The period in which the globe haltingly
came to be seen as a single space for political action witnessed the propounding
of a number of schemes for polities stretching across great distances; but space
46
Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1864), 6. Pownall
advocated American representation in the six editions of his Administration published
between 1764 and 1777, but in a speech in the House of Commons on December 1778
he changed his position, advocating instead American independence. For details of this
switch, see David Stevens, introduction to app. B, Correspondence of Adam Smith,
37980. See also G. H. Guttridge, Thomas Pownalls The Administration of the Col-
onies: The Six Editions, William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 3146; and Miller,
Dening the Common Good, 21113, 23538.
47
Later, in Thomas Pownall, A Memorial Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereigns
of Europe (London, 1780), Pownall advocated a loose confederationa League
consisting of Britain, the United States, and the (potentially) independent states of Latin
America.
48
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh, 1774),
2:iv. On consolidation, see John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political
Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995). See also Kendle, Federal
Britain, chap. 1.
49
The prevailing government position was that the colonists did not deserve special
treatment, that they should make do with virtual representation, whereby they were
represented by MPs elected from other districts who were to speak on behalf of the
country as a whole. See H. T. Dickinson, Britains Imperial Sovereignty: The Ideo-
logical Case against the American Colonists, in Britain and the American Revolution,
ed. H. T. Dickinson (London, 1998), 6497; and Paul Langford, Property and Virtual
Representation in Eighteenth-Century England, Historical Journal 31 (1988): 83
115.
itself was still seen by most, if not all, as a serious and perhaps permanent
impediment to such grandiose ambitions.
Richard Price, unorthodox minister and the bane of Edmund Burke, advo-
cated a political project that, while also confederal in form, was considerably
more radical than that of Smith and the proponents of American representation.
Price launched a forceful assault on the prevailing conception of governance
and representation, and in so doing he developed a position that foreshadowed,
albeit in an anemic form, the later idea of a federal Greater Britain. However,
his visionary scheme was not (and could not have been) considered plausible
given the prevailing conception of nature and the tyranny of distance, and
it sank without trace. In his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty
(1776), he dened impediments to civil liberty as any will distinct from that
of the majority of a community which claims a power in making laws for it
and disposing of its property.
50
He continued, It is an immediate and nec-
essary inuence that no one community can have any power over the property
or legislation of another community which is not incorporated with it by a just
and fair representation. If the community was not governed by its own popular
will, manifested in the practice of direct political representation, it languished
in a state of slavery.
51
As a potential solution to this dilemma, Price rec-
ommended establishing a senate, or body of delegates, such as he had earlier
described as appropriate for the peaceful governance of Europe.
52
Thus he
shifted the locus of power, in certain senses, away from a recongured parlia-
ment in Westminster, as the proponents of colonial representation were de-
manding, and to a superordinate body. In his discussion of European politics,
he had suggested, drawing on a common line of reasoning, that rather than
having one country dominate all the others and in the process destroy civil
liberty, it was advisable to let every state, with respect to all its internal
concerns, be continued independent of all the rest, and let a general confed-
eracy be formed by the appointment of a senate consisting of representatives
from all the different states.
53
In both Europe and the wide reaches of the
British empire, such a senate would ideally possess the power of managing
all the common concerns of the united states, acting as a common arbiter or
umpire in disputes between clashing interests. In order to carry out such a
50
Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), in his Po-
litical Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge, 1991), 23. Such liberty was to be seen
as a blessing, truly sacred and invaluable (23). For Price, perfect civil liberty was
only possible in small communities; larger ones had to rely for their protection on
representation, and this led to great problems in America and Britain.
51
Price, Observations, 30. See also Richard Price, Additional Observations, in
Political Writings, 78, 93.
52
Price, Observations, 25.
53
Ibid.
538 Bell
monumental task, it would have under its direction the common force of the
states to support its decision. The result would be an empire of freemen,
not an empire of slaves.
54
Here, in a passage commonly overlooked, we nd
an embryonic model of the supra-parliamentary federal idealthough not
really of a federal statepenned almost a century before historians begin their
narratives about the development of this form of theorizing.
55
The most powerful, eloquent voice railing against the doctrine of colonial
representation was that of Burke. Burke wished to retain the empire, but he
was skeptical of the practicability or desirability of closer political union with
the colonists: better relations with the Americans were imperative, but the
constitutional structures did not need radical overhaul. In an essay written in
response to a pamphlet on the Present State of the Nation (1769), he wrote
of his interlocutor, William Knox: It costs him nothing to ght with nature,
and to conquer the order of Providence, which manifestly opposes itself to the
possibility of such a Parliamentary Union.
56
And, expressing his contempt for
the argument with his customary biting sarcasm, Burke proceeded to observe
that it looks like the author has dropped from the moon, without any knowl-
edge of the general nature of this globe, of the general nature of its inhabitants,
without the least acquaintance with the affairs of this country.
57
As the threat
of war hung like a darkening cloud over the intellectual battleeld, and as
desperation for a pacic settlement grew perceptibly, Burke presented what is
probably the clearest articulation of the recurrent problem of governance over
distance, when, in his great speech to the House of Commons in March 1775,
he stated: Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No
contrivance can prevent the effects of this distance in weakening government.
Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution, and the want
of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system.
58
As a result of this conspiratorial concatenation of time and space, In large
54
Ibid., 3435.
55
An early example is George B. Adams, who argued that credit for the rst federal
idea should belong to Edward Jenkins (Imperial Federalism). See George B. Adams,
The Rise of Imperial Federalism, Annual Report of the American History Association
(1894), 26; and also William Roy Smith, British Imperial Federation, Political Sci-
ence Quarterly 36 (1921): 284.
56
Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication Intitled The Present State of
the Nation (1769), in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1889),
1:376. On Burkes international thought, see David Armitage, Edmund Burke and
Reason of State, Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 61734.
57
Burke, Observations on a Late Publication, 376. See also Edmund Burke, To
the British Colonists in North America, in Burkes Speeches and Writings on American
Affairs, ed. Hugh Law (London, 1908), 180.
58
Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with the Colonies, in his Speeches and Writings
on American Affairs, 95. See also Paine, Common Sense, 67.
bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature
has said it. . . . This is the immutable condition, the eternal law, of detached
empire.
59
And what nature has decreed, mere human reason and ingenuity
cannot undo.
Jeremy Bentham was also deeply skeptical about the possibility of govern-
ing colonies over great distances.
60
He highlighted, in writings produced be-
tween the 1790s and the 1820s, the absurdity of attempting to govern effec-
tively over vast expanses of space, going so far as to compare the difculties
that Spain faced ruling over its colonial possessions with those of governing
the moon: It has its Peninsular part and its Ultramarian part! It has its earthly
part: it has its lunar part.
61
Bentham was opposed to the colonies for a battery
of reasons. In regard to distance, he sketched two main lines of argument.
First, he presented a political-economic case, wherein distance increased the
cost of war, especially through the maintenance and provisioning of an ex-
pensive navy; the burden on the state was not, in a nal utilitarian calculus,
worth this amount of expenditure and danger.
62
Second, he reiterated the fa-
miliar argument that distance rendered the rulers insensitive to the needs and
wants of the colonial populations: employing a phrase also used by Smith, he
stressed that it was impossible to understand adequately the life of strangers.
Exercised by imported strangers, subordinate power exercises itself by acts
of oppression: or at any rate, what to this purpose comes to the same thing, is
thought to do so. . . . Before one grievance, with its discontent, has reached
their ears, another grievance, with accumulating on both sides, till patience is
lost on both sides.
63
All of these negative arguments were to be repeated in
the following decades and can be heard resonating throughout nineteenth-
century discussions of the role of distance in deciding the status of the colonial
empire.
59
Burke, On Conciliation, 96. Burke, rather than following the logic of his argu-
ment by suggesting that imperial governance was therefore untenable, insisted on treat-
ing the colonies more gently instead of demanding too much from them. This rather
weak argument was lampooned mercilessly by Josiah Tucker, among others, in his
Letter to Edmund Burke (Gloucester, 1775).
60
Note that Bentham tended not to distinguish between the different types of colony
that the British administered. For sagacious advice on Benthams political thought, I
am indebted to Jennifer Pitts. The best account of Benthams views on the colonies is
Jennifer Pitts, Legislator of the World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies, Po-
litical Theory 31 (2003): 200234.
61
Jeremy Bentham, Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria! in Colonies, Commerce and
Constitutional Law (ed. Philip Schoeld, 1995), in The Collected Works of Jeremy
Bentham, gen. ed. J. H. Burns and J. R. Dinwiddy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1970), 52. Italics in original.
62
Jeremy Bentham, Works, 5:268.
63
Jeremy Bentham, Emancipate Your Colonies, Works, 4:409.
540 Bell
During this periodthe ideological forging of the most powerful state the
world has yet seenthe vagaries of distance assumed a pivotal role in debates
over the nature of governance and the maintenance of colonial ties. Over the
course of the next century, things were to change drastically, the radical notion
of extensive political unions populated by strangers being supplanted by a
vision of the future in which tightly integrated global communities, the analogs
of traditional national communities, were possible, and even necessary. It is
the purpose of the rest of this article to explain how the idea of imperial
federation moved from the extreme reaches of political discourse, as exem-
plied in Prices visionary argument, and how the notion of a global state
became possible.
III. NATURE IN FLUX: IMPERIAL POLITICAL THEORY, CA. 183070
We can remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway;
nothing can resist us. (THOMAS CARLYLE)
64
The ow of proposals for recasting colonial constitutional structures decreased
following the dissolution of the Atlantic empire. Indeed, the period between
the loss of the Thirteen Colonies and the 1820s is noticeable for its (relative)
silence on the matter. The reason for this absence is twofold. First, the re-
maining territories were mainly plantations rather than settler colonies, and as
such there was not a particularly sizable or signicant referent for debate.
Although it is no longer commonly accepted that this was a period of imperial
retrenchment, and, in fact, expansion continued apace, the new acquisitions
were made primarily in India and Africa. In other words, they were not tra-
ditional colonies planted by and for British settlers with the intention of forging
new self-contained communities.
65
The question of ethnicity was therefore
central: the British were uninterested in forming closer constitutional unions
with nonwhite populations. Added to this was the effect of the conservative
reaction to the revolutionary wars, both in America and in France. The British
state focused on ghting the French and on keeping the remaining elements
of its empire from rebelling, as both Ireland and a number of Caribbean Islands
64
Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829), in The Collected Works of Thomas
Carlyle (London, 1857), 2:100101.
65
See also Herman Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Colonies and
Colonization (London, 1839), 9. On this period, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:
The British Empire and the World, 17801830 (London, 1989); Mark Francis, Gov-
ernors and Settlers: Images of Authority in the British Colonies, 18201860 (London,
1992); and Eliga H. Gould, The American Revolution in Britains Imperial Identity,
in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhal
and Roland Quinault (Aldershot, 2000), 2338.
did, albeit unsuccessfully, in the 1790s.
66
The empire, as Chris Bayly has ar-
gued, was conceived increasingly in terms of hierarchy and subordination,
rather than, as the American colonists had often viewed it, as an empire of
liberty. An aristocratic and soldierly ethos prevailed, and the idea of incor-
porating the empire into the sacred realmof Britain was anathema to the temper
of the times.
67
As Sir George Cornewall Lewis wrote in 1841, Since the close
of the American War, it has not been the policy of England to vest any por-
tion of the legislative power of the subordinate government of a dependency
in a body of elected inhabitants.
68
Attention focused instead on whether the
empire should exist at all a topic that engaged Bentham, James Mill, and
the political economistsor, for the more numerous group that believed in
the empires continued utility, on strengthening the authority of the British
in the plantation and conquest territories. Second, it was generally believed
that one of the most important lessons of the collapse of the American colonial
system was the fact that it was impossible to generate and sustain strong com-
munal bonds over great distances. The notion of a global imperial polity
dropped below the horizon.
It was only in the 1820s that the issue of the imperial constitutional order
began to return to the forefront of mainstream British political debate. In the
wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with increasing numbers of emigrants populat-
ing (and expanding) the settler colonies and with radical constitutional reforms
being debated in the Commons, the question of the status of the colonies was
reignited.
69
The relationship between the sheer vastness of the globe and co-
lonial governance remained a topic bubbling beneath the surface of debate,
dening the scope of the political imagination: it was to play a formative role
in midcentury imperial discourse. Once again, this topic has been sidelined in
the historiography of the British empire. Unlike the time of the debates pre-
ceding the American revolution, in the period following the Napoleonic wars
the actual perception of the globe and of the limits imposed by nature was
more complex, more contested, and opinion was split over whether distance
66
Michael Duffy, War, Revolution and the British Empire, in The French Revo-
lution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge, 1991), 11845.
67
C. A. Bayly, The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 17601830, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 2842.
68
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (Lon-
don, 1841), 160.
69
On the empire, reform, and the unsuccessful clamor for parliamentary represen-
tation, see Miles Taylor, Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act
Revisited, in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 17801850, ed. Arthur Burns
and Joanna Innes (Cambridge, 2003), 293312, and Colonial Representation at West-
minster, c. 180065, in Parliaments, Nations, and Identities in Britain and Ireland,
16601850, ed. Julian Hoppitt (London, 2003), 20619.
542 Bell
was forever going to present a barrier to forging closer emotional and political
ties with remote colonial outposts. For some commentators, particularly those
with an eye xed resolutely on the future, the nascent steamship technology
led to a reevaluation of Burkes purportedly unassailable eternal law, and
consequently to a recalibration of the vicissitudes of distance. Immutable na-
ture was here under unrelenting attack. However, for the majority of imperial
theorists, distance remained a salient obstacle to constitutional and communal
integration, and other forms of rule had to be developed, most notably colonial
self-government. Indeed, I would argue that given the then dominant belief
in the impossibility of adequate governance over large distances, the devel-
opment of the doctrine of colonial responsible government was the only
feasible ideological position for those who wanted to retain and strengthen the
empire: power had to be (partially) devolved, because it was as yet impossible
to do anything else with it.
70
The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a com-
prehensive technological revolution, encompassing communications, materials,
armaments, and medicine.
71
This was to have a deep impact on all dimensions
of human thought and action. The results were monumental but multifaceted.
Nietzsche viewed the modern world as characterized by hubris toward the
natural realm, and he despaired of our rape of nature with the help of machines
and the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers.
72
Thomas Carlyle, in a more ambiguous vein, intoned that we war with rude
Nature and, by our restless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded
with spoils.
73
Carlyles threnody to a preindustrial, Arcadian past was issued
originally as a challenge to the obsession with trying to wrest the control of
nature from the hands of God.
74
This epic undertaking was both an intellectual
70
The role of distance in determining midcentury policy was clear to later Victorian
observers; as Admiral Sir John Colomb wrote in 1892, It was geographical position
[i.e., distance] that lay at the root of the developments [i.e., self-government] that have
taken place. Admiral Sir John Colomb, A Survey of Existing Conditions, in White,
ed., Britannic Confederation, 6.
71
David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientic World-View in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford, 1986); Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago,
1997); and Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientic Culture: Science, Art, and Society
in the Victorian Age (Madison, WI, 1989). On its cultural effects, see Stephen Kern,
The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
72
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Cambridge, 1994), 86.
73
Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1896), 2:60,
quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and
Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 213.
74
Carlyle, whose recognition of the heroic grandeur of the task resonated with what
John Burrow calls his sensibility of the apocalyptic sublime, was one of the many
and a practical exercise, combining a scientic assault focused on deciphering
the tangled and elusive codes of the physical world and the subsequent tech-
nological exploitation of such discoveries through the development of novel
engineering practices; it was the remaking of Nature in the image (and at the
service) of Man. At the interstices of these ambitious endeavors, the political
imagination was likewise being reshaped.
Of particular relevance to our present concerns is the communications rev-
olution, which revolved primarily around two inventions: steam-powered lo-
comotion and the telegraph. Steam rst came to prominence with the devel-
opment of the railways, but soon afterward other potential applications were
being explored. The rst steamship crossing of the Atlantic, made by the Royal
William in 1833, heralded the inauguration of a new era, although the wide-
spread practical impact of the technology was not to be felt until later in the
century, as there was a considerable lag between showcasing a prototype and
producing a commercially viable product and all the necessary supporting
infrastructure. The rst half of the century may well have been, in Carlyles
suggestive phrase, the Age of Machinery, of the coming of industrialization
and (for him) all its accompanying sins, but it was in the second half of the
century that the new machinery was put to use extensively, and momentously,
in reconguring global communications, transport, and ultimately the realm
of political experience and perception.
75
Nevertheless, as we shall see, the fact
that it was at least possible had a decisive impact on the political thought of
the time. The telegraph, patented only four years after the Royal Williamsailed,
was also a revelationits impact, revolutionary rather than evolutionary, was
even more profound than that of steamallowing nearly instantaneous com-
munication across vast distances. Rudyard Kipling, the court poet of imperi-
alism, was to proclaim later, Here in the womb of the worldhere on the
tie-ribs of the earth / Words, and the words of men, utter and utter and beat.
They have, he continued, killed their father Time.
76
And yet, like steam,
the telegraph took years of further development before it could make a sig-
Victorians who remained deeply skeptical about the benets of the struggle with nature.
See John Burrow, Images of Time: From Carlylean Vulcanism to Sedimentary Grad-
ualism, in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 17501950, ed.
Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge, 2000), 219.
75
Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 100101.
76
Rudyard Kipling, Deep-Sea Cables, in Rudyard Kiplings Verse, 18851932
(London, 1934), 173. As a contemporary wrote, It is perhaps Kiplings happiest stroke
to have xed on Deep-Sea Cables as the symbol of the unity of the English race.
J. H. Muirhead, What Imperialism Means (1900), in The British Idealists, ed. David
Boucher (Cambridge, 1997), 243. On the social impact of steam and the telegraph more
generally, see Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (Cambridge,
2002), chap. 4.
544 Bell
nicant contribution, rst to domestic society and then to global politics. The
English Channel was rst traversed with a functioning cable in 1851, the At-
lantic only in 1866.
77
The key theoretical and practical concerns of midcentury revolved around
free trade, emigration, and the degree of self-government to be ceded to the
settler colonies. The colonial free trade argument was a constitutive element
of the political movement agitating for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the
remaining Navigation Acts.
78
Meanwhile, driven by Malthusian fears of an
ever-expanding population and by increasing awareness of the levels of pau-
perism at home, there were widespread appeals for some degree of assisted
emigration, the great question of the day.
79
The ideas of E. G. Wakeeld,
and in particular his proposals for the distribution and sale of land in the
colonies and for government intervention in the process of systematic colo-
nization, acted as the theoretical backdrop for much of this writing.
80
How-
ever, both of these issues were embedded in the wider debate over the right
of and need for a modicum of self-government in the colonies. This was mo-
tivated by increasing colonial disquiet combined with the impetus for consti-
tutional innovation precipitated by the Reform Act of 1832.
81
Throughout this
period there were also calls for colonial representatives to sit in parliament,
and the cycle of debates over possible ways to secure the future of the em-
pire swung into an upward trajectory.
82
Those who wanted to maintain and
77
Contemporary newspaper responses can be found in Kenneth Chew and Anthony
Wilson, Victorian Science and Engineering Portrayed in the Illustrated London News
(Stroud, 1993), 35, 3840. There had been a very short-lived Atlantic cable in 1858.
78
On imperial free trade, see Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonies and Coloni-
zation, 2 vols. (London, 1841).
79
P. MacDougall, Emigration: Its Advantages to Great Britain and Her Colonies
(London, 1848), 2. Malthus was inuential in the rst half of the century but far less
so during Victorias reign: Boyd Hilton, The Politics of Anatomy and an Anatomy of
Politics, 18251850, in Collini et al., eds., History, Religion, and Culture, 183. On
emigration, see, e.g., William Cattermole, Emigration: The Advantages of Emigration
to Canada (London, 1831); W. Blanchford Jerrod, An Essay on Colonial Government
(London, 1849); and Charles Shaw, An Extensive System of Emigration Considered,
2nd rev. ed. (London, 1848). On attitudes to emigration in the rst half of the century,
see H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 18151830: Shoveling out Paupers
(Oxford, 1972).
80
See here The Collected Works of Edmond Gibbon Wakeeld, ed. M. F. Lloyd-
Pritchard (Glasgow, 1968), 17887, 7581040; see also Charles Buller, On System-
atic Colonization, Speech in the House of Commons, April 6, 1843, reprinted as app.
1 in Wakeeld, Collected Works, 9951029; and Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free
Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970), chaps. 4, 5.
81
John Arthur Roebuck, The Colonies of England, a Plan for the Government of
Some Portion of Our Colonial Possessions (London, 1849); and Jerrod, Essay on Co-
lonial Government.
82
See the comments in Martin, Empire Federalism, 70. The rst serious proposal
strengthen the empire understood that it was essential to modify the nature of
the bond between the settler colonies and London. Colonial resentment at
British heavy-handedness was reaching critical levels, and the Canadian up-
rising (1837) proved to be both warning and catalyst for change. The British
reacted, often grudgingly, by granting increased autonomy to the colonies.
Gladstone, a zealous enthusiast of imperial reform, claimed that the brazen
age (17831840) of excessive and intrusive metropolitan intervention in the
settler empire came to an end and that a new era of colonial politics ensued.
83
Relations with the colonies were reappraisedso much so that he declared,
It is now, then, coming to be understood that the affairs of the colonies are
best transacted and provided for by the colonists themselves, as the affairs of
Englishmen are best transacted by Englishmen.
84
Of relevance here is that
the colonial reformers and their critics took it for granted that it was impossible
to form a unied polity encompassing the colonies to which they advocated
sending the emigrants and devolving power. Such bonds barely gure in their
accounts of the future; instead, given their conception of the problems of gov-
ernance over great distances, they searched for alternative political programs.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, later to be chancellor of the exchequer, con-
sidered the great impact of distance on imperial affairs in his inuential Essay
on the Government of Dependencies (1841). He argued that the primary reason
why a power such as Britain needed to form a system of dependencies in the
rst place (as opposed to imposing direct rule) was distance, for if the lands
were not so far away, they could be incorporated fully into the dominion of
the superior parliament.
85
He noted that, notwithstanding the facilities for
communication afforded by the art of modern civilization, the point is soon
reached, even in the present time, at which it becomes impossible for the most
powerful community to govern a territory without interposing a subordinate
government between it and a supreme government. Distance was, after all,
the cause which renders it necessary for the supreme government to govern
it in that form.
86
Meanwhile, in a later discussion of Adam Smiths proposals
for representatives to sit in London during this period was made when Joseph Howe
attempted to use the shift from virtual to direct representation that was signaled in the
then forthcoming (1832) Reform Bill to have nineteen of the thirty reallocated seats
given to the colonies. This was defeated resoundingly: Hansard, 3d ser., vol. 6 (August
16, 1831), cols. 11043.
83
W. E. Gladstone, Our Colonies, an Address Delivered to the Members of the Me-
chanics Institute, Chester, on Monday, the 12th November 1855 (London, 1855), 17.
See also 1011.
84
Ibid., 20.
85
Cornewall Lewis, Government of Dependencies, 183. He here also quotes widely
from Burkes speech On Conciliation with the Colonies and draws on the arguments
about distance therein (this speech is quoted at length, 379400).
86
Ibid., 187.
546 Bell
for colonial representation in parliament, Cornewall Lewis drew explicitly on
Burke in order to try to demolish the veracity of such claims: The main
objection to the plan (an objection which its author has not noticed) lies in the
distance of the colonies from England. Where a supreme government is pre-
vented by distance . . . from communicating rapidly with any of its territories,
it is necessary that the distant territory should be governed as a dependency.
87
Despite the continuity of this venerable mode of argument, there were those
with a more optimistic view of the current state of technology and its impact
on the colonial question. Lord Durham, the great hope of Radical reformers,
stressed the increasing role of technology in his famous report on the Canadian
rebellions.
88
The Durham report contained two main recommendations: rst,
that Upper and Lower Canada be reunited, and second, that this new entity
should be granted responsible government.
89
Durham was alive to the im-
portance of distance in his plans, and he was critical of the lack of internal
communications infrastructure in the vast Canadian territories.
90
Indeed, he
was keen to stress the role that new scientic discoveries could play in his
scheme for uniting both the British and French Canadians and the outlying
provinces.
91
He was likewise aware of the future possibilities engendered by
the recent success of the great experiment in which the Royal William had
negotiated the Atlantic, although he did not develop these at any great length.
92
The report appeared at a time when the perception of distance and its rela-
tionship to the world was in ux: conicting ideas about the potential for
conquering nature, for defeating Burkes eternal law, led to radically dif-
ferent conceptions of the future of the empire.
In contradistinction to the views of Cornewall Lewis, G. A. Young wrote,
in his defense of the argument for having Canadian representatives sit in Lon-
87
Ibid., 301. Cornewall Lewiss claim about Smith not noticing the dangers of dis-
tance in his plan for representation is technically inaccurate (see Smith, State of the
Contest with America, 382), although he would not have had access to Smiths then
unpublished manuscript.
88
On the report, see Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy (Cambridge,
1972). It was regarded during the nineteenth century, however inaccurately, as a key
moment: Oman, England in the Nineteenth Century, 248.
89
Lord Durhams Report on the Affairs of the British North American Colonies, ed.
Sir C. P. Lucas (Oxford, [1839] 1912), vol. 2.
90
See, e.g., Lord Durhams Report, 2:204, 213, 31619.
91
Indeed, Durham wrote that the great discoveries of modern art, which have,
throughout the world, and nowhere more than in America, entirely altered the character
and channels of communication between distant countries, will bring all the North
American colonies into constant intercourse with each other (Lord Durhams Report,
2:316).
92
Ibid. See also app. C, 327, in vol. 3 of the Report, for further comments on the
future role of steam. See also 2:318.
don, that the objection urged by Mr. Burke to a similar scheme cannot now
be maintained. The power of steam has bridged the Atlantic, and the length
and uncertainty of voyages to and from America are already matters of his-
tory.
93
However, this was at the time very much a minority view, following
in the wake of the rst Atlantic crossing and long before such feats were
considered widely practicable. The debate was split between those who took
account of the latest technological developments and then extrapolated their
potential into a plan for the future and the more cautious majority, who pre-
ferred to focus instead on the uncertain present. The specter of Burke still
haunted, even shaped, the understanding of the political possibilities engen-
dered by nature.
For those prepared to scan the horizon of the future, there were signs of
radical change to be divined. Herman Merivale, Drummond Professor of Po-
litical Economy at Oxford, provides an illuminating bridge between the dis-
integration of the British American empire and the later expansionary period,
between empire melancholy and buoyancy. Indeed, his study Colonies and
Colonization (1839) embodied both the pessimism of the present and the uto-
pianism of the future that dened much nineteenth-century imperial theorizing.
In his discussion of the settler colonies, he focused on their potential for
growth, observing that the only regions that combined the three chief con-
ditions of prosperity . . . are those removed from us by half the circumference
of the globe. And, with our present means of transport, all our improved skill
and increased enterprise has not been, nor can be, successful in overcoming
this great obstacle of distance.
94
The costs were simply too high, and, more-
over, the tediousness of communication with the mother-country causes much
embarrassment to commerce, produces much disinclination on the part of the
better class of colonists to remove there, and impedes the moral and intellectual
advance of the community.
95
Here we nd an excellent summary of the ar-
guments against the possibility of closer political integration, avored by the
lessons of recent history. However, Merivale was far from glum, and he noted
abruptly and with evident excitement that we are just on the eve of a revo-
lution and that the future would be very different from the troubled, insecure
present. In particular, he emphasized the role that he foresaw for the edgling
technologies of steam and telegraph. The results of these developments would
93
G. A. Young, The Canadas, British and Foreign Review 8 (1839): 328. Young
then proceeded to offer a strong criticism of federal political systems, arguing that it
was extremely difcult to draw clear boundaries between respective sovereign powers.
94
Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures, 12. The rather ambiguous chief
conditions of prosperity were room and soil for a rapid increase of population, nat-
ural advantages for the production of wealth, and a secure dependence on the mother
country, at least in the rst stage of their existence (12).
95
Ibid., 12.
548 Bell
be profound, leading to ever-faster communications and consequently greater
levels of colonization: The next fty years, therefore, will, in all probability,
see a change analogous in character, and more equal in extent, to that which
was effected in the rst half century after the landings of the Spanish in Amer-
ica.
96
In the meantime, however, all that could be done was to wait for the tech-
nological means to become available; nature still encroached powerfully into
the political imagination. Writing less than a decade later, two young revolu-
tionaries were also taking note of the political impact of technological devel-
opments: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all,
even the most barbarian nations, into civilization.
97
But for those intent on
securing the future of the empire, it was still courting ideological unintelligi-
bility to argue for the construction of a homogeneous, centrally administered
federal state stretching over the face of the earth; the substantive theoretical
preconditions had not yet been met. Writing just over ten years after Marx and
Engels, J. S. Mill was one of the last political thinkers to employ the Burkean
refrain in an unqualied manner, to resort to the impossibilities presented by
the eternal laws of nature, when he commented in his Considerations on
Representative Government (1861) that the feelings of equity, and concep-
tions of public morality, from which these suggestions [for colonial parlia-
mentary representation] emanate, are worthy of all praise; but the suggestions
themselves are so inconsistent with rational principles of government that it is
doubtful if they have been seriously accepted by any reasonable thinker. Coun-
tries separated by half the globe do not present the natural conditions for being
under one government, or even members of one federation.
98
Two years later,
in The Empire (1863), Goldwin Smith, Regius Professor of Modern History
at Oxford and a self-professed disciple of Adam Smith, made the great dis-
tances separating the British colonial possessions one of the central planks in
his call for colonial emancipation
99
the cutting of formal links between
Britain and the settler coloniesand in so doing ended up falling in line with
Burke, in so many other respects his political nemesis. Adopting a distinctly
Burkean tone, he argued that we need scarcely discuss in detail the possibility
96
Ibid., 16.
97
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Gareth
Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth, 2002), 224. See Stedman Joness introduction for a
lucid discussion of Marx and Engels on globalization.
98
J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), in Utilitarianism,
Liberty, and Representative Government, ed. A. D. Lindsay (London, 1910), 379. See
also Goldwin Smith, The Empire: A Series of Letters Published in The Daily News,
1862, 1863 (Oxford, 1863).
99
Smith, The Empire, 85.
or expediency of summoning from the ends of the earth people who could not
be involved in less than six months, to decide whether England should go to
war upon some question affecting herself, and not admitting perhaps an hours
delay.
100
Consequently, Smith was scathing about schemes for parliamentary
federation, singling out for criticism the great Scotsmans aforementioned plan
and hoping to deter those who might try to resurrect this pernicious line of
thought: I fear this is a mere Utopia, having, like many Utopias, its visionary
seat in the past.
101
A generation later, these condent contentions would have been greeted with
surprise, even incredulity. For much had changed by then, and the conventions
of imperial political thought had suddenly lost one of their most prominent
and time-honored elements. We thus witness a jagged discontinuity in political
discourse: nature was no longer the immutable, inscrutable foe that had con-
fronted Burke so forcefully. As Carlyle reminds us, it was instead regarded by
the Victorians as something to be conquered, tamed, set to use by human
ingenuity and power. Nature was to be mastered, not feared or acquiesced to.
And political theory mirrored this Promethean arrogance.
IV. IMPERIAL POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE AGE OF SCIENTIFIC
UTOPIANISM, CA. 18701900
In these days we can break with Burkes objection, NATURA
OPPOSUIT, by merely pointing to what science has done, and re-
lying on what we know that it yet will do. (H. R. NICHOLLS)
102
The second half of the nineteenth century was infused by a commanding belief
in the power of science and technology to solve the manifold problems of
society.
103
This was a time in which the search for a science of society (or
polity) to match the unprecedented advances of the natural sciences was at its
peak, and the rational, scientic method offered a powerful and culturally
authoritative way of thinking about the governance of the country.
104
It is little
100
Ibid. For his highly critical account of Burkes conception of empire, see Goldwin
Smith, The United States: An Outline of Political History, 14921871 (New York,
1893), 69.
101
Smith, The Empire, 84.
102
H. R. Nicholls, The Prophetic Objections to Federation, Imperial Federation 1
(September 1886): 274.
103
Stefan Collini, Political Theory and the Science of Society in Victorian Brit-
ain, Historical Journal 23 (1980): 204; and Richard Drayton, Natures Government:
Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (London, 2000), chap. 6.
104
Burrow et al., That Noble Science of Politics.
550 Bell
surprise, therefore, that the notion of innovative technologies shattering pre-
vious political certainties found a receptive audience.
Herman Merivale, in an essay published in 1870, set out to survey the
imperial scene as the theoretical and policy contours of a new era came slowly
into focus; once again he serves as a marker between two distinct periods of
political debate. He analyzed the prospects for the future of the empire, re-
viewing the policy developments of the preceding decades and scrutinizing
recently proffered political solutions. Merivale was by then convinced of the
impossibility of combining the aspirations of colonial self-government with
closer ties between London and the rest of the empire: the belief that a proper
balance could be struck between those two ideals had been a mere delu-
sion.
105
He struck a melancholy noteone to be heard with increasing fre-
quency in the course of the ensuing decadeclaiming that the empire was
tending toward disintegration, and he predicted the gradual dropping off of
our greater colonies from their present union.
106
Merivale considered four different arguments about the possibility of rec-
onciling provincial liberty with metropolitan authority: colonial representation,
which has been familiar to political thinkers ever since our rst American
dissensions a hundred years ago;
107
constitutional reform (a written consti-
tution for the empire); the creation of a system of colonial agents, sitting on
an advisory council; and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with
the colonies. He did not consider any of these options practicable. For example,
in his discussion of parliamentary representatives he argued that such a body
seems a contradiction in terms. Colonies are separate communities, with sepa-
rate every-day interests. They have no common interest as against the mother-
countryexcept in those very rare occasions in which the rst principles of
government come into question.
108
This was a perceptive comment, and it
may well serve as a suitable epitaph for the whole federal enterprise. However,
what is noticeable about this essay, written by one of the most esteemed co-
lonial commentators, was that it does not even mention schemes for a global
federal polity.
109
They had not yet come of age.
During the last three decades of the century, the radically transformed per-
ception of distance resulted in the frequent envisioning of the whole world as
a stage for political action and institutions and in the shift in language asso-
ciated with this revolution. An intercontinental polity only then appeared as a
105
Herman Merivale, The Colonial Question in 1870, Fortnightly Review 7 (1870):
156.
106
Ibid., 154.
107
Ibid., 164.
108
Ibid., 171.
109
See the comments in ibid.
realistic option, and there soon developed a growing sense of condence in
the possibility of constructing a unied planet-spanning political entity.
In one of the most prominent early statements of the supra-parliamentary
federal ideal, published only a year after Merivales pessimistic stocktaking
essay, John Edward Jenkins warned against the insidious dangers that he un-
derstood as besetting British policy: At this moment, he wrote, we are
drifting to the disintegration of our Empire.
110
This was to become a common
theme in political argument during the 1870s, as numerous authors employed
the language of crisis. This emotive idiom made possible the claim that radical
change was imperative. Without it, a grave disaster would befall the country
and the empire.
111
In his impassioned plea for union, Jenkins was aware that
he faced an uphill battle, and consequently he drew on the vocabulary of
emergency: the British were drifting to imperial dissolution, and this de-
manded urgent action. Moreover, Jenkins was fully cognizant of the tradition
of argument that employed the size of the planet as a bar to such schemes, and
he considered the magnitude of the empire to be an issue worth confronting
directly: A solitary difculty, like the pillar of salt, stands upa sign of
retrospective despair, of dead, inane deciency of hope. Distance, enchantress
of the far-off view, is looked upon as the intractable witch of confederation.
112
However, Natures eternal law no longer offered the seemingly immutable
obstacle that it once did. Action was needed to save the empire, and circum-
stances had changed, among them the advent of steam and the telegraph,
which have destroyed the obstacles of distance.
113
Jenkins looked with even
greater hope toward the future: It may be said that every year we advance
nearer to our dependencies both in time and facility of intercourse. At no very
distant date steam communication with Australia will be so frequent, regular,
and rapid, and the telegraph system so enlarged and cheap, that no practical
difculty would impede the working of a representative federal govern-
110
[Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 165. Note that, although Merivale mentions the
lessening impact of distance, he rather inconsistently adduces Burkes arguments about
the impossibility of representation over great distances. Merivale, Colonial Question,
15354, 16465.
111
[Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 185; Robert Andrew Mace, On the Crisis of
the Empire: Imperial Federation, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 5 (1873):
212; and Oscar Boulton, The Crisis of Empire, Imperial Federation 4 (August
1889): 18687. For a discussion of the function of crisis in political thought, see
Istvan Hont, The Contemporary Crisis of the Nation-State in Historical Perspective,
in his Jealousy of Trade; and Reinhart Koselleck, Some Questions Regarding the
Conceptual History of Crisis, in his The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing
History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA, 2002), 23647.
112
[John Edward Jenkins], An Imperial Confederation, Contemporary Review 17
(1871): 78.
113
[Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 179.
552 Bell
ment.
114
Here then was the creed of a Greater British state, once a dream,
now a plausible ideological proposition. This was to be both a constant refrain
and a powerful rallying cry throughout the next two decades, as the concerted
attempt to weld the dream into reality was embarked upon by the federal
advocates. Federation became a clarion call against the tides of history, an
attempt to short-circuit the apparently eternal rise and fall of empires and to
ensure that the colonies were permanently welded together.
115
A further important contributor to the shift in the terms of debate was the
Liberal statesman W. E. Forster. In Our Colonial Empire, an address deliv-
ered on the future of the empire in 1875, Forster employed a number of themes
common to political discourse during the decade.
116
First, in his opening re-
marks he was quick to point out that he was going to talk about only the
white settlement colonies. Second, he noted with obvious satisfaction the
shift in the terms of empire discourseWho talks now of casting off the
Colonies? What more popular cry at present than the preservation of our Em-
pire?
117
and the spread of pro-empire sentiment. And, most tellingly, he
waxed lyrical on the surmounting of temporal and spatial obstacles in the face
of global union: whereas in the past the difculties of time and space would
. . . drive them [the colonies] to independence, this was now highly unlikely
to occur, for, in contradistinction to Burkes earlier claim about the seas, sci-
ence has brought together the ends of the earth, and made it possible for a
nation to have oceans roll between its provinces.
118
He concluded by arguing
for the development of an Anglo-Saxon federative scheme. In a later essay, in
which he heralded the establishment of the Imperial Federation League (IFL)
in 1884, Forster answered a rhetorical question about the plausibility of estab-
lishing a viable political community separated by vast expanses of water.
Yes, he argued, it may be a novelty; but there is another novelty, and that
is the political effect of steam and electricity.
119
This point was echoed by
Francis de Labillie`re, who suggested that the newcommunication technologies
rendered the oceanus dissociabilis objection to federation redundant.
120
It was
114
[Jenkins], An Imperial Confederation, 78.
115
Ibid., 67. On the revision of ideas about cycles of time, and imperial temporality
more generally, see Duncan S. A. Bell, From Ancient to Modern and Back Again:
Imagining the British Empire, 18601900 (paper presented at the Centre for Political
Ideologies, University of Oxford, February 2004).
116
W. E. Forster, Our Colonial Empire, as reported in The Times, Monday, No-
vember 6, 1875, 9. On the importance of Forsters speech, see F. P. de Labillie`re,
British Federalism: Its Rise and Progress, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute
24 (1893): 110.
117
Forster, Our Colonial Empire, 9. For similar sentiments, see also The Times,
October 25, 1872.
118
Forster, Our Colonial Empire, 9; Burke, On Conciliation, 9.
119
Forster, Imperial Federation, Nineteenth Century 17 (1885): 206.
120
F. P. de Labillie`re, The Contraction of England and Its Advocates, National
repeated as well at the Westminster Palace Hotel Conference (1884), out of
which the IFL grew, when the Conservative MP W. H. Smith remarked that
for all practical purposes the electric telegraph and steam have brought the
most distant and the most remote colony into nearer relations, and certainly
into greater sympathy, with the interests of Government in the capital of Lon-
don than the distant and remote portions of Great Britain were some 100 or
200 years ago.
121
The most authoritative statement of this shift in imagination owed from
the pen of J. R. Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.
In The Expansion of England (1883) he observed that the possibility of con-
structing a true Greater Britain was something that could have been contem-
plated only in the second half of the nineteenth century, as before that distance
acted as an unbridgeable impediment to political unity. Historically the em-
pire, spread so widely, had been practically dissolved by distance.
122
Such
an impediment pertained no longer, however, for science has given the po-
litical organism a new circulation, which is steam, and a new nervous system,
which is electricity.
123
Seeley might have gone further and noted that follow-
ing the logic of this argument a Greater Britain would have been impossible
even thirty years before. He noted that in the eighteenth century Burke
thought a federation quite impossible across the Atlantic Ocean. However,
this was no longer a feasible position to hold, for since Burkes time the
Atlantic Ocean has shrunk till it seems scarcely broader than the sea between
Greece and Sicily.
124
These new conditions, declared Seeley, make it nec-
essary to reconsider the whole colonial problem. They make it . . . possible
actually to realise the old Utopia of a Greater Britain.
125
This was not, then,
purely an administrative, practical matter but a cognitive one, concerned with
the possibility of envisioning an imagined political community on a global
scale.
126
That point was reiterated by Labillie`re, writing in 1894: the question
of distance, he maintained, is almost superseded by steamand the telegraph,
so that the prospect of a Federal Empire, which ve-and-twenty years ago
appeared very remote, and which fty years since seemed almost a chimera,
now assumes a pressing and tangible shape.
127
Review (June 1884), reprinted in Labillie`re, Federal Britain; or, Unity and Federation
of the Empire (London, 1894), 160. Italics in original.
121
W. H. Smith, in Imperial Federation: Report, 33. See also The Times, July 30,
1884.
122
Seeley, Expansion of England, 75 (and also 64, 296).
123
Ibid., 74.
124
Ibid., 297.
125
Ibid., 74.
126
On imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
(London, 1983); see also Duncan S. A. Bell, Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and
National Identity, British Journal of Sociology 54 (2003): 6383.
127
F. P. de Labillie`re, Some Concluding Suggestions, in his Federal Britain, 12.
554 Bell
One of the most useful ways in which to chart the changing nature of po-
litical argument is to highlight the shift in the vocabularies used to imagine
the world. The fundamental transformation in the ontological precepts em-
ployed in conceiving the planet was matched by the proliferation of novel
methods and vocabularies for attempting to portray it. The post-1870 political
discourse of empire was infused with fresh metaphors and evocative phrases
that served partly to re-map a new conceptual understanding of the relationship
between the size of the planet and the political destiny of the empire and that
served also to add a touch of urgency, romance, or inevitability to the future.
Imperial political thought was permeated by adulatory odes to the near-
miraculous power of technology. Two forms of linguistic innovation are of
particular interest because of their prevalence in empire discourse: the employ-
ment of organic (and particularly bodily) metaphors to describe the empire and
the use of the phrase space and time (or vice versa) to replace or complement
distance in explaining scale and its relationship to political organization.
Neither of these modes of expression was truly original, for they were both
parasitic upon traditional state-centered discourses; the empire theorists bor-
rowed, elaborated, and extended to the whole world modes of expression pre-
viously utilized only in relation to contiguous political communities.
The increasingly widespread employment of the conjoined pair time and
space in imperial political thought was borrowed from a language that rst
developed in order to register the impact of the railways on the Victorian
imagination. As the railway boom served as an early indicator of the power
of technology in reshaping political thought, so it had also witnessed a revo-
lution in the languages used to try to capture this shift. The railways were
perceived as having shrunk the size of Great Britain, shattering previous
conceptions of distance, speed, and national geography. It was during the 1840s
that the phrase the annihilation of space through time, so resonant with the
sheen of modernity and encoded in a vocabulary of scientic authenticity,
became a commonplace.
128
As the poet Heine warned on hearing about the
opening of a rail link between Paris and Rouen, The elementary concepts of
time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways.
129
The staple categories of Newtonian physics and Kantian metaphysics were, so
it seemed, under assault.
128
As one observer commented in 1839, if railways were established throughout the
country, the whole population of England would sit nearer to one another by two-
thirds of the time which now respectively alienates them. . . . As distances were thus
annihilated, the surface of the country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became
not much larger than one immense city. Quoted in W. Schivelbusch, The Railway
Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the 19th Century
(Oxford, 1986), 34. See Michael J. Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination
(New Haven, CT, 1999), 21, 15071.
129
Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 34.
This redolent scientistic language was adopted subsequently by the imperial
political theorists. The inventions of science, Forster declared at the West-
minster Conference, have overcome the difculties of time and space which
were thought to make separation almost a necessity.
130
In the wake of the
Pacic cable becoming operational in 1872, The Times declared that the At-
lantic Cable annihilates about two thousand miles of space; the Australian
telegraph annihilates no less than twelve thousand.
131
Sir Frederick Young
proclaimed that the marvellous and mysterious help of telegraphy had
worked a veritable revolution in the affairs of the world.
132
Nature was now
the subject of annihilation, of forceful overcoming by the mind and practical
works of humanity; it was no longer an eternally imprinted set of fetters.
Meanwhile, Lord Norton, a sympathetic Tory critic of the empire federalists,
employed the same terminology in defending the existing constitutional rela-
tions between the colonies and London; the moral union of the empire was
already strong, he contended, and the more time and space are annihilated,
the closer does this sort of union become.
133
The liberal historian E. A. Free-
man was adamant that the federal project was bound to fail, based as it was
on implausible claims about the ability to forge a common political identity
between such disparate groups. Nevertheless, he was clear also about the im-
pact of steam and the telegraph: Modern science has annihilated time and
space . . . [so] that it takes no longer to get to Westminster from the most
distant British colonies, than at the time of the Union of England and Scotland,
it took to get from Shetland to London.
134
Whether employed by the propo-
nents or the opponents of federation, the language of time and space was called
upon routinely to support arguments and assertions; its political indeterminacy
was a function of the varied interpretations of what followed in the wake of
the planets being perceived to shrink. For some this was a jejune point,
heralding little signicant change in the possibilities of political organization;
for others it was an unprecedented invitation to novelty.
David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), conates the two
distinct periods in which the language of time and space began to signify a
130
W. E. Forster, comments reported in Imperial Federation: Report, 27. See also
Lord Rosebury in Imperial Federation: Report, 36.
131
The Times, November 16, 1772, reprinted in the Account of the Dinner held at
the Canon Street Hotel, on Friday, 15th November, 1872, to celebrate the completion
of Telegraphic Communications with the Australian Colonies, Proceedings of the
Royal Colonial Institute 3 (1872): 36.
132
Comments printed in the Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 8 (1876
77): 11819.
133
Lord Norton, Imperial FederationIts Impossibility, Nineteenth Century 34
(1884): 514.
134
E. A. Freeman, The Physical and Political Bases of National Unity, in White,
ed., Britannic Confederation, 52.
556 Bell
shift in the perception of the scale of the world.
135
He argues that 1848 should
be regarded as the key marker and that the midcentury years witnessed a rapid
acceleration in the spatial expansion of capitalism: Capitalism became em-
broiled in an incredible phase of massive long-term investment in the conquest
of space.
136
This powerful argument certainly has merit; it notes the critical
role played by the shift in the representation of the planet during this period,
and it is instructive regarding the close relationship between cultural idioms
and their political-economic foundations. However, in claiming that it was
during the 1840s that space and time were reimagined, he misses the vital
point that during the nineteenth century space was perceived to have died
twice. In the 1840s, it was wounded fatally in the national sphere when the
country appeared to many observers to shrink in the wake of the railway
revolution. However, it was only during the closing decades of the century
that it was to be annihilated once again, this time on a global scale; the world
as a whole thus appeared to contract.
137
As Labillie`re wrote, when Victoria
ascended to the throne in 1837, No visionary had then even dreamed of the
opening of telegraphic communication with Australia, or that men would be
able to travel, in a fortnight, from London to the Pacic shores of Canada.
138
The lag in the changing terminology of imperial discourse reects the fact that
the two shifts in imagination were separated by a generation.
The second shift in the semantics of empire was the extensive employment
of organic metaphors to describe British overseas dominions. Organic ideas
were of course far from novel, constituting one of the staple languages of late
Victorian political thinking, and imperial discourse was once again borrowing
from a more widely employed lexicon.
139
However, the idea of the biological
growth of the empire was previously an anathema, as the idea of an organic
135
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989), 241.
136
Ibid., 252, 261, 264.
137
See, for an early example, J. Stephen, The Atlantic Telegraph and Its Lessons,
Fortnightly Review 5 (1866): 442. See also [Anon], Atlantic Telegraph, Cornhill
Magazine 12 (1865): 36473.
138
Labillie`re, Federal Britain, 251.
139
The metaphorical relationship between communication and politics during the
nineteenth century is outlined partially in Laura Otis, The Metaphoric Circuit: Organic
and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth-Century, Journal of the History
of Ideas 63 (2002): 10529, although she fails to mention empire. On organic political
thought, see Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ide-
ologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 19091926 (Oxford, 2002), chap.
1; and esp. Sandra den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late
Victorian Thought (Oxford, 1996). See also Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of
Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, 1999).
entity presupposes an intimate bond between the parts constituting the life-
form. As a result, it was generally understood that there would be contiguity
between the elements, thus allowing, for example, territorially bounded states
to be conceived as organisms. It was steam, through the medium of trans-
oceanic shipping, and electricity, through the medium of the telegraph, that
were now perceived to have provided the means to envision the empire as one,
as intimately linked together and capable of functioning as a living being.
Nevertheless, this linguistic device was employed in a purely metaphorical
sense, remaining a pallid shadow of the more powerful near-literal readings
current in some (largely Germanic) versions of organic theorizing.
140
In particular, this mode of expression specied an intimate connection be-
tween the empire and the mammalian (presumably human) body: hence See-
leys new circulation for the political organism, the Marquis of Lornes
discussion of political shocks spreading instantaneously through the imperial
limbs, and Henniker-Heatons claim that the telegraph and the post are the
nerves and arteries of the whole.
141
For Jenkins, in his early federalist mani-
festo, the endangered empire represented a hazardous organism.
142
Mean-
while, Sir Henry Parkes, outlining a case for strengthening the ties between
London and Australia, argued that it was essential to bind the body and limbs
of the empire together in one great self-sustaining, consanguineous political
organism,
143
while the idealist J. H. Muirhead, drawing on the organic idiom
popularized partly by his philosophical compatriots, declared that newarteries
and nerve systems were beginning to be formed between the various sections
of the English race.
144
Forging an even more direct analogy, another observer
claimed that nowadays, the whole earth resembles, in a measure, one of our
own bodies. The electric wires represent the nerves, and messages are con-
veyed from the most distant regions to the central plane of government, just
as in our bodies, where sensations are conveyed to the sensorium.
145
However, as with most such shifts, there was a strong undertone of conti-
nuity accompanying the transformation in political discourse. Burkes impos-
140
Cf. Peter Mandler, Race and Nation in Mid-Victorian Thought, in Collini et
al., eds., History, Religion, and Culture.
141
Marquis of Lorne, Imperial Federation (London, 1885), 113; and J. Henniker-
Heaton, The Postal and Telegraphic Communication of the Empire, Proceedings of
the Royal Colonial Institute 19 (1888): 172.
142
[Jenkins], An Imperial Confederation, 77.
143
Sir Henry Parkes, Australia and the Imperial Connection, Nineteenth Century
15 (1884): 869.
144
Muirhead, What Imperialism Means, 243.
145
Sir Gabriel Stokes, reply to a speech by Lord Salisbury, reprinted in Electrician,
November 8, 1889, 13.
558 Bell
ing presence still made itself felt, and his vestigial voice could be heard in
Labillie`res claim that had he lived a century later, the great statesman would
undoubtedly have been an empire federalist.
146
Surveying two decades of in-
tense debate over federation and the rising tide of support for the idea, Labil-
lie`re made this claim on the basis that the laws of nature that Burke had so
prematurely labeled immutable had been removed, opening the door to an
ever-closer association with the far-ung reaches of the empire. Technology,
Labillie`re asserted, has marvelously removed the impossibilities of the past.
147
Despite the often utopian conceptions assumed for the role of science, there
were those who either remained skeptical of the panegyric attitude taken to-
ward the new technologies or believed that the practice outran the publicity.
The telegraph was often slow, had limited coverage, and was very expensive.
148
It was a common complaint that monopolies dominating the telegraph system
rendered it virtually impossible for the vast majority of the population to uti-
lize, and the most forceful opponent of such monopolies, Henniker-Heaton,
complained that as a result imperial communications were denied to all but
a wealthy few.
149
As a result, the potential of improved communications for
smoothing colonial relations and for strengthening the ties of empire was being
seriously degraded. Nevertheless, he was a rm believer in the power and
potential of communications and of the increasing interdependence that the
telegraph in particular could engender, for it provided the means of intensi-
fying and perpetuating the sympathy that is the basis of union.
150
Indeed, he
ascribed near magical powers to the new technologies and consequently ten-
dered an ode to the new age: Stronger than death-dealing war-ships, stronger
than the might of legions, stronger than wealth and genius of administration,
stronger than the unswerving justice of Queen Victorias rule, are the scraps
of paper that are borne in myriads over the seas, and the two or three slender
wires that connect the scattered parts of her realm.
151
As a result of this fragile
146
Labillie`re, British Federalism, 96. Labillie`re earlier advocated federation in
The Permanent Unity of the Empire, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 6
(187475): 3648. For other examples of the Smith-Burke debate being employed to
structure arguments, see Sir George Ferguson Bowen, The Federation of the British
Empire, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 17 (188586): 290; Frederick
Young, On the Political Relations of Mother Countries and Colonies (London, 1885),
1617; and W. M. Greswell, Prize Essay: Imperial Federation, in England and Her
Colonies (London, 1887).
147
Labillie`re, British Federalism, 97.
148
See Simon Potter, Communication and Integration: The British Dominions Press
and the British World, c. 18761914, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
30 (2003): 19596.
149
J. Henniker-Heaton, An Imperial Telegraph System, Nineteenth Century 45
(1899): 90614, 907.
150
Henniker-Heaton, An Imperial Telegraph System, 910.
151
Henniker-Heaton, Postal and Telegraphic Communication, 172.
copper girdle enveloping the empire, not a misfortune, or a cause of rejoicing,
of hope, astonishment or apprehension, could occur anywhere in the world
without a thrill of sympathy cresting like a wave over the earths surface.
152
The role of the new communications technologies in not only dissolving dis-
tance but also (as a consequence) forging a sense of community through bring-
ing people into more frequent and intimate contact with one another was con-
sidered essential by many of the proponents of federation, for it was believed
to foster a sense of political unity between the colonists and the people of the
United Kingdom, as well as between the different elements of the empire.
153
The double scientic innovation precipitated a heightened awareness about
material, and, more important, cultural and emotional interdependence, whereby
an action in one part of the globe resonated powerfully and almost concurrently
with people in another. The generation and maintenance of a communal iden-
tity stretching over the planet was nally possible, so it was thought, and thus
the key precondition for statehood that underlay Victorian political thought
had been met.
154
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS: REMAKING THE GLOBAL POLITICAL
IMAGINATION
During the course of the long nineteenth century, the ways in which the
world was imagined underwent a profound and irreversible transformation.
Although this transformation was always contested, always questioned, and
although it generated varying interpretations of its possible consequences, dur-
ing the protracted reign of Victoria the planet appeared to shrink before the
eyes of many observers; the world was nally made small, manageable, tame.
This change in the structures of consciousness generated a concurrent shift in
the nature of political thought, revolutionizing the manner in which political
communities in general and the settler empire in particular were, and indeed
could be, conceived. In the period between the end of the Seven Years War
and the dawn of the nineteenth century, the debate over distance and political
community had, despite a brief owering of radical visions for transatlantic
unions, been fairly one-sided, dominated by the view articulated most pow-
erfully by Edmund Burke: nature was an immutable antagonist, and political
projects had to be adaptedrestrictedto meet this blunt certainty. But as
152
Ibid.
153
See also Lord Thring, The Consolidation of the British Empire, in White, ed.,
Britannic Confederation, 170.
154
Although this claim was often wildly exaggerated by the empire theorists, there
were some grounds for their condence; see Mike Sewell, All the English-Speaking
Race Is in Mourning: The Assassination of President Gareld and Anglo-American
Relations, Historical Journal 34 (1991): 66586.
560 Bell
the century unfolded, this picture began to blur; and as new communications
technologies were invented and then became the driving engines and symbolic
markers of the Victorian imperial state, political thinkers recast their views on
the spatial conguration of polities. For the rst time, the idea of a global state
became a seemingly reasonable proposition. But the transition was slow and
uneven: the middle decades of the century were pervaded by theoretical con-
ict and confusion over the coming of the age of steam and electricity. The
signs of the times were hard to decipher, the future unclear. For some, this was
a period of uncomfortable adjustment; the developments seemed either too
fantastic or too limited to make much of a difference, and they preferred to
maintain the Burkean stance. For others, however, the new technologies pre-
sented great opportunities, and they grasped them with relish. It was only in
the second half of the century, and mainly in the period following 1870, that
the majority of observers felt secure talking about the global annihilation of
time and space and the end of distance as a problem in the creation of
cohesive political communities. The imperial federation movement, and the
wider ideal of Greater Britain, was the most prominent articulation of this shift
in the nature of political consciousness.
The power of the revolution in political discourse is illustrated in the ar-
guments adduced by those critical of federation. Whereas distance had for
decades if not centuries been a central plank in the case of the opponents of
closer constitutional ties, it was after about 1870 employed far less frequently
and always in a heavily qualied manner. The silences, as ever, speak loudly.
There were certainly those who drew on such arguments, notably Freeman,
but they tended to stress that although the world had indeed been perceived to
shrink, this did not mean it was feasible to build an intercontinental political
community. For Freeman, the problem was not simply distance but the fact
that the ideal nation required a continuous territory . . . inhabited by a peo-
ple under one government.
155
In other words, both the opponents and pro-
ponents of federation tended to be united in their assumptions about the nature
of political communities; they differed in their interpretation of the impact that
technology had in challenging the naturally imposed limits of the world. The
Marquis of Lorne, responding to Forsters impassioned plea for federation,
was keen to ask what the colonists themselves actually thought of the future
direction of government policy and to suggest that rash federal proposals were
perhaps unrealistic in meeting their desires. However, he was also at pains to
stress that it was now easy to direct such questions to them, as telegraphic
communication makes Australia as near to the Colonial Ofce as Victoria
Street.
156
Whether or not people were opposed to the new technologies or the
155
Freeman, Physical and Political Bases, 35, 52.
156
Marquis of Lorne, Unity of Empire, Nineteenth Century 17 (1885): 403. This
new ideals of imperial administration, what is certain is that the glories of
Victorian engineering and technology catalyzed a fundamental shift in the
manner in which people viewed the world and their relationship to it. No more
could the classic injunction about the vast and insurmountable size of the
empire determine policy toward other parts of the globe. In retrospect, the
critics, heirs of the diffused Burkeanism that pervaded the Victorian political
imagination, were correct about the impractical, hubristic view of technology
entertained by the federal theorists, for the fact that it is possible to commu-
nicate with somebody on the other side of the planet does not necessarily
engender a sense of community or common feeling, let alone common inter-
ests. The relentless rise of colonial nationalism, as well as the general colonial
distrust of the federal idea, serves as a reminder of this. However, these were
not issues that appeared to disturb the glibly optimistic advocates of technol-
ogy. The more breathless adherents of the contemporary globalization thesis
would do well to learn from this episode.
Lord Salisbury, prime minister and foreign secretary, gave the inaugural
speech at the founding dinner of the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1889.
It serves as a suitable paean to an era of unrestrained condence in the ability
of human ingenuity to defeat the ancient problems of political governance and
community formation. His comments no doubt pleased those who had invited
him, for they comprise one of the most striking statements of the intimate links
between science and global politics in the Victorian era. He started by noting
the enormous benets which electrical science confers upon mankind, and
he added that at the Foreign Ofce we positively exist by virtue of the tele-
graph.
157
He then claimed that the telegraph has, as it were, assembled all
mankind upon one great plane, where they can see everything that is done,
and hear everything that is said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at
the very moment these events take place. Electrical engineers had thus com-
bined together almost at one moment, and acting at one moment upon the
agencies which govern mankind, the opinions of the whole of the intelligent
world with respect to everything that is passing at that time upon the face of
the earth. In conclusion, he proclaimed boldly that the telegraph is the most
conspicuous feature in the politics of our time.
158
And so, in a sense, it was.
Although this article has focused on the metropolitan political imagination,
I do not believe that the radical transformation in perceptions of time and space
occurred only in London, Britain, Europe, or the Westindeed, I would
essay was written as a skeptical riposte to Forsters federationist agenda; in the same
vein, and in the same edition, see also Viscount Bury, The Unity of the Empire,
38196.
157
Marquis of Salisbury, Speech, printed in Electrician, November 8, 1889, 13.
158
Salisbury, Speech, 13.
562 Bell
speculate that similar shifts in conceiving the planet occurred elsewhere in the
empire, as well as throughout those areas of the world in which the new com-
munications and transport technologies, or at least some knowledge of them,
had penetrated. However, it is also likely that the pace, depth, and timing of
these shifts were variable because of the uneven diffusion of technology and
knowledge and the variegated cultural milieus into which they were projected
and through which they were disseminated.
Historicizing globalization is a project long overdue, one to which intellec-
tual historians and political theorists in particular need to pay greater atten-
tion.
159
The history of globalization is not simply a history of the spread of
capitalism across the face of the planet, and of increasing social, political, and
economic interdependence, central as they are. It is also a history of the ways
in which the world came to be conceived as integrated, as interconnected, and,
nally, as constituting a global village. The manner in which perceptions of
distance were transformed is, then, an integral component of the history of
global consciousness. As distance was dissolved in the minds of observers, so
the sense of temporality itself was transformed; as space was annihilated, so
timethe time taken to communicate, the time elapsing between events sepa-
rated by expanses of space, the time to formulate political decisionswas
apparently compressed; as the world appeared to shrink, so it seemed to ac-
celerate. Central to the unfolding of globalization, therefore, was a profound
shift in the perception of time, as well as of space. And during the convoluted
and prolonged period when time and space, and indeed the nature of wide
realms of human experience, were recast, political possibilities were reimag-
ined also. But the answer propounded by the more ambitious imperial feder-
alists to the apparent shrinking of the worldthe construction of a global
composite stateis not one that has lasted into our own time. Todays neo-
liberal prophets of globalization, that elusive new old phenomenon, tend to
argue insteadalbeit erroneouslythat the state is being dissolved, its sov-
ereign borders undermined by global ows of capital, information, and peo-
ples. Their response is not to ght this trend but to swim with the (purportedly)
poststatist tide. In so doing, and rather ironically, they hark back to the analysis
provided by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848), probably
the most acute examination of the expansive tendencies of much nineteenth-
century global capitalism.
159
The most impressive study so far is Chris Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World,
17801914 (London, 2003). See also A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World His-
tory (London, 2002); and Duncan Bell, Globalisation and History: Reections on
Temporality, International Affairs 79 (2003): 80115.

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Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 17701900

Author(s): Duncan S. A. Bell

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