The Imperial Federation Movement - A Manifesto for Global Britain

By Edward Harris

BETWEEN 1870 AND THE GREAT WAR, THE WORLD ECONOMY thrived in ways which seem familiar today. The mobility of commodities and labour reached unprecedented levels, the sea-lanes and telegraphs were rapidly becoming busier, as Europe exported people and capital and imported raw materials and manufactures. The economic climate was characterised by relatively free trade, few legal restrictions on migration, and almost unregulated capital flows. Technological innovations were believed to be annihilating distance and revolutionising the energy sectors, as telephones, radios, internal combustion engines, paved roads and oil-burning ships and power stations began to complement the coal- and steam-driven infrastructure of the Victorian economy. The development of the massive American domestic market and the opening of China encouraged business innovations and allowed substantial profits.

With a few adjustments, this description would not be entirely inappropriate for the post-Cold War global economy. A substantial difference, however, between then and now – perhaps the substantial difference – is that this ‘first age of globalisation’ was not an age of nation states, but of empires. It was the needs of the imperial economies, especially those of the British Empire, which were serving to integrate the regions and continents of the world in a way which seemed both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the ‘proto-globalisations’ or ‘regionalisations’ of the past. Today, opponents of globalisation speak disparagingly of American capitalism’s creation of a single, bland and homogenous ‘McWorld’; opponents of the same process at the turn of the twentieth century might just as easily have derided the consolidation of a Royal Chartered World Company, as the ‘anglobalisation’ phenomenon locked the world into an economic system as never before.

This inevitably brought imperial questions into sharper focus, forcing British statesmen, historians, and what today would probably be called pundits – whether within the United Kingdom itself or in the settler colonies – to give more consideration to colonial questions. Many started to believe – erroneously, of course – that the British Empire had, like Rome after Trajan’s Dacian exploits, reached the limits set on its expansion by nature and resources, and so these colonial questions began to assume more the nature of inter-imperial relations rather than forward strategy.

Founded in 1884, it is hard not to note the irony that the Imperial Federation League (IFL) was set up exactly 100 years after the disastrous conclusion to the previous attempt to rationalise the relations between London and the settler colonies. As the gun-smoke lifted from the battlefields of America and India in 1763, the British found themselves in possession of an Empire unexampled in extant and almost sickening in complexity. Expanding British dominion by far more than was necessary to neutralise the threat of French aggression brought imperial questions into sharper focus at Westminster. The British government of 1763 found itself in sole possession of North America, the dominant power in India, and with a greatly strengthened position in West Africa and the West Indies.

Parallel to the new imperial tone emerging in London in the aftermath of the war, a change in attitudes had emerged in the North American colonies. National pride in being Britons was engendered by the victories, perhaps bringing imperial solidarity to its greatest height since the first colonisations. In addition, the perceived development and maturity of the colonies created among them heightened expectations for a larger rôle within the empire, a rôle which would raise the status of the colonies from dependence upon to at least a near equivalence with the Mother Country.

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Posted by Cato the Younger (Ed Harris)