Anxieties of Empire and the Moral Tradition: Rome and Britain

Abstract

While considerable attention has been paid to the Roman Empire as a model and a legitimation of British imperial expansion in the Victorian and Edwardian period, the anxieties and moral problems of empire given focus by the Roman example have been relatively neglected. Yet even in the ancient world there was sharp criticism on moral grounds of territorial expansion involving exploitation and oppressive military force. This was influentially registered in Augustine's City of God and invoked in debate on the rival claims of Cicero and Caesar, complicating British imperial apologetic and helping to sustain an informal tradition of moral disquiet represented and renewed by politicians such as Gladstone and John Morley.