Bureaucratic Civilization

Abstract

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.