Popular Imperialism: Broadening the Context

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Rudyard Kipling, ‘The English Flag’ (1891). MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Before anyone leaps in, I also discussed why this might not be especially significant in these cases. Bernard Porter, ‘Further thoughts on imperial absent-mindedness’. John MacKenzie replied to this with “Comfort and conviction”, to which I did not respond at the time, but probably should have done, if only to correct a couple of assertions that a glance at my bibliography would have shown him were mistaken: (a) that I had ‘not looked at the press’: in fact I did, selectively, to be sure, but this was in the days before digitalized newspapers enabling word-searches and (b) that the claim made for me that I had ‘examined hundreds of magazines, memoirs and school textbooks’ was ‘not actually true’. It is: they are listed in the book. He also defended his charge that The Absent-Minded Imperialists would give ‘comfort’ to hidebound old reactionaries, by quoting Ronald Hyam's support for my thesis, which I found odd, not having suspected that other academic historians were the reactionaries he had in mind, and seeing no evidence that Hyam was particularly ‘comforted’. Since this article was completed, Theodore Koditschek has (independently) taken this point up in his excellent Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination, with reference to the interaction between imperialism and liberalism at the ‘intellectual’ level in the nineteenth century. Bernard Porter, ‘Edward Elgar and Empire’. He makes the ‘Hobson’ point in his 2008 article, cited above. This was in response to League of Nations sanctions following Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Finaldi suggests it indicated the ‘adherence of the masses to the myth of the place in the sun’ (p. 220); but surely the main motive was—insofar as it was truly voluntary—simply to defend the Italian national honour. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory. According to Ajagàn-Lester, ‘De Andra’. Afrikaner, ‘scientific racism’ was far more prominent in Swedish school textbooks than I found it to be in contemporary English ones. Quoted in Patrick Salmon, Scandinavia and the Great Powers (1997), 18–19. A reference of course to David Cannadine, Ornamentalism. MacKenzie, “Comfort and conviction,” 659.