Rosebery and Liberal Imperialism, 1899-1903

Abstract

“Liberal Imperialism” has been a confusing label ever since the Boer War, when it was first widely applied. It was then a source of controversy within the Liberal party, much of it centering around Lord Rosebery, who introduced the term. Some of his contemporaries considered Liberal Imperialism to be marked by dangerously aggressive policy, while J. A. Spender, who also lived through these years, later interpreted it as a revival of the Palmerstonian spirit. More recently historians have treated it as ideology. Bernard Semmel has called it “social imperialism,” placing its origins in the 1880's. G. R. Searle has argued that many of Rosebery's Liberal Imperialist ideas were part of an ideology of “national efficiency,” a set of ideas that crossed party lines and that emerged in 1900 as a consequence of wartime failures. “Liberal Imperialism” has also been used to refer more generally to the “imperialism” of Liberals before as well as after the outbreak of the Boer War. I shall argue that Liberal Imperialism is best understood, not as ideology, but as the rhetoric of party infighting during the Boer War, that it is best to confine the use of the label to the period of the war and its immediate aftermath, and that the spirit of the ideas used by Liberal Imperialists, particularly as regards their perspective on the Empire, was defensive and pessimistic. In these years the Liberal right — no less than the Liberal left, with its attack on “imperialism” — was engaged in reassessing Britain's world position.