The Philosophic Radicals and Colonialism

Abstract

In 1948, in an address before this association, the late J. B. Brebner spoke of laissez-faire as a “myth,” describing it as a battle cry of the middle classes in their struggle with the landed aristocracy, and noting particularly that the philosophic Radicals—the Benthamites—were proponents not of laissez-faire, as they had been represented to be, but of a new bureaucratic collectivism. It is becoming clear that the reputed mid-Victorian policy of “anti-colonialism” is likewise a myth, as two Cambridge dons argued in an article in 1953, for England continued to extend her empire—both “formal” and “informal”—during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Was the policy which led to the extension of the empire in direct contradiction to the ideas of the men who had revealed the absurdities of the “Old Colonial System” in the bright beam of the new science of political economy and had brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and of the Navigation Acts in 1849? Or is the “anti-colonialism” of Radical doctrine also a myth? I hope to show that Benthamite Radicals, far from being ideological opponents of colonialism, as they are usually depicted, were advocates of positive programs of empire, and, grounding their argument upon the new economic science, constructed and maintained a set of doctrines of which the keystone was the necessity of empire to an industrial England.