Patriotism,Self-Interest and the ‘Empire Effect’: Britishness and British Decisions to Invest in Canada, 1867–1914

This paper builds on the growing body of literature on the British World, which has shown that people in the dominions had a strong British identity and their claims to Britishness were recognised by people in the British Isles. It attempts to gauge the extent to which this British World identity influenced the global allocation of British capital. Much of the existing literature on British investment in the dominions dismisses the possibility that the pattern in Britain's capital exports was significantly affected by imperial patriotism. This article will suggest that imperial sentiment did indeed influence the destination of British capital exports. Imperialist sentiment influenced the legal and political institutions of the dominions in ways that encouraged British investment. Moreover, imperial ideology may have influenced investors' decisions in ways that the existing historiography does not adequately explore: at least some British investors may have been willing to accept a lower anticipated rate of return because they valued the psychological satisfaction of investing in territories that happened to be part of the British Empire. This article compares the experience of British investment in the United States, which has an ambiguous relationship with the British World, with that of investment in Canada with a view to understanding the impact of the British World identity on investment patterns.     

Character, ‘Ordered Liberty’, and the Mission to Civilise: British Moral Justification of Empire, 1870–1914

In a path-breaking study of the thought of Sir Henry Maine, Karuna Mantena has recently argued that the overthrow, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of the liberal imperialism promoted by Macaulay and James Mill meant that the ‘civilising mission’ became a mere alibi for continued British rule in the empire and that it was drained of all moral content. The article demonstrates, using a wide range of contemporary sources, that, although many British imperialists thought that Asian and African civilisations might never progress to the point of enjoying constitutional government, they did believe that it was the purpose of British rule to bring to their colonial subjects the benefits of what they called ‘ordered liberty’. This they saw as the foundation of Britain's own greatness and as essentially a moral force. Nonetheless, the article goes on to show that one purpose of the civilising mission was to strengthen empire sentiment at home, and thus to underwrite the moral authority of the gentlemanly elites who ran it. The latter feared that the advent of democracy in Britain might otherwise undermine ordered liberty at home and weaken the commitment to the imperial cause.