One of the most persistent voices of Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century belonged not to a sitting politician, nor to a Tory grandee, but to a man who operated outside of official circles. Lionel Curtis, if one was forced to attribute to him a career, could best be described as an imperial spokesman and organizer. Through his writings, travels, and eclectic and exhaustive proselytizing, Curtis helped maintain imperialism as a subject of importance for the public and Whitehall alike. Imperial leaders from Cecil Rhodes and Sir Alfred Milner to Jan Smuts, New Zealand Prime Minister Sir...

In the course of inter-election campaigning for the constituency of Peebles and Selkirk in the immediate pre-war years, John Buchan’s Liberal opponent, Donald MacLean, accused the Conservative Buchan of vacillating on the issue of tariffs. Buchan’s response, ‘consistency is not much of a virtue,’¹ was indicative of his mental outlook and political temperament, and characterized his attitude to Empire. This is not to say that Buchan lacked a focused intellect or was merely self-serving, desirous of the trappings and honours of political postings, but devoid of substance, as some critics have charged.² John Buchan was a practical man, whether as...

If Lionel Curtis and John Buchan were representative of a breed of imperialist open to, though not necessarily always persuaded by, a broader interpretation of Empire and its underlying tenets, the polemical journalist Arnold White, by contrast, provides a stark example of a imperialist who believed that Empire was just fine as it was, except for those instances when it could benefit from becoming more like it had been. He epitomized imperialism at its most parochial. As ‘Vanoc,’¹ theDaily Express’s shrill critic-at-large, White voiced the concerns of the emerging clerk culture of Northcliffe’sDaily Mail, the suburbs, and Selfridge’s...

The organic imperialism of Lionel Curtis and the nascent cosmopolitan imperialism of John Buchan demonstrate two strains of early twentieth-century thought on citizenship and the Empire. Those men, however, travelled in the worlds of political philosophy and the civil service. They were, with only occasional exceptions,¹ strangers to the world of policy implementation. The task of giving practical shape to ideas of imperial citizenship was left to others. One such figure was the imperial journalist and traveller Richard Jebb. Like Curtis and Buchan, Jebb was primarily a theorist. However, Jebb had a clearer conception than they of the dominions’ emerging...

So spoke the future King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, in a speech delivered in 1889 to the Royal Colonial Institute (RCI) on the subject of imperial emigration. Edward expressed the conviction, shared by many of his countrymen, that the Empire was, in Sir Charles Dilke’s famous phrase, a ‘Greater Britain.’ Its people shared British culture and heritage, common bonds which provided the basis for imperial growth and success. The future growth of the Empire, then, should come through British emigration. This would have the added benefit of relieving domestic population pressures without contributing to the economic growth...

If there has been a theme characterizing Britain’s relationship with her overseas relations throughout the twentieth century it is ambivalence. This book has evaluated the efforts of a select group of late Victorian and Edwardian imperial ideologues to articulate a concept of citizenship which could unite Britons at home and in the Empire. Their efforts ended in frustration: the broader public was not convinced of the necessity of a clearly defined imperial citizenship. Perhaps those ideologues asked too much of their putative fellow-imperial citizens. As one of Richard Jebb’s correspondents observed, ‘The average man has only a certain amount of...