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Formed in 1884, the Imperial Federation League sought to promote the idea of imperial unity, based on a vision of Britain and its colonies consolidating as a single polity. Consideration of the place of the British West Indies in a federation scheme served to highlight the divisions within the empire and the differences in understandings of imperial citizenship. Federationists were inconsistent about whether the West Indies should form part of the self-governing empire, based largely on different assumptions about race and the capacity for self-government. This failure to clearly define the nature of imperial community highlighted the tensions and inconsistencies of late-Victorian imperialism.

During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast \"Anglo-Saxon\" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

Realism, the dominant theory of international relations, particularly regarding security, seems compelling in part because of its claim to embody so much of Western political thought from the ancient Greeks to the present. Its main challenger, liberalism, looks to Kant and nineteenth-century economists. Despite their many insights, neither realism nor liberalism gives us adequate tools to grapple with security globalization, the liberal ascent, and the American role in their development. In reality, both realism and liberalism and their main insights were largely invented by republicans writing about republics. The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is necessary has expanded due to technological change. In Daniel Deudney's reading, there is one main security tradition and its fragmentary descendants. This theory began in classical antiquity, and its pivotal early modern and Enlightenment culmination was the founding of the United States. Moving into the industrial and nuclear eras, this line of thinking becomes the basis for the claim that mutually restraining world government is now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot survive without new types of global unions. Unique in scope, depth, and timeliness,Bounding Poweroffers an international political theory for our fractious and perilous global village.

The article analyses the political views of Canadian intellectuals which had influence on the formation of Canadian political culture at the turn of the 20th century. The author confirms that the Canadian intellectual thought was the main ideological factor in the conditions of the formation of Canadian statehood, undeveloped party and political system, the lack of deep traditions of the parliamentary system, insufficient political practice and the lack of distinct ideology of basic political parties in the process of forming the Canadian nation. On the basis of studied Canadian sources, the author makes conclusion that the most of Canadian intellectuals did not participate directly in the political process and they considered themselves its bystanders. Besides, the Canadian intellectuals promoted the British political culture of the Victorian epoch. Although all of them were familiar wih the British socialistic thought – Fabianism, they insisted that the social transformation in the Canadian society is possible only through the improvement of moral system, the education of lower social classes and the maintenance of elite monarch traditions. The American influence on Canadian political culture was peripheral at the beginning of the 20th century. The ideas of the Chicago Sociological School and the European continental thought were not used. The Victorian intellectuals understood their time as the social crisis and their political discussions were often devoted to the problems of imperialism, religion, education and feminism. They undoubtedly influenced the Canadian political elite in the matter of further development of the Canadian nation and state, but they expressed their own unique views on the contemporary society in academic press and in elite clubs discussions. They did not share the opinion of publicity about contemporary social processes, because their position was far from the direct party policy. Though some of them participated as the experts in the government commissions and in the international organizations, and doing so, they influenced the process of making political decisions. The Canadian Victorian intellectuals considering themselves bystanders of contemporary social processes, created the background for smooth evolution transition to the policy of social transformation, the development of unique Canadian liberal tradition and the creation of the social welfare state in the middle of the 20th century.

This book appraises the critical contribution of the Studies in Imperialism series to the writing of imperial histories as the series passes its 100th publication. The volume brings together some of the most distinguished scholars writing today to explore the major intellectual trends in Imperial history, with a particular focus on the cultural readings of empire that have flourished over the last generation. When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded, the discipline of Imperial history was at what was probably its lowest ebb. A quarter of a century on, there has been a tremendous broadening of the scope of what the study of empire encompasses. Essays in the volume consider ways in which the series and the wider historiography have sought to reconnect British and imperial histories; to lay bare the cultural expressions and registers of colonial power; and to explore the variety of experiences the home population derived from the empire.

First published in 1973. Part of the studies in Commonwealth Politics and History series, this volume is a collection of essays with the topics of Empire and authority, social engineering, traditional rulership, Christianity, the sequence in the demission of power, and the political aftermath of the British Empire.

Outpourings such as these by Goldwin Smith, historian, writer and journalist, found national and international audiences among the periodical-and book-reading public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also had quite focused potential audiences with the many associations connected to expressions of Englishness, Canadianness and Anglo-Saxonism in North America. Smith delivered his words, in fact, at the Canadian Club of New York in 1887, and would make similar statements amid much controversy at the St George’s Society of Toronto a few years later. Smith’s views reflect what Bell describes as ‘a lost opportunity’: after the American Revolution and

This chapter analyses the ideas of Lionel Curtis, co-founder of the imperial pressure group the Round Table, concerning imperial citizenship. Curtis' ideas concerning imperial citizenship point to one of the central strands of the imperial thought web—the idea of union consecrated in an imperial citizenship. He believed that imperial federation held the key to world peace and provided the buttress of civilization. Though Curtis struggled to reconcile the existence of multiple loyalties within the Empire with the formation of a unified imperial state, his ideas were influential in framing the political evolution of Empire in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps of greatest significance was his concept of dyarchy, which epitomized the British style of informal Empire.

This chapter contains sections titled: Psychogeography and Art‐Machines Recovering Art Conclusion

Review(s) of: W. David McIntyre, Dominion of New Zealand: Statesmen and Status 1907-1945, New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Wellington, 2007, 211pp, $35.