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Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 17701900Author(s): Duncan S. A. BellSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 523-562Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/497716 .Accessed: 14/02/2014 08:39

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The Journal of Modern History 77 (September 2005): 5235622005 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2005/7703-0001$10.00

All rights reserved.

Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire inBritish Political Thought, 17701900*

Duncan S. A. BellChrists College, Cambridge University

The inventions of science have overcome the great difculties of time and space which were thought to make separation almost anecessity, and we now feel that we can look forward, not to theisolated independence of Englands children, but to their beingunited to one another with the mother-country, in a permanent fam-ily union. (W. E. F ORSTER )1

I. INTRODUCTION : TIME , SPACE , EMPIRE

The British empire is back in vogue. Driven partly by the boom in postcolonialwriting, and partly by the present debate over global political order, it is onceagain a burgeoning eld of historical study. 2 However, there are deleteriousgaps in this revival, most notably in the exploration of imperial politicalthought. While a number of pioneering historians have dissected early modernideologies of empire, the analysis of nineteenth-century British colonial the-ories remains inadequate; moreover, the most impressive studies of Victorianpolitical thought have made the question of overseas dominion tangential tothe exploration of domestic intellectual movements and culture. 3 This is illus-

* I would like to thank the following for their comments and advice on earlier drafts

of this essay: John Burrow, David Cannadine, Nicholas Canny, John Dunn, MichaelFreeden, Istvan Hont, Stuart Jones, Peter Mandler, Peter N. Miller, Maria Neophytou,Andrew Porter, David Reynolds, Casper Sylvest, Moshik Temkin, Richard Tuck, andthe anonymous reviewers for this journal.

1 W. E. Forster, comments made in Imperial Federation: Report of the Conferenceheld July 29, 1884, at the Westminster Palace Hotel (London, 1884), 27.

2 A. G. Hopkins, Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial Past, Past and Present 164 (1999): 198244; The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols.,ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1998 99); and Linda Colley, What Is ImperialHistoryToday? in What Is History Today? ed. David Cannadine (London, 2002), 132 48.

3 On empire, see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cam-bridge, 2000); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500 c. 1850(New Haven, CT, 1995); and Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intel-lectual History of English Colonisation, 15001625 (Cambridge, 2003). For British

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(and desire for) a transatlantic British imperial union. But ultimately it was acluster of later technological innovations that provided the catalyst for thetransformation in political consciousness: some of the most spectacular engi-neering triumphs of the Victorians, most notably the ocean-traversing steamshipand especially the submarine telegraph, precipitated a fundamental restructur-ing of imperial political thought. The communications revolution transformedthe manner in which future political possibilities were (and could be) envi-sioned. Technology impacted not only on the material structures of social andpolitical life but also on the cognitive apprehension of the worldon themodes of interpreting and reacting to the natural environment and the politicalpotential contained therein.

The eighteenth century witnessed the birth pangs of globalization, at leastin the sense that it was recognizednot only by the political economists, who

had long noted the phenomenon, but by the governing classes also that manyof the communities of the world were becoming increasingly interdependent,that actions in one place had far-reaching and often unanticipated effects inanother, and that the whole planet was becoming a single space for economicexchange and political action. Political consciousness was being revolution-ized. This shift in perception was to have a monumental impact on the con-ception of the empire and the later evolution of imperial political thought. TheSeven Years War (175663) had been the rst truly global war, and manycommentators recognized it as such. A further dimension of this new global-izing sensibility lay in the inadvertent transformation, from the 1750s onward,of the spatial scope of moral responsibility by the cold mechanisms of themarket. 10 The spread of global capitalism inculcated altered perceptions of causation in human affairs 11 and an increasing awareness of the multiple and

complex webs of connection spanning the planet. Increasingly, the Britishempire was regarded, at least by some observers, as a semi-integrated political-economic system, and in the years following the crushing victory over Francethe idea of a pan-Atlantic British community bound by the political technologyof virtual representation was frequently proposed. 12 Edmund Burke sug-gested that the Thirteen Colonies and Britain comprised one great nation, with

10 Thomas L. Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,pts. 1 and 2, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 33961, 54766. See also thedebate over this issue in Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992).

11 Haskell, Capitalism, pt. 1, 342.12 On the competing visions of empire during this period, see H. V. Bowen, British

Conceptions of Global Empire, 175683, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 127; and P. J. Marshall, Britain and the World in the EighteenthCentury: IV, The Turning Outwards of Britain, Transactions of the Royal HistoricalSociety, ser. 6, 11 (2001): 115.



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Dissolving Distance 527

America branded that most growing branch, while Arthur Young argued in1772 that the American colonists and those residing in the home islands con-stituted one nation, united under one sovereign. 13 There were also numerousproposals for parliamentary representation of the colonists. The period saw thearticulation of a powerful, albeit minority, discourse of transatlantic Britishidentity, stressing the commonality of legal and political traditions and in par-ticular the centrality of constitutional liberty. 14 However, theorists of economicintegration and the diffusion of (limited) political rights continually ran intothe difculties presented by the vast distances separating the component com-munities of the (settler) empire. Indeed, it was Burke, as we shall see, whowas the most eloquent theorist of the spatial limitations imprinted by nature.The practical problem was so acute that, as Ian Steele has argued, the Britishgovernment struggled to spread the message of military cessation and had

difculty controlling the transition between war and peace throughout the At-lantic world. 15

The era stretching from the middle of the eighteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth, then, saw an increasing sensitivity to the pervasiveness of global interconnections. Many of the key idioms of political theory were alsoin a state of ux. For our present purposes, the most signicant transitionrelated to the understanding of federalism. The tortuous debate over the newAmerican constitution saw the emergence of the idea, so prominent in TheFederalist (178788), of a national federal state. Confederation had, in post-Renaissance political thought, been regarded as a weak form of governance,prone to instability; this new mode of national federation, in practice as muchas in theory, promised something different. 16 This vision was to be of central

13 Edmund Burke, Speech at Bristol Previous to Election (1780), in The Writingsand Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. W. M. Elofson with John A. Woods (Oxford, 1981),3:464; Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 1.

14 See esp. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development inthe Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 16071788 (Athens,GA, 1986); and Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture inthe Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). However, it should beremembered that during the course of much of the century, Britons displayed a highdegree of indifference to the colonies: Jacob M. Price, Who Cared about the Colonies?The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British Society and Politics, circa 1714 1775,in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Ber-nard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 395437.

15 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 16751740: An Exploration of Communica-

tion and Community (New York, 1986).16 On shifts in the language of federalism, see the comments in J. G. A. Pocock,States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspec-tive, in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock



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importance to the later British imperial federalists, who drew repeatedly onthe example of America. These general shifts in material conditions and po-litical imagination acted as a generative backdrop for the mid- and latenineteenth-century transformation in the understanding of the geographicallimitations of statehood. They created an intellectual and political environmentin which such theoretical innovations could emerge and ourish.

What was novel in the late Victorian era was the belief in the possibility of a single global (federal) state ruling over a homogeneous worldwide nation.This required as its condition of possibility the belief that distance had beendissolved, that the world had shrunk to a manageable size. Before about 1870a global polity was never considered as a feasible political option, barely g-uring in argument; afterward, it became a common demand. John EdwardJenkins, a radical Australian and a keen advocate of federation, observed in

an inuential 1871 essay: It is likely that I shall be met with the familiarsneer that I have dreamed a magnicent dream. 17 And yet, he continued, thedream could nally be translated into reality with the necessary political will,for the world had changed irrevocably and along with it the manner in whichempire and state could be envisaged. Many others were to share his dream.

As with the question of the necessity (if not the purpose) of imperial fed-eration itself, views on the nature of distance transcended party political andtheological divisions between individuals; rather, what mattered was their rela-tive optimism concerning the present and future opportunities engendered bynew scientic developments. This was as much a matter of sensibility, and of imagination, as of partisan political conviction. But the reaction to technolog-ical change was not unequivocal: at every stage there were dissenters, skeptics,critics. Technology may inuence the broad outlines of political-economic

developmentit may even occasionally shape it by establishing the bound-aries within which certain modes of existence or political forms are consideredwidely plausible and desirablebut it does not fully determine it. Nor doesit propel it in a unilinear direction. The technological shift was a necessarybut not sufcient condition for the imagining of a global state. The conditionsof sufciency were provided by the well-known permutation of social, cultural,and political ruptures that transformed Britain during the nineteenth century,by the shifting patterns of European and international trade and politics, andby the rise of democracy and fear of domestic unrest. In this article, though, Iam concerned primarily with the preconditions that allowed for the recasting

(Lawrence, KS, 1988), 5578; Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, ModernWorld: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 17761814 (Madison, WI, 1993).

17 [John Edward Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, Contemporary Review 16 (1871):185.



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of political thought rather than the specic developments that triggered ordirected it. 18

Although the role of technology in the practices of imperialism has receivedconsiderable attention from scholars, its impact on imperial political thoughthas been largely overlooked. 19 Historians have focused traditionally on therelationship between technology and the economic or administrative aspectsof imperial governance (and often expansion). Lewis Pyenson, characteristi-cally, suggests that it is essential to concentrate on how science has been usedto further the overseas political goals of imperial nations in their colonies andspheres of inuence. 20 What this mode of analysis neglects is the fundamentalprior effect that the shifting perception of the plasticity of nature, of the worlditself, had on the political imagination; it is the cognitive apprehension of political possibilities that is sidelined in the focus on efciency and adminis-

tration. Technological change was not important simply because it helped tomeet imperial goals but because it reshaped the very identity and directionof the goals themselves. Political theorists, meanwhile, have tended to gen-eralize about the indispensable function of technology in the constitution andlegitimation of modernity, the manner in which technical rationality and theimmanent drive to master nature have stripped humans of their individualityand freedom of action. 21 While this argument may be plausible at a rareed

18 I explore these political issues in detail in Bell, Building Greater Britain, chap. 1.19 For example, neither the most comprehensive account of imperial federation nor

the most recent exposition of the idea of Greater Britain give technological change asufciently prominent place. See Cheng, Schemes ; and Andrew Thompson, Imperial

Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 18801932 (London, 2000), chap. 1.20 Lewis Pyenson, Science and Imperialism, in Companion to the History of Mod-ern Science, ed. R. C. Olby et al. (London, 1996), 928. This perspective pervades thework of Daniel Headrick, the most prolic writer on empire and technology: DanielHeadrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nine-teenth Century (New York, 1981), The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer inthe Age of Imperialism, 18501940 (Oxford, 1988), and The Invisible Weapon: Tele-communications and International Politics, 18511945 (Oxford, 1991). For a moreexpansive conception of the role of science, see Richard Drayton, Science and theEuropean Empires, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 23 (1995): 503-11; and also the essays in Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise,ed. Roy Macleod, special issue, Osiris, 2nd ser., 15 (2000). None of these recent in-terventions specically engage the topics under discussion in this article.

21 Robert B. Pippin, Technology as Ideology: Prospects, in his Idealism as Modern-ism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997), 185233; Langdon Winner, AutonomousTechnology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA,1977); and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialecticof Enlightenment (London,[1944] 1997).



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level of abstraction, it does not help to disentangle and situate the often con-tradictory conceptions of the limits placed by natureand challenged by tech-nology on the boundaries of political association during the modern era. Thisproblem is brought into sharp relief in the analysis of the transformation of nineteenth-century imperial discourse.

This article is structured as follows. In the following section I outline theessential role of distance in the conception of political communities; subse-quently, I chart the way in which questions of scale helped to shape the natureof the fraught arguments over the American colonies following the SevenYears War. This debate foreshadowed the concerns of the later empire fed-eralists, and some of the foremost thinkers involved in the dispute, notablyAdam Smith and Edmund Burke, were called upon routinely as authoritativevoices throughout the subsequent decades; they set the tone as well as the

terms for much nineteenth-century theorizing. Moreover, at least one of theircontemporaries, Richard Price, pregured the later debate over federationproper. Section III charts developments in the subsequent decades. It arguesthat debate over the constitutional conguration of the settler empire droppedout of view until the 1820s, but nonetheless this period witnessed a series of material and conceptual transformations that provided the backdrop for theresurgence of imperial debate in the middle decades of the century. It thensketches the diverse ways in which midcentury thinkers wrestled with ques-tions of colonial governance and suggests that the positions that they assumed,as well as the general drift of policy itself, were often related directly to dif-fering conceptions of the present and future impact of technology. In the nalsection I explore the role of technological projections in the imperial discourseof the last thirty years of the century, illustrating how the imperial federalist

vision had moved from the extremes of political argument to the center, andhow its panegyrists adopted new forms and deployed novel vocabularies toenvisage the globe. This discursive shift followed from a wildly optimisticinterpretation of science and technology as agents capable of ameliorating theproblems that distance posed to community.

II. THE ETERNAL LAW : EMPIRE , GOVERNANCE , AND THEVICISSITUDES OF DISTANCE

Spatiality is an often overlooked, yet central, theme in the history of politicalthought. The obstacles embodied in particular congurations of time andphysical spaceand in particular the relative difculty taken to traverse or,perhaps more importantly, communicate across great distances have pre-

sented a recurring problem for the political imagination. 22 At the dawn of

22 One of the most useful accounts of the role of distance in political practice is



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Western philosophical reection, Aristotle wrote in the Politics that the idealsize of the polis was attained only when the number of citizens encompassedby it was capable of self-sufciency ( autarkia ) while still living within an areacapable of being kept under surveillance. 23 Likewise, what J. G. A. Pocock labels the politics of extent has played a constitutive role in the evolutionof and debate over republican conceptions of politics. 24 Traditionally, onlysmall republics were considered feasible, until Montesquieu suggested that aconfederation (a republique federative ) could provide a potential answer to theproblem of scale, a solution reiterated (and extensively recongured) to mo-mentous effect in The Federalist. 25 Modern globalization discourse implicitlyplaces concerns about scale center stage, and breathless paeans to the collapseof space and time, and even the end of geography, in the age of the satelliteand the World Wide Web are frequent. 26 As emphasized below, even the lan-

guage of contemporary globalization, replete with claims of radical novelty,often simply replicates the way in which the Victorians articulated their un-derstanding of global dynamics.

There are various reasons why distance has been thought to present prob-lems for the identity of political communities, and a number of them are evi-dent in the arguments explored in this article. Some refer simply to adminis-trative reach. In the days before efcient state agencies existed, it was oftenextremely difcult for a central political body to maintain control over theoutlying districts of its territory; the greater the distances involved, the greaterthe problems. However, as we shall see, there was a further set of assumptionsabout the nature of political communities and the preconditions for statehoodthat underlay the imperial federation debates, and they played a pivotal though

Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australias History(Melbourne, 1977).23 Aristotle, Politics 1326b11, trans. T. Sinclair, rev. T. J. Saunders (Harmondsworth,

1981), 405. Earlier, Plato ( Laws 737e ff.) had advocated an even more specic idealsize for the community, which was to be composed of 5,040 citizen farmers, in additionto their families, slaves, and some resident aliens. The idea of the necessarily bounded,self-contained political community also played an important role in the political thoughtof early modern Europe, and it continues to do so. See also Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, chaps. 1 and 2.

24 J. G. A. Pocock, The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom: The William Jovanovich Lecture at Colorado College, October 14, 1987 (Colorado Springs, 1987).

25 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M.Cohler (Cambridge, 1989), bk. 9, 13138; and Publius (James Madison), Letters 10(November 22, 1787) and 51 (February 6, 1788), in The Federalist, with the Letters of Brutus, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge, 2003), 4046, 25155. For another potential

solution, see David Hume, The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, in his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 51233.26 See David Held et al., eds., The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge,

2001), esp. the essays by David Harvey and Manuel Castells.



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often subterranean role in the arguments over a global polity. The conceptualpresupposition shared by both the allies and adversaries of federation wasstraightforward: a durable polity required a high degree of social, cultural, andpolitical homogeneity. 27 This was an idiom central to political thought fromthe seventeenth century onward, and it retained its power in the nineteenthcentury; as Alexis de Tocqueville had written in Democracy in America (1835),A certain uniformity of civilization is not less necessary to the durability of a confederation, than a uniformity of interests in the States which composeit. 28 Distance, so the critics of imperial federation claimed, rendered suchhomogeneity void or only partial. For them, distance was a continuing threatto the identity and bonds of citizenship, for the necessary complex of sharedvalues, ideals, and, in a Victorian idiom, individual and national characterwere all too often dissolved by detachment from the mother country. The

proponents of a global polity believed instead that distance had been dissolvedthrough a technological revolution.Debate over the feasibility (and indeed desirability) of a federal Greater

Britain during the late Victorian age should be understood as an echo, albeita highly distorted one, of an intricate series of arguments that raged a centuryearlier. Following the Treaty of Paris (1763), which attempted to draw a veilover the bloody Seven Years War, there was a heated, largely futile intellectualskirmish over the manner in which the empire was to be governed. The warhad seen the size and nature of the empire transformed dramatically, and thischallenged the previously dominant mercantile notion of the maritime, com-mercial colonial system, which stressed the importance of the colonies forwealth generation and which understood wealth generation itself as the key tosecurity in an increasingly competitive world. 29 The inherent tension between

the traditional metropolitan-centered understanding of communityand nationalinterest, on the one hand, and the embryonic, devolved, and increasingly in-dividualistic conception of liberty and rights propounded by the disaffectedcolonists, on the other, led ultimately to the dissolution of the bond betweenBritain and its American territories. 30 It was a debate whose contours, dynam-ics, and outcome were to resonate powerfully over the coming century.

27 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861), is thebest-known Victorian articulation of this view. Therewere of courseexceptions,notablyLord Acton, Nationality, in the Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears(Indianapolis, 1985), 1:40939.

28 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London,[1835] 1862), 1:188.

29

See Malachi Postlethwayt, Great Britains True System (Farnborough, [1757]1968); and also the comments in Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Com- petition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), andPagden, Lords of All the World, chap. 7.

30 Peter Miller, Dening the Common Good: Empire, Religion, and Philosophy in



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In order for the full complexity of the debate to be grasped, it needs to beunderstood in the context of a series of arguments revolving around the scopeof individual reason and common interest, the limits of religious toleration,the meaning and practice of political representation, and so forth. For ourpresent purposes, however, it is useful to isolate one of the key elements,namely, the role that distance played in theorizing the most suitable form of connection. This was a matter of great importance, upon which Thomas Painehad commented plaintively that even the distance at which the Almighty hathplaced England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authorityof one over the other, was never the design of Heaven. 31

Adam Smith, whom his friend David Hume described as being very zeal-ous in American affairs, 32 considered the colonial system both economicallyand morally unjustiable. He argued that the colonies had thrived despite them-

selves, that their wealth developed in spite of their being colonies, not becauseof it. One of the crucial reasons for their success was distance, which allowedthem to escape the chains of domination to a degree unimaginable in pastempires. In the plenty of good land, the European colonies established inAmerica and the West Indies resemble, and even greatly surpass, those of antient Greece. In their dependency upon the mother state, they resemble thoseof antient Rome; but their great distance from Europe has in all of them al-leviated more or less the effects of this dependency. Their situation has placedthem less in the power of their mother country. 33 The problems of commu-nication and political administration between Europe and the immensely re-mote 34 American and West Indian colonies allowed the colonists greater in-dependence than had traditionally been the case, and this distanceconsequentlyspawned healthier conditions for wealth generation. Nevertheless, Smith re-

Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994). On the intellectual history of the rev-olution, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cam-bridge, MA, 1967); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Po-litical Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975).

31 Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth,1986), 87.

32 David Hume to Adam Smith, February 8, 1776 (Letter 149), in The Correspon-dence of Adam Smith, ed. E. Campbell Mossner and I. Simpson Ross (Oxford, 1977),186. Hume was a critic of the war and of the empire in general: David Hume, Of theBalance of Power, in Essays, 339, 340. Hume also comments on the problems of governance over distance on p. 341.

33 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.W. B. Todd (Oxford, 1976), bk. 4, chap. 7, 567 (and 568 71 ff.). Cf. Steele, TheEnglish Atlantic. Emma Rothschild also notes the weight placed on questions of distance in

Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Prov-inces, Modern Intellectual History 1 (2004): 6, 13, 1516.34 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 559. Smith also noted the problems engendered by

governance over distance in a letter to John Sinclair of Ulbster, October 14, 1782 (Letter221), in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, 262.



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mained skeptical of the economic and (interwoven with this) moral utility of the colonial system. Although the British colonies enjoyed greater liberties,both civil and commercial, than those of the other European powers and theAntients, Smith argued, they nevertheless embodied a manifest violationof the most sacred rights of mankind. 35 Moreover, their mercantile tradingsystem distorted the British economy dangerously, exposing it to potentialdestruction. 36

Overall, folly and injustice marked European colonial policy, Smith con-cluded, and ideally the whole system should be abolished. This would not leadto great economic losses in the long run, as the colonial advocates claimed,for the natural affection between the colony and the mother country wouldquickly revive, and the two nations could develop an extensive and pros-perous relationship, based on free trade and friendly sentiment. 37 However, the

pride of nations would not allow them to advocate such a radical policy of separation, and Smith therefore proffered some recommendations for modi-fying the existing administrative structures of the empire. 38 He argued that itwas essential for the colonists to help pay for the defense and administrationof the colonies; however, in a discussion over the manner in which the levelsof taxation were to be decided upon and the monies raised, he noted the geo-graphical impossibility of coordinating this process across such a large andfragmented political system. The distance of the colony assemblies from theeye of the sovereign, their number, their dispersed situations and their variousconstitutions would render it very difcult to manage them in the same manner,even though the sovereign had the same means of doing it. 39 Once again, thesheer size of the empire precluded it from operating as a unied polity should.Moreover, the fact that there was no sentimental bond between the various

colonists (itself primarily a function of distance) indeed, that they werestrangers to one another 40 made it highly unlikely that such a dispersed

35 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 582.36 See esp. ibid., 60617.37 Ibid., 617. In an unpublished document, Smith presented an incisive analysis of

his view on the war with the Americans. He included the suggestion that, assumingthe war led to the dissolution of the colonial bond, and in the event that natural affec-tions did not revive quickly enough, it might be benecial to hand Canada over to theFrench and Florida to the Spanish, so as to surround the Americans with potentialenemies and thus force them into alliance with their old rulers. See Smiths Thoughtson the State of the Contest with America, February 1778, ed. David Stevens, in TheCorrespondence of Adam Smith, 37785. This plan had also occurred to Samuel John-son, Taxation no Tyranny, in The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. D. Greene (NewHaven,

CT, 1958), 10:451.38 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 61617; cf. ibid., chap. 5, sec. 3, 94647.39 Ibid., 619.40 Ibid., 622.



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mode of governance could ever work. As a result, Smith argued that Londonmust be the focus of decision making, and it was thus necessary to have thecolonies represented in parliament. Drawing on the example of the Dutchconfederation, he proposed the union of Great Britain with her colonies, 41 averitable United States of Britain. He believed, in other words, that a form of constitutional federal union 42 cemented with American political representa-tion would be the most suitable compromise solution to the crisis. While hewas aware that the Americans would still regard distance from the seat of government as a problem, he did not think that this predicament would endure,for as the population of the United States grew, so would the size of its rep-resentation, and the seat of power would shift across the Atlantic. 43 Writingover a century later, J. Shield Nicholson, professor of political economy at theUniversity of Edinburgh, claimed that Smith had formulated the most denite

and most practicable scheme ever yet published of Imperial Federation.44

Atthe time, however, it seemed far from practicable, and Smith remained under-standably pessimistic about the possibilities of such a solution being acceptedwidely. Unfortunately . . . the plan of constitutional union with our coloniesand of American representations seems not to be agreeable to any considerableparty of men in Great Britain. The plan, which, if it could be executed, wouldcertainly tend most to the prosperity, to the splendour, and to the duration of the empire, if you except here and there a solitary philosopher like myself,seems scarce to have a single advocate. 45

While Smiths ideas certainly suggest a form of constitutional union, theycannot be seen as promoting the idea of an intercontinental British state pred-icated on strong and resilient communal bonds. Indeed, the logic of Smithsargument is that such an entity would be impossible, owing to the fact that the

diffused nature of the empire rendered its members as strangers to one an-

41 Ibid., 624.42 Smith, State of the Contest with America, 383.43 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 62526. Note, however, that this did not mean the

British parliament itself would migrate across the Atlantic but rather the body respon-sible for coordinating the united states, the assembly which inspects and superin-tends the affairs of the whole empire (620).

44 J. Shield Nicholson, Tariffs and International Commerce, in Britannic Confed-eration: A Series of Papers . . . Reprinted from the Scottish Geographical Magazine,ed. A. S. White (London, 1892), 122.

45 Smith, State of the Contest with America, 382. As J. G. A. Pocock has noted,apart from a few Scots who remembered Andrew Fletcher, there was no language of

confederation/federation available to British political thinkers at the time; J. G. A.Pocock, Political Theory in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 17701790: (2) Empire,Revolution, and the End of Early Modernity, in Varieties of British Political Thought,15001800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1993), 296.



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other. Smith sought colonial representation in order to generate taxation, andhe had no desire to forge an ocean-straddling Greater British polity. Smith,however, was not a lone voice in the wilderness; there were other solitaryphilosophers arguing for radical solutions. Thomas Pownall advocated ascheme of American parliamentary representation, at least in the early editionsof The Administration of the Colonies (176477), arguing that the coloniesand Britain were bound by a common commercial interest and that togetherthey formed a grand marine dominion. 46 The colonies were to be self-governing entities within the British imperium. 47 Following a different line of reasoning, Lord Kames, in his Sketches of the History of Mankind (1774),suggested a consolidating union similar to that which had linked Scotlandand England in 1707. 48 These were very ambitious schemes, sketching theghostly outline of an incipient transoceanic (though not planetary) polity, but

they were also marginal as much signs of desperation at the loss of Britishprestige as of plausible propositions for government policyand Smith hadbeen correct to claim that those in favor of American representation, let aloneanything more radical, occupied a sparsely populated and deeply unpopularank on the spectrum of opinion. 49 The period in which the globe haltinglycame to be seen as a single space forpolitical action witnessed thepropoundingof a number of schemes for polities stretching across great distances; but space

46 Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1864), 6. Pownalladvocated American representation in the six editions of his Administration publishedbetween 1764 and 1777, but in a speech in the House of Commons on December 1778he changed his position, advocating instead American independence. For details of thisswitch, see David Stevens, introduction to app. B, Correspondence of Adam Smith,

37980. See also G. H. Guttridge, Thomas Pownalls The Administration of the Col-onies: The Six Editions, William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 3146; and Miller, Dening the Common Good, 21113, 23538.

47 Later, in Thomas Pownall, A Memorial Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereignsof Europe (London, 1780), Pownall advocated a loose confederationa Leagueconsisting of Britain, the United States, and the (potentially) independent states of LatinAmerica.

48 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh, 1774),2:iv. On consolidation, see John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: PoliticalThought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995). See also Kendle, Federal Britain, chap. 1.

49 The prevailing government position was that the colonists did not deserve specialtreatment, that they should make do with virtual representation, whereby they wererepresented by MPs elected from other districts who were to speak on behalf of thecountry as a whole. See H. T. Dickinson, Britains Imperial Sovereignty: The Ideo-

logical Case against the American Colonists, in Britain and the American Revolution,ed. H. T. Dickinson (London, 1998), 6497; and Paul Langford, Property and VirtualRepresentation in Eighteenth-Century England, Historical Journal 31 (1988): 83115.



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itself was still seen by most, if not all, as a serious and perhaps permanentimpediment to such grandiose ambitions.

Richard Price, unorthodox minister and the bane of Edmund Burke, advo-cated a political project that, while also confederal in form, was considerablymore radical than that of Smith and the proponents of American representation.Price launched a forceful assault on the prevailing conception of governanceand representation, and in so doing he developed a position that foreshadowed,albeit in an anemic form, the later idea of a federal Greater Britain. However,his visionary scheme was not (and could not have been) considered plausiblegiven the prevailing conception of nature and the tyranny of distance, andit sank without trace. In his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty(1776), he dened impediments to civil liberty as any will distinct from thatof the majority of a community which claims a power in making laws for it

and disposing of its property.50

He continued, It is an immediate and nec-essary inuence that no one community can have any power over the propertyor legislation of another community which is not incorporated with it by a justand fair representation. If the community was notgoverned by its ownpopularwill, manifested in the practice of direct political representation, it languishedin a state of slavery. 51 As a potential solution to this dilemma, Price rec-ommended establishing a senate, or body of delegates, such as he had earlierdescribed as appropriate for the peaceful governance of Europe. 52 Thus heshifted the locus of power, in certain senses, away from a recongured parlia-ment in Westminster, as the proponents of colonial representation were de-manding, and to a superordinate body. In his discussion of European politics,he had suggested, drawing on a common line of reasoning, that rather thanhaving one country dominate all the others and in the process destroy civil

liberty, it was advisable to let every state, with respect to all its internalconcerns, be continued independent of all the rest, and let a general confed-eracy be formed by the appointment of a senate consisting of representativesfrom all the different states. 53 In both Europe and the wide reaches of theBritish empire, such a senate would ideally possess the power of managingall the common concerns of the united states, acting as a common arbiter orumpire in disputes between clashing interests. In order to carry out such a

50 Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), in his Po-litical Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge, 1991), 23. Such liberty was to be seenas a blessing, truly sacred and invaluable (23). For Price, perfect civil liberty wasonly possible in small communities; larger ones had to rely for their protection onrepresentation, and this led to great problems in America and Britain.

51

Price, Observations, 30. See also Richard Price, Additional Observations, inPolitical Writings, 78, 93.52 Price, Observations, 25.53 Ibid.



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monumental task, it would have under its direction the common force of thestates to support its decision. The result would be an empire of freemen,not an empire of slaves. 54 Here, in a passage commonly overlooked, we ndan embryonic model of the supra-parliamentary federal idealthough notreally of a federal statepenned almost a century before historians begin theirnarratives about the development of this form of theorizing. 55

The most powerful, eloquent voice railing against the doctrine of colonialrepresentation was that of Burke. Burke wished to retain the empire, but hewas skeptical of the practicability or desirability of closer political union withthe colonists: better relations with the Americans were imperative, but theconstitutional structures did not need radical overhaul. In an essay written inresponse to a pamphlet on the Present State of the Nation (1769), he wroteof his interlocutor, William Knox: It costs him nothing to ght with nature,

and to conquer the order of Providence, which manifestly opposes itself to thepossibility of such a Parliamentary Union. 56 And, expressing his contempt forthe argument with his customary biting sarcasm, Burke proceeded to observethat it looks like the author has dropped from the moon, without any knowl-edge of the general nature of this globe, of the general nature of its inhabitants,without the least acquaintance with the affairs of this country. 57 As the threatof war hung like a darkening cloud over the intellectual battleeld, and asdesperation for a pacic settlement grew perceptibly, Burke presented what isprobably the clearest articulation of the recurrent problem of governance overdistance, when, in his great speech to the House of Commons in March 1775,he stated: Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. Nocontrivance can prevent the effects of this distance in weakening government.Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution, and the want

of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system.58

As a result of this conspiratorial concatenation of time and space, In large

54 Ibid., 3435.55 An early example is George B. Adams, who argued that credit for the rst federal

idea should belong to Edward Jenkins (Imperial Federalism). See George B. Adams,The Rise of Imperial Federalism, Annual Report of the American History Association(1894), 26; and also William Roy Smith, British Imperial Federation, Political Sci-ence Quarterly 36 (1921): 284.

56 Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication Intitled The Present State of the Nation (1769), in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1889),1:376. On Burkes international thought, see David Armitage, Edmund Burke andReason of State, Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 61734.

57 Burke, Observations on a Late Publication, 376. See also Edmund Burke, To

the British Colonists in North America, in Burkes Speeches and Writings on American Affairs, ed. Hugh Law (London, 1908), 180.58 Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with the Colonies, in his Speeches and Writings

on American Affairs, 95. See also Paine, Common Sense, 67.



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bodies, the circulation of powermustbe less vigorous at the extremities.Naturehas said it. . . . This is the immutable condition, the eternal law, of detachedempire. 59 And what nature has decreed, mere human reason and ingenuitycannot undo.

Jeremy Bentham was also deeply skeptical about the possibility of govern-ing colonies over great distances. 60 He highlighted, in writings produced be-tween the 1790s and the 1820s, the absurdity of attempting to govern effec-tively over vast expanses of space, going so far as to compare the difcultiesthat Spain faced ruling over its colonial possessions with those of governingthe moon: It has its Peninsular part and its Ultramarian part! It has its earthlypart: it has its lunar part. 61 Bentham was opposed to the colonies for a batteryof reasons. In regard to distance, he sketched two main lines of argument.First, he presented a political-economic case, wherein distance increased the

cost of war, especially through the maintenance and provisioning of an ex-pensive navy; the burden on the state was not, in a nal utilitarian calculus,worth this amount of expenditure and danger. 62 Second, he reiterated the fa-miliar argument that distance rendered the rulers insensitive to the needs andwants of the colonial populations: employing a phrase also used by Smith, hestressed that it was impossible to understand adequately the life of strangers.Exercised by imported strangers, subordinate power exercises itself by actsof oppression: or at any rate, what to this purpose comes to the same thing, isthought to do so. . . . Before one grievance, with its discontent, has reachedtheir ears, another grievance, with accumulating on both sides, till patience islost on both sides. 63 All of these negative arguments were to be repeated inthe following decades and can be heard resonating throughout nineteenth-century discussions of the role of distance in deciding the status of the colonial

empire.

59 Burke, On Conciliation, 96. Burke, rather than following the logic of his argu-ment by suggesting that imperial governance was therefore untenable, insisted on treat-ing the colonies more gently instead of demanding too much from them. This ratherweak argument was lampooned mercilessly by Josiah Tucker, among others, in his Letter to Edmund Burke (Gloucester, 1775).

60 Note that Bentham tended not to distinguish between the different types of colonythat the British administered. For sagacious advice on Benthams political thought, Iam indebted to Jennifer Pitts. The best account of Benthams views on the colonies isJennifer Pitts, Legislator of the World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies, Po-litical Theory 31 (2003): 200234.

61 Jeremy Bentham, Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria! in Colonies, Commerce and Constitutional Law (ed. Philip Schoeld, 1995), in The Collected Works of Jeremy

Bentham, gen. ed. J. H. Burns and J. R. Dinwiddy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1970), 52. Italics in original.62 Jeremy Bentham, Works, 5:268.63 Jeremy Bentham, Emancipate Your Colonies, Works, 4:409.



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During this periodthe ideological forging of the most powerful state theworld has yet seenthe vagaries of distance assumed a pivotal role in debatesover the nature of governance and the maintenance of colonial ties. Over thecourse of the next century, things were to change drastically, the radical notionof extensive political unions populated by strangers being supplanted by avision of the future in which tightly integrated global communities, the analogsof traditional national communities, were possible, and even necessary. It isthe purpose of the rest of this article to explain how the idea of imperialfederation moved from the extreme reaches of political discourse, as exem-plied in Prices visionary argument, and how the notion of a global statebecame possible.

III. NATURE IN FLUX : IMPERIAL POLITICAL THEORY , CA . 183070

We can remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway;nothing can resist us. (T HOMAS CARLYLE )64

The ow of proposals for recasting colonial constitutional structures decreasedfollowing the dissolution of the Atlantic empire. Indeed, the period betweenthe loss of the Thirteen Colonies and the 1820s is noticeable for its (relative)silence on the matter. The reason for this absence is twofold. First, the re-maining territories were mainly plantations rather than settler colonies, and assuch there was not a particularly sizable or signicant referent for debate.Although it is no longer commonly accepted that this was a period of imperialretrenchment, and, in fact, expansion continued apace, the new acquisitionswere made primarily in India and Africa. In other words, they were not tra-ditional colonies planted by and for British settlers with the intentionof forgingnew self-contained communities. 65 The question of ethnicity was thereforecentral: the British were uninterested in forming closer constitutional unionswith nonwhite populations. Added to this was the effect of the conservativereaction to the revolutionary wars, both in America and in France. The Britishstate focused on ghting the French and on keeping the remaining elementsof its empire from rebelling, as both Ireland and a number of Caribbean Islands

64 Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829), in The Collected Works of ThomasCarlyle (London, 1857), 2:100101.

65 See also Herman Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Colonies and Colonization (London, 1839), 9. On this period, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:The British Empire and the World, 17801830 (London, 1989); Mark Francis, Gov-

ernors and Settlers: Images of Authority in the British Colonies, 18201860 (London,1992); and Eliga H. Gould, The American Revolution in Britains Imperial Identity,in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhaland Roland Quinault (Aldershot, 2000), 2338.



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did, albeit unsuccessfully, in the 1790s. 66 The empire, as Chris Bayly has ar-gued, was conceived increasingly in terms of hierarchy and subordination,rather than, as the American colonists had often viewed it, as an empire of liberty. An aristocratic and soldierly ethos prevailed, and the idea of incor-porating the empire into the sacred realm of Britain was anathema to the temperof the times. 67 As Sir George Cornewall Lewis wrote in 1841, Since the closeof the American War, it has not been the policy of England to vest any por-tion of the legislative power of the subordinate government of a dependencyin a body of elected inhabitants. 68 Attention focused instead on whether theempire should exist at alla topic that engaged Bentham, James Mill, andthe political economistsor, for the more numerous group that believed inthe empires continued utility, on strengthening the authority of the Britishin the plantation and conquest territories. Second, it was generally believed

that one of the most important lessons of the collapse of the American colonialsystem was the fact that it was impossible to generate and sustain strong com-munal bonds over great distances. The notion of a global imperial politydropped below the horizon.

It was only in the 1820s that the issue of the imperial constitutional orderbegan to return to the forefront of mainstream British political debate. In thewake of the Napoleonic Wars, with increasing numbers of emigrants populat-ing (and expanding) the settler colonies and with radical constitutionalreformsbeing debated in the Commons, the question of the status of the colonies wasreignited. 69 The relationship between the sheer vastness of the globe and co-lonial governance remained a topic bubbling beneath the surface of debate,dening the scope of the political imagination: it was to play a formative rolein midcentury imperial discourse. Once again, this topic has been sidelined in

the historiography of the British empire. Unlike the time of the debates pre-ceding the American revolution, in the period following the Napoleonic warsthe actual perception of the globe and of the limits imposed by nature wasmore complex, more contested, and opinion was split over whether distance

66 Michael Duffy, War, Revolution and the British Empire, in The French Revo-lution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge, 1991), 11845.

67 C. A. Bayly, The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 17601830, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (1998): 2842.

68 Sir George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (Lon-don, 1841), 160.

69 On the empire, reform, and the unsuccessful clamor for parliamentary represen-tation, see Miles Taylor, Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act

Revisited, in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 17801850, ed. Arthur Burnsand Joanna Innes (Cambridge, 2003), 293312, and Colonial Representation at West-minster, c. 180065, in Parliaments, Nations, and Identities in Britain and Ireland,16601850, ed. Julian Hoppitt (London, 2003), 20619.



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was forever going to present a barrier to forging closer emotional and politicalties with remote colonial outposts. For some commentators, particularly thosewith an eye xed resolutely on the future, the nascent steamship technologyled to a reevaluation of Burkes purportedly unassailable eternal law, andconsequently to a recalibration of the vicissitudes of distance. Immutable na-ture was here under unrelenting attack. However, for the majority of imperialtheorists, distance remained a salient obstacle to constitutional and communalintegration, and other forms of rule had to be developed, most notably colonialself-government. Indeed, I would argue that given the then dominant belief in the impossibility of adequate governance over large distances, the devel-opment of the doctrine of colonial responsible government was the onlyfeasible ideological position for those who wanted to retain and strengthen theempire: power had to be (partially) devolved, because it was as yet impossible

to do anything else with it.70

The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a com-prehensive technological revolution, encompassing communications, materials,armaments, and medicine. 71 This was to have a deep impact on all dimensionsof human thought and action. The results were monumental but multifaceted.Nietzsche viewed the modern world as characterized by hubris toward thenatural realm, and he despaired of our rape of naturewith thehelp of machinesand the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers. 72

Thomas Carlyle, in a more ambiguous vein, intoned that we war with rudeNature and, by our restless engines, come off always victorious, and loadedwith spoils. 73 Carlyles threnody to a preindustrial, Arcadian past was issuedoriginally as a challenge to the obsession with trying to wrest the control of nature from the hands of God. 74 This epic undertaking was both an intellectual

70 The role of distance in determining midcentury policy was clear to later Victorianobservers; as Admiral Sir John Colomb wrote in 1892, It was geographical position[i.e., distance] that lay at the root of the developments [i.e., self-government] that havetaken place. Admiral Sir John Colomb, A Survey of Existing Conditions, in White,ed., Britannic Confederation, 6.

71 David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientic World-View in the NineteenthCentury (Oxford, 1986); Bernard Lightman, ed., VictorianScience in Context (Chicago,1997); and Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientic Culture: Science,Art, and Societyin the Victorian Age (Madison, WI, 1989). On its cultural effects, see Stephen Kern,The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983).

72 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge, 1994), 86.

73 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1896), 2:60,

quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 213.74 Carlyle, whose recognition of the heroic grandeur of the task resonated with what

John Burrow calls his sensibility of the apocalyptic sublime, was one of the many



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strengthen the empire understood that it was essential to modify the nature of the bond between the settler colonies and London. Colonial resentment atBritish heavy-handedness was reaching critical levels, and the Canadian up-rising (1837) proved to be both warning and catalyst for change. The Britishreacted, often grudgingly, by granting increased autonomy to the colonies.Gladstone, a zealous enthusiast of imperial reform, claimed that the brazenage (17831840) of excessive and intrusive metropolitan intervention in thesettler empire came to an end and that a new era of colonial politics ensued. 83

Relations with the colonies were reappraisedso much so that he declared,It is now, then, coming to be understood that the affairs of the colonies arebest transacted and provided for by the colonists themselves, as the affairs of Englishmen are best transacted by Englishmen. 84 Of relevance here is thatthe colonial reformers and their critics took it for granted that it was impossible

to form a unied polity encompassing the colonies to which they advocatedsending the emigrants and devolving power. Such bonds barely gure in theiraccounts of the future; instead, given their conception of the problems of gov-ernance over great distances, they searched for alternative political programs.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, later to be chancellor of the exchequer, con-sidered the great impact of distance on imperial affairs in his inuential Essayon the Government of Dependencies (1841). He argued that the primary reasonwhy a power such as Britain needed to form a system of dependencies in therst place (as opposed to imposing direct rule) was distance, for if the landswere not so far away, they could be incorporated fully into the dominion of the superior parliament. 85 He noted that, notwithstanding the facilities forcommunication afforded by the art of modern civilization, the point is soonreached, even in the present time, at which it becomes impossible for the most

powerful community to govern a territory without interposing a subordinategovernment between it and a supreme government. Distance was, after all,the cause which renders it necessary for the supreme government to governit in that form. 86 Meanwhile, in a later discussion of Adam Smiths proposals

for representatives to sit in London during this period was made when Joseph Howeattempted to use the shift from virtual to direct representation that was signaled in thethen forthcoming (1832) Reform Bill to have nineteen of the thirty reallocated seatsgiven to the colonies. This was defeated resoundingly: Hansard, 3d ser., vol. 6 (August16, 1831), cols. 11043.

83 W. E. Gladstone, Our Colonies, an Address Delivered to the Members of the Me-chanics Institute, Chester, on Monday, the 12th November 1855 (London, 1855), 17.See also 1011.

84 Ibid., 20.85

Cornewall Lewis, Government of Dependencies, 183. He here also quotes widelyfrom Burkes speech On Conciliation with the Colonies and draws on the argumentsabout distance therein (this speech is quoted at length, 379400).

86 Ibid., 187.



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for colonial representation in parliament, Cornewall Lewis drew explicitly onBurke in order to try to demolish the veracity of such claims: The mainobjection to the plan (an objection which its author has not noticed) lies in thedistance of the colonies from England. Where a supreme government is pre-vented by distance . . . from communicating rapidly with any of its territories,it is necessary that the distant territory should be governed as a dependency. 87

Despite the continuity of this venerable mode of argument, there were thosewith a more optimistic view of the current state of technology and its impacton the colonial question. Lord Durham, the great hope of Radical reformers,stressed the increasing role of technology in his famous report on the Canadianrebellions. 88 The Durham report contained two main recommendations: rst,that Upper and Lower Canada be reunited, and second, that this new entityshould be granted responsible government. 89 Durham was alive to the im-

portance of distance in his plans, and he was critical of the lack of internalcommunications infrastructure in the vast Canadian territories. 90 Indeed, hewas keen to stress the role that new scientic discoveries could play in hisscheme for uniting both the British and French Canadians and the outlyingprovinces. 91 He was likewise aware of the future possibilities engendered bythe recent success of the great experiment in which the Royal William hadnegotiated the Atlantic, although he did not develop these at any great length. 92

The report appeared at a time when the perception of distance and its rela-tionship to the world was in ux: conicting ideas about the potential forconquering nature, for defeating Burkes eternal law, led to radically dif-ferent conceptions of the future of the empire.

In contradistinction to the views of Cornewall Lewis, G. A. Young wrote,in his defense of the argument for having Canadian representatives sit in Lon-

87 Ibid., 301. Cornewall Lewiss claim about Smith not noticing the dangers of dis-tance in his plan for representation is technically inaccurate (see Smith, State of theContest with America, 382), although he would not have had access to Smiths thenunpublished manuscript.

88 On the report, see Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy (Cambridge,1972). It was regarded during the nineteenth century, however inaccurately, as a keymoment: Oman, England in the Nineteenth Century, 248.

89 Lord Durhams Report on the Affairs of the British North American Colonies, ed.Sir C. P. Lucas (Oxford, [1839] 1912), vol. 2.

90 See, e.g., Lord Durhams Report, 2:204, 213, 31619.91 Indeed, Durham wrote that the great discoveries of modern art, which have,

throughout the world, and nowhere more than in America, entirely altered the characterand channels of communication between distant countries, will bring all the North

American colonies into constant intercourse with each other ( Lord Durhams Report,2:316).92 Ibid. See also app. C, 327, in vol. 3 of the Report, for further comments on the

future role of steam. See also 2:318.



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don, that the objection urged by Mr. Burke to a similar scheme cannot nowbe maintained. The power of steam has bridged the Atlantic, and the lengthand uncertainty of voyages to and from America are already matters of his-tory. 93 However, this was at the time very much a minority view, followingin the wake of the rst Atlantic crossing and long before such feats wereconsidered widely practicable. The debate was split between those who took account of the latest technological developments and then extrapolated theirpotential into a plan for the future and the more cautious majority, who pre-ferred to focus instead on the uncertain present. The specter of Burke stillhaunted, even shaped, the understanding of the political possibilities engen-dered by nature.

For those prepared to scan the horizon of the future, there were signs of radical change to be divined. Herman Merivale, Drummond Professor of Po-

litical Economy at Oxford, provides an illuminating bridge between the dis-integration of the British American empire and the later expansionary period,between empire melancholy and buoyancy. Indeed, his study Colonies and Colonization (1839) embodied both the pessimism of the present and the uto-pianism of the future that dened much nineteenth-century imperial theorizing.In his discussion of the settler colonies, he focused on their potential forgrowth, observing that the only regions that combined the three chief con-ditions of prosperity . . . are those removed from us by half the circumferenceof the globe. And, with our present means of transport, all our improved skilland increased enterprise has not been, nor can be, successful in overcomingthis great obstacle of distance. 94 The costs were simply too high, and, more-over, the tediousness of communication with the mother-country causes muchembarrassment to commerce, produces much disinclination on the part of the

better class of colonists to remove there, and impedes the moral and intellectualadvance of the community. 95 Here we nd an excellent summary of the ar-guments against the possibility of closer political integration, avored by thelessons of recent history. However, Merivale was far from glum, and he notedabruptly and with evident excitement that we are just on the eve of a revo-lution and that the future would be very different from the troubled, insecurepresent. In particular, he emphasized the role that he foresaw for the edglingtechnologies of steam and telegraph. The results of these developments would

93 G. A. Young, The Canadas, British and Foreign Review 8 (1839): 328. Youngthen proceeded to offer a strong criticism of federal political systems, arguing that itwas extremely difcult to draw clear boundaries between respective sovereign powers.

94 Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures, 12. The rather ambiguous chief

conditions of prosperity were room and soil for a rapid increase of population, nat-ural advantages for the production of wealth, and a secure dependence on the mothercountry, at least in the rst stage of their existence (12).

95 Ibid., 12.



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be profound, leading to ever-faster communications and consequently greaterlevels of colonization: The next fty years, therefore, will, in all probability,see a change analogous in character, and more equal in extent, to that whichwas effected in the rst half century after the landings of the Spanish in Amer-ica. 96

In the meantime, however, all that could be done was to wait for the tech-nological means to become available; nature still encroached powerfully intothe political imagination. Writing less than a decade later, two young revolu-tionaries were also taking note of the political impact of technological devel-opments: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all,even the most barbarian nations, into civilization. 97 But for those intent onsecuring the future of the empire, it was still courting ideological unintelligi-

bility to argue for the construction of a homogeneous, centrally administeredfederal state stretching over the face of the earth; the substantive theoreticalpreconditions had not yet been met. Writing just over ten years after Marx andEngels, J. S. Mill was one of the last political thinkers to employ the Burkeanrefrain in an unqualied manner, to resort to the impossibilities presented bythe eternal laws of nature, when he commented in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) that the feelings of equity, and concep-tions of public morality, from which these suggestions [for colonial parlia-mentary representation] emanate, are worthy of all praise; but the suggestionsthemselves are so inconsistent with rational principles of government that it isdoubtful if they have been seriously accepted by any reasonable thinker. Coun-tries separated by half the globe do not present the natural conditions for beingunder one government, or even members of one federation. 98 Two years later,

in The Empire (1863), Goldwin Smith, Regius Professor of Modern Historyat Oxford and a self-professed disciple of Adam Smith, made the great dis-tances separating the British colonial possessions one of the central planks inhis call for colonial emancipation 99 the cutting of formal links betweenBritain and the settler coloniesand in so doing ended up falling in line withBurke, in so many other respects his political nemesis. Adopting a distinctlyBurkean tone, he argued that we need scarcely discuss in detail the possibility

96 Ibid., 16.97 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Gareth

Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth, 2002), 224. See Stedman Joness introduction for alucid discussion of Marx and Engels on globalization.

98 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), in Utilitarianism,

Liberty, and Representative Government, ed. A. D. Lindsay (London, 1910), 379. Seealso Goldwin Smith, The Empire: A Series of Letters Published in The Daily News,1862, 1863 (Oxford, 1863).

99 Smith, The Empire, 85.



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or expediency of summoning from the ends of the earth people who could notbe involved in less than six months, to decide whether England should go towar upon some question affecting herself, and not admitting perhaps an hoursdelay. 100 Consequently, Smith was scathing about schemes for parliamentaryfederation, singling out for criticism the great Scotsmans aforementionedplanand hoping to deter those who might try to resurrect this pernicious line of thought: I fear this is a mere Utopia, having, like many Utopias, its visionaryseat in the past. 101

A generation later, these condent contentions would have been greeted withsurprise, even incredulity. For much had changed by then, and the conventionsof imperial political thought had suddenly lost one of their most prominentand time-honored elements. We thus witness a jagged discontinuity in politicaldiscourse: nature was no longer the immutable, inscrutable foe that had con-

fronted Burke so forcefully. As Carlyle reminds us, it was instead regarded bythe Victorians as something to be conquered, tamed, set to use by humaningenuity and power. Nature was to be mastered, not feared or acquiesced to.And political theory mirrored this Promethean arrogance.

IV. I MPERIAL POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE AGE OF SCIENTIFICUTOPIANISM , CA . 18701900

In these days we can break with Burkes objection, NATURAOPPOSUIT, by merely pointing to what science has done, and re-lying on what we know that it yet will do. (H. R. N ICHOLLS )102

The second half of the nineteenth century was infused by a commanding belief in the power of science and technology to solve the manifold problems of society. 103 This was a time in which the search for a science of society (orpolity) to match the unprecedented advances of the natural sciences was at itspeak, and the rational, scientic method offered a powerful and culturallyauthoritative way of thinking about the governance of the country. 104 It is little

100 Ibid. For his highly critical account of Burkes conception of empire, see GoldwinSmith, The United States: An Outline of Political History, 14921871 (New York,1893), 69.

101 Smith, The Empire, 84.102 H. R. Nicholls, The Prophetic Objections to Federation, Imperial Federation 1

(September 1886): 274.103

Stefan Collini, Political Theory and the Science of Society in Victorian Brit-ain, Historical Journal 23 (1980): 204; and Richard Drayton, Natures Government:Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (London, 2000), chap. 6.

104 Burrow et al., That Noble Science of Politics.



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surprise, therefore, that the notion of innovative technologies shattering pre-vious political certainties found a receptive audience.

Herman Merivale, in an essay published in 1870, set out to survey theimperial scene as the theoretical and policy contours of a new era came slowlyinto focus; once again he serves as a marker between two distinct periods of political debate. He analyzed the prospects for the future of the empire, re-viewing the policy developments of the preceding decades and scrutinizingrecently proffered political solutions. Merivale was by then convinced of theimpossibility of combining the aspirations of colonial self-government withcloser ties between London and the rest of the empire: the belief that a properbalance could be struck between those two ideals had been a mere delu-sion. 105 He struck a melancholy noteone to be heard with increasing fre-quency in the course of the ensuing decadeclaiming that the empire was

tending toward disintegration, and he predicted the gradual dropping off of our greater colonies from their present union. 106

Merivale considered four different arguments about the possibility of rec-onciling provincial liberty with metropolitan authority: colonial representation,which has been familiar to political thinkers ever since our rst Americandissensions a hundred years ago; 107 constitutional reform (a written consti-tution for the empire); the creation of a system of colonial agents, sitting onan advisory council; and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations withthe colonies. He did not consider any of these options practicable. Forexample,in his discussion of parliamentary representatives he argued that such a bodyseems a contradiction in terms. Colonies are separate communities, with sepa-rate every-day interests. They have no common interest as against the mother-countryexcept in those very rare occasions in which the rst principles of

government come into question.108

This was a perceptive comment, and itmay well serve as a suitable epitaph for the whole federal enterprise. However,what is noticeable about this essay, written by one of the most esteemed co-lonial commentators, was that it does not even mention schemes for a globalfederal polity. 109 They had not yet come of age.

During the last three decades of the century, the radically transformed per-ception of distance resulted in the frequent envisioning of the whole world asa stage for political action and institutions and in the shift in language asso-ciated with this revolution. An intercontinental polity only then appeared as a

105 Herman Merivale, The Colonial Question in 1870, Fortnightly Review 7 (1870):156.

106

Ibid., 154.107 Ibid., 164.108 Ibid., 171.109 See the comments in ibid.



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realistic option, and there soon developed a growing sense of condence inthe possibility of constructing a unied planet-spanning political entity.

In one of the most prominent early statements of the supra-parliamentaryfederal ideal, published only a year after Merivales pessimistic stocktakingessay, John Edward Jenkins warned against the insidious dangers that he un-derstood as besetting British policy: At this moment, he wrote, we aredrifting to the disintegration of our Empire. 110 This was to become a commontheme in political argument during the 1870s, as numerous authors employedthe language of crisis. This emotive idiom made possible the claim that radicalchange was imperative. Without it, a grave disaster would befall the countryand the empire. 111 In his impassioned plea for union, Jenkins was aware thathe faced an uphill battle, and consequently he drew on the vocabulary of emergency: the British were drifting to imperial dissolution, and this de-

manded urgent action. Moreover, Jenkins was fully cognizant of the traditionof argument that employed the size of the planet as a bar to such schemes, andhe considered the magnitude of the empire to be an issue worth confrontingdirectly: A solitary difculty, like the pillar of salt, stands upa sign of retrospective despair, of dead, inane deciency of hope. Distance, enchantressof the far-off view, is looked upon as the intractable witch of confederation. 112

However, Natures eternal law no longer offered the seemingly immutableobstacle that it once did. Action was needed to save the empire, and circum-stances had changed, among them the advent of steam and the telegraph,which have destroyed the obstacles of distance. 113 Jenkins looked with evengreater hope toward the future: It may be said that every year we advancenearer to our dependencies both in time and facility of intercourse. At no verydistant date steam communication with Australia will be so frequent, regular,

and rapid, and the telegraph system so enlarged and cheap, that no practicaldifculty would impede the working of a representative federal govern-

110 [Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 165. Note that, although Merivale mentions thelessening impact of distance, he rather inconsistently adduces Burkes arguments aboutthe impossibility of representation over great distances. Merivale, Colonial Question,15354, 16465.

111 [Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 185; Robert Andrew Mace, On the Crisis of the Empire: Imperial Federation, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 5 (1873):212; and Oscar Boulton, The Crisis of Empire, Imperial Federation 4 (August1889): 18687. For a discussion of the function of crisis in political thought, seeIstvan Hont, The Contemporary Crisis of the Nation-State in Historical Perspective,in his Jealousy of Trade ; and Reinhart Koselleck, Some Questions Regarding theConceptual History of Crisis, in his The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing

History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA, 2002), 236 47.112 [John Edward Jenkins], An Imperial Confederation, Contemporary Review 17(1871): 78.

113 [Jenkins], Imperial Federalism, 179.



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ment. 114 Here then was the creed of a Greater British state, once a dream,now a plausible ideological proposition. This was to be both a constant refrainand a powerful rallying cry throughout the next two decades, as the concertedattempt to weld the dream into reality was embarked upon by the federaladvocates. Federation became a clarion call against the tides of history, anattempt to short-circuit the apparently eternal rise and fall of empires and toensure that the colonies were permanently welded together. 115

A further important contributor to the shift in the terms of debate was theLiberal statesman W. E. Forster. In Our Colonial Empire, an address deliv-ered on the future of the empire in 1875, Forster employed a number of themescommon to political discourse during the decade. 116 First, in his opening re-marks he was quick to point

esp technology, space, and empire

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