Race and Imperial Democracy on the British Left, c. 1885–1914

Abstract

This thesis investigates the entanglements between democracy and empire in British progressive thought between c. 1885 and 1914. It focuses on three prominent ‘new liberal’ thinkers who were preoccupied with theorising the relationship between metropolitan democracy and imperial hierarchy: John A. Hobson, Leonard T. Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas. In this thesis, I advance two main arguments. First, I argue that these thinkers ought to be interpreted as imperial democrats, in the sense that they saw imperial hierarchy as necessary for the progress of metropolitan democracy. While they also saw the relationship between empire and democracy as deeply fraught, they understood ‘social democracy’ in Britain to require an expansive empire of free trade. This latter view is a crucial but neglected determinant of their imperial thought. Second, I show how these progressive thinkers produced innovative critiques of racial domination. They argued that, in order to reconcile the deep tensions between British democracy and global empire, ‘racial prejudice’ and ‘white supremacy’ ought to be confronted and overcome. This study argues that such arguments were intended as redemptive critiques of empire, which sought to adjudicate between forms of imperial power that threatened democracy ‘at home’ and those that did not. This thesis therefore suggests that fin-de-siècle debates about imperial democracy in metropolitan Britain represent a distinctive but overlooked context where democratic thought became deeply entangled with imperial power. The arguments recovered here are contrasted against contemporaneous white-settler democratic thought, on the one hand, and anti-colonial democratic thought, on the other. In what follows, the Introduction argues for viewing the period c. 1885–1914 as Britain’s age of imperial democracy. Chapter One traces how the early Fabian socialists theorised social democracy as an imperial society of equals—a political vision that this study’s three central figures drew on and modified. Chapters Two to Four examine in turn how Hobson, Hobhouse, and Wallas theorised the relationship between democracy, empire, and race in their own distinctive ways.