The essence of the empire

Describing the British empire at the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1897, the brilliant young journalist and imperial propagandist, G. W. Steevens, declared it to be a ‘world-shaping force’. Steevens with these words captured the very essence of the Victorian empire, a cosmoplastic enterprise not defined by mere territorial extent, even though this was coterminous with a considerable portion of the earth's surface. The British dominance – ‘Britain's imperial century’, the Pax Britannica, economic and cultural hegemony – was, however, effectively over by the end of the First World War. As the 1920s opened, Britain was weaker, its rivals stronger and more worrying, its challengers more determined, its policies increasingly uncertain and confused. It had become, in short, a declining, dysfunctional empire on the road to liquidation. This was not, of course, immediately apparent. In 1927 a young professor of history at the University of Toronto concluded his lecture-course on the history of the British empire:

This prediction was made by Lester Pearson, later prime minister of Canada (1963–8). However, ‘success’ is not a theme or prediction that history can endorse for the twentieth-century British empire.