Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire

Theodore Koditschek

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975066.004

3 - Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011

Theodore Koditschek

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Theodore Koditschek: Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia

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In England we can have no other feeling than that of respect for men who stood up in bad times to maintain the independence of their country against unjust aggression … No greater calamity could have befallen England than if, for want of such men [William Wallace and Robert Bruce] she had been able to place on Scotland the yoke she abhorred, and to have her, even down to this time perhaps, a conquered nation … I say it would have been a happy thing for the British Empire if Ireland had her Wallace and her Bruce, if it had not in those dark ages come by conquest under the arbitrary yoke of England, but had like Scotland gradually amalgamated with England by pacific measures.

T. B. Macaulay, toast to Calcutta Scottish Society, Dec. 1, 1834, quoted in S. C. Sanial, “Macaulay in Lower Bengal,” Calcutta Review, 244 (1906), 306

We are trying … to give a good government to a people to whom we cannot give a free government … We have to engraft on despotism those blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty … It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government: that having been instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. […]

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Type: Chapter
Information: Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination
Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
, pp. 99 - 150

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975066.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

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