The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain

The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. By BERNARD PORTER (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004; pp. xvii + 475. £25). ‘WE seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’, famously observed J.R. Seeley. Far from purporting to explain the causes of British expansion overseas, this sarcastic remark was in fact referring to the contemporary neglect of imperial history in schools and universities. Hence the title, Absent-Minded Imperialists, of Bernard Porter's recent study of empire, society and culture in Britain. Written as a contribution to current debates on Britain's imperial culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Absent-Minded Imperialists concludes that the Empire's impact on British society and culture was extremely uneven and generally superficial. In doing so, it takes issue with all those authors, prominent among them Catherine Hall and Jeffrey Richards, who have insisted that imperialism penetrated much further into British society than was previously believed. Contrary to claims that British popular culture was ‘imbricated’ or ‘steeped’ or ‘saturated’ in imperialism, as cultural imperialist interpretations have variously asserted, ‘the relationship between Britain's external imperialism and her domestic society was much more ambivalent than such a reading implies’(p. 307). Porter's findings are assembled over twelve broadly thematic chapters, each one in proximate chronological sequence. The overall period covered extends from c. 1800 until 1940, with the first seven chapters focusing on the years up until the 1880s. Chapter eight, ‘Peril and Propaganda, c. 1900’, acknowledges that from this point empire and society began to need each other more than in the past, as Britain faced new imperial rivals. Yet even as the remaining chapters take the account down to the eve of World War Two, Porter demonstrates that the impacts of empire, while experienced more widely than previously, were still largely confined to the upper and middle classes. There may have been greater acquiescence, but the embrace was scarcely warmer.