An Empire on Paper: Greater Britain and the Racial Propaganda of the Imperial Federation League, 1884–1893

This article revisits the Imperial Federation League (1884–1893) to investigate the ways in which its racial rhetoric was central to both its operation and collapse. Drawing on the League’s minute books and propaganda organ, Imperial Federation, it traces how transimperial Anglo-Saxonist discourse allowed the League to imagine ‘Greater Britain’ as a racial polity and to hold together an otherwise disparate membership. This article argues that the IFL’s racial rhetoric took its content from the capitalist imperatives of the League’s gentlemanly membership, naturalising the demands of controlling land, labour, and resources as claims of racial solidarity, supremacy, and shared political community. Because such claims of partnership could not be reconciled with the structural asymmetries of the empire’s political-economic order, the League descended into open conflict. As internal disputes over free trade and imperial preference intensified, the same racial rhetoric turned against the settler colonies, to police the boundaries of imperial belonging and validate the League’s managed collapse without colonial consultation. That the colonies could be claimed and then disqualified by the same capitalist standards indicates that the IFL’s transimperial Anglo-Saxonism did not only serve capitalism but was constituted by it. This article’s intervention demonstrates that organisational dysfunction is an insufficient explanation for the League’s failure, placing the broader imperial unity movement within the context of late-Victorian racial formation and the emerging global colour line.