The Impulse for Expansion: The Philanthropists and the Tropics

Abstract

The doubts aroused by the policies of Gladstone’s first government concerning Great Britain’s relationship with her self-governing possessions fascinated and preoccupied colonial zealots throughout the 1870s. Yet some of the most difficult problems requiring urgent solution in this decade concerned not the colonies of English settlement but the periphery of empire, the area beyond the pale of British settlement into which British interests and influences had penetrated. The areas principally involved were Africa, south-east Asia and the Pacific. Here British politicians were reluctantly forced to consider the problem of governing indigenous populations and of expansion into the tropics.