Abstract
‘The Empire is a bread and butter question’, Cecil John Rhodes declared in 1895. He had just attended a meeting of the unemployed in the East End of London and his journalist friend, W. T. Stead, recorded his impressions. ‘I listened’, said Rhodes,
to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.
V. I. Lenin noted the quotation and used it in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917.1 The close connection between imperialism and what they called ‘the social question’ at home, was very clear both to the advocates and to the opponents of colonial expansion.
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Notes and References
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1975), pp. 93–4.
The evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry is in Parliamentary Papers (1886) xxx, 1, 231; xxii. 1; xxiii, 1. The final reports are in Parliamentary Papers (1886) xxiii, 507. For the role of Dunraven and the Fair Trade League see M. E. Chamberlain, ‘Lord Dunraven and the British Empire’, Morgannwg, xv (1971) 50–72.
J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, 3rd ed. (London, 1938) p. 101.
F. Harcourt, ‘Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: a question of timing’, HJ, xxiii (1980) 87–109.
J. L. Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain (London, 1932) i 548–58.
The Times, 16 July 1895, quoted in G. Bennett, The Concept of Empire 2nd ed. (London, 1962) pp. 313–14.
B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London, 1960) p. 27.
H.-U. Wehler, ‘Bismarck’s Imperialism, 1862–1890’, P&P, xlviii (1970) 123, 124.
Sidney Webb, ‘Twentieth Century Politics: a Policy of National Efficiency’, Fabian Tract, no. 108 (1901) p. 9.
Quoted in R.J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition; the Politics of Social-Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton, 1975) p. 373.
A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965) p. 600.
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© 1984 M. E. Chamberlain
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Chamberlain, M.E. (1984). Imperialism and Social Reform. In: Eldridge, C.C. (eds) British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17655-7_8
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