Conclusion

Abstract

In the 1860s, when Britain was at its peak of wealth and power as the pioneer industrial nation, Charles Dilke toured the English-speaking world and in his book Greater Britain (brought out hastily in 1868) provided a powerful gloss on the mythology of Empire. In a section about ‘dependencies’, he said the tropical lands were ‘a nursery of statesmen and warriors’¹ without which Britain would ‘irresistibly fall into national sluggishness of thought’. India offered that ‘vastness of dominion’ which imparted ‘width of thought and nobility of purpose’. Only forty years later, as rival powers already exceeded Britain in productive capacity and were competing in various parts of the world, Lord Curzon warned that when the Empire fell there would be poverty for many, ‘narrow and selfish materialism’ for others, and the country would be reduced to receiving flocks of tourists come to view castles, cathedrals and ‘relics of a once mighty sovereignty’ as they did at the ruins of Athens.² After another sixty years, Wilson’s about-turn over East-of-Suez was, in Bernard Porter’s words, ‘momentous’ as marking a watershed in Britain’s long process of adjusting to the changing situation in the world.³ In many respects, Dilke’s and Curzon’s prophecies had been fulfilled. But did the loss of Empire really bother the British?