Not lions, but ostriches

Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the colonisers.
But that, surely, is a fallacy. For the British empire was, for most of its history, an elite project. There is little evidence that it ever enthused the British people, except perhaps in the decade following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when Beatrice Webb found ‘all classes’ to be ‘drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’. Yet, in the one general election in which imperial questions were squarely at the forefront — that of 1906, which was dominated by Joseph Chamberlain’s appeal for tariff reform as a means to secure closer ties between the Dominions and the ‘Mother Country’ — the voters responded by giving the Little Englanders of the Liberal party a landslide majority.