Why, after centuries of neglect, did Britain and the other European powers rush to appropriate nine-tenths of the African continent within sixteen years? In Africa and the Victorians, Robinson and Gallagher sought to provide a new answer, one that firmly refuted the traditional diagnoses of both the economic historians and the popular imagination. The authors (with the aid of Alice Denny) sought evidence from the records of late-Victorian cabinets and consuls. "If the workings of the mind of government can be deciphered," they argue, "it may then be possible to translate back from the symbols of policy-making into the terms of why the partition really took place." In doing so, they uncovered the workings of what they termed 'the official mind.' They discovered that the Evangelical revival and the rise of secular liberalism construed the spirit of the age, and that the spirit never experienced a sudden shift towards imperialism, but rather armed itself with formal imperialism only when informal efforts faltered against rising African nationalism. The late-Victorians sought, in each case, to safeguard the precious routes to India and the eastern empire. Contrary to the economic historians, simple statistics showed that African markets could not possibly explain the onrush of late Imperialism. Instead, Egyptian nationalism sparked the 1882 Suez intervention, and the Suez intervention in turn sparked the division of Africa. "The so-called imperialism of the late-Victorians began as little more than a defensive response to [indigenous] rebellions... the 'imperialism' of the late-Victorians was not so much the cause as the effect of the African partition." The Europeans, it seems, stumbled (rather than strode) into possession of Africa.
Robinson and Gallagher disagreed with the arguments of the economic historians, but they full-heartedly embraced the 'spirit of abstraction' that accompanies such debates. As a consequence, historic figures like Gladstone and Goldie, Chamberlain and Salisbury, Kitchener and Rosebery peak out from their graves, but never fully come to life. The ideas that inspired them remain mysteriously buried, for the authors offer no intellectual history of Victorian morality and its discontents. Surely such an examination would shed light on how liberalism and Evangelicalism interacted to create the predominate 'spirit of the age' that suffuses Africa and the Victorians as a necessary condition for both formal and informal modes of imperialism. Still, despite the book's brevity and abstractions, it unveils the tension of late-Victorian foreign relations, and provides a fascinating window into the tragi-comedy of imperial foreign policy and its unexpected consequences.
Robinson and Gallagher disagreed with the arguments of the economic historians, but they full-heartedly embraced the 'spirit of abstraction' that accompanies such debates. As a consequence, historic figures like Gladstone and Goldie, Chamberlain and Salisbury, Kitchener and Rosebery peak out from their graves, but never fully come to life. The ideas that inspired them remain mysteriously buried, for the authors offer no intellectual history of Victorian morality and its discontents. Surely such an examination would shed light on how liberalism and Evangelicalism interacted to create the predominate 'spirit of the age' that suffuses Africa and the Victorians as a necessary condition for both formal and informal modes of imperialism. Still, despite the book's brevity and abstractions, it unveils the tension of late-Victorian foreign relations, and provides a fascinating window into the tragi-comedy of imperial foreign policy and its unexpected consequences.
RSS Feed
