‘It is tempting to suggest’, Gordon Jackson has observed, that ‘the surge of imperialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century . . . owed most to changes in European technology, especially the triple-compound-engined steel ships around 1880 and the subsequent dramatic fall in freight rates’. Given the proliferation of explanations that abound in the literature on the so-called new imperialism of the late nineteenth century (Professor Jackson alludes to several), it is controversial to assign technology generally and steel ships in particular a dominant deterministic role. To clarify and pursue the assertion further one must start with the discussion of nineteenth-century British imperialism developed in the work of Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, which appeared in 1993 and which not only triggered an outpouring of reviews in historical journals but a book of essays as well, edited by Raymond Dumett. The latter book offers a number of critiques of the Cain–Hopkins work while the two authors are provided the opportunity of an afterword or rebuttal. Here the two authors use the occasion to rethink a working definition of the term imperialism. They

Structural power, or the rules of the game, was shaped and imposed by the imperial or metropolitan state’s preferences and policies buttressed by organized coercion (i.e. military and naval force). Relational power features one or other of a broad range of responses to these impositions by dependent or subordinate states on the periphery. Whatever the forms of relational power (and some could allow for considerable peripheral initiative and advantage), structural power, Cain and Hopkins argue, was significantly ascendant. And, moreover, they argue ‘the principal controllers of structural power were gentlemanly capitalists’.

In their rebuttal Cain and Hopkins also rehearse their definition of gentlemanly capitalists.