(George Bernard Shaw)

Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Fabian Society in October 1900. Shaw recognized what many historians have subsequently failed to see: the meaning of imperialism inside British politics was not fixed. Rather, the terms “empire” and “imperialism” were like empty boxes that were continuously being filled up and emptied of their meanings. Of course, the same was true of other political concepts: the idea of patriotism, for instance, was constantly being reinvented by politicians. But the idea of empire was all the more vulnerable to this sort of treatment because it was sensitive to changing circumstances at home and abroad and because it had to take account of a colonial as well as a British audience. Furthermore, the fact that opinion in Britain was widely felt to be ignorant or indifferent to the empire meant that politicians had to be particularly careful in deciding what sort of imperial language to use.

This article will consider what contemporaries meant when they spoke of empire, how its meaning varied between different political groups in Britain, and whether it is possible to point to a prevailing vision of empire during the period between the launch of the Jameson Raid in December 1895 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

On August 30, 1914, Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald, an inveterate conscriptionist and disciple of Lord Roberts, deputized thirty women in Folkstone to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame “every young ‘slacker’ found loafing about the Leas” and to remind those “deaf or indifferent to their country's need” that “British soldiers are fighting and dying across the channel.” Fitzgerald's estimation of the power of these women was enormous. He warned the men of Folkstone that “there is a danger awaiting them far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle,” for if they were found “idling and loafing to-morrow” they would be publicly humiliated by a lady with a white feather.

The idea of a paramilitary band of women known as “The Order of the White Feather” or “The White Feather Brigade” captured the imagination of numerous observers and even enjoyed a moment of semiofficial sanction at the beginning of the war. According to the Chatham News an “amusing, novel, and forceful method of obtaining recruits for Lord Kitchener's Army was demonstrated at Deal on Tuesday” when the town crier paraded the streets and “crying with the dignity of his ancient calling, gave forth the startling announcement: ‘Oyez! Oyez!! Oyez!!! The White Feather Brigade! Ladies wanted to present the young men of Deal and Walmer … the Order of the White Feather for shirking their duty in not coming forward to uphold the Union Jack of Old England! God save the King.’”

It has been more than a decade since Benedict Anderson urged us to consider the nation a particular kind of cultural artefact and to study national communities in terms of the style in which they are imagined. Anticipating Anderson's seminal work, Enoch Powell, the Biblical scholar, Ulster Unionist M.P., and 1960s advocate of the voluntary repatriation of people of color in Britain likewise suggested that the “life of nations … is lived largely in the imagination.” He also noted that the myths on which Britain's “corporate imagination” rested had, since 1945, become severely impoverished. Amidst the rubble produced by the collapse of many of those myths scholars have begun to problematize the various components of national identity that, customarily, have been taken for granted as “real” rather than invented. They have also begun to trace the manner by which the national community has constantly been imagined and reimagined in the past. Some of their more insightful work has considered the articulation of Englishness against other nationalities in the United Kingdom, particularly the Irish. This had led Linda Colley to suggest that national identity is always contingent and relational, the product of boundaries drawn up to distinguish between the collective self and the other.

In this essay, I want to suggest that Britain's wartime sense of national unity, generated through the struggle against fascist Germany, began to crumble after 1945. This gradual erosion of national cohesion, coupled with Britain's failure to generate new narratives of national purpose through the rhetoric of the Cold War, led to a veritable crisis of national self-representation in the 1950s, a crisis compounded by domestic social dislocation and the rapid emergence of the political, military, and economic hegemony of the United States.