This chapter deals with the development and increasing prevalence of steam-powered technology in the life and culture of the 1830s. It discusses the vexed question of the relationship between liberalism and empire and the contribution of liberal progressives and technological radicals, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Babington Macaulay, to the process of empire. It argues that a war begun in 1839 between the British and the Qing empires acts as a summation of the progress in the decade towards a new form of steam-powered colonialism. The ‘Steam Romanticism’ of the 1830s had a strongly imperialist dimension. This chapter discusses the crucial contribution of the Romantic period satirical novelist and essayist to this process. As a leading administrator of the East India Company, Peacock was intimately involved with the commissioning, design, and construction of new, steam-powered vessels for use by the Company, notably the iron-hulled warship the Nemesis, the presence of which proved crucial in the First Opium War with China.

Classical economic liberalism was the first perspective on political economy to achieve worldwide influence. Its most famous advocate was Adam Smith whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations became a foundational text for economic liberals that was known around the world by the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, some other European political economists consolidated the international dimension of the classical liberal economic perspective by building on Smith’s ideas, including David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot. These and other European classical economic liberals were united in the belief that free trade and free markets would foster global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom. At the same time, they did not always concur about the precise ways that free trade would generate these benefits or about which of them was most important. They also disagreed about the universal relevance of economic liberalism, their willingness to accept exemptions from free trade, their interest in international specialization and economic integration beyond free trade in goods as well as about the place of force, imperialism, civilizational discourse, and intergovernmental cooperation in the economic liberal project. In short, there were many distinct versions of classical economic liberalism.

Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. This chapter argues that ex-servicemen in the interwar period still believed that they had been forgotten by the general public, despite a number of popular culture and commemorative representations of their campaigns. Using Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s argument about soldier memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, this chapter argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. This chapter also investigates the proliferation of crusading rhetoric in the memoirs of ex-servicemen who fought in Palestine, arguing that most soldiers did not use the language of holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilisation. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilisation to Arabs and Greeks and that, once again, it was they who had actually won the war. Crucially, these themes arose again after the war but for different reasons, emphasising the need to consider as separate wartime writings from post-war memoirs.

Chapter 3 looks at what the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia meant to soldiers. In the early stages of the campaigns, many soldiers were fed up at being ‘exiled’ from the Western Front and embarrassed not to be fighting Germans. So far from the Western Front, they had to find a different meaning for their campaigns. Some soldiers found a personal meaning in the greater likelihood that they would survive the war, while others, mostly pre-war regular soldiers, were concerned about career mobility. Strategic and moral meanings were also found. In diaries and letters home, soldiers argued that they were contributing to the global war effort and the defeat of the Central Powers. Others argued that they were liberating Arabs and Jews from Ottoman misrule and bringing the benefits of liberal imperialism to the supposedly backward peoples of the Middle East and the Greeks. In both this chapter and in Chapter 5, it is impossible not to see in the writings of soldiers and ex-servicemen an argument for Britain’s imperial project – that, to them, the war and the aims of British liberal imperialism were compatible and mutually reinforced each other.

This chapter focuses on the formal German response to the challenges of globalization and the new imperialism discussed in the previous chapters, culminating in Kaiser Wilhelm’s shift to “World Policy” and the bid to build a large battleship navy in 1897. The complex of ideas, interests, and personalities that shaped this policy are analyzed in depth, revealing that educated middle-class liberal opinion was much more decisive in this shift than is usually appreciated. Prominent in this process were the ideas and perceptions of Gustav Schmoller and his students. Schmoller knew Alfred Tirpitz and had the ear of Bernhard von Bülow, and Ernst von Halle and Hermann Schumacher were easily drawn into Tirpitz’s legislative campaign to significantly expand the German fleet on their return to Germany. They became part of a very sophisticated and effective naval propaganda effort that mobilized the German professoriate and culminated in passage of the first navy bill in April 1898 which dramatically increased the size of Germany’s battleship navy into a deterrent “risk fleet.”

The civil truce between parties and religious confessions proclaimed by the Kaiser in August 1914 was severely eroded by the controversy over war aims that Karl Rathgen, Hermann Schumacher, and Max Sering played key roles in defining. Set in the context of the preceding chapters, annexationist war aims must be seen as a continuation of “World Policy” with liberal imperialist features. Meanwhile, Gustav Schmoller became embroiled in a public controversy sparked by the army’s “Jewish census,” lending anti-Semitic prejudice credibility and further eroding the civil truce. War aims would prove highly controversial, and along with the debate over the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, fueled the anti-government and anti-Kaiser populism that culminated in the formation of the Fatherland Party and the final gamble to secure a victory with annexations and war indemnities. After Germany’s defeat the war aims debate, the Jewish census, and the Fatherland Party would cast a long shadow. Along with the inherent contradictions of the Paris Peace, they turned a sizeable portion of the German public into intractable foes of their republic and the new world order.

The first chapter describes how plans for liberal internationalist government began within the extended Bloomsbury group, as a moment of queer cosmopolitan disaffiliation with imperial order. The chapter opens with a mysterious set of letters written in protest against the Boxer Rebellion, one of the last wars of Victorian liberal imperialism. These letters, supposedly written by a Chinese consul, in fact are penned by a central member of “Edwardian Bloomsbury,” G. L. Dickinson, a Cambridge mentor to E. M. Forster who will be crucial to plans for formal international government after the First World War. Dickinson generates connections between Cambridge and May Fourth Modernism in China, through his friendship with the poet Xu Zhimo. It argues that the affiliations of Dickinson, Forster, and Xu Zhimo provide a model for thinking through an interwar modernism defined by cosmopolitan friendship, queer disaffiliation from the nation, and a strong attachment to liberal governmental institutions.

The Conclusion traces the fruits of Ancien Régime imperial innovation and colonial experimentation into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish a new perspective on how continuity, innovation, and rupture conditioned the broader narrative of French colonial empire. It looks at the long road to the creation of the DOM-TOM (départements et territoires d’outre-mer) as well as at the ideological underpinnings of French imperial incursions into West and North Africa. Based on this brief overview, it proposes a non-linear history French colonial empire.