During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast "Anglo-Saxon" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

Duncan Bell is a university lecturer in international relations at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Christ's College. He is the editor of Memory, Trauma, and World Politics and Victorian Visions of Global Order.

Endorsements:

"Victorian conceptions of empire have generally been considered in isolation from domestic political debate: the province of the economic or imperial historian rather than the historian of politics. In this impressive study, Duncan Bell resituates the arguments about a union of English-speaking peoples as an integral part of an anxious post-1870 debate about the condition of Britain in what contemporaries saw as a newly globalized world. Greater Britain was put forward as one solution to mass democracy or national decline. This is a pioneering work of research, which invites reconsideration of Victorian political thought as a whole."--Gareth Stedman Jones, University of Cambridge

"In this fine book, Bell has performed a real service by refocusing attention on the grand late-nineteenth-century debate about creating a 'Greater Britain' capable of rivaling the United States. It injects vigorous new life into a subject hitherto often a byword for dullness."--Peter Cain, Sheffield Hallam University

"Globalization, empire, and the uncertain future of the state are all topics high on the contemporary intellectual agenda, but ours is not the first generation to have viewed their interconnections with both anxiety and expectation. Duncan Bell's masterly survey of late-nineteenth-century British political thought shows how a generation of creative thinkers tackled transnationalism almost a century before the term was invented. The book is a major contribution to modern intellectual history and will surely become one of the foundational texts in the emerging field of the history of international thought."--David Armitage, Harvard University