Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
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In the pages of this book, Froude worked hard to fit the reality of
Australasia into the mold of these expectations. Adelaide reminded him
of England. The M elbourne coast was reminiscent of the Suffolk shore-
line. English oaks were adapting well to the new climate. The lawn tennis
at Government House might have been played by English gentility.
The ministers would have done credit to a Cabinet in Londo n. The crisis
in Sudan had elicited a troop of bronzed volunteers. In New Zealand,
a rising tide of Britishness was detected on every front: myriad native
plant and animal species all seemed to give way before the familiar
flora and fauna that the Britons had had transplanted from their north
Atlantic home. So it was also with human beings. The Maori, Froude
was convinced, would soon enough follow the Australian aborigines into
extinction. Drunken, lazy, incapable of self-improvement, they reminded
him of the Irish.
There were the same cabins, the same children running about barefoot and half-
naked, the same pigs, the same savage taste for brilliant colours, the women
wearing the madder coloured petticoats; the same distribution of employment
between the sexes, the wife working in the fields, the man lying on his back and
enjoying himself ... Nature had created an identical organization on the opposite
side of the planet. Even the children had learned to beg in the same note.
107
More disturbing than the degradation of the Maori, however, were odd
signs that New Zealand’s and Australia’s Anglo-Saxons might not
share Froude’s vision of an agrarian yeoman paradise. Too many of the
colonists were drawn to mining camps and cities. Auckland, in particular,
struck him as especially squalid and undistinguished. What if the British
emigrants to Australasia were not interested in Froude’s peasant arcadia?
Too many had moved, not to escape urban industrialism, but to replicate
it, albeit with improved living standards and higher wages. Their ties to
the motherland seemed more instrumental than sentimental. They were
using their vaunted political freedom to slap tariffs on metropolitan man-
ufactures, balking at the prospect of exporting food and raw materials
for all eternity. Here it is Froude, the disillusioned realist, who seems
to have fallen victim to his counter-romance.
108
It is telling to compare his essentialized account of British Australia
with William Westgarth’s Colony of Victoria,thefirst empirical Anglo-
Australian history. Like Froude, Westgarth was an empire booster, an
aficionado of Anglo-Saxonism, and a staunch advocate of federation
107
Froude, Oceana, quote on 298.
108
Froude, Oceana, 245–6; Derek Schreuder and Stuart Ward (eds.), Australia’s Empire
(Oxford, 2008).
Racial exclusion and Froude’s oceanic dream 195
with the mother country. But he was also a well-informed traveler who had
lived in Melbourne during the 1840s and 1850s and traded with it ever
since. He understood that if the British–Australian Union were to con-
tinue during the coming era, sentimental bonds would have to be rein-
forced by capitalist self-interest. Victoria, as Westgarth showed, had
grown from nothing to a population of half a million in less than twenty-
five years. The ini tial settlement had been based on sheep farming to
meet the insatiable demands of British industry. Then, in the 1850s, the
discovery of gold brought in thousands of prospectors, entrepreneurs,
and adve nturers of every race and nation, drawn in by the lure of lucre
for a lucky few. In this dynamic melting-pot, Westgarth boasted, the
Governor of the province was an Irish Catholic, and the Mayor of
Melbourne was a Jew.
109
Froude’s Oceana cannot accommodate this aspect of the Australian
experience, because it has abandoned the ground of eventful conjuncture
for a vaguely indeterminate racial temporality. The terror that fuels his
fantasy of Anglo-Saxon expansion is the nightmare that the global world
of the twentieth century might turn out to be sixteenth-century Ireland
writ large. Australasia would then become the modern Ulster, the land
ordained for the revitalization of Anglo-Saxons. The West Indies, on the
other side of the globe, would devolve as the habitat of the archetypal
indegene. A year after returning from his antipodean voyage, Froude
finally tacked westward across the Atlantic, this time to investigate race
relations in the sugar colonies. In his published account, The English in
the West Indies, Froude’s frame of reference is partly set by the Carlylean
image of Quashee. Yet Froude’s West Indian Negro is a more interesting
character, since he is – like Froude’s Irishman – at once both the target
for the author’s animus and also the repository of his subliminal fanta-
sies. Where Carlyle would use the whip to force Quashee back onto the
plantation, Froude parodies him in place as a prelapsarian creature who has
somehow escaped from “white” original sin. Where Carlyle excoriated him
for living on pumpkins, the son and victim of Revd. Froude will not
necessarily begrudge him the spontaneous fruits of his edenic Caribbean
garden, “oranges and plantains, bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts, but not
apples.”
109
Like Froude, however, Westgarth was a believer in race essentialism, at least to a degree.
He regarded Australia’s Chinese immigrants as dangerous, and the aborigines as
doomed. See William Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria: Its History, Commerce and Gold
Mining; its Social and Political Institutions (London, 1864); William Westgarth, Half a
Century of Australasian Progress: A Personal Retrospect (London, 1889); DNB, XX: 1265–
6; Edward Beasley, Mid-Victorian Imperialists: British Gentlemen and the Empire of the
Mind (London, 2003), 53–63.
196 Re-imagining a Greater Britain
In their ordeal of slavery, Froude reluctantly al lows, these African-
Americans had to pass through “a brief purgatory.” Now, however, in
the era of emancipation, they had found an “eternity of blessedness
[under] the English Crown.”
Under the rule of England in these islands the two million of these poor brothers-
in-law of ours are the most perfectly contented specimens of the human race to be
found on the planet ... If happiness be the satisfaction of every conscious desire,
theirs is a condition which admits of no improvement: Were they independent,
they might quarrel among themselves, and the weaker become the bondmen of the
stronger; under the benevolent despotism of the English Government, which
knows no difference of colour, and permits no oppression, they can sleep, lounge,
and laugh away their lives as they please.
110
The one price which the Negro must pay for this edenic condition is to
be stripped of the knowledge and self-consciousness of fallen humanity.
Froude’s Negro is alternately described as a “grinning monkey” and a
“loyal spaniel,” who (absen t English mastery) will drift back into a
mangy cur. “If for the sake of theory or to shirk responsibility, we force
them to govern themselves, the state of Hayti stands as a ghastly example
of the condition into which they will inevitably fall.”
111
In this grotesque self-projective fantasy of West Indian Negroes as a
chosen non-people, the realities of imperial exploitation are figuratively
reversed. Plantation slavery was actually the first installment of emanci-
pation, since it took the Negro away from the cannibalistic bestiality of
Africa and introduced him to the Adamic disciplines of productive work.
Slavery was no w unacceptable and outmoded, but the West Indian freed-
man (like the Irish peasant) still had to be subjected to English discipline.
“Give them independence, and in a few generations they will peel off
such civilization as they have learned as easily and willingly as their coats
and trousers.” The West Indies had ferti le lands and “docile, good tem-
pered workers.” It need not degenerate into a moral and economic dis-
aster. “But the future of the blacks and of our own influence over them
for good depend on their being protected from themselves and from the
schemers who would take advantage of them.”
112
It is instructive at this point to trace the language of “race” as it
developed over the course of Froude’s life’s work – from its intermittent
early appearance as a casual phrase in his Tudor History, through a core
(but not colored) concept in his mid-career denunciations of the Irish, to
110
Froude, English in the West Indies, 81; Carlyle, On the Nigger Question,1–37.
111
Froude, English in the West Indies, 50, 25, 81, 161.
112
Froude, English in the West Indies, 287.
Racial exclusion and Froude’s oceanic dream 197
the central, all-encompassing explanatory category of his late tour of
the Ca ribbean colonies. Froude certainly deserves his reputation, along-
side Carlyle, as one of the most flamboyant race-mongers of an overtly
racist century.
113
However, a close look at the way “race” works in both
men’s writings raises questions about Victorian understandings of the
term. In particular, neither man was at all attracted by the “racial science”
that current historiography holds res ponsible for converting white
intellectuals to biological determinism during the second half of the
nineteenth century.
114
On the contrary, both Froude and Carlyle were
vehement opponents of biological determinism, as they were of all mate-
rialistic “pig philosophies.” For both men, race was to a considerable
extent a cultural or even a spiritual phenome non that manifested itself
superficially in the forms of color and physiognomy. Reflecting an implicit
113
Froude’s increasing propensity towards racial stereotyping can also be detected in his
private correspondence, where he was more inclined to express his opinions candidly. He
indicated that Anglo-Saxons were by nature freedom lovers, especially fit for the task of
governing lesser peoples, but they would always choose death rather than slavery for
themselves. The Irish (or “Paddies,” as he privately called them) were thriftless and
unruly, but might be improved by English Protestant dictatorship or a one-way ticket
into the Australian bush. People of color were privately denominated as “niggers,” and
presented as wholly determined by their race, and therefore as scarcely capable of
individual personality. This casual racism was not incompatible with a willingness to
recognize merit in people of color, albeit only in the context of his racial and historical
theories. “When I was travelling in South Africa,” Froude recounted, “I had a black man
and a white man with me, and the black was worth a dozen of the white. For all I know,
the black race may be as good as the white when it has gone through the same training.
Hitherto, the Negro has had no chance: he has been a slave from the beginning of history”
(quoted in DF, II: 613). On the other hand, racial equality in Froude’s mental universe of
competing peoples, struggling for survival in a world of scarcity, was not necessarily a
pretty thing. Lord George Hamilton recalled a dinner party conversation in which
Froude described “Zulus and Kaffirs” as “a virile and intelligent race, physically stronger
than the average European, who were multiplying and increasing faster than white
men ... [and would] ultimately demolish the white race.” The only viable strategy was
“to exterminate them.” When Hamilton objected, Froude gloomily replied, “If you do
not adopt that policy, they will exterminate you.” Quoted in Michael Bentley, Lord
Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge,
2001), 225.
114
The standard accounts are Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971);
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Great Britain (London, 1982); Douglas A. Lorimer,
Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (Leicester, 1978); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York,
1981); George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology (New York, 1968); George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (London,
1987). My own contribution can be found in “Capitalism, Race and Evolution in
Imperial Britain, 1850–1900,” in Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Cha-Jua, and Helen
Neville (eds.), Race Struggles (Champaign-Urbana, 2009), 48– 72. For stimulating treat-
ments from a literary critical perspective see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, 1995); and H. L. Malchow, Gothic
Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (Palo Alto, 1996).
198 Re-imagining a Greater Britain
neo-Lamarckism that remained popular into the early twentieth century,
Froude (like Carlyle) believed that racial essences were not eternally
fixed, but could be slowly altered over multiple generations.
115
For Froude, then, race was never a rigidly biological phenomenon,
because it always remained fluid and historical in character. As such, its
centrality in his later writings was a direct reflection of his changed under-
standing of history. During his early career as an empirical researcher
into the sixteenth century, history was understood as a string of open
conjunctures that were to be organized and related in a narrative frame.
Deep structures such as “race” played little role in explanation, since the
course of history was deemed to run on the surface of events. It was only
later, when Froude grew more fatalistic, that he explained historical
developments in racial terms. Even then, however, his “races” remained
enmeshed in the flux of history. Though not susceptible to rapid improve-
ment (or instant deterioration) they were seen as broadly mutable over
the long run. In this manner, Froude could combine the most vicious
disparagement of supposedly inferior races with an abstract endorsement
of ultimate racial equality. “With the same chances and with the same
treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally
from both [white and black] races.”“But it does not follow,” he contin-
ues, “that what can be done eventually can be done immediately.”
The gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has been opened
by the centuries of training and discipline which have given us the start in the race.
We set it down to slavery. It would be far truer to set it down to freedom. The
African blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of
years, and it has been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from
becoming civilized. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as
like their fathers as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it is likely
enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity.
116
Some historical accident in the unrecorded past, however, had set the
Anglo-Saxons on a long march of racial improvement. “Our own Anglo-
Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a thou-
sand years of civil and spiritual authority.” In other words, Henry VIII
had beaten sixteenth-century Englishmen into submission so that their
nineteenth-century descendants could be free. Now, it was the duty of
nineteenth-century Englishmen to beat Negroes into submission so
that their descendants might someday be free. Racial others remained
115
Conway Zirckle, “The Early Idea of the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics and of
Pangenesis,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society, NS, 35.2 (Philadelphia,
1946). Discusses the long and venerable genealogy of such notions.
116
Froude, English in the West Indies, 124–5.
Racial exclusion and Froude’s oceanic dream 199
intrinsically different, yet they were still distant members of the Greater
British family.
117
10 The race against Froudacity
Like his denunciations of the Irish over a decade earlier, Froude’s infan-
talization of West Indian Negroes was predicated on the assumption that
they were not part of his audience, would not read what he said about
them, and could not write back. On the contrary, claimed the Revd.
P. H. Doughlin, “here in the West Indies, and on the West Coast or
Africa, are to be found Surgeons of the Negro Race, Solicitors, Barristers,
Mayors, Councillors, Principals and founders of High Schools and
Colleges, Editors and Proprietors of Newspapers, Archdeacons, Bishops,
Judges, and Authors.” Such men would not recognize themselves in
Froude’s simple savage, nor would they appreciate his rude jests and
racist calumnies. In 1888, a Barbadian liberal, N. Darnell Davis, shot
back with Mr. Froude’sNegrophobia, which described The English in the
West Indies as “a mere piece of Book-making, containing no real study of
the past History, and still less of the real life, of the English and African
Races in the West Indies. Of the actual condition of the British West Indies
of today Mr. Froude knows as much, and as little, as a Cook’s Tourist.”
118
No less offended by this act of racial tourism was a retired colonial official,
C. S. Salmon, who upbraided the famous English historian for his absolute
ignorance of African-American history. Froude’s failure to appreciate
Africa’s indigenous civilization had engendered a crude slander on West
Indians’ capabilities. Such people had not been savages before slavery
degraded them. Since emancipation they had been reclaiming their herit-
age, and they were producing a Creole culture that was clearly beyond
Froude’sken.
119
Froude’s inadequacies as an observer were most thoroughly exposed
by the black Jamaican linguist J. J. Thomas, in his aptly titled Froudacity.
The “Cook’s Tourist,” who professed to be trafficking in the exotic, was
merely dispensing his familiar, garden-variety anglocent ric bigotry. The
relish with which Froude relayed tales of salted babies devoured by
ravening black beasts, Thomas exposed as a malicious libel. The canard
117
Froude, English in the West Indies, 125.
118
N. Darnell Davis, Mr. Froude’s Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a Cook’s Tourist
(Demerara, 1888), quote on 3. See also Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historians of the
West Indies (Washington, DC, 1980), 152–7; and Eric Williams, British Historians and the
West Indies (Brooklyn, 1994), 137–46.
119
Davis, Froude’s Negrophobia, 35; C. S. Salmon, The Caribbean Confederation: A Plan for the
Union of the Fifteen British West Indian Colonies (London, 1888), 40–76.
200 Re-imagining a Greater Britain
of cannibalism was trotted out merely to frighten (or perhaps titillate)
his English audience. Yet not a single piece of con firmed and authenti-
cated evidence was offered in support of this central theme. In his travels
Froude had never visited with a single Negro, but he had bee n wined
and dined by wealthy planters who had shown him what they wanted
him to see. All the manifest accomplishments of black West Indians had
been ignored or dismissed. Only their failures and transgressions were
loudly proclaimed. By such methods, Froude had placed the West Indian
Negro in an inescapable trap. On the one hand, political enfranchisement
was made contingent on acquir ing a European education. Yet “when
these qualifications are conspicuously mastered,” imperialism “refuses
[the Ne gro] the prize because he is a Negro.”
120
Davis, Salmon, and Thomas all insisted on the heterogeneity of West
Indian society. Froude’s efforts to fix it within his black-and-wh ite racial
polarity did violence to a more multi-sha ded reality. The disappearance
of most old-style white planters, the decline of sugar as a mainstay of the
local economy, and the rise of a diverse and increasingly prosperous
mulatto elite are all noted as central features of the West Indian experi-
ence, yet are completely absent from Froude’s account. As a result, he
had failed to grasp the central development of the post-emancipation
period: the breakdown of the old plantation economy and the rise of a
class of independent small-holding blacks. Here indeed, had he been so
inclined, Froude might have found the stalwart yeoman farmers who were
so conspicuously scarce among the Anglo-Saxons of Australasia.
It is the black men who pay taxes and support Her Majesty’s Government. In the
Islands, especially, it is the black men who are taking up the land and cultivating it.
They are rapidly becoming peasant proprietors of the European type. It is the black
men who do nearly all the labour. The West Indies are essentially agricultural, but
the black men make very good mechanics, and skilful and bold sailors, and they do
well mostly all the work that has to be done in this way. In times of trouble and
difficulty they are found to be reliable soldiers, and a couple of these regiments of
Mr Froude’s black men help very materially to keep the flag of England from being
thought too slightingly on the West Coast of Africa.
121
Davis, Salmon, and Thomas were no less concerned about the place of
the West Indies in Greater Britain than was Froude. However, they drew
diametrically opposite conclusions about the best means to preserve
Caribbean loyalties. Where Froude envisioned patriotism as exclusively
120
J. J. Thomas, Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude (London, 1888),
182; Salmon, Caribbean Confederation, 128–30.
121
Davis, Froude’s Negrophobia,28–30; Salmon, Caribbean Confederation, 53; Thomas,
Froudacity, 179–93.
The race against Froudacity 201
white, Salmon and Thomas transposed it into a more living color, as the
metropole became increasingly dependent on her multiracial colonies. As
against Froude’s insistence on central control and authoritarian govern-
ment, his three critics argued that only the grant of representative ins titu-
tions would preserve West Indians’ sentiments of British affinity. “The
demand for Reform in the Crown Colonies,” according to Thomas,
A demand which our author deliberately misrepresents – is made neither by nor
for the Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East Indian. It is a petition put
forward by prominent responsible colonists – the majority of whom are Whites,
and mostly Britons besides. Their prayer, in which the whole population in these
Colonies most heartily join in, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said
Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and having, in intelli-
gence and every form of civilized progress, outgrown the stage of political tutelage,
should be accorded some measure of emancipation therefrom.
122
Here again, the ironies abound. The colonial confederation that Froude
would have foisted on unwilling South Africans was being eagerly sought
by West Indians of all races, who argued that the best means of keeping
them loyal to Greater Britain was to enable them to have a say in their own
affairs. “Education,” warned Davis, “has taught the West Indian African
to think ... He does not prove himself un-English by his desire to have
some say in the election of those who are empowered to raise and spend
his taxes, and to make laws for him.”“T he universal demand for more
local self-government is not due to a want of loyalty to British rule,”
Salmon insisted, “but to a well-founded feeling that progress is hardly
practicable without it.” By thwarting this trans-racial progress and self-
government in the West Indies Froude was (as he had earlier done in
Ireland) actually undermining the very Greater British imperial union
that he professed to advance.
A people can be made loyal, and they can be kept loyal, by granting to them their just
demands. The withholding of these demands always endangers loyalty and sometimes
destroys it ... How a thing is given, and when, makes a great difference. Administrators
who are unaware of this fact, or who under-estimate the sentiment that lies behind the
facts of life are unworthy to have power in an empire, especially in one where the races
differ from one another in their origin, their character, and their history.
123
11 Conclusion
When Froude died in 1894, the eulogies rolled from the peri odical press.
Lion of the literary establishment, paragon of patriotic imperialism, he
122
Thomas, Froudacity, 131; Salmon, Caribbean Confederation, 128–30.
123
Salmon, Caribbean Confederation, 134.
202 Re-imagining a Greater Britain
was hailed as the Devonshire Englishman par excellence. Appointed Regius
Professor of Modern History two years earlier, he had returned in triumph
to the Oxford that had ignominiously expelled him as a youth.
124
Having
prevailed over most of his rivals in the enterprise of history writing, he died
with the laurels of Macaulay on his brow. True enough, a small group of
academics sneered at his superficiality, his eclecticism, his indiscipline,
and his romantic disillusionment with romance.
125
Froude had not cared,
knowing that it was precisely these qualities that had gained him wide
readership and had rendered his judgments a force to be reckoned with
wherever the Union Jack flew. In fact, Froude’s reputation as impression-
istic, or inc oherent, was largely undes erved. In this chapter, we have
seen that a deep structure of thought and emotion loomed just below
the textual surface of nearly all his writing, relentlessly imposing its fixed
assumptions about the nature of m ankind and society. Indeed, at some
slight risk of oversimplification, we might suggest that Froude’s writing –
in all its baroque plenitude – is built around the arch itecture of four quite
simple, overarching premises. (1) The world is a dark and dangerous
place that is essentially divided between those who are being beaten and
those who are doing the beating. (2) It is better to be among the latter
than among the former group. (3) The beaters are to be celebrated for
their success, and the beaten deserve contempt for their failure. (4) This
ascendancy of the strong over the weak, which crude materialists might
interpret as “might makes right,” must be reinterpreted as a deeper
spiritual unfolding of providential will.
126
Introduced to these principles by his father’s hand, Froude had been
taught by Carlyle to put them into words. In the four decades after 1850,
he emerged as an influential writer by applying them to three of the most
burning preoccupations of his time: history, empire, and race. History,
his first love, absorbed him throughout the 1850s and 1860s, teaching
him to ground his personality in the life of his nation and to seek security
in the image of an authoritarian but protective Tudor state. The history
124
London Times, October 24, 1894; Burrow, A Liberal Descent, 234.
125
In particular, E. A. Freeman mounted a vicious attack on Froude over a period of four
decades, impugning his accuracy, integrity, intelligence, and style. This was particularly
mystifying inasmuch as there were no deep differences between the two men in inter-
pretation or ideology. Froude’s revenge was to replace Freeman as Regius Professor of
Modern History at Oxford when the younger man died in 1892. DF, II: 456–70.
126
Consider, for example, the following passage: “As nature has constituted us that we
mustberuledinsomeway... the rule inevitably will be with the strongest, so nature
has also allotted superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in
deciding that the weak shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from
themselves, and then she confers true liberty when she seems most to be t aking it away”
(The English in Ireland,I:5).
Conclusion 203
of this state led him outward, to encompass an Empire that had been
founded by the far-seeing inspiration of sixteenth-century statesmen, but
was now offering a providential solution to many of the most perplexing
social and political problems of the Victorian age. During the 1870s and
1880s, Froude’s engagement with Empire brought him face to face with
the phenomenon of race, a category of classification and explanation
that virtually supplan ted history in the books of his old age. Here, a host
of complexities resolved themselves into a comforting dualism, in which
stalwart Anglo-Saxons, heirs of the Protestant Reformation, could renew
their hereditary vigor by emigrating to the colonies. There they would
harness the labor of darker, lesser peoples to spread order and prosperity
across the face of the earth.
127
As the friend of leading politicians, as editor of Fraser’s, and as author of
many bestselling books, Froude was clearly one of the important “talking
heads” of the later Victorian age. His exact significance, however, is not
easy to pinpoint. Unlike Macaulay, who attracted a broad but diffuse
audience, Froude was a more polarizing figure to whom reviewers
responded with either strong hostility or vigorous praise. Since few were
likely to look to him for expertise on specifi c subjects, it may be that his
influence came from the sharpness with which he registered th e mood-
swings of middle-class propertied Victorian readers, who were exchang-
ing the easy optimism of Macaulayite liberalism for the hars her, less
confident spirit of a more straitened, neo-conservative age. Froude cer-
tainly did not cause these mood-swings, but he could be th eir beneficiary.
When the progress narrative weakened, when it was temporarily super-
seded by xenophobia or by racial panic, those with a stake in the existing
order might become attracte d to Froudian thinking as they slipped from
the buoyancy of hope into the shadow of fear. It was in this reflective and
reactive sense that Froude contributed to changing the way in which
Greater Britain was imagined during the second half of the nineteenth
century. Once envisioned as a crusade to spread ang locentric values
to the world’s backward peoples, Greater Britain could then be re-
conceptualized as a necess ary perimeter, sustaining Britain’s economic
expansion, absorbing the nation’s surplus population, and providing a
bulwark against foreign hostility.
Yet, as Froude was repeatedly at pains to demonstrate, this shift in
attitudes toward race, nationality, and empi re in his own era also required
127
Froude himself acknowledged, late in life, “My character as a boy was a very miserable
one – I don’t know how I came by it. I have had hard work to mend it even a little, and I do
not know that I have essentially succeeded, or whether characters as such admit of
mending.” Quoted in MJAF, 280–1.
204 Re-imagining a Greater Britain