Roundtable

Response
Richard Price
It is a pleasure to respond to the comments on my book, British Society
1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change, offered by Timothy
Alborn, Francis O’Gorman and Joanna Innes. Although most of the
reviews of the book when it appeared were considered and judicious,
the readings by these three commentators give me particular pleasure.
Academics do not need to be praised to be flattered; nor do they need
to find agreement. It is compliment enough when the ideas that one
offers are taken seriously. Each of these respondents has clearly taken
the book and its argument seriously. They have raised questions and
criticisms that demand proper consideration. I plan to do that in so far
as space will allow and in so far as I am able. These comments draw my
attention to weaknesses and absences that were not fully evident at the

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time I wrote the piece. But I do not intend to present the results of new
research. Indeed, in the past few years my focus has shifted away from
the questions I was concerned to address in British Society. I am now
engaged on a project that looks at British history from the perspective
of the frontier of empire in the early nineteenth century. As a con-
sequence my sense of the historiography of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth century has shifted more towards the body of work that deals
with empire. Thus, my response will comment more on the conceptual
and methodological implications of the comments on my original argu-
ment. In particular, I will address topics that in one form or another are
raised by the papers presented here. Those issues are: the context in
which the book was conceived, especially as it relates to the matter of
periodization; the question of the ‘age of reform’ and the dangers and
advantages of using contemporary categories to analyze a period; the
absence of culture in my book; the unarticulated historical dynamic
that underpinned its argument; the issue of empire in the schema of
the book; and, finally, the question of British modernity.
I can best approach the first point – context and periodization – by
admitting what was obvious to the commentators: that this book was
written as a kind of summing up of many years of engagement with
some dominant themes in the historiography of modern Britain. And I
think it is not out of place to expound a little on the assumptions and
purposes that lay behind that project, because it is relevant to any assess-
ment of the strengths and weaknesses of the argument of the book. As
Joanna Innes rightly remarks, I came out of an historical world of the
1960s and 1970s when a different approach to social history was open-
ing up new and at the time exciting vistas. I had long thought that one

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of the missions of the social history that came out of that era should be
to re-write the general history of Britain. This ambitious agenda
may have been misguided. We are all aware of the way meta-narratives
distort the complexity of the historical process and erect new forms of
disciplinary exclusion. Still, it seems to me important not to dismiss
entirely the advantages of arguments that try to explain a broad period.
They are, I think, twofold.
First, they oblige us to think about change. I continue to believe that
one of the central justifications of history is that it helps us explain
change. Naturally, there should be argument about how we understand
change. It may very well be that scholarship rooted in a focus on socio-
economic forces tends to slip too easily into positivist teleologies. But
the underlying project of British Society, to explain how we got from
one point to another in time, seems to me to lie at the heart of what
historians should do. This question seems often to be lost in the

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contemporary interest in culture as the site of historical determination.
Thus, to take an example from the currently popular treatment of
empire as a cultural formation, there is a tendency to deploy concepts
such as modernity as signifiers that float on a sea unbounded by
horizons of time or even place. Empire in the eighteenth century, for
example, is treated as a source of that century’s modernities in the same
way as it is offered as the origin of the more advanced modernity of the
early twentieth century. Yet no necessity to define what these moderni-
ties were is recognized, let alone explain how one kind of modernity was
different from another, nor what their relation to one another was.1
And this suggests a second advantage of taking the long view, also a
foundational premise of British Society: the exploration of relational
associations between the various spheres of society. Along with explain-
ing change over time, this is a further distinctive mission of an histori-
cal methodology. Thus, to draw again from the cultural scholarship on
empire, we can note a failure to make any attempt to integrate questions
of political economy into its perspective. The unfortunate result is that
one kind of holistic framework replaces another. Whereas some of us
used to believe that a combination of Marx, Lenin, Hobson and
Schumpeter contained the key to understanding imperialism, that holy
grail has now passed to Edward Said and Homi Bhaba. There is much
that can be said in favour of these scholars. But they are not that
much interested in contextualizing analysis in time or space. They are
interested in the epistemologies of representation. As a consequence,
they are not particularly concerned to ask how one aspect of a social
formation relates to other aspects of social formations. The end result,
I would argue, is a framework of inquiry that individually can be very

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interesting and thought provoking, but which soon reaches the limits
of its ability to reveal new or sophisticated insights. If we are not par-
ticularly interested, for example, in the relationship of the culture of
empire to the other signs of empire – its military, diplomatic, political,
sociological and economic formations – then there is a distinct ceiling
on what culture can be used to explain. There is evidence already
of sclerotic tendencies in the ‘new’ scholarship on empire precisely
because it is analytically confined to a set of well-established cultural
precepts, and essentially uninterested in anything outside of their
boundaries.2 In any case, the underlying architecture of my book rested
on the two combined assumptions: that explaining change is a central
task for historians, and that one mark of superior historical arguments
is their success in linking various spheres of societal experience. This
returns us, finally, to the value of arguing about periods.
As Francis O’Gorman points out in his piece, periods are an everyday

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currency in historical or literary studies. But – as with the aforemen-
tioned cultural studies of empire – periods seldom seem to receive
much scholarly attention in their own right. They are seldom examined
for the assumptions that are contained within the choice of a particular
set of years. Yet their significance should not be underestimated.
Writing about history can hardly escape a chronological framework and
choosing that framework is itself a statement about historical under-
standing. Periodization is not simply a convention of convenience that
provides us with one way of limiting and controlling our questions and
analysis. Periods are necessary for two elementary but important
reasons. First they are essential to contextualizing historical analysis.
How can we understand the significance, for example, of late nine-
teenth century ‘modernities’ without contextualizing our particular
aspect of interest within a wider vista of historical relationships?
And, second, periods are essential to a conception of the dynamic of
historical change over time.
The question of the ‘age of reform’ in early nineteenth century
Britain is a case in point. It is worth focusing on this for a moment
because how we conceive of the 1830s and 1840s underpins perhaps
the most serious objection to the argument of my book. Indeed, both
Joanna Innes, and Martin Hewitt (the latter in a paper soon to be
published in Victorian Studies), have rightly made this the fulcrum of
their criticisms of my notion that the Victorian period needs to be
folded into the wider chronology of 1680-1880.3 In essence they have
argued that this period contained sufficiently new features to mark a
significant break with the past and gave shape to the Victorian period.
This period has long been regarded as one in which the old world of

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the eighteenth century finally gave way to the new world of the nine-
teenth century. Exactly how it is to be assessed in the longer-term sweep
of British history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, however,
is precisely the subject of debate. The period’s importance in this
respect lies in the claim that it is the origin of nineteenth century
modernities. But how one assesses the significance of these decades
depends to a considerable extent on how we treat the contemporary
definitions of ‘reform’. Both Hewitt and Innes (and her collaborator
Arthur Burns) take contemporary assertions of reform seriously and see
their task as elaborating and exploring exactly what was at stake in these
claims. This is also the essence of Francis O’Gorman’s comments from
the perspective of literary history. I have no objections to that pro-
cedure. Indeed, it is a valid way to practice the historian’s craft; and it
may very well lie at the heart of what literary historians do. There is a
whole school of history that places a first priority on entering the mind

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of the past. O’Gorman’s formulation puts this procedure rather nicely.
Explaining the importance of understanding what the Victorians meant
by ‘reform’ is essential, he argues, to understanding what they thought
they were doing and why they acted the way they did.
This is quite right. But the difficulty comes when we want to move
beyond that and take a slightly broader perspective, of either concept
or time. We know how the story ended, and as historians we are entitled
to ask of past actors how what they did was connected both with what
preceded, and followed, their actions. These connections were not
necessarily of interest to the actors of the time. Yet in order for us to see
why what they did took the shape that it did, it is useful to move beyond
their own mental world. And this was my purpose in British Society. It was
informed by a belief that much of the foundational historiography of
the Victorian period had not only adopted the categories of the time,
but in a sense had been captured by them. In the process, I believed,
the categories of contemporaries had been reified.4
Reading both Innes and Hewitt’s remarks from several years later, I
readily concede that it would have been better if my book had discussed
in more detail exactly how that period of ‘reform’ could be conceived
within the longer term context of the argument. Had I done so I think
I would have admitted the formative importance of the 1830s and 1840s
for shaping much of significance in the social and political world of the
mid-Victorian period. Indeed, one of the revisionist claims in the book
of essays edited by Burns and Innes is to push that period back to
include the aftermath of the American War, and to expand the mean-
ing of ‘reform’ beyond the exclusive focus on parliamentary reform to
include moral and social reform. But for my taste making these moves

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fails sufficiently to escape from the trap of sanctifying and elaborating

the meanings of the time. It is correct to point to the fact that ‘reform’
was a keyword for this period. But its early nineteenth century domi-
nance surely began with the Wilkite movement and then extended into
a wider context of moral renewal, both for individuals and society as a
whole. This is extremely important, and it suggests that a fruitful line of
approach to understanding this period may be to follow historians like
Dror Wahrman into the world of subject formation rather than class
formation.5 If that is the case, then I would again point to fact that the
origins of this notion of ‘reform’ surely extends back to the later seven-
teenth century. It was at this moment that reform gets secularized, as
it were, in organizations like societies for the suppression of vice
which were detached from an essentially religious foundation of social
morality (although they were not detached from religion itself) and
were focused very much on altering individual sensibilities.

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But it is a reflection of the instability that is attached to this kind of
periodization that Wilkes gets only passing mention by Burns and Innes.
Of course, it would have been quite possible to have framed their book
from the Wilkite moment as well as from the moment of evangelical
reform in the 1780s. Indeed by extending the ‘age of reform’ back to
the last third of the eighteenth century, they are again adopting the
rhetoric and language of the well known reformers of that period. In
short, I do not think these historians have escaped from the trap that I
was concerned to get us out of.
Furthermore, I would also argue that my concept of dynamism and
containment can accommodate the evidence and arguments that are
presented for arguing for the pivotal importance of the ‘age of reform’.
Here is where I would agree that my conceptualization would have been
improved by a deeper and more complete explication of how change
and containment worked within the period as a whole. In other words,
I did not present a mechanism that explained my sense of how change
was accommodated within limits that did not essentially disrupt the
social and political formations derived from 1688. Nor did I explain the
various phases of change within that broader period. It is impossible for
me to do this here. But my point was that the quality of change did not
shift the terrain of political, social or economic relationships into new
landscapes that needed different organizational structures to govern
them, nor a vocabulary to explain them that would have been incom-
prehensible to the world of the late seventeenth century. Thus, the
forces for change worked within limits that were frequently quite
consciously conservative. To cite just one example from Burns and
Innes’ book: the intent of Daniel O’Connell in pushing successfully for

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catholic emancipation was quite explicitly to preserve social and political

relationships in Ireland, not to disrupt them.6 Reform in this context
was clearly within the Burkean tradition rather than the Painite
tradition.
But of course change was dynamic in the sense that it continually
tested the boundaries of prior arrangements. Thus, again to take a
pertinent example, the eruption of rebellion in the North American
colonies caused a tectonic movement of the existing formations that
under pinned political and social relations. The end result was that the
question of the political arrangements that had emerged from the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries once again were pushed
onto the political agenda. Burns and Innes are quite right to con-
textualize the 1830s and 1840s in terms of the later eighteenth century.
The debate and the contest over what to do about the new pressures
for change was protracted and contentious. And it was so because the

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legacies of 1688 were at stake. This was clearly recognized by those on
both sides of the political debate which climaxed in the years 1828-32.
But, once again, the point at issue for my thesis is how we read the events
of those years within the context of the past. My reading of that process
was that the limits of 1688 were restored by 1832 rather than were
broken.7 The political nation remained constricted and closely defined.
Most importantly the place of the ‘people’ in the political world
remained confined to the noisy world of out of doors politics, which
was precisely where it had been since the1690s. This does not mean
there was no ‘change’. Obviously, there were new and significantly
new elements in the configurations of politics. Leadership styles, for
example, were modified; organizational structures were developed that
were fundamentally new. Chartism, for example, may have used the
rhetoric of eighteenth-century politics, but its organizational methods
looked way beyond even the practices of the mid-nineteenth century.
Still, this element of change was not sufficient to introduce the organ-
izational or ideological structures of ‘class politics’ that came to shape
politics after the 1880s.
Hewitt’s case for the 1830s and 1840s is a bit different. The strongest
part of his argument against my framework lies in his deployment of
evidence from scientific culture, particularly the openings to new
conceptions of the visual and optical during these years. I am not
qualified to take issue with this particular objection. I just am not famil-
iar enough with the scholarship on theories of knowledge or percep-
tion. However, I think the question about such theories should be: what
role did they play in reshaping the way society was culturally, politically
or socially organized? Were they agents of destablization in the mid-

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Victorian period or were they agents that redrew boundaries? Still, in

focusing on this issue Hewitt points to a serious absence from my book,
which others have noted too. I did not deal with culture. This was as
much a strategic decision as it was an intellectual decision. I did in fact
collect quite a lot of material on religion and religious culture over the
period. But I could see no way to do justice to the category of culture –
even defined quite narrowly – without an overly large extension to the
book. In addition,the historiography I was coming out of and reacting
to, was largely that of a Marxian social-economic and political approach
that had been formative for my generation of British historians.
Nevertheless, it always lurked at the back of my mind that certain
aspects of cultural history over this period did lend themselves to the
arguments that I put forth. In particular, the social history of religion
and especially evangelicalism would seem to fit the case for melding the
nineteenth century into the earlier period. Methodism was a direct

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product of the early eighteenth century, in spite of the later attention
that was given to it by early historians of the labour movement as a quin-
tessentially working-class religion. The moral impetus that underlay the
evangelicalism of the great ethical causes of the ‘age of reform’ surely
makes most sense if it is seen as part of an ongoing concern with the
reformation of manners that runs through the period from the 1690s.
Indeed, the moral offensive – the rational recreation movement –
against popular culture from the 1830s would have been thoroughly
familiar to people like Jonas Hanway a century earlier or the London
methodists who launched a series of prosecutions against immorality in
the 1760s.8 Many of the central strategies that Victorian philanthropy
used to address social problems were far more like eighteenth century
initiatives than they were like anything to be found after the later
nineteenth century.
Another issue that was not confronted as explicitly as it could have
been in the book was raised by Joanna Innes: the question of the histori-
cal dynamic that underlay my conception of change within continuity
in the period 1680-1880. She raises the question in particular in relation
to the end of the process in the mid to late-nineteenth century. There
seems to be agreement that the later nineteenth century did see the
emergence of new social formations. But Innes raises the excellent
point that how these new terrains arrived is not addressed. It was a prob-
lem that I was aware of when I finished the book, but only briefly
addressed. Indeed, I contemplated a new project that would take
another look at the mid-Victorian period from that perspective. I
think that it would be possible to construct an argument that the mid-
Victorian period was dominated precisely by the tensions and in-

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stabilities that were created by the successful restoration of order in the

reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. The idea that this was a period whose
stability followed from the defeat of Chartism is one that dies hard in
the historiography, and it is not entirely wrong. But it is only one half of
the story. The old formulation of ‘equipoise’ that was enunciated by
W.L. Burn was a brilliant insight into this period. But equipoise suggests
a sort of natural balance, when in fact I would prefer to see it as some-
thing that was in constant danger of slipping out of control and had to
be continually maintained. This was after all the period when what Mary
Poovey called the ‘ideological work of gender’ moved into high gear to
produce and secure the authoritative boundaries of sexual and gender
difference.9 Was this a product of the complete hegemony of domestic
ideology, or rather of its need to negotiate a stable dominance?
As we now more fully appreciate, Chartism did not immediately
disappear, but tended to shift its focus to a more local level, where it

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continued to inject an element of instability into the social and politi-
cal landscape of equipoise. A similar instability ran through the conduct
of politics. The popular politics of the mid-nineteenth century con-
tinued to be dominated by an ‘out of doors’ rowdiness that was part of
the disorders of the Hanoverian era. Likewise, the continuing debate
about parliamentary reform did not go away. It remained a major pre-
occupation within parliament and the formal political nation.10
So what happened to disrupt this stability? I personally think that is
a question that could well occupy the attention of nineteenth-century
specialists. It is impossible for me to answer it here. I can only suggest
as I did in the book, that a dynamic composed of forces both internal
and external to British society converged to disrupt the structures of
social, cultural and political authority that had been restored in the age
of reform. These forces surely took different forms in the different
spheres of societal experience. At one level, they represented a growth
of systems and forces that had been implanted earlier. Thus, as
Theodore Hoppen has pointed out, one distinguishing feature of the
mid-Victorian period was the way what he calls ‘industrialism’ estab-
lished itself in the economy. By this he means the expansion of indus-
trial forms that had been prefigured in the first industrial revolution,
and were to achieve general dominance during the second industrial
revolution.11 Other internal forces intruded themselves more rudely
into the social terrain. The relatively sudden displacement of religion
as the main source of cultural authority in the 1860s and 1870s, for
example, could not have been predicted in 1830. At another level, there
was the question of unintended consequences that followed from
actions during the age of reform. Here the political reform of 1867

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would offer prime evidence for this aspect of the process.

1867 opened the door to a series of legal and administrative chal-
lenges that in their turn pointed to an expanded electorate. But the
nature of the discourse itself that surrounded 1867 demonstrated the
extent to which the restoration of the 1830s had decayed. The exact
confection of forces that created the opening offered by 1867 is, of
course, very complex. But the central question in 1866-67 continued to
be the question that had animated the politics of reform in 1830-32.
How much reform was needed to bring politics back into balance? 12
This question was much less loudly trumpeted in 1867; it was also recog-
nized to be much more complicated than in 1832 – witness the intricate
legal definitions that were resorted to in order to secure a bill. As
Disraeli learned when he tried to calculate statistically the safest level at
which to set the franchise, the possibilities of containing politics to the
old idea of a limited political nation were much weaker now than they

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had been thirty years before. It was as much a symptom as a cause of
such an erosion that Gladstone, for example, had already begun to
move – however cautiously and with strong mental reservations –
towards identifying his political future with the idea of a democratic,
working-class electorate.
Outside the confines of the islands, external forces were also operat-
ing to undermine the terrain of the older social, political and cultural
structures. Here the leading force was surely the changing place of
empire in British society. Empire came to possess a different valence
in the culture and politics of the later nineteenth century than it had
possessed before.13 Over the mid to late-nineteenth century the role
that empire played in the composition of Britishness underwent a sea
change. The traditional role that empire played in national identity
derived from the original idea that Britain’s empire was a Protestant
empire that brought liberty and freedom in its wake. The most recent
version of that ideology was the christian humanitarianism of mission-
ary culture. This notion was displaced as the central discourse of empire
over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. By the late-nineteenth
century, empire was justified as critical to Britain’s competitive role in
the changed world political economy and as morally legitimate by dint
of new theories of racial hierarchy. The older christian humanitarian-
ism does not disappear, of course. But its place in scale of justifications
for empire had changed, along with the way it was articulated.
Similarly, the way empire is placed in the politics of the nation
changes. Disraeli shifted the discourse in that respect. He put empire
into popular politics in a way that it had not been before. The associa-
tion between this and the growing democratization of the political

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nation is an obvious one. The political discourse of empire was a way of

creating a new kind of national unity at a time when it was necessary to
find ways of overcoming competing loyalties (like class) in politics. The
fact that empire was also increasingly present in the popular culture
through things like product advertising or popular songs and stories,
only reinforces the argument that the relationship of empire to
national culture is decisively altered during this period.
Empire, it is generally agreed, was a critical component of ‘modern-
ity’, although, as I remarked earlier, the idea of modernity has been
used with insufficient attention to contextual specificities. In the late-
nineteenth century, however, it is easy to demonstrate the particular
configuration of empire’s contribution to ‘modernity’. It was central to
the subjectivity of Britishness. It was central also to the idea of economic
modernity. And this provides me the opportunity to comment on
Timothy Alborn’s interesting remark about the unresolved character

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of British economic and social modernity that runs through my
book. I regard this as a fair comment. This was another issue that was
incompletely addressed.
To explain this, I have to circle back to where I begin in this brief
‘Response’ and speak again about the subjective experience from which
the book grew. My own historical practice emerged from a scholarly
context which was heavily inflected with the idea that the British
experience constituted the norm of twentieth-century modernity.
The book was written against the backdrop of a whole generation of
scholarship that placed Britain at the forefront of the path to twentieth-
century modernity. Thus, the starting point for my own reconsideration
of the period 1680-1880 was a series of notions that for a long time domi-
nated the historiography of Britain and that saw British history broadly
as a series of ‘firsts’. They included the idea that Britain was a political
model in respect of the growth of parliamentary democracy from the
seventeenth century; the notion that she was the first industrial nation
with the first ‘modern’ economy; that she had acquired the first of the
modern empires; and that she was also the first to experience mature
class politics, emanating both from the bourgeoisie and from the
working class.
But I think that Alborn’s way of drawing a conclusion from my argu-
ment is right. It is not helpful to conceive Britain as playing such a role.
Indeed, if twentieth century economic modernity is defined as con-
stituted centrally by industrial capitalism, then Britain’s relationship to
that modernity was characterized by deep ambiguities that flowed from
the legacies of the past that were described in British Society. It was not
that Britain somehow ‘lost’ the ‘spirit of industrial capitalism’ at some

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point in the twentieth century.14 It was that she never actually had it in
the first place. If we wish to speak in terms of historical ‘modernities’,
the occasion of British modernity was the moment when the empire of
commerce and trade left its deep imprint on the culture, traditions and
institutions of Britain. And that moment was the subject of my book,
British Society 1680-1880.
(University of Maryland, College Park)

Endnotes
1. Examples of this tendency are to be found in Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism
and Identity in Late Victorian Culture. Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003) and Kathleen Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in A New Imperial History.
Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660-1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2. See my piece ‘One Big Thing: Britain and its Empire’, forthcoming in Journal of
British Studies, 2006.

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3. Martin Hewitt, ‘Why the notion of Victorian Britain does make sense’, forthcoming
Victorian Studies (Spring 2006). For a fuller elaboration of the view of Innes on this
period see the ‘Introduction’ to the very important book of essays that she edited
with Arthur Burns, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4. But this does not mean an inferior kind of history. The first edition of Asa Briggs’
Age of Improvement (London: Longmans,1959), for example, remains a classic work
of history because it conveys an interpretation of a period that successfully combines
a meta-narrative with richly nuanced detail and attention to the place of different
levels of social experience within the narrative.
5. Making of the modern self: identity and culture in eighteenth-century England (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2004).
6. See Jennifer Ridden, ‘Irish reform between the 1798 Rebellion and the Great
Famine’, in Burns and Innes, Rethinking the Age of Reform.
7. But this is not to say that J.C.D. Clark’s ‘ancien regime’ may be extended beyond
1832. I do not subscribe to the notion that pre-1832 England (or Britain) may be
seen as an ancien regime. Indeed, that is only possible if one fails to recognize that
the landscape of British society was shaped by far more than politics and religio-
political thought.
8. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 499.
9. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian
England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). See also Margot Finn, After
Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848-1874 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993).
10. See James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815-
1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Miles Taylor, The Decline of
British Radicalism 1847-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
11. K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1848-1886 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 3.
12. This still seems to me to be the central story of 1867 in spite of the attempts to place
race and gender at the centre of the issue. This can only be done by inference and

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implication. There is very little direct evidence that these were live or threatening
issues in the political and social process that went to compose 1867. The leap in the
dark was not a leap into an unknown gender or racial future, but to an unknown
class future. This is not to deny that race and gender issues were part of the context
of the 1860s, for they clearly were. The Jamaican rebellion was a profoundly import-
ant event in the way empire was played out in national politics. See Catherine Hall,
Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
13. Which is why most current scholarship focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries where it is relatively easy to demonstrate the centrality of empire to the
culture and politics. For a very intelligent treatment of this see Andrew Thompson,
The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (London: Longmans, 2005).
14. Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); or from different angle see Corelli
Barnett The Audit of War: the illusion and reality of Britain as a great power (London:
Macmillan, 1986).

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