Legitimizing the British Empire: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Civilizing Mission

This essay explores the peculiar meanings conferred on the idea of nation in the context of various attempts to redefine in statal-national terms Britain’s imperial identity which characterized the tradition of liberal imperialism. The analysis focuses on the evolution of a specific form of pan-Britannism that emerged from the 1880s onwards and sought both to emphasize the political potentialities of a presumed ethnolinguistic and cultural homogeneity between the “white colonies” and the motherland, and to credit the British global state with a providential vocation for the unification of mankind. India’s later inclusion in pan-Britannist rhetoric, which went so far as to invest the “Raj” with the mission of encouraging the birth of a pan-Indian nation state based on the cross-fertilization of European and Asian civilizations within the British Commonwealth of Nations, not only demonstrated the colonial authorities’ final adoption of a variant of Orientalism aiming to distinguishing itself from the most blatant kinds of cultural differentialism, but was also premised on a profound revision in a pluralist sense of the categories according to which late Victorian imperialists had interpreted nationality in reference to the British Empire’s composite metropolitan core and its neo-European overseas peripheries.