Introduction

One of the most famous comments made about empire is that the British seemed ‘to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. Sir John Robert Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, made this remark in a series of lectures pub­lished in 1883 as The Expansion of England.

In this section we consider three particular variants of how empire was planned and executed. Tony Ballantyne concedes that British imperial expansion as a rule was messy and contingent, but in spite of Seeley’s provocative epigram, the British did not lack for imperial theorists. Edward Gibbon Wakefield was an important critic of this pattern and in the 1830s and 1840s he put forward an influential new model to replace it. Known as ‘systematic colonisation’, at the base of this theory was the idea that money from colo­nial land sales would subsidise assisted emigration. This would allow for capitalist development in colonies and ease population pressure in the metropole. While Wakefield failed in his mission to bring order to the processes of colonial expansion, his ideas about migration and colonies would influence a range of new societies, particularly in North America and Australasia, and offer a powerful theory of what is now known to scholars as settler colonialism.

Wakefield conceived his model of free emigration in part as a reaction to the convict transportation that underpinned the penal colonies of Australia. As Clare Anderson and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart point out in their chapter, almost all European powers trans­ported convicts to their colonies.

Mark Choate returns us to the late nineteenth-century moment of high imperialism during which Seeley sought to galvanise popular thinking about empire. The context was a heightened competition for colonies that ushered in a new moment in European expansionism, the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the ‘scramble for Asia’. Italy, Germany and Japan are his players in this high-stakes game of geopolitics. Tracking three significant elements of this period—the colonialism of economic expansion, settler colonialism in the era of mass migration and the way foreign policy and imperial glory were used to influence politics and reputation at home—Choate asks what was ‘new’ about the new imperialism.