ABSTRACT
So what was the British Empire, what were the imperial concerns of the time, and where could the Victorians find out about all this?
The empire of the 1850s and 1860s included what was left of British North America after the peace with the United States in 1783; what was left of the British Caribbean after the sugar economy was ruined by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s; various bases like Gibraltar and Malta, left over from centuries of wars and struggles; the more recent anti-slave trade bases on the coast of West Africa; the southern tip of the same continent, taken as a base during the Napoleonic Wars but open to settlers and rapidly turning into a set of colonies; India, ruled until 1859 not by the British government but by the East India Company; and the very young colonies of Australia and New Zealand, with New Zealand coming under British rule only in 1840. Some of these places were governed by military commanders, some (such as Bermuda) by local governments hundreds of years old, and many were self-governing parliamentary democracies, nearly independent of Whitehall except in foreign policy, defence and native affairs. This state of near independence in many of the more developed colonies of settlement1-granted in response to the burning of the local parliament in Newfoundland in the year of revolution, 1848-was called ‘responsible government’, because each ministry was responsible to the lower house of the local parliament. The cabinet stood or fell by its votes in parliament, not by the favour of the local governor. By 1859, the world was girded with 11 of these English-speaking colonial democracies, each with its own ‘responsible government’, its own parliament, mace and speaker, a vibrant and contentious local press, and as often as not its own agenda of expansion and development.
