ABSTRACT
Just as there have been strenuous attempts to show that there was no Great Depression in the late-Victorian period, so has there also developed a body of opinion that the ‘New Imperialism’ so often regarded as distinctive of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was not really ‘new’ and that, so far from being the outcome of any new philosophy of Empire, it was a rather harassed, if not desperate, reaction to the force of unlooked-for circumstance. However, attempts to play down
the Imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s must be seen against the undoubted fact that Imperialism was a burning public issue at the time; that between 1871 and 1900 there were added to the British Colonial Empire around 66 million people and 4¼ million square miles; and that this great accession of peoples and territories, though obtained at a time when France, Germany, Italy and Belgium were all for the first time simultaneously involved in the race for colonies, was greatly in excess of the gains made by any of these powers. Just as nothing quite like the economic phenomenon rightly or wrongly called The Great Depression had happened before, so was the Imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s without precedent.
