ABSTRACT
By 1900 the British Empire had spread into many continents and controlled many di erent nations, hoping to make use of their unexploited wealth and to ‘secure to Great Britain the freedom to sell all over the world the products of her growing interests’.1 e British politicians and intelligentsia who theorized the ideologies of the Empire, played a major role in maintaining, expanding and strengthening the British Empire as well as managing the a airs of the colonized peoples. John Buchan, a prominent empire commentator in the Edwardian period, was strongly in uenced by the ethos of Empire in his early ction and polemics.2 In the 1916 ‘Preface’ to the third edition of A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Buchan said that ‘our Empire is a mystic whole which no enemy may part asunder, and our wisest minds are not given to the task of devising a mechanism of union adequate to this spiritual unity’.3 Hence, the ‘wisest minds’ had to have a duty towards the Empire, impelling them to ‘devise’ methods and ‘mechanisms’ to strengthen it.
