ABSTRACT
The Edwardian period has often been neatly packaged as 'the Age of Empire', a time when the membership of the Primrose League achieved its apex, Robert Baden-Powell established the Boy Scouts, and the nation annually celebrated 'Empire Day'. Museums and exhibitions collected together artefacts from across the empire, and, as Ruth Hoberman argues, in showcasing treasures from the colonies, museums in particular 'worked as a kind of stage on which cultural anxieties and conflicts were played out' for a mass audience. The New Age magazine, meanwhile provided a space for the open-ended discussion of empire. The brutish strength of England emerges as the single aspect of superiority that has enabled the assembly and sustenance of an empire. The British schooling system was in part designed to educate a middle-class work force who would be encouraged to disperse across the empire to seek their individual fortunes.
