The ‘British World’, other worlds, and the five rings: possibilities for trans-imperial histories and historical ‘what ifs’

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, an obscure British imperialist envisioned that in the near future the ‘many lands’ of the globe might well be ruled by ‘one people’, the English-speaking denizens of imperial ‘Greater Britain’ and the United States (Cooper 1891a, 458). John Astley Cooper, an ardently imperial Briton who spent his childhood in Australia and his adolescence and adulthood in England, argued that in order to fully assume the duties of global command, these world-ruling ‘one people’ needed an institution to remind them of their common bonds and commingled interests (Llewellyn 2011; Mangan 1985; Moore 1988, 1991). Divided into a multitude of distinct polities and dispersed to the far corners of the earth, this heterogeneous band of English speakers could only meet their leadership duties if they remembered the essential Englishness that animated their many but related cultures, whether they had been born in the original homelands of the British Isles or in the far-flung realms of North America, Africa, Asia or the Antipodes (Cooper 1891a, 1891b, 1891c, 1895).