ABSTRACT
At their head stood John Robert Seeley,8 Regius Professor of History at Cambridge from 1869 until his death in 1895. His lecture course on the British Empire, delivered in 1881-2 and published in 1883 as The Expansion of England, established imperialism as a central theme of modern British history and in the public mind. Within two years the book had sold 80,000 copies. It remained in print until 1956. Thus Seeley, in the words of one of his followers:
threw a powerful searchlight on the development of the British empire, and brought home to thousands of readers, who have never before thought of it, the sense that, after all, our Colonies are only England beyond the seas – a greater England but England all the same …9
Seeley, who had previously been Professor of Latin at University College, London, and who had been appointed to the Cambridge chair by Gladstone, thus helped to popularize and legitimize British imperialism in an intellectual sense, although the term was used only twice in the book, and on both occasions with reference to despotic rule.10 The irony of all this was not lost upon contemporaries. In 1895 Jacobs, writing in The Athenaeum, declared, 'our Imperialism of today is the combined work of Beaconsfield and Seeley, a curious couple of collaborators'.11
