ABSTRACT
We have looked at men-from Arthur Mills to William Denison and Edward BulwerLytton-who began with some interest in democracy and the English-speaking colonies. Then they went on to develop a broader and more general idea about the nature and extent of the British Empire. Some made this intellectual move as early as the 1840s, as Mills and William Westgarth did; others took longer. Either way, they moved so far away from their intellectual point of origin-democracy-that they were able to derive for themselves a racialist programme of tropical conquest and domination. They had discovered a general and world-wide British imperialism in which the colonies of settlement faded into the background. The intellectual category of ‘the British Empire’ that had once taken in the Tocquevillean societies of Australasia or North America had metastasized into something much larger, comparatively featureless, and almost unrecognizable.
