ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Balance of Power in the 1860s – or of the illusion of Balance – had left an ominous gap in Britain’s diplomatic defences. Most political economists positively welcomed it. The trouble though may have started much earlier, when British capitalism was flourishing, and its very success made it impossible that it could ever be rooted out. The point was that the Victorians’ commercial and financial penetration of the world was bound to provoke reactions. Full-blooded imperialism also required full-blooded imperial governors. In the middle of the 1890s, therefore, Britain’s isolation from Europe was as great, and as necessary to her, as it had ever been. The Liberal vision, too, which had sustained Britain’s sense of difference before, was beginning to fade. The less secure they looked, the more effort and force and responsibility and expense it took to maintain them.
