ABSTRACT
For generations, while Englishmen were taught to think of themselves as guardians of an empire that would never stop expanding, to be a “little Englander” was to be stamped as decadent or only half an Englishman. The First World War was followed within a few years by a grand operation to restore morale and confidence, the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Empire was a poor substitute for a genuine, open-minded interest in the world, and if England had been discovering such an interest since 1945, it would be a big step forward; instead there seems, rather, to have been a relapse into insularity. A consequence of the end of empire may have been to deprive young progressives of one motive for joining left-wing parties. Workers have taken on middle-class characteristics, such as ownership of cars: a class or race emulating a “higher” one is likely to start by adopting its worse, not its better proclivities.
