ABSTRACT
The Boer War put an end to the wilder expressions of late-Victorian imperialism. 1 'The war has been the nation's Recessional after all the pomp and show of the year of Jubilee. It has transmuted the complacent arrogance and contempt of other nations begotten of long years of peace and prosperity to a truer consciousness both of our strength and of our defects, and has awakened an earnest desire to make those defects good.' So admitted the first volume of The Times History of the War in South Africa (1900). During the Edwardian years the British Empire ceased to provide excitement. Instead, its progress even its ultimate survival - became a subject of sober concern. At the opening of the 1902 Colonial Conference Joseph Chamberlain remarked how 'the weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us to support it'. 2 Yet Chamberlain found little backing at the conference for his ideas of imperial unification. The sense of national differentiation was strengthening yearly within the white 'Dominions' (as the self-governing colonies were coming increasingly to be called), unchecked by the introduction of Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford (1902) or of Empire Day (1904). New generations were growing up overseas which had never known Britain as 'home'. New Zealand remained the most British of the Dominions; but when at the 1911 Imperial Conference her Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, unexpectedly echoed Chamberlain's old proposals for formal links, he was opposed both by the other Dominion premiers and by Asquith, the British Prime Minister. Such a scheme, declared Asquith, would be 'absolutely fatal to our present system of responsible government'. 3
