In the heyday of British Imperial power, between the 1830s and the 1950s, was opinion at home saturated with the ideology and culture of “Empire”, or at best indifferent to the Imperial project? The two greatest historians of British imperialism, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, insisted on indifference. The private calculations of Ministers and their official advisers, so they argued, betrayed a constant anxiety that the electorate (and, by extension, public opinion) would punish the enlarging of Imperial burdens, not least for the cost it imposed on the taxpayer. If Imperial aggrandisement led to a military disaster, electoral chastisement would be especially severe: that was the lesson of Gladstone’s “Midlothian” election in 1880, after Disraeli’s Government was tainted by the Afghan and Zulu wars. Would-be expansionists had to conceal their intentions and make spurious claims about the need for defence or the gains from trade. When Empire began to cost serious money (after the Second World War), the electorate ditched it without a second thought. In more recent years, historians, like geese, have rushed in a flock to the other end of the field. It is now widely asserted (though perhaps not as widely as Bernard Porter suggests) that British public culture was deeply “imperialised”: public opinion endorsed the Imperial “mission”; and the values and vices of an Imperial mind-set were diffused so generally in British society as to pervade (or corrupt) almost every issue in the public arena, as well as literature, thought and even domestic behaviour. BBC producers now feel entitled (perhaps even obliged) to insert bogus scenes with “Imperialist” dialogue in their glossy productions of Austen or Trollope, just as a few years ago they would have added a dollop of gratuitous sex.

In The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British really thought about Empire, a vivid, compelling and closely written book, Professor Porter confronts this fashionable view head-on. In any study of opinion, historical technique becomes a central issue. It is easy enough by selective quotation to make extravagant claims and draw sweeping conclusions. On the other hand, even if it were possible to trawl comprehensively through the masses of printed materials, audio-visual productions, as well as sculpture, architecture and art, in less than a lifetime, in search of Imperial motifs or unspoken assumptions, it would still be necessary to interpret the findings. Did a “jingo” press reflect public opinion or seek to persuade it? Did adventure novels set in exotic places reveal a public appetite for conquest and rule? Did battle-scene art suggest a public lust for colonial wars? Did the trade promotions for South African oranges or Australian raisins imply sentimental attachment to the lands of white settlement? Was the great torrent of imperial propaganda meant to chime with a mood of Imperial enthusiasm or counter the effects of a stultifying indifference?

Porter’s solution to this methodological problem is the key to the book. It falls into two parts. To supply the data, he has sampled a huge collection of source materials: some seventy-eight newspapers, periodicals and school magazines from The Times to Tit-Bits via the Harrovian; official publications ranging from Hansard to the Lord Chamberlain’s list of plays performed; over 100 memoirs; more than 130 “school textbooks” – a category that include Macaulay’s History of England; and a further 200 contemporary publications, including many popular novels. This forms Porter’s midden pit (Porter is fond of the archaeological metaphor). But to prevent the “shards” of Imperial matter from distorting the sample, Porter insists that they must be placed in their context: set against the background of all the other evidence on political attitudes, popular beliefs, literary tropes, theatrical themes, artistic fashions, music-hall acts and textbook topics. Much of The Absent-Minded Imperialist is taken up with assessing the number and size of the shards against the larger mass of non-Imperial concerns. In the course of inquiry a number of the more ebullient claims about the place of Empire in popular culture are subjected to a crushing (and justified) dismissal.

The overall conclusion is heavily negative. Porter concedes that there is abundant evidence for Imperialist attitudes, the internalisation of Imperial values and the passionate belief in an Imperial mission. But rather than being spread through British society it was heavily bunched. In working-class culture, it was practically invisible. Empire held almost no interest and evoked even less enthusiasm among working-class audiences, readers and voters. Working-class memoirs ignore the Imperial theme. If staring at maps with large red blotches created Imperial feelings in the impressionable young, they failed to survive into autobiographical middle age. Popular theatre avoided imperial topics. Even music-hall acts were far more ambivalent towards the “jingo” mentality than is often supposed, mixing satire and sentiment in an artful appeal to different parts of the audience. In popular literature, horror, crime and sex were overwhelmingly dominant: Empire was nowhere. Further up the social pyramid, in the Victorian middle class, there was less indifference, but not much less. There was plenty of enthusiasm for the spread of free trade, or even the Gospel, and for the idea that Britain was in the van of progress. But the Victorian liberalism to which the middle class was attracted was universalist in outlook, deeply suspicious of the authoritarian claims of Empire, and bored to distraction by talk of the Raj – a subject that emptied the House of Commons at a stroke. The only quarters of Victorian society where Imperialist attitudes were rife, Porter argues, were the aristocracy and that part of the upper middle class where running an Empire was regarded as part of the birthright of a ruling elite.

Porter’s case is built on an extensive sampling of what English people (the restriction is deliberate) of all classes read, wrote, viewed, heard and said in the long nineteenth century, and the short Imperial twentieth. He is careful to adopt an undogmatic tone and the text is peppered with conversational asides to the reader to the effect that he might be wrong but probably wasn’t. But behind this disarming screen, an entire herd of sacred cows is being driven off to slaughter. Porter is sceptical of the fashionable claim that English identity was shaped by unflattering comparisons with non-European peoples. They were far more likely, if popular histories are any guide, to stress the contrast with their own “savage” forebears. He is dismissive of the suggestion, also highly fashionable, that twenty-first-century racism is the lineal descendant of Imperial attitudes, arguing that the majority view in Victorian England attributed English success to cultural not racial attributes: the English were in front, not on top. Modern-day racism was a post-colonial phenomenon. He laughs out of court the idea that because the English drank tea (or consumed other colonial produce), they imbibed Imperial prejudice along with their char. In fact, most exotic foodstuffs had to be very heavily “anglicised” before they appealed to domestic consumers. Nor was the Victorian preoccupation with manliness necessarily connected with the pursuit of Empire: indeed some of the qualities required of Imperial rulers were surprisingly gender-neutral. Late Victorian militarism was more plausibly explained in terms of the fear of invasion than the urge to fight battles in colonial jungle and swamp. Much the same could be said of the monarchist sentiment of the late nineteenth century; there was no vital link with Imperial enthusiasm. Porter turns his fire on another lumbering quadruped: the transmission of the Imperial message through the medium of the novel. If it existed at all, the message was so coded as to elude most of the readers, for whom the adventure not the empire was the main attraction. If there was a large audience for “Imperial” novels, it was a little surprising that an author such as Trollope, who was keenly alert to the taste of the market, showed no interest in writing one. Nor can it be assumed that writing an adventure novel revealed a taste for Empire. One of the most popular in Victorian England was Swiss Family Robinson. Swiss empire-builders would have had to set sail from the coast of Bohemia .

When it comes to the 1890s, the argument  changes gear a little. Porter acknowledges that  was more Imperialism about. But he  attributes this largely to the new sense of anxiety among the “Imperialist class” who were  now anxious to alert a wider segment of opinion to the foreign threat. There was a much more serious propaganda effort, although it tended to emphasise not what the Empire could for the working class but what the working class should do for the Empire. Even the new  wave of school textbooks (a source to which Porter gives much attention) did not make  Empire the central strand of “our island story”.  Porter’s real point is to question the impact of  this Imperial propaganda, arguing that most if not all went in one working-class ear and out of  other. This was not just a matter of ignorance or inattention (as in Lord Milner’s complaint that it was necessary to explain to his audience by England needed an Empire before discussing how to defend it). It reflected the strength and maturity of English working-class culture with its own tastes, interests, values and priorities, different and distinct from those of the middle class (there is an echo here of the work of Ross McKibbin). After the First World War, it was a similar story. After the Second (a period Porter deals with somewhat perfunctorily) public indifference was graphically illustrated by a Colonial Office survey of public opinion. Scarcely any respondents could name a colony: “one man named Lincolnshire”.

Porter’s argument might be summarised as making three principal claims. He insists that the evidence for popular Imperialist attitudes is “thinly scattered, marginal, trivial, occasional, or ternporary”. Secondly, the Imperialist mentality, in so far as it did exist, was a class phenomenon, overwhelmingly rooted in the upper classes. Thirdly, the fact that the British acquired an Empire had no logical connection with the existence or otherwise of Imperial enthusiasm at home. It was the objective facts of British wealth and power that conferred on Britain its Imperial status, not the interest shown in the Imperial enterprise by domestic opinion. In the great debate, Porter thus comes down heavily on the side of Gallagher and Robinson, who were always keen to stress that the “demos” knew little and cared less about Empire. What are we to make of this?

We might notice first that Porter anticipates two lines of attack. The first is from the intuitionist school, the acadeiffic version of that plaintive cry “he must have done ie’. Some of this is larger than life. There is the intriguing tale of the Victorian husband whose (ex-maidservant) wife wore a leather leash (surely a fairly unusual marital requirement even in the dark age of patriarchy). The leash allowed the husband to enjoy the vicarious thrill of Imperial mastery - or so we are told. Of course, no affidavit exists to attest the Imperial motive behind this alarming syndrome, and even if it did we might doubt its veracity on the Cretan principle. Victorian spectators, suggests another writer, went to see stuffed animals in museums to get a similar kick (of course, it is hard to know if they actually got it). The implicit argument of the intuitionist school is that the Victorians’ silence on their Imperial urges cannot be taken at face value: it can only be seen as a form of denial. Porter’s response to this argument which would drive a coach and horses through his patient assemblage of data - is to press the point that if such subliminal feelings were really widespread in British society it is hard ot believe that they would not have surfaced more strongly in the mass of material he surveys. It is a telling point, since despite the simplistic assumptions of much of the literature in this field, Victorian culture was not monolithic: its ideas and values were fiercely contested.

The second objection to Porter’s argument would be more fundamental, or perhaps fundamentalist. This is the view that every aspect of British (or European) culture that was complicit in, or an accessory to, the process of expansion into other parts of the world was by definition Imperialist. Just as European capitalism was inescapably Imperialist (according to Lenin) so was its culture (the parallel trajectory of these arguments is not entirely coincidental). On this gigantic question, Porter assumes an agnostic air, though his general approach would suggest deep-rooted scepticism. He is not concerned, he says, with “broader imperialism”, adding the Parthian shot that to define Imperialism in this universal way is rather like saying that everything that flies should be called a bird. Distinguishing wasps from aeroplanes then becomes rather difficult.

Of course, the definitional issue is the nub of the argument, as it always is in the Imperial debate. For Porter, the “Imperialism” in question is the “dominating, possessing, controlling sort”. Though the settlement colonies get an early mention, it is English attitudes towards India and the tropical colonies that fill most of the text. It might be objected that this is to set the bar very high. These were the places least likely to impinge upon English consciousness: indeed Britain ruled very little of the tropical and subtropical world before 1890, apart from India. Is this the best test of “imperialist” thinking? Nor is it as clear as Porter would have us believe that British expansion abroad had no vital connection with opinion at home. British leaders may have assumed rightly that grabbing vast tracts of Africa had little appeal to public opinion. But they were equally sure that failure to maintain Britain’s prerogatives as a great world power would lead to electoral trouble. After 1885, some 60 per cent of all adult males had an electoral voice. They acquiesced in maintaining a huge and increasingly expensive navy, much of which was kept (until 1912) in the Mediterranean or beyond. They accepted an army proportionately twelve times as large as the American army before 1900, and almost half of which was stationed far away in India. Trade-union objections to “Chinese slavery” in South Africa - an election issue in 1906 - sprang from the fear that indentured labour would steal British emigrants’ jobs in a “white man’s country”, not from fraternal solidarity with downtrodden Asians. Even after the coming of universal suffrage, there were not many votes to break up the Empire, instead, there were trade-union calls for higher imperial tarriffs and better regulation of cheap colonial labour. In a time of desperate danger in 1940-42, there was no public outcry when the cream of the Army was sent off to fight in Egypt. If its minutes are any guide, the main concern of Atlee’s Labour Cabinet in 1947 was not India’s fate, but its own, if its policy were seen by the voter at home as “scuttling the Empire”. Had English opinion been fiercely opposed to the coercion of Nasser or the repression of Mau Mau, the British Government’s policy might have been different. As for the “Empire”, as Andrew Thompson has shown, it was widely thought of before 1914 as meaning the white settlement countries (in common parlance “the Colonies”), not India (to the outrage of Lord Curzon) or tropical Africa. Both main Edwardian parties assumed the wide popularity of eventual “closer union” between the Dominions and Britain, even if they differed over the role of tariffs. Porter says little about emigration, the side of Empire that touched people most. Yet belief in their right to colonise those parts of the world where native peoples were weak was glaringly evident in English attitudes. Millions of all classes moved on this presumption.

On these counts and more, it seems hard to deny that British Imperial power enjoyed the tacit, physical (and sometimes vocal) support of a very wide cross-section of opinion at home. What there clearly wasn’t (and surely Porter is right on this) was a “joined-up” Imperialism, an imperial “mind-sef’ uniformly domineering, aggressive and racist. Even the word Imperialism” had no settled meaning, partly because the British imperium was so bafflingly diverse. For the real British Empire was not just a bloc of territories to rule. It was a colossal jigsaw of dependencies and protectorates, settlement colonies and “spheres of interference”, trucial states and treaty-ports, enclaves and entrepots, gunboats and garrisons, shipping lanes and coaling stations, cable routes and airways, consulates and concessions, infrastructures and investments, barren rocks and bases. How it actually worked or was held together, even how they had acquired it, was a mystery to even the cleverest of its rulers, as their correspondence bears out. They had no English name for this crazy construct: the closest they came was a dog-Latin tag, the Pax Britannica. Estimating the part played in its rise and fall by attitudes at home towards a purely imagined Empire must be even harder to judge. On this larger question, both sides of the argument over Britain’s imperial culture find themselves firing into an empty continent.

The real Empire is the subject of Bill Nasson’s new book, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World. Interestingly, he also inclines to a minimalist view of public interest at home. His book is aimed at a more general readership and offers a synoptic account of British expansion from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Nasson is a black Capetonian, now Professor of History at Cape Town University. His take on Empire is tinged with wry amusement at its fits and follies and a sharp awareness of its human effects. The interweaving of social, cultural, political, diplomatic, economic and military history is extraordinarily deft: a huge range of reading is poured into some 200 pages. Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the freshness of the writing, which is crisp, economical and witty. The final chapter is a kind of summing-up. Written in a post-colonial, post-apartheid periphery of Empire, its conclusions are striking. Readers in search of a short history of the British Empire, comprehensive and bracing, need look no further.