Are Imperialists Zealots?
Historians do not normally make it their business to downplay the importance of what they study, but in some sense that is Bernard Porter’s aim in this engaging and learned, if rather flawed, book. The author of The Lion’s Share, a highly successful survey of modern British imperialism (now in its third edition), as well as other works in the field, Porter challenges the proposition recently advanced by proponents of the “new imperial history” (myself included) that the empire had a significant impact on British society and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Seeley’s famous dictum that the British acquired their empire in a fit of absence of mind supplies the title and thematic lodestone for Porter, who argues that the empire was never much on the minds of most Britons. How do you determine how much attention the British gave to the empire? Porter insists that “context is all” (p. 93), and he sees class as that context’s crucial variable. Different classes, he argu
