Review of A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power (London: Macmillan, 1959)

Abstract

Abstract Wight wrote, “British imperialism has produced one of the great debates in the history of political thinking—a debate largely between absolute and conditioned morality. No man is good enough to be another’s master. True; but if masters are inevitable, some are better than others. We may have no right to be there, indeed; but if enterprise and accident have put us there the question quickly becomes, have we a right to leave? Good government can be a duty overriding the grant of self-government, as the young Churchill argued in the South African debate in 1906. … The book’s chief weakness is that while it describes from the inside the nationalism of the older Dominions (so distressing to imperialists), Indian and Egyptian nationalism are seen from the outside, as the imperialists saw them, and remain a mysterious and unanalysed force. But it is reassuring to see how little the anti-imperialist case has rested on any belief that if only British despotism is dismantled, democracy will spring up in its place.” “‘British liberalism,” Thornton argued, “is the story of a privileged class working to abolish or extend its privileges.” “But no group of men that has yet governed Britain has come to the decision that political and international power are also privileges which may be given away on grounds of conscience or humane principle.” Wight concluded, “The book leaves you debating with yourself … whether this statement is true, and if it be true whether it is right.”