Abstract
In 1877 Edward Dicey wrote ‘England, like Rome, is the corner-stone of an imperial fabric such as it has fallen to the lot of no other country to erect, or uphold when erected.’389 This is familiar territory, where the comparison to Rome establishes or confirms the special magnificence of Britain’s Empire. But that was only the first step. Dicey continued, revealing still more of the conceptual imperial constellation bound up with classical discourse. Having acknowledged the role of naked self-interest in the foundation and maintenance of Britain’s rule in India, he came to the crux of the issue. He claimed that the real reason the British, as opposed to another equally avaricious rival, held India was that ‘to us has been given a mission like to that of ancient Rome’.390 This too is familiar territory: Britain’s civilizing mission, so similar to Rome’s, made the Indian Empire special and historically great. But the conclusion of Dicey’s thought carries us onto new ground, revealing the final element in the imperial nexus derived from classical discourse. As he put it ‘we too might well be bidden to remember that regere imperio populos is the talent committed to us.’391 Romans and Britons shared the same rare and innate capacity for imperial rule, inimitably described by the immortal and apparently irresistible genius of Virgil.392 Everything followed from this essential similarity in character. Without it there could be no talk of a magnificent and durable ‘imperial fabric’ or of an imperial civilizing ‘mission’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes to Text
E. Dicey (1877) ‘Mr. Gladstone and Our Empire’, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 2, p. 295.
Ibid., p. 306.
Ibid.
P. Vasunia (2009) ‘Virgil and the British Empire, 1760–1880’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 155, p. 109, 93.
S. Patterson (2009) The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York) pp. 132–3,141, 146, 167.
Sir James Stephen (1873) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London) pp. 98–9.
G.N. Curzon (1900) ‘Speech given on 28 October, 1898’, Speeches by Lord Curzon of Keddleston, vol. 1, 1898–1900 (Calcutta) p. iv.
S. Attridge (2002) Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Palgrave) pp. 8–9.
Anon. (1821) Scrutator, no. 30, p. 282. For a similar formulation, see Scrutator no. 43, p. 403, where episodes from the classics provided satirical counterpoints to the romantic misadventures of a student.
Anon. (1862) ‘A Soldier’s Death’, The Haileybury Observer, vol. 1, p. 14. This work was a compilation of contributions to the Observer by various students spanning the years 1839–42.
K. Wilson (2004) ‘Introduction’ in K. Wilson (ed.) A New Imperial History (Cambridge) p. 5.
Richard Temple (1882) Men and Events of My Time in India (London) pp. 102–3. See also William Wilson Hunter (1890) Rulers of India: The Marquess of Dalhousie (Oxford) p. 54.
See H. V. Canter (1949) ‘The Impeachments of Verres and Hastings: Cicero and Burke’, Classical Journal, vol. 44, pp. 199–211.
Marquis Curzon of Keddleston (1925) British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses (Toronto) vol. 2, p. 252.
V.G. Kiernan (1982) ‘Tennyson, King Arthur, and Imperialism’, in R. Samuel and G.S. Jones (eds) Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, History Workshop Series (London) p. 131.
Anon. (1800) ‘The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea. Part the First. Containing an account of the navigation of the Ancients from the Sea of Suez to the Coast of Zanguebur. With Dissertations. By Dr. Wm. Vincent’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 70, p. 857.
Sir W.F.P. Napier (1977) Defects Civil and Military of the Indian Government (Ajmer) p. 362. First Published 1850. Elaborated in his (1851) History of General Sir Charles Napier’s Administration of Scinde, and Campaign in the Cutchee Hills (London).
Consult H. Mattingly et al. (1962–8) The Roman Imperial Coinage (London) pp. 577a, 742, 743, & 744.
James Rennell (1782) Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan. With an introd. illustrative of the geography and present division of that country. To which is added an appendix, containing an account of the Ganges and Burrampooter rivers (London).
A bas-relief chimneypiece, executed by Michael Rysbrack between 1728 and 1730, and a ceiling painting by Spirodone Roma from 1778. Mildred Archer (1979) India and British Portraiture (London) plates 1, 3.
Anonymous (1842) ‘Punch’s Pencillings No. Liii’. Punch, vol. III. M. Dresser (1989) ‘Britannia’, in R. Samuel (ed.) Patriotism and the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. II (London) pp. 26–8. L. Colley (1992) Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven) plates 3, 41, 61, 70 (p. 311), 76 for a variety of Britannia figures. See also N. Ferguson (2002) Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London) p. 165, for a particularly fine reproduction of Dyce’s Neptune Resigning the Empire of the Seas to Britannia. He later discusses Britannia Pacificatrix, though with little explicit attention to the choice of iconography: Empire, pp. 312–3.
A. Smith (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London) pp. 280, 289. See also Wm. Rose, ‘Dr. Symonds’ Remarks upon an Essay’, 211.
For an earlier example in the context of the Seven Years’ War, see Anon. (1757) ‘To the Author of the TEST’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 27, p. 267: footnote.
See M. Archer (1979) India and British Portraiture (London) plates 148 and 123 respectively.
See D. Ludden (1993) ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge’, in C.A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds) Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia) p. 256.
Letter to Cornwallis, 19 March, 1788. Quoted in S.N. Mukherjee (1968) Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge) pp. 130–1.
A. Alison (1833) ‘The East India Question’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 33, p. 787.
T.B. Macaulay (1841) ‘Warren Hastings’ Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome (London) p. 658.
C. Edwards (1999) ‘Translating empire? Macaulay’s Rome’, in C. Edwards (ed.) Roman Presences (Cambridge) p. 82.
C. Hall (2006) ‘At home with history: Macaulay and the History of England’, in C. Hall and S.O. Rose (eds) At Home with Empire (Cambridge) p. 36.
Anon. (1858) ‘Indian Heroes’, Westminster Review, vol. 70, o.s., p. 360.
G.O. Trevelyan (1864) The Competition Wallah (London) pp. 78, 111.
A. Markley (2004) Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome (Toronto) p. 24.
For example, Abyssinia (1867), the Ashanti campaign (1874), Afghanistan (1879), Zulu War (1879), the First Anglo-Boer War (1880–1), Egypt and Sudan (1882, 1884–5, and 1896–8), the Jameson Raid (1895) and the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). For a discussion of the relationship between these events and popular interest in empire, see J.M. MacKenzie (ed.) (1986) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester) p. 2.
See B. Porter (2007) The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford) p. ix.
J. Springhall (1986) ‘“Up Guards and at them!” British Imperialism and popular art, 1880–1914’, in J. MacKenzie (ed.) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester), and S. Bratton (1986) ‘Of England, home and duty’, in J.M. MacKenzie (ed.) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester) pp. 50, 74–5 respectively. See also M.D. Kutzer (2000) Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (New York) p. xv.
J.A. Mangan (1986) “The Grit of our Forefathers’: invented traditions, propaganda and Imperialism”, in J.W. MacKenzie (ed.) Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester) p. 120.
M. Bradley (2010) ‘Tacitus’ Agricola and the Conquest of Britain: Representations of Empire in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in M. Bradley (ed.) Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford) pp. 127–8.
Ibid., pp. 129–30. For the original quote from J.E.C. Welldon see (1910) ‘The Early Training of Boys into Citizenship’ in Essays on Duty and Discipline, fourth edition (London) p. 3.
For Homer, and martial epic more generally as a source of ‘imperial attitudes’, see S. Dentith (2006) Epic and Empire in Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge) p. 3.
For the contrary view see F.M. Turner (1982) ‘Antiquity in Victorian Contexts’ Browning Institute Studies vol. 10, p. 13, and E. Prettejohn (1996) ‘Recreating Rome in Victorian Painting’, in M. Liversidge and C. Edwards (eds) Imagining Rome (London) p. 54.
Dicey, ‘Mr. Gladstone and Our Empire’, p. 306. See A.C. Lyall (1884) ‘Government of the Indian Empire’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 159, p. 32, for a similar echo of Virgil.
S.J. Owen (1878) ‘The Stability of Our Indian Empire’, Contemporary Review, vol. 31, p. 517.
Joseph Chamberlain (1897) ‘The True Conception of Empire’, delivered at the Annual Royal Colonial Institute Dinner, Hotel Metropole, 31 March 1897. Transcribed in C. Boyd (ed.) Mr. Chamberlain’s Speeches (London, 1914) p. 3. Emphasis in the original. See. B.M. Gough (1990) ‘Pax Britannica: Peace, Force, and World Power’, Round Table, vol. 314, p. 168, discussing Sir George Bowen’s use of the phrase, following the Elder Pliny. Nat. Hist., 27.1.
Augustus boasted that before he came to power the doors of this temple had only been closed twice, a score he claimed to have surpassed by one. Res. Ges. Aug 13. See R.T. Ridley (2003) ‘The Emperor’s Retrospect: Augustus’ Res Gestae in Epigraphy, Historiography and Commentary’, Studia Hellenistica, vol. 39, pp. 114–15.
Lady G. Cecil (1921) Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury (London) vol. 2, p. 313. Related also in J. H. Park (1970) British Prime Ministers of the Nineteenth Century Policies and Speeches (New York) p. 153.
‘Remember always that you are a Roman’ was one of Rhodes’s favourite sayings. J.C. Lockhart and C. M. Woodhouse (1963) Rhodes (London) p. 31. Recounted also in Betts, ‘The Allusion to Rome’, p. 151.
Ibid. For Butler, see R. Symonds (1986) Oxford and Empire: the last lost cause? (Oxford) p. 13.
N. Vance (1999) ‘Decadence and the subversion of empire’, in C. Edwards (ed.) Roman Presences: receptions of Rome in European Culture 1789–1945 (Cambridge) p. 213.
W.E. Gladstone ‘England’s Mission’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 4 (1878) pp. 560–84. Reproduced in P.J. Cain (1999) Empire and Imperialism: The Debate of the 1870s (South Bend) p. 253.
Cromer (1910) Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London) p. 34.
In similar vein, see James Bryce (1913) The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (London) pp. 55–6 on shared imperial character and pp. 66–7 on Virgil as ‘the national poet of the empire’.
P.W.M. Freeman (1996) ‘British Imperialism and the Roman Empire’, in J. Webster and N.J. Cooper (eds) Roman Imperialism: post-colonial perspectives (Leicester) pp. 334–5; his claim that classical education taught ‘moral, organizational, and judgmental’ lessons but that these did not extend to conceptions of empire is difficult to accept. R. Hingley (2001) ‘Introduciton’ in R. Hingley (ed.) Images of Rome: perceptions of ancient Rome in Europe and America in the modern age JRA Supplementary Series 44 (Portsmouth) 148.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 C.A. Hagerman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hagerman, C.A. (2013). Classical Discourse and British Imperial Identity: The Imperial Character. In: Britain’s Imperial Muse. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316424_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316424_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32643-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31642-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)