Imperialism and Social Reform

Abstract

‘The Empire is a bread and butter question’, Cecil John Rhodes declared in 1895. He had just attended a meeting of the unemployed in the East End of London and his journalist friend, W. T. Stead, recorded his impressions. ‘I listened’, said Rhodes,

to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.

V. I. Lenin noted the quotation and used it in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917.¹ The close connection between imperialism and what they called ‘the social question’ at home, was very clear both to the advocates and to the opponents of colonial expansion.