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The Motives and Methods of Expansion, 1815–1865

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Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914

Part of the book series: Cambridge Commonwealth Series

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Abstract

During the eighteenth century, European racial attitudes were made up of four main elements: belief in the homogeneity of mankind, disbelief that skin colour had any special significance, romantic idealisation of the ‘noble savage’, and respect for non-European civilisations, especially the Chinese and Indian. Eighteenth-century urbanity gave way to nineteenth-century arrogance and censoriousness as a result of several influences: accumulating experience of closer contact with non-European peoples, industrialisation, the evangelical revival and the rise of utilitarian doctrines. Industrialisation enormously increased the disparity in power between Britain and the rest of the world, and induced contempt for those regions which did not experience it. This led in particular to a decline in the prestige of China. Thus Tennyson could write, ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’. And even so sensitive a man as the eighth Earl of Elgin declared before the Royal Academy in 1861 that ‘the distinguishing characteristic of the Chinese mind’ was ‘occasionally to have caught glimpses of a heaven far beyond the range of its ordinary ken and vision’: it caught glimpses of the paths which lead to military, maritime and literary supremacy when it invented gunpowder, the compass and printing-press, but in their hands:

… the invention of gunpowder has exploded in crackers and harmless fireworks. The mariner’s compass has produced nothing better than the coasting junk. The art of printing has stagnated in stereotyped editions of Confucius, and the most cynical representations of the grotesque have been the principal products of Chinese conceptions of the sublime and the beautiful.

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  1. Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK

    Ronald Hyam (Fellow and Librarian)

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© 1993 Ronald Hyam

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Hyam, R. (1993). The Motives and Methods of Expansion, 1815–1865. In: Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22784-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22784-6_2

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-333-57758-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22784-6

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