This is a description of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 from WB Maxwell’s Victorian novel Vivien:
Pinnacle of the Nation-state
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
This is a description of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 from WB Maxwell’s Victorian novel Vivien:
Clarissa's Blog 
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
LikeLike
When nationalism becomes imperialism?
LikeLike
Imperialism predates nationalism by millennia. I’m living here in the US because of imperialism, so I’m not complaining.
Imperialism, thus, is more natural than nationalism. Nationalism was invented at a very high stage of societal and economic development. It needs to be put together with care. It’s a tender flower but its fruit is like nothing else.
LikeLike
Much of British imperialism existed to “export” the surplus workers made redundant by the industrial revolution. The decline in birth rates made this less of an issue, although it is still a problem to deal with outdated industries. For example, Thatcher couldn’t just ship the coal miners to the colonies.
https://johanfourie.com/empire-and-emigration/
LikeLike
Much of British imperialism existed to “export” the surplus workers made redundant by the industrial revolution.
I don’t know whether this is a quotation, but India at the height of the Industrial Revolution (1858-1947) saw no significant transfer of workers, at all. At best a few hundred administrators in the Indian Civil Service and their families – who lived there temporarily: the rest were military men.
The movement towards the other British colonies hardly involved workers – the Irish during the potato famine who left for Canada or Australia were mostly unskilled labourers, and in any case the vast majority moved to the US, definitely NOT a British colony…
The British colonial system provided huge socio-economic opportunities for the middle classES, in particular for lower middle-class men wanting to improve their prospects in order to rise through the ranks and join the upper middle class. Among working-class men only the better educated were able to insinuate themselves into that rigidly competitive system.
No, British workers stayed at home, where the inflow of raw materials from the colonies and the expanded commercial opportunities that this provided offered the best prospects for economic advancement. There was no “shipping off” of qualified workers to the colonies: they were needed in the mother country.
LikeLike