BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

parts of South Africa and occupied Egypt, thus became embroiled in the “scramble” to draw
lines on maps of Africa favorable to national security and prestige. Germany’s actions also
stimulated demands from British merchants for more government intervention in favor of British
markets threatened by native uprisings and the designs of foreign rivals. Anglo-German colonial
rivalry therefore became an important component of the new “imperialism of free trade” that
gilded the chess game of international strategy, despite the fact that in Africa the commercial
interests of Britain and Germany dovetailed in opposition to French and Portuguese
protectionism. 11 Concerns over German colonial aims also gave impetus to the steady growth of
Liberal imperialism and played a crucial role in stirring popular enthusiasm for empire, which
culminated in what James Sturgis has called the “almost monolithic imperialist stance of the
metropolitan press in 1900.” 12 During Gladstone’s second ministry fault lines had developed
within the Liberal party between “Palmerstonians,” anxious to maintain Britain’s imperial
Cape Colony on the east side in order to block German access to the landlocked Transvaal. In
1888 the British East Africa Company was granted a charter in response to German incursions
into Sultan of Zanzibar’s dominions. See Goodlad, British Foreign and Imperial Policy, 33-34.
11 William G. Hynes, The Economics of Empire: Britain, Africa and the New Imperialism
1870-95 (London, Longman Group, 1979), 68-69, 73-77, notes the lobbying efforts of the
Manchester cotton merchants and other groups seeking guarantees of free trade in response to the
encroachment of foreign rivals on colonial markets. Pressure from commercial groups reacting
to fears of recession, overproduction and the need for new markets also motivated the British
annexation of Upper Burma in 1886, which was justified as a means of protecting India (pp. 54-
55). David McLean, in “Finance and ‘Informal Empire’ before the First World War,” Economic
History Review, n.s. 29, no. 2 (May 1976): 295-305, argues that British “free trade imperialism”
in Turkey, Persia and China adhered to the strategy of achieving political influence, and
thwarting German or French influence, through the support of British commercial and financial
ventures in an attempt to exercise “control without formal responsibility” (p. 305).
12 Sturgis refers to the years from 1892 to 1902 as a “decade of conscious imperialism.”
See “Britain and the New Imperialism,” in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed.
C.C. Eldridge, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 93, 96.
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