BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

The rise of both America and Germany complicated the future of British world leadership
and infused the issue of social reform with a new sense of urgency. Joseph Chamberlain and the
Tariff Reform League emphasized protection of British industry for the maintenance of empire
and welfare of the working class, while the Liberal Imperialists and Fabians argued for the
improvement of working class conditions in order to breed a healthy, vigorous, imperial race. In
either case, imperialists rejected free trade, “scoffed at Cobdenite or socialist proclamations of
international friendship” and urged preparation against the “inevitable challenge of German
power.” 40 Fear of Britain’s “inevitable” decline, along the lines of Gibbon’s Rome, became a
constant source of anxiety which peaked during the Boer War with its supposed revelations of
“racial degeneration” in anaemic combat troops. 41 Moreover, the promise of imperial greatness
seemed to depend upon technical education, military efficiency, and solving the inequities facing
an expanded industrial working class, problems for which the German model offered a number of
possible solutions. For example, the German Realschulen, the General Staff, and Bismarck’s
State Socialism (i.e., worker’s old age, sickness and accident insurance) were widely discussed
and supported by imperialists in relation to needed reforms. While it provoked interminable
sermonizing and opprobrium, the German model left no doubt as to the necessity of action, but
the idea of a federated empire resting on state protection of industry and labor represented an
imperialist holy grail nestled amidst the horrors of Germanization. Fears of retaliatory “dear”
developments that determined Britain’s pre-World War I alliances with France and Russia rather
than with the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy.
40 Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, 234-35.
41 Hynes, Edwardian Turn of Mind, 17-18, 23. See also Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-
German Antagonism, 343.
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