BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Dangerfield’s famous phrase, the “strange death of Liberal England” that came in the form of
Liberal imperialism shattered both Little Englander and Germanophilic idealism from the Left. 36
Dangerfield specifically referred to the British public’s self-indulgent release of inner tension
through melodramatic scenarios of a German invasion:
. . . what could be more exciting than to gather all the political rages, all the class hatreds,
all the fevers for spending and excitement and speed, which then seemed to hang like a
haunted fog over England—to gather them and condense them into one huge shape and
call it Germany? 37
Nothing illustrates this internal conflict between imperialism and Liberal Germanophilia better
than the political career of Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain began as a Radical reformer in the
1870's, split with Gladstone as a Liberal Unionist in 1886 over the issue of Irish Home Rule, and
as a champion of imperial-social and tariff reform, became a lay participant in the “squalid
argument” that galvanized Liberal and Free Trader opposition in 1903. 38 As Colonial Secretary
under Salisbury’s third Conservative ministry Chamberlain advocated an alliance with Germany
in both 1898 and 1899, only to be rebuffed at home and abroad. In 1901-2 he wound up publicly
trading insults with the German Chancellor, Bernard von Bülow, in a bitter exchange concerning
British soldierly conduct during the Boer War that reverberated in the patriotic presses of both
36 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 189-90, argues that the phrase might be extended to include
western Europe because imperialism generally undermined bourgeois liberalism.
37 The Strange Death of Liberal England, (New York: Capricorn Books, 1935), 119.
38 The Liberal reaction came in response to Chamberlain’s Glasgow speech of October 6,
1903 which implied that imperial preference would benefit England by keeping colonies at the
status of non-industrial, primary producers. Cited in Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social
Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1960), 93, in a discussion of Chamberlain’s transformation from Benthamite social reformer to
imperialist tariff reformer.
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