>Anyone know how British imperialism represented itself? Did it >wear a
>"humanitarian" cloak, or is this a specifically American >(moralizing)
>style? Was it more honest about "straight power >concepts," as Kennan put
>it in that infamous memo?
Imperialist imagery tends to reflect whatever big issues are simmering back home. In the case of British imperialism in Africa, the Abolition debates leading into imperialism were a major site for hashing through Europe's own thoroughgoing transformations (in social forms and consciousness) during the Industrial Revolution. Their charter for empire reflected all of this.
Regarding abolition, Robin Blackburn and others point out that it wasn't a simple function of capitalist self-interest (calculations of the profitability of plantation production), but reflected a more complex process where capitalism's own emergent ontology (notions of value, interest, humanity, society, nature, etc.) fueled the antislavery rhetoric. As Europeans argued at home about social contract, the concept of natural rights, and the principles of economy, slavery began to seem as offensive to the libertarian principles of free trade and rational improvement as well as to the egalitarian individualism of Protestantism.
Of course, through this debate, the longstanding "Dark Continent" trope remained, and was deployed differently by both sides of the slavery issue. Those opposed to abolition argued that slavery was the "natural law" of Africa, while abolitionists in part blamed the slave trade itself for "deforming" the normal progress of Civilization. In both cases Africa is debased and uncivilized, and neither side doubted that the history of Africa was to involve Europe.
Those on the abolitionist side argued for a mode of colonial production that merged material utility and the "moral virtue of free, self-possessed labor." They pitted the domination and brutality of the New World plantation system against the flourishing new "colonial garden," whose virtuous trade, based on the "natural right to liberty" was good both for British revenue and the soul of Africans.
"Liberty" was a big, big theme in this imperialism. Just as the working class back home was so very "free" to starve or to work at almost starvation wages. The rhetorics were intertwined.
Smokestack capitalism's self-understanding involved working through nature of property, labor, freedom, civilization against their posited opposites, and imperialism was understood in terms of these larger issues:
Nations of Europe! o'er whose favour'd lands Philosophy hath rais'd her light divine, (A brighter sun than that which rules the day) Beneath whose piercing beam, the spectre forms Of slavish superstition slow retire! Who greatly struggling with degrading chains, Have freed your limbs from bondage! felt the charms OF PROPERTY! [ahem, my emphasis] beyond a tyrant's lust Have plac'd domestic bliss! and soon shall own That noblest freedom, freedom of the mind, Secure from priestly craft and papal claims!
(William Roscoe _The Wrongs of Africa, a Poem_, 1787)
Maureen