In 1900, during the height of the Boer War, the Fabian Society, a prominent middle-class Socialist society in Britain, issued Fabianism and the Empire, an election pamphlet edited by prominent playwright and Fabian Society member George Bernard Shaw. Ostensibly the society’s first work on the British Empire in its sixteen years of existence (it was founded in 1884), the publication, a mere 55 pages long, is now widely considered to be the definitive statement by Fabians on imperialism. Today, most historians take the position that the Fabians were, in historian Bernard Semmel’s words, "social imperialists" if and when they ever thought about the Empire and were—for whatever reason—as imperialist and jingoist as Joseph Chamberlain or Cecil Rhodes and as racist, if not more so, as late Victorian and Edwardian society at large. [1] Few pay adequate attention to alternative opinions on the subject expressed by other Fabians, individuals who rejected imperialism outright or those who were deeply critical of it. Therefore, this series of essays will examine these alternative positions and the debates they engendered so that deeper light can be shed not only on Fabians and their opinions on the British Empire, but also on the broader question of left-wing organizations and imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although there was general agreement by Fabians on what British imperialism meant in actuality—that it was primarily an economic, political and militarily based system of hegemonic control by Britain over its colonies mostly for the benefit of British capitalism and capitalists—there was considerable debate over whether this system could be reformed to remove British capitalism from the Empire, or whether the Empire, inherently unreformable, should be rejected outright. Though on the surface seeming to be an issue not all that controversial, as nearly all Fabians shared a common definition of the Empire, in reality it was the most controversial of all issues debated and discussed by the Fabians from 1884 to 1914.
Despite all this, there has not been a lot of work done on the Fabians and imperialism. The few historians who have done work on this area have mostly concluded that the Fabians were more often than not on the side of imperialism. [2] The only matter that seems to be debated is the degree of their imperialism. Some argue that they were as strident in their imperialism and as racist as Cecil Rhodes or Joseph Chamberlain and castigate them for this. Others take a more nuanced and balanced view; though noting that the Fabians were indeed imperialists, they point out that their imperialism was in many ways a more enlightened one than that which existed at the time. Lastly, a third, more recent group of historians, mostly biographers of various Fabians, have sought to exonerate their particular subject or subjects from believing in imperialism while castigating the others for doing so.
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