A study of how the Victorians considered transforming the British Empire into a “Greater Britain”, written by a Cambridge academic, has been announced as the joint winner of the 2008 Whitfield Book Prize.

Dr Duncan Bell, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre of International Studies, and Fellow of Christ's College, was awarded the prestigious prize for his book, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton, 2007).

Funded by the Whitfield Fund and the Royal Historical Society, the Whitfield Book Prize is awarded annually to a scholar for his or her first book (as a sole author) on a subject within the field of British history.

The book analyses the late Victorian debate on the future of the British Empire. Many prominent thinkers found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain — a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and southern Africa. Greater Britain, they argued, would dominate global politics during the twentieth century.

Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious — creating a planet-spanning nation state — to the practical and mundane — reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. They were motivated by fears generated by the onset of democracy, by emerging challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global co-operation and communication that anticipated the globalisation debates of today.

Exploring attitudes to the state, race, space, nationality and empire, as well as highlighting the various imaginative roles played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, the book seeks to illuminate important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

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