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empire, but were also strongly in favor of emancipating the colonies” (Ram 1926: 106). Finally,
according to learning models, Britain’s experience with overseas empire argued against new
colonial acquisitions. After losing a bitter war of secession in the Thirteen Colonies, the British
found that it was more profitable to trade with the newly independent American nation than to
formally possess it . This would seem to be a “formative event” in Britain’s experience with
empire which would dissuade her from choosing that path again in the nineteenth century (Reiter
1996), and yet she did.
The Victorian British Empire, then, remains a compelling puzzle. Exhibiting all the
attributes of an enlightened, liberal democracy that had learned bitter lessons in North America,
it not only participated in the wave of “new imperialism” in the late nineteenth century, it led the
pack. How might one understand or predict this? We propose a new model, based around a
rational, revenue-maximizing sovereign, to unravel this and other puzzling patterns of formal
imperial conquest in the international system.
Theory
In his treatise on imperialism, the venerable William Langer ruminated that “at bottom
the movement was probably as much economic as anything else” (quoted in Lloyd 1970: 131). In
this statement, as vague as it is pithy, is encapsulated a vast research agenda – patterns of war
and economics. We examine a single strand of that web: the conditions under which actors
primarily use either conquest or commerce to gain access to resources outside of their own
borders. The dependent variable is binary: the absence or presence of formal imperialism – one
actor forcibly assuming the sovereign duties of another territory. All other relations, such as
commercial interaction unfettered by political pressure, or even the coercion and economic
bullying labeled “informal imperialism” or “neo-colonialism,” are treated as non-events. While
Convention