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Robert Montgomery Martin and the Origins of ‘Greater Britain’

ABSTRACT The idea of ‘Greater Britain’ has been associated with the later Victorian era, but it was anticipated in most important particulars. This article examines perhaps the most ambitious single text on the British empire produced during the first half of the nineteenth century: Robert Montgomery Martin’s five-volume, 3,000 page History of the British Colonies. Published in 1834-5, in the midst of seminal debates over imperial administrative and commercial policy, Martin’s opus offered the first comprehensive account of Britain’s overseas possessions. Read in context, the History emerges as a political clarion call. It sought not only to awaken the British to the worth and unity of their allegedly undervalued foreign dependencies, but also to intervene in specific controversies about the workings of imperial government, and to reveal the Divine purpose that lay behind Britain’s ascent to global power. Martin’s History, it is suggested, was a monumental and in some ways path-breaking attempt to fuse religion and statistics with arguments about the future of the empire.