This set focuses on the influential economic and political commentators who saw weaknesses in the infrastructure of the British Empire at the turn of the 20th century. Dubbed Idealists of Empire, they saw that the British Empire seemed to have no governing principles, no structure and no guiding ideals. Sir John Seeley's famous quote of 1883 sums up this view: we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. The mission of the idealists was to find an Imperial solution to this problem. The idealists of Empire documented their findings as they looked more...