Mackinder and Liberal Imperialism: Part One

The secret machinery behind Anglo-American supremacy

Britannia Rules the Waves by Nicholas Habbe (1876)

Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent uncovers how a hidden British elite engineered global power.

The influence of Halford Mackinder on the development of Anglo-American geopolitical conceptions—along with those of their continentalist opponents—is well known and widely acknowledged. By contrast, Mackinder’s ties to Anglo-American oligarchic networks are less often emphasized. Yet this aspect is essential for understanding Mackinder’s influence and role in shaping a geopolitics that sought to balance cosmopolitanism with imperialism.

A political geography, in other words, that holds the Anglo-American sphere must temper globalist idealism through imperialist realism in order to maintain its role as guide and organizer of world affairs, despite the shifts and crises that periodically convulse the world-system.

Mackinder began teaching at Oxford in 1887. In 1899, he was appointed director of Oxford’s School of Geography. After a politico-scientific expedition to Kenya—then a British protectorate—he returned to Britain and began a political career among the Liberal-Imperialists (“Limps”).

In 1904, Halford Mackinder became the director of the influential London School of Economics, founded in 1895 by four members of the Fabian Society: Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw.

The Fabian Society was one of the most influential political clubs within the British imperial elite at the time. Elite-socialist in orientation, the Society’s influence extends into the present. Many prominent globalists studied at the London School of Economics. George Soros is a famous example.¹ In addition to serving as director of the LSE, Mackinder was also a regular speaker at the dinners of the Coefficients Club.

The Coefficients Club was founded in November 1902 at the initiative of the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The Webbs possessed a vast political network, and the Coefficients soon included within its ranks influential figures of the British elite, such as Sir Edward Grey, Lord Haldane, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and Leo Amery. A kind of inner circle of the Fabian Society, the Coefficients gathered from 1902 to 1908 a dozen carefully selected members whose aim was to deliberate on the means necessary to renovate and effectively transform the British Empire in the face of strategic competitors and the internal structural problems inherent to the world’s most extensive empire.

H. G. Wells describes this club in his novel The New Machiavelli, an autobiographical fiction in which he offers a romanticized account of his experience within the Fabian Society and the British influence networks. In the novel, he significantly renames the Coefficients Club as the Pentagram Circle.

Mackinder participated in the Coefficients as a representative of the Liberal-Imperialist current—a tendency that supported British imperial policy while also calling for social reforms. This convergence illustrates the alignment of views and interests among the liberal, imperial, and socialist-leaning (early Labour) sectors of the British oligarchy at the time.

Let us cite Professor Bernard Semmel, one of the foremost specialists of the influential political current that Liberal-Imperialism represented in the Anglo-Saxon world a century ago. The following passage summarizes the atmosphere around 1900:

In 1900, in the midst of the Boer War, a general election was called and Mackinder contested Warwick as a Liberal. He was in favour of the war, but the Radicals and the greater part of Liberal party organizations throughout the country were opposed to it. Mackinder was defeated. During the course of the war, the Liberal-Imperialists became more and more estranged from the main body of Liberalism and, in the middle of 1901, Rosebery made an address to the Liberal City Club which caused many to believe that the former Prime Minister was about to organize a new party, a party which he had indicated would make ‘national efficiency’ its objective. The leaders of Fabian socialism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Bernard Shaw, had long been intimate with the leaders of Liberal Imperialism, especially with Rosebery and Haldane. Interested in the possibility of a party of national efficiency, the Webbs and Shaw wished to join their collectivist programme to the imperialism of the followers of Rosebery. The Webbs decided to form a dining club which, they hoped, would serve as a ‘brains trust’ for the new political movement. They invited a dozen prominent individuals, representing both political parties, but having a common interest in a strong, effective Empire.²

Mackinder would become one of the primary spokesmen and representatives of the Liberal-Imperialists, even approaching, at one moment, a ministerial post. The Liberal-Imperialists opposed the more Radical and left-leaning wing of the Liberal Party. At the time, Radical Liberals “maintained nineteenth-century Liberalism’s traditional attitudes which favoured laissez-faire and opposed imperialism and militarism,”³ whereas the Liberal-Imperialists supported social reforms while defending the Empire. They saw themselves as liberal in domestic policy and imperialist in foreign policy. The term imperialism had not yet acquired the negative connotation it bears today—largely due to the Marxist reinterpretation following Lenin’s 1916 work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, foundational to Marxist international-relations theory.

The Liberal-Imperialists constituted a political current that claimed the right—and even the duty—for socially and technically advanced nations to dominate other peoples in order to lead them towards material progress. Liberal-Imperialism also functioned as an element of internal stability and social progress for Britain itself. This view was widely shared among the elites of the time, including the powerful Cecil Rhodes. His well-known statement expresses explicitly the link he saw between political stability and imperial expansion:

In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in our factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.⁴

Lord Rosebery (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1894 to 1895), leader of the Liberal-Imperialists and champion of imperial modernization, expressed clearly the racial consciousness that characterized the British imperial elites of the era: “An empire such as ours requires as its first condition an imperial race. In the rookeries and slums which still survive, an imperial race can not be reared.”⁵ According to Bernard Semmel, this view was also shared by Mackinder: the improvement of living conditions as a means of racial and social hygiene, itself a prerequisite for British imperial power. One might well ask what Mackinder and the Limps would say of the current remnants of their empire were they to walk the streets of London today.

The articulation of socialist-leaning, imperial, and protectionist elite poles lay at the heart of the strategic concerns of the circles in which Mackinder sought to exert influence. For the Liberal-Imperialists, free trade served as the means to unify the cosmopolitan and imperial wings of British liberalism.

One platform on which both the Radical and Imperialist wings of Liberalism could unite was that of free trade. The Radicals regarded free trade as the keystone in the edifice of cosmopolitanism. For the followers of Rosebery, and for Mackinder, it was the economic basis of imperialism.⁶

Free-trade ideology, socialism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism: these were the currents the British elite sought to fuse. Such a fusion would have been impossible without the support of high finance, as always.

As in our own era, the driving force of thalassocratic imperialism was the world of finance and the City, where the true decision-makers of political globalism met and coordinated:

The Liberal-Imperialists were known to be closely connected with English financial interests, and it was fitting that Mackinder should have developed his insights into free trade imperialism in a series of lectures to the Institute of Bankers in London in 1899.⁷

The essential debate for financial elites appears unchanged today: not for or against imperialism, but which imperialism? Collectivist or free-trade?

Mackinder defended the need to combine protection of the internal market of the British thalassocratic grand-area with the preservation of the Empire’s cosmopolitan financial-projection capacities:

British industry, he asserted, was faced with the keenest foreign competition and soon British commerce might be in a similar position. This circumstance was a result of a tendency ‘towards the dispersion and equalisation of the industrial and commercial activity throughout the world.’ However, the more dispersed the world’s industry and commerce might be, ‘the greater will be the need of a controlling centre to it.’⁸

Thus, it was necessary to shield British industry from external competition while expanding the Empire’s financial influence abroad. The City would articulate both functions, assuming the responsibility of becoming the principal economic pole of the liberal global order, with the British Empire as its center.

‘Though in the human frame there are many muscles,’ he continued, ‘there is only one brain.’ There may be many ‘National Clearing Houses,’ but there will be only one ‘International Clearing House,’ and, because of Britain’s leading position in world commerce for two centuries, because of the vast and enormously profitable British carrying trade and the entrepôt system, because ‘we have an enormous accumulation of wealth,’ because ‘we have a vast export of capital, and a great ownership of capital fixed in the outlying portions of the world,’ and because the City was ‘the most convenient market for capital, and therefore the most convenient settlement-place for loans, or debts,’ London, he believed, was destined to remain the banking centre of the world.⁹

Mackinder was prescient in foreseeing the future of the City of London as a global financial pole increasingly detached from its domestic industrial base: “It appears, therefore, quite possible that the financial importance of the City of London may continue to increase, while the industry, at any rate, of Britain, becomes relatively less.”¹⁰

For Liberal-Imperialists, it seemed natural—and almost instinctive—that the world’s most efficient capitalism, borne by what they saw as the “best race,” should absorb other national capitalisms and merge them into a universalized form of capital. Once globalized, this capital would need to defend itself against strategic rivals who contested its monopoly:

‘This gives the real key,’ Mackinder proclaimed, ‘to the struggle between our free trade policy and the protection of other countries—we are essentially the people with capital, and those who have capital always share the proceeds of the activity of brains and muscles of other countries. It is eternally true “that to him that hath shall be given.”’ Other powers felt a quite natural resentment and wished to prevent England from exporting capital (whether in the shape of rails, machinery, or monetary investment). ‘It was a struggle,’ Mackinder proclaimed in good Darwinist fashion, ‘of nationality against nationality—it is a real struggle for Empire in the world.’ To underscore his point, and in so doing anticipating J. A. Hobson’s later analysis of imperialism, Mackinder suggested that ‘it is for the maintenance of our position in the world, because we are the great lenders, that we have been driven to increase our empire.’¹¹

Through J. A. Hobson, this vision of capitalism’s world-destined expansion was later taken up and weaponized for anti-capitalist purposes by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Yet unlike the Marxist theory of international relations that Lenin formulated in 1916, the English Liberal-Imperialists regarded imperialism as the necessary condition for the internal development of the United Kingdom, its colonies, and even the world-system as a whole. This internal development, in turn, constituted the indispensable foundation for the cosmopolitan reach of the British Empire—as the reading of Bernard Semmel reminds us:

(to be continued in part two)

(Translated from the French)

1. Bernard Semmel, “Sir Halford Mackinder: Theorist of Imperialism,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Nov. 1958, vol. 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1958), pp. 554-561.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape, excerpt from the journal Neue Zeit, 1898 (cited by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916).

5. Bernard Semmel, “Sir Halford Mackinder: Theorist of Imperialism,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Nov. 1958, vol. 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1958), pp. 554-561.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, March 1900–May 1900, p. 271. See also Britain and the British Seas, cited in Bernard Semmel, “Sir Halford Mackinder: Theorist of Imperialism,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Nov. 1958), pp. 554–561.