Were 19th century Britons living in the metropole engaged in the activities of the British Empire?

There is significant historiographical debate over the extent to which 19^th Century Britons were engaged with their nation’s imperial ventures. Bernard Porter suggests that domestic British society in the early and mid 1800s was populated by ‘absent-minded imperialists’. John Mackenzie, on the other hand, argues that late 19^th century British culture was saturated with images and stories of empire. To understand why there are such diverse perspectives on this issue, we must see domestic Victorian engagement with empire as a dynamic relationship which changed across time. A succession of imperial crises in the 1850s and 60s – including the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Morant Bay Uprising of 1865 – pushed empire to the forefront of the general British population’s conscious with unprecedented concern. Coinciding with and then extending beyond these events in the imperial peripheries were drastic transformations to domestic British culture in the late 1800s. Changes in literacy, mass culture, and consumerism made British society both far more receptive to and also far more imbued with information about empire. Developments in both the empire and domestic British culture meant that late 19^th century Britons were far more engaged with imperial activities than their counterparts in the early Victorian period.