Liberal Imperialism and Wilkie Collins’s Antonina

Abstract

This chapter outlines how the British empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was transformed from a naval, commercialist enterprise, for which ancient Greece and the maritime Athenian empire had proven a much more fitting parallel, to an expansionist, land-based project, which drew increasingly on Roman models. It outlines how imperial expansion from the 1840s catalysed a shift away from the mercantile manliness of previous centuries, towards the privileging of militaristic masculinities more in keeping with a robust, expanding empire. The second part of the chapter looks in detail at Wilkie Collins’s first published novel Antonina (1850), which, in a marked departure from the ‘antique fictions’ of earlier nineteenth-century novelists, embraces Rome in order to celebrate a liberal imperial style of masculinity and a hybrid Romano-Germanic cultural identity for Britain’s imperial male.