Imperialism, Colonialism and Internationalism

Abstract

This chapter examines Morris’s consolidation of an anti-imperialist and internationalist political imaginary within the fin-de-siècle socialist movement. The chapter is divided into four sections: the first specifies the content of Morris’s anti-imperialism and its place within the wider socialist movement; the second examines the relative merits of the concepts of cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism as a means of situating Morris’s anti-imperialist politics, taking account of recent critical recuperations of cosmopolitanism, as well as early translations of News from Nowhere; the third section specifies the way in which Morris’s utopianism consolidated an internationalist structure of feeling, and functioned as a counter-hegemonic intervention into the romance revival of the 1880s. I conclude by examining some of the contradictions in Morris’s internationalism, with reference to his ideas on colonialism.