The Third British Empire

Abstract

In a 1925 lecture at Columbia University, Alfred Zimmern proposed the ‘Third British Empire’ as the cornerstone of postwar international life. Zimmern spoke as one of Britain’s leading academics and minor statesmen. As we saw in the last chapter, polemical mobilization and the emergence of new propaganda and information apparatuses expanded roles for scholars, particularly historians, as experts, government servants, public diplomats, and social philosophers in Britain.