Walter Crane and his classic image of 19th century imperialism

I’ve been posting recently on the topic a 2025 ZEITGeschichte edition on imperialism. It highlights several notable figures in criticizing imperialism and the war it generates. I’ve written about John Atkinson Hodges’ books on imperialism that were quite influential in shaping Western debates over it. Hodges was one of several figures the ZEITGeschichte edition highlights.

Another of them is a British artist Walter Crane, who drew a colonial map of the world that appeared in 1886 in a weekly called The Graphic. It included a number of images incorporating British imperialist stereotypes of the time.

The ZEITGeschichte author writing about it, Judith Scholter, finds an interesting and ironic twist to the fact that Crane’s map from The Graphic became such an iconic image of the glorious British Empire:

Walter Crane was a British illustrator an prominent representative of the Arts-and-Craft Movement in Great Britain, which wanted to reconcile the beauty of art with the usefulness of craftwork. Crane was a member of the socialist Fabian Society; he condemned ruthless profit-seeking, because it degraded the utility of products and the value of labor.

The newspaper The Graphic in which the map appeared was thought of as liberal and reform-oriented. In this sense, the robe of Atlas [bottom-center] is adorned with a sash with the inscription “Human Labor” [on the top of Atlas’ head]. Above the scene [top of map]; there are three virgins in Jacobin caps floating with the words “Freedom,” Fraternity, and “Federation”.

The antiwar movements in the decades leading up to the First World War, peace movement included advocates of socialism as well as reformers with more of a moral or humanitarian focus. Of course, humanity has known about the horrors of war for millennia, so that was not a new recognition peculiar to the nineteenth century.

As a sidebar on the Blogspot version of this blog explains, one of the most important pacificist advocates of the time was Berta von Suttner (1843-1914), who won the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize winner. In fact, she was a friend of Alfred Nobel, who supported her pacifist activism, and she was likely was an important influence on his establishing the peace prize.

She was "one of the most famous women of her time" (Suddeutsche Zeitung) and "the best known Austrian political activist woman at the beginning of the 20th century." (Anton Pelinka) Von Suttner founded the Austrian Society of Friends of Peace (1891) and the German Peace Society (1892). She wrote an influential antiwar novel Lay Down Your Arms! (1889), which by 1905 had gone through 37 editions. She edited an antiwar journal by the same name that began publication in 1892. She rightly feared that a world war would occur. She was also active for women's rights and vegetarianism. Von Suttner died a few days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand's fatal encounter with Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

In the United States, the Spanish-American War, which found the US supporting the independence of Cuba from Spain in line with the Monroe Doctrine and led the US to wage a bloody colonial war in the Philippines also gave rise to an American peace movement and an Anti-Imperialist League that included Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), the psychologist and philosopher William James, David Starr Jordan, and labor leader Samuel Gompers. (1)

The European Social Democratic parties generally regarded wars between capitalist nations as a form of class war that was a danger to the lives and freedom of their working-class voters. That sentiment and understanding was real. But when it came to supporting wars of their own country – or their own capitalist class, as they put it – nationalism was still a very powerful drug. As John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:

In 1870, [German Chancellor] Bismarck, who had once made overtures to [Karl] Marx to put his pen at the service of his fatherland, went to war with [French Emperor] Napoleon III. In a prelude to the vastly greater drama of August 1914, the proletarians of the two countries showed themselves far from being denationalized; instead they rallied to the defense, as they saw it, of their respective homelands. Then, as later, nothing was so easy as to persuade the people of one country, workers included, of the wicked and aggressive intentions of those of another. [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) Zack, Aaron (2024): The American Anti-Imperialist League at Faneuil Hall. Boston National Historical Park 01/09/2024. [pre-Trump 2.0]. <https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/anti-imperialist-league-fh.htm> (Accessed: 2025-21-08).

(2) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1977): The Age of Uncertainty, 105. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.