Abstract
This essay explores the peculiar meanings conferred on the idea of nation in the context of
various attempts to redefine in statal-national terms Britain’s imperial identity which character
ized the tradition of liberal imperialism. The analysis focuses on the evolution of a specific form
of pan-Britannism that emerged from the 1880s onwards and sought both to emphasize the
political potentialities of a presumed ethnolinguistic and cultural homogeneity between the
“white colonies” and the motherland, and to credit the British global state with a providential
vocation for the unification of mankind. India’s later inclusion in pan-Britannist rhetoric, which
went so far as to invest the “Raj” with the mission of encouraging the birth of a pan-Indian na
tion state based on the cross-fertilization of European and Asian civilizations within the British
Commonwealth of Nations, not only demonstrated the colonial authorities’ final adoption of a
variant of Orientalism aiming to distinguishing itself from the most blatant kinds of cultural dif
ferentialism, but was also premised on a profound revision in a pluralist sense of the categories
according to which late Victorian imperialists had interpreted nationality in reference to the
British Empire’s composite metropolitan core and its neo-European overseas peripheries.