Commerce, State, and Anti-Alienism: Balancing Britain’s Interests in the Late-Victorian Period

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain governed one-quarter of the globe; her merchant and naval fleets ruled the waves. Yet despite being the most powerful industrial nation on earth, Britain panicked in the last decades of the Victorian era, as inward migration from Eastern Europe began to dominate its political and manufacturing heartlands. With foreign culture and commerce increasingly infiltrating the East End of London, the Leylands area of Leeds, and the Gorbals district of Glasgow, the more Conservative newspapers and their anti-alien spokesmen began to question Britain’s policy of unrestricted asylum.¹ By 1902 there was sufficient political support to bring about a parliamentary review of immigration in the form of a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration.² Yet the proposals by the Conservative party to restrict alien immigration in the 1900s threatened Britain’s liberal policies of asylum and free trade which had brought about much of Britain’s economic strength.