This chapter asks how A.V. Dicey accounted for one of the nineteenth century’s most globally consequential revolutions in British political opinion: the growth of pro-imperial sentiment. Dicey’s handling of the problem importantly illuminates how he thought about political dynamics, and how he conceptualised the drivers of political change over time. It also opens up wider questions about fin-de-siècle imperial ideas, and political theory. Dicey’s analysis of the rise of imperialist conviction reminds us that the phenomenon was not just a background to new currents of imperial political thought, but one of the transformations imperial thinkers aimed to explain. This in turn reveals an even larger, similarly neglected development in the realm of British ideas: the growing preoccupation with the structural explanation of political change in the contemporary world.
