Talk by Ronald Robinson, Ph.D.
Fellow of St. John's College. Cambridge Dr. Robinson suggests that our understanding of the nature of national expansion has for too long been anchored to John Seeley's thesis in The Expansion of England — in its own day ' a great leap of historical imagination.' By drawing a distinction between formal and informal expansion, however, new light is thrown on the subject, and the speaker develops the idea of informal empire recently explored by Professor Vincent Harlow in his book The Founding of the Second British Empire.