Excerpt from The Organization of Imperial Studies in London

Nor is our deficiency alone in works intended mainly for the use of scholars and publicists. That highly important person the general reader is equally ill served. It is strange that no one of the greater masters of modern historical writing in England should have turned his attention to the story of the British Realm in its extension beyond the seas of Europe. What might the subject have become in the hands of a Froude, a Freeman, a Stubbs, a Samuel Rawson Gardiner, a John Richard Green! Seeley, who seemed marked out for the task, contented himself with a single suggestive, if somewhat superficial, essay. Macaulay has given us a vivid indication of what he could have done with the theme if he had not limited his share in it to two dazzling biographical sketches. We have had no modern History of the English in India written on a large scale and with the dignity and literary power the subject demands. We have not even an adequate life of the great man who was the founder of our Empire in the East; for. The English language is still without a really sufficient historical biography of Robert Clive. If he had been a Frenchman or a German how many notable books would have illus trated every phase of his activity by this time! Or to turn to another portion of the field, we are still waiting for a comprehensive and precise account of the struggle between the British and the Dutch for commercial supremacy in the East and West. We have no study in minute detail of the Mercantile System and the effects and application of the Navigation Acts. If there are some good histories of particular colonies we owe them not to English, but to colonial writers, such as Kingsford for Canada, and Theale for South Africa. And for the story of the struggle for the New World between France and Britain we go to no British historian, but to the prose epic of Francis Parkman, an American citizen and the graduate of an American University.

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