Any investigation of the issue of imperial defence at the turn of the twentieth century must begin with the conflict in South Africa. In the first instance, the war crystallised anti-British feelings throughout Europe. The hostility of the great powers, with the exception of Japan and the United States, was clear in Britain and in the colonies. This was especially the case in Germany, where press attacks against British policy and the Empire in a wider sense were vehement. The spectre of European intervention in South Africa and a wider war (perceived dangers exacerbated by the shocking revelations of British military weakness of Black Week) were causes of significant political and public concern. Pre-existing, long-term feelings that the Empire was under siege were reinforced. The ‘blanket of public enthusiasm that had enveloped Britain's imperial enterprise during the 1890s’ was replaced by a drive for imperial consolidation and security. Men like Chamberlain embodied this sentiment; the Empire was the defining characteristic of Britain and things British, and its very existence depended on its being strong and unified. This atmosphere of fear partially accounts for the continuing failure of a Liberal vision in Britain, despite the efforts of such groups as the Fabian Society to use the war to advocate a revision of the imperial idea to include social and domestic reform. The conservative picture of Empire, even if it had transitioned from imperial celebration to imperial protection, was more dominant than ever during the war years, in the centre and in the colonies.

Under such circumstances many leading advocates of imperial unity saw both an opportunity and evidence in support of their arguments for more extensive intra-Empire connections. From South Australia, for example, Lord Tennyson, as Governor, wrote to Chamberlain in April 1900 that in his opinion ‘most prominent Australian statesmen’ saw the war as proof that the Empire should be ‘more firmly and formally federated than it is now’.

The British regular army of the mid-nineteenth century essentially remained the small and elite force it had been a hundred years earlier whereas its European counterparts were being transformed by mass conscription. At the same time British military prestige had been declining since Waterloo as the effectiveness of such an army in a significant European war was questioned at home and abroad, inside and outside military circles. The difficulties exposed by the Crimean War were a clear sign that reform was overdue, not only of the British regular force but also of the auxiliaries: the traditional county-based militia, the mounted yeomanry and the rapidly growing and predominantly city-based volunteer movement. In 1859 a royal commission on the fortifications of British harbours found that the Royal Navy, the regular army and the auxiliaries combined could not ensure Britain's safety from invasion. Meanwhile, Liberal government policies favoured financial and fiscal conservatism, caution in international affairs and reduced defence expenditure. The Gladstone government of 1868, in an environment of general retrenchment, subsequently gave the Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell, an impossible mandate to modernise the British Army and to cut costs while increasing efficiency.

Cardwell's subsequent reforms, although significant, were more evolutionary than revolutionary. He was prepared to push for reform against prevailing military conservatism, and did so with a greater level of parliamentary support than his predecessors. Like Earl Grey, Cardwell saw the recall of imperial garrisons abroad as a key step. If the need to maintain these military outposts was removed, then reorganisation of the home army became a real possibility. In any case the scattered garrisons had never added anything to the defence of the British Isles. Moreover, colonial service had always been costly in money and men, given the higher rates of disease, death and desertion on such postings, factors that aggravated the consistent problem of military recruitment. Expenditure on the army in India came out of the Indian budget, yet the other colonial garrisons accounted for a full third of the military vote, and the burden was growing, an acute concern to free-trade liberals.

Canada in 1898 was in the midst of a period of industrialisation, economic growth, immigration and optimism concerning the nation's potential. Many aspects of Canadian society were transforming, from market structures to lifestyles, with literacy levels and media access rising rapidly as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Sir John Macdonald's forty-year public career had ended with his death in 1891, bringing on a period of difficulty for Conservatives, culminating in electoral defeat in 1896. From this point Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a French Canadian with a political power base in Quebec, led a new Liberal government that, despite its rhetoric, did not change existing policy directions in any significant way. Laurier did, however, recognise the wave of confidence buoying the country, declaring that while the eighteenth century belonged to Britain and the nineteenth to the United States, the twentieth was Canada's. Such sentiment marked an important sense of emergent national consciousness. This was not so much the assertion of Canadian nationalism – if this meant a self-identity that stood outside the Empire – but rather a newfound self-belief and willingness to emphasise Canadian domestic prerogatives and preferences in both the political and public spheres. Growing Canadian power came with a growing assertion of Canada's aspirations, desires and its rightful place within the Empire, not in place of it.

In fact, despite Canada's rising sense of self as a nation, fashionable imperialism, or rather Empire nationalism, remained a powerful social and intellectual force. Canadians dined on the same diet of Kipling, Henty and Ballantyne as their cousins in South Africa and Australasia. Similar social, church and educational structures, for example, promoted the idea of Empire, and the same range of patriotic and imperially oriented organisations such as the Navy League, the Empire Loyalist Associations and even the Boys' Brigades drove the message home in Canada, as they did in all of the self-governing colonies.