What about Bernard Porter's argument that the British hardly paid attention to the British Empire being built in "The absent-minded imperialists".... in other words, there was no real 'culture of imperialism' in Britain during the late ninteenth century. The title is, I believe, based on a John Robert Seeley quote: "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind".

On that note, one could also point to Cain and Hopkins' alternate argument that the empire was built largely to suit a group of London financiers - the "service sector", as he called them. This is related to Lenin's argument that the new imperialism was basically states dividing up the world in the service of monopolistic corporations.