Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868

Empire as the Triumph of Theory Who were the first people to invent a world-historical mission for the British Empire? And what were the constituencies behind the development of imperialism in midVictorian England? These questions are vital for understanding where the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century came from. Empire as the Triumph of Theory takes as its sample the more than two hundred earliest members of the first major proimperial pressure group: the Colonial Society (founded in 1868, it is now the Royal Commonwealth Society). The book goes on to a careful and well-written tour of the different parts of the Victorian world, putting the founders of the Colonial Society into their social contexts. Empire as the Triumph of Theory concludes that imperialism was developed less by investors and office holders than by people who, whatever their other activities, had written books or articles about the cultures of the world. Victorian activities around the globe were multitudinous and varied; and general ideas about England’s imperial mission were, in fact, constructed by members of the Colonial Society, in order to make sense out of information flowing in from this teeming world. This is the first work to explore the social and intellectual origins of the Colonial Society, brings the mid-Victorians to life, and should become a standard work for specialists on imperialism. Edward Beasley is lecturer in history at San Diego State University, where he also teaches in the Liberal Studies Program. He studied the nineteenth-century British Empire under the late John S.Galbraith and nineteenth-century England under Judith Hughes.

British foreign and colonial policy Series editor: Peter Catterall ISSN: 1467–5013

This series provides insights into both the background influences on and the course of policy making towards Britain’s extensive overseas interests during the past 200 years. Whitehall and the Suez Crisis Edited by Saul Kelly and Anthony Gorst Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement The Liberal Party, 1919–1939 Richard S.Grayson British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945–1963 Scrutinising the official mind Frank Heinlein Harold Wilson and European Integration Britain’s second application to join the EEC Edited by Oliver Daddow Britain, Israel and the United States, 1955–1958 Beyond Suez Orna Almog The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937–1939 Louise Grace Shaw Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–1967 From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War Robert McNamara British Foreign Secretaries Since 1974 Edited by Kevin Theakston The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951 R.M.Douglas India’s Partition

The story of imperialism in retreat D.N.Panigrahi Empire as the Triumph of Theory Imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of 1868 Edward Beasley

Empire as the Triumph of Theory Imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of 1868

Edward Beasley

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2005 Edward Beasley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-31876-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-714-65610-0 (Print Edition)

To my parents

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

List of illustrations General editor’s preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

x xi xiii xv

Introduction The founding of the Colonial Society The usual suspects Businessmen Travels and ideas Tocqueville and Lord Bury: the empire of democracy Adderley discovers the pattern of the world Conclusion

1 12 25 45 62 75 95 115

Appendix: Members of the Colonial Society Notes Bibliography Index

121 128 186 201

Illustrations Figure

Figure 1 Major extra-European territories of the British Empire, 1868

xvi

Tables

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 5.1 5.2

New members by period and by status on joining Members who wrote Aristocrats joining the Society New members by parliamentary membership Members governing the colonies Regular officers and engineers Bankers and businessmen Areas visited Subjects of books and articles published by the founders by April 1869

18 22 25 30 33 36 46 64 72

General editor’s preface At one point in this book Edward Beasley draws an interesting distinction between little, middling and big histories. His purpose is simple: to illustrate how his ‘little’ history of a particular social group, the men who in 1868–69 founded Britain’s Colonial Society, informs the ‘big’ history of long-run trends in attitudes towards abstractions such as empire and imperialism. The point is apt for, too often, these two types of history do not coincide, not least in the field of imperial history. It is too easy to assume that events shape attitudes to these grand themes, without checking sufficiently the contemporary evidence. And insofar as ‘little’ history is considered, it is unfortunately on occasion in order to shoehorn it into servicing the broad conclusions that ‘big’ history suggests. So, for instance, it is sometimes assumed that the imperialist children’s literature of a G.A. Henty somehow shaped the empire reflected by his writings, even though those who read his works between the 1880s and the First World War included not so much the already mature builders of empire, but instead the men who went on to close it down in the 1950s and 1960s. Or it is similarly assumed that the publication of Dilke’s Greater Britain explains subsequent changing attitudes to empire. This book, which looks, among others, at an earlier group of Henty’s, suggests a more complex relationship between the little and big histories of empire in nineteenth-century Britain. A change in the latter in the last decades of the century, exemplified by the Scramble for Africa, has long been supposed. Empire seemingly shifts from the occasional acquisition of either settler colonies or coaling and trading stations to a more thorough-going forward policy. But, Beasley argues, this was not the result of the happenstance reaction to major events, the usual suspects including the Indian Mutiny and the Jamaican Governor Eyre controversy of the 1850s and 1860s. Nor, he maintains, was it a reflection either of changes in what he terms ‘middling’ history, the activities of government agencies and institutions, or the influence of Dilke’s 1869 publication upon official minds. Instead, as Beasley shows, Great Britain was reflexive of broader trends already in train when it appeared, one of which was the infant Colonial Society. Particular catalysts for change—a book, an event, a new government directive—are therefore rejected here in favour of what might be termed, somewhat oxymoronically, a broad little history. Beasley does not look at the first expression of the views of a young man, as Charles Dilke then was, so much as at the maturing ideas of a somewhat disparate group whose one common point was their early membership of the Colonial Society. That membership reflected the point to which their conceptualization of empire had travelled by 1868–69, but it was not the prompt for it. There are, of course, a number of groups of eminent Victorians who have already been subjected to collective scrutiny. For instance, the controversies among ethnographers and anthropologists of the 1850s and 1860s, not least their responses to imperial events such as the brutal suppression of unrest in Jamaica by Governor Eyre, have been used by subsequent historians to suggest a hardening of attitudes to race in mid-Victorian Britain.

What this does not demonstrate, however, is that such controversies can readily be read across and inserted into the discourse of empire. A young man such as Dilke might have found his consciousness of empire shaped by such developments. The intellectual journeys of the vast majority of Beasley’s subjects, maturing as they did over a much longer span, were much less susceptible to such influences. Instead, their views of empire were largely formed over the preceding decades as travellers, businessmen, officials or lawyers within the increasingly self-governing colonies of settlement. The result, Beasley suggests, was that by the 1860s they had arrived at a systematic view of empire. Their ideas may not have been entirely congruent, either among all the founders or with how ideas of empire would subsequently develop over the next few decades. There were to be conflicts over proposals for imperial federation, or on how empire should behave relative to native peoples. But these controversies were about the articulation of empire. Late Victorians could debate what empire should do and how it should be organized, but first they needed to think through, by the 1860s and 1870s, what it actually was. Beasley’s little history of the founders of the Colonial Society, and of how they came to think of empire as an abstraction, is thus an important part of explaining why this development in the big history of the British Empire came about. Peter Catterall London, 6 April 2004

Acknowledgements Thank you to my parents, Virgil Roy Beasley and the late Ima Jean Beasley; my brother, Howard Russell Mendenhall; and my grandparents, Audrey and Lawrence Michael. And thank you to my best friend, Rebecca Lea Hartmann Frey; my goddaughter, Sarah Castille Frey; and our friend and roommate, Ronald Zavala. At the University of California, San Diego, my thanks go to my dissertation advisers, namely the late John S.Galbraith, who showed me the British Empire, and Judith M.Hughes, who made me a European historian. I would also like to thank my selfappointed and much appreciated supporters, Stephen Cox, Thomas Dunseath, Laura Galbraith, and the late Christine Norris. Thanks also to Mary Lillis Allen, Pam Clark, Douglas Cremer, Stefan Fodor, Elizabeth Jordan, David S.Luft, John Marino, Allan Mitchell, James Ralph Papp, Ann Ramirez, David Ringrose, Robert Ritchie, Cynthia Truant, Errol Seaton, Andrew Wright, and the UCSD History Department for its financial support. At San Diego State University, thank you to William Ashbaugh, Laurence Baron, Bruce Castleman, Aimee Lee Cheek, William Cheek, Betty Fischer, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, David Dufault, Ross Dunn, Barry Joyce, Harry McDean, Polly Mason, Adriana Putko, Carole Putko, Phoebe Roeder, and my students, especially in Modern European History. I thank Jason Clark for drawing the map. Thank you also to the libraries of the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Irvine, and San Diego State University. I owe a special dept to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office of San Diego State University, including Edward Dibella, Kelley Martin, and Teri Roudenbush. In London, I am deeply in debt to the British Library in its Bloomsbury incarnation, as well as the India Office Library and Records, a British Library Department located (when I used it) in Blackfriars Road. Thank you also to the many people who helped me at the Institute of Historical Research; the Historical Manuscripts Commission; the Public Record Office, Kew; the British Museum; and the London Goodenough Trust (the London House for Overseas Graduates), now Goodenough College. My thanks to Professor A.G.Hopkins for his encouragement. And thank you to Andrew Humphries, who was my editor at the firm of Frank Cass; to my editor at Routledge, Terry Clague; to the Series Editor, Peter Catterall, of Queen Mary and Westfield College; and to Gail Welsh and Wearset Ltd. Finally, there is (or was) the Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Northumberland Avenue. My thanks go to the Society and the Commonwealth Trust for maintaining the library as long as they did, and for allowing me to see everything that I wanted to see. I must give even deeper thanks, however, to the extremely helpful library staff. That staff is now dispersed, and the collection is in its new home at Cambridge University. But thank you to Miss T.A.Barringer, the Librarian of the Royal Commonwealth Society. She did so much to help me even in those uncertain years when

she was trying to keep the collection together and running. My thanks also to the Librarian Emeritus of the Royal Commonwealth Society, the late Donald Simpson, OBE, who shared with me his own information on the early members of the Colonial Society. Without his kindness, I would have had a much harder row to hoe in collating the membership.

Abbreviations ADB

Australian Dictionary of Biography

Add. MS/Add. MSS

Additional Manuscript/Additional Manuscripts

AHLP

Austen Henry Layard Papers

BL

British Library

CS

Colonial Society

CB

Companion of the Order of the Bath

CIE

Companion of the Indian Empire

Corresp.

Correspondence

Coun. Min.

Council Minutes

DCB

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

DNB

Dictionary of National Biography

DP

Dilke Papers

edn

edition

EIC

East India Company

encl.

enclosure

fo, fos

folio, folios

FRS

Fellow of the Royal Society

GCB

Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath

GCMG

Knight Grand Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George

GCSI

Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India

GP

Gladstone Papers

HMS

His Majesty’s Ship/Her Majesty’s Ship

IOLR

India Office Library and Records

KCB

Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath

KCMG

Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George

KP

Knight of Saint Patrick

MICE

Member of the Indian Corps of Engineers

Min.

Minutes

n.

note

n.d.

no date

n.s.

new series

NJ

New Jersey

NY

New York

o.s.

old series

PP

Parliamentary Papers (‘Command Papers’)

PRCI

Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute

PRO

Public Record Office

RCS

Royal Commonwealth Society

RCSA

Royal Commonwealth Society Archives

RCSL

Royal Commonwealth Society Library

rev.

revised

ser.

series

SPG

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

TLS

Times Literary Supplement

Figure 1 Major extra-European territories of the British Empire, 1868 (source: drawn by Jason Clark).

Key A The Bahamas B Bermuda C British Honduras D Jamaica

E Trinidad

H Sierra Leone

F Windward and Leeward Islands

I Gold Coast forts K Niger delta forts and and Fante area Lakoja Consulate

G The Gambia

J Lagos

1 Introduction In the late nineteenth century, Great Britain acquired a new empire in Africa and elsewhere in the Tropics. And it acquired a new enthusiasm for empire as a whole. A vast swathe of ‘British Empire Red’ stretched across thousands of schoolroom maps, and it made millions of British hearts beat faster. Imperial questions became central in British politics. The Boer War of 1899–1902 was fought in service of the imperial mission, a mission that soared above the rather meagre economic benefits of almost all the territory in Africa. People died for the empire. Where did this late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for empire come from? Little of this imperial enthusiasm had existed at mid-century. There had been little desire to keep the empire together, and little attempt to explore the idea of what the various pieces of the empire might add up to if they were looked at as a whole. The heart of the old empire had gone in the American Revolution, and the remaining North American possessions had been sent down the road to self-government after the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. No one in the mother country seemed to mind a bit. In the 1840s, a political movement called ‘colonial reform’ had supported an expansion of the settlement colonies in order to make new homes for Great Britain’s surplus population, but colonial reform died away in the better economic climate of the early 1850s. Most of the settlement colonies (in North America, Australia, and New Zealand) were given self-government by the middle of that decade. The colonies of the West Indies, economic embarrassments ever since the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, inspired little enthusiasm. While some people were enthusiastic about retaining the Indian Empire (especially when it rebelled in 1857), they were not enthusiastic about the empire in general. The imperial enthusiasm that did exist was patchy and short-lived. Now and again there was the occasional imperial adventure, the occasional projection of British imperial power. Sometimes the idea was to abolish the slave-trade. Other projections of British power arose from instabilities in the remaining imperial possessions; usually this meant a need to secure dangerous frontiers, but it also meant the need to repress the Indian Mutiny. And now and then there would be other projections of power and enthusiasm, usually after some real or imagined affront to national pride, as in the Opium Wars. None of these isolated exertions of British power belied the general lack of interest in extending or ruling the colonies, or in any idea of imperial mission—a lack of interest that was evident from the 1830s to the late 1860s. Liberal England (and Scotland) followed Adam Smith in recoiling from colonial expenditure. Mid-nineteenth-century governments did not like paying the defence costs of Canadians, of truculent South Africans, or of downright violent New Zealanders. As seen from London, the New Zealanders quite inhumanely and expensively insisted on picking fights with the Maori.

Empire as the triumph of theory

2

If the troops could be recalled from New Zealand, the money to pay them could be used to lower taxes, to build sewers, or to defend against the Germans (a key point in 1870). Still, the imperial adventures continued, and the British Empire, or pieces of it, were always in the background in mid-Victorian England. Throughout the century, indeed, the idea of imperial political federation would sometimes pop into the minds of political reformers.1 Various pro-colonial sentiments appeared with some regularity in the press, albeit with little in the way of systematic development.2 Citizens of the country that had invented industrialism and defeated Napoleon could hardly fail to notice their advantages over the rest of the world, and the fact that they had come to control large pieces of it.3 And as might be expected in a big, bustling culture, there were some people who began to pay more sustained attention to the bewildering variety of imperial news in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. What was happening in their minds? How did they try to make sense of it all? Such people bulked large among the founders of the Colonial Society of 1868, the first major organization promoting the empire as a whole. In what they wrote and what they did, the Colonial Society founders show where the different strands of support for imperialism came from, and how those strands were brought together. The founders helped to bring coherence to the diverse and contradictory strands of British imperial thinking at mid-century. They ushered in the revival of interest in the imperial question that was already notable by 1870.4 They also helped to illustrate the origins of the imperial enthusiasm that would sweep through the British people by the end of the nineteenth century. For most of the 1860s, as in the several decades before, ideas about the empire were still uncoordinated. There was not even a word that could encompass British policy in all the areas of the empire, from New South Wales to the Punjab. The word ‘imperialism’ would not do, for it meant something different then. Indeed, as Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt have explained: The fact that what came to mind whenever the word imperialism was used between 1852 and 1870 was always the French empire and never the British serves to indicate that the latter lacked the quality which made the former subject to criticism under that name—the quality of representing a challenge to the public mind by its very existence. Most critics of British imperial affairs did not seem to consider the name of the British Empire a provocation against which their moral or political conscience was bound to react. The name of the British Empire was not, as a rule, raised in boastful rhetoric. There were no statesmen or publicists prominent in English public life for whom, on the ground of attitude or public utterances concerning the imperial position of Great Britain, the term ‘imperialism’ or ‘imperialist’ would have been characteristic.5 Indeed, ‘imperialism’ was a term of obloquy; it referred only to the domestic policies of Napoleon III. For Goldwin Smith, writing just before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, ‘imperialism’ was nearly synonymous with ‘despotism’. He used both words to refer to the system of domestic government under the Ancient Romans and Louis Napoleon alike. In his view, the opposite of imperialism throughout history was ‘English freedom’.6 But

Introduction

3

while ‘imperialism’ as a term could be rehabilitated only after Napoleon III had lost his throne in 1870, the enthusiasm of a number of Britons for their empire may be traced a few years before the word was applied to England. The business of this study is to look for the growth of the imperial sentiment in Great Britain before 1870, and to look for it among a particular group of people. The Colonial Society was among the earliest signs of a movement of opinion in the direction of supporting the empire, and of thinking about the empire as a single large unit. Thus, instead of following older scholarship and attempting to characterize mid-Victorian imperialism by skipping among isolated quotations from what would seem to be a randomly chosen set of contemporary writers,7 we will use the founders of the Colonial Society as a pre-made sample. By looking at the founders we can see how particular individuals became interested in the empire as a general category, and how their ideas about the empire changed and grew. We can see how imperialism originated in individual minds, and what it derived from. The founders of the Colonial Society were indeed individuals who became imperialistic sometime before 1868, their imperialism having grown out of their other interests, and the position they reached is unmistakably imperialistic. The imperial enthusiasts of the Colonial Society included in their plans not only the settlement colonies but also many of the tropical areas that would be unclaimed by Europeans until the 1880s—showing the creation of imperialism as a general, geographically wide-ranging category.8 And yet, while the Colonial Society is a key place to look at how and why people moved away from their other concerns and became imperialists, it is not the only place. As long ago as 1938, one scholar suggested that the federal issues implicit in the US Civil War and in the Confederation of Canada soon after might have fed into the growth of imperialism in the late 1860s. That does not seem to have been the case, for the main founders of the Colonial Society had become interested in the empire and in how to govern it—whether federally or otherwise—well before the American Civil War; some paid close attention to the war in America, while others ignored it completely.9 Another place to look for the origin of late 1860s imperialism is in connection with the Abyssinian expedition of 1867, as Freda Harcourt has shown. She argues that Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli embarked on an African adventure to pander to the voters who had been enfranchised by the 1867 reform bill.10 Yet other scholars disagree. The Abyssinian War itself seems to have stemmed more from a set of bureaucratic and diplomatic blunders than from anyone’s demagogic tendencies, even Disraeli’s.11 Among the members of the Colonial Society, moreover, a much wider and much older set of imperialistic attitudes were visible than among the people connected to the Abyssinian affair. All in all, the founders of the Colonial Society are the best group among which to examine who became an imperialist and why. Viewed up close, the imperialistic Zeitgeist disappears, revealing instead the individuals who founded the Society, and the specific intellectual and social backgrounds out of which their imperialism grew. At bottom, the concern is this: How does a society like Victorian England—so alive with controversies and debates, so alive with different doubts and different faiths, so full of ambitions and contradictions—how does so diverse a society12 resolve itself to impose a grand, ill-conceived dream on that world—and an imperial dream—which is a denial of

Empire as the triumph of theory

4

that diversity, and a desire to smooth it away? Where did the bandwagon of imperialism come from? Do a few opinion-makers invent huge movements, or do movements appear with apparent suddenness when some common element (as I believe) happens to bubble up in the lives of tens of thousands of people thinking in parallel about the economic, political, and intellectual substructures of their age? Throughout the lives of the founders of the Colonial Society, evidence of European domination was everywhere for those who chose to see it.13 And the founders did choose to see it. That is, they chose to look at the big trends in the history of European contacts with non-European peoples; they were using bigger and bigger categories and drawing bigger and bigger conclusions about the whole history of the world. Their thinking became imperial in scope, and this often took place well before 1868. The main founders of the Colonial Society were devotees of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose writing burst upon the scene in the early 1830s. For the Tocquevilleans, the central theme of world history was the rise of democracy; lessons came pouring in from the many newly self-governing English-speaking societies abroad—thus the British Empire was the vanguard of civilization. Alongside the Tocquevilleans in the Colonial Society there were archaeologists and anthropologists. These men were attempting to understand how the British Empire fitted into a world history that went back to the empires of Egypt and Sumeria. But the temptation to think about lofty abstractions on the order of ‘world democracy’ (for the Tocquevilleans) and the English ‘race’ (for the anthropologists) is a powerful one, and hard to break away from. It draws you in. You begin to forget about individual cases. As the years went by, the founders’ thinking tended more and more to the collective and the imperial. This is what drew them together by 1868. Perhaps in trying to come up with a grand imperial ideal, they were trying to answer a basic question: What did England stand for? As Linda Colley has pointed out, the emancipation of the Catholics had meant that English nationalism could no longer be congruent with Protestant zeal; meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire soon after 1833 left the English with less to campaign against.14 So what did England stand for? Railways and industry? England as the land of liberty was a great success— except that what seemed most successful was the world of Gradgrind rather than the English constitution. Thus some Englishmen searched for a place for their country within a meaningful scheme of worldwide cultural and social progress, a scheme that would stand above the triumphs of what many of them saw as grubby British manufacturers.15 To come up with such a scheme means indulging in at least a few grand generalizations. For thirty years, and with ever greater intensity, the founders-to-be of the Colonial Society had been extending their ideas about the mission of England and its democratic settlements overseas, and about archaeology, anthropology, and race. They had been extending their ideas about these things to cover ever larger units of culture, government, or population, units that grew imperial in scale. What was the mission of Anglo-Saxon civilization? And what was the mission of the men in London who led it? This study builds on a rich trove of scholarship about British imperialism in the nineteenth century, part of the national histories of more than 1,000,000,000 people in countries and universities around the globe. Many scholars have focused on British initiatives from Whitehall (the ‘centre’), others on the interaction of Europeans and nonEuropeans in the different places where they met (the so-called ‘periphery’).16 Yet

Introduction

5

London had its own peripheries—its own uncoordinated points of contact between Europeans and the wider world. That is, it had unofficial men who at the privacy of their desks were trying to figure out the world they lived in, and how they ought to act in it. It should also be said that this book addresses questions of imperialism rather than of imperial expansion.17 Although it would be hard to imagine either imperialism or the empire developing in the utter absence of the other, none the less the attitudes and the territorial additions did not have to jog along together in any coordinated way. This is something that scholars have learned in attempting the devilish task of periodizing imperial history. The imperialism that came together in 1868 would have something to do with preparing the way for the imperial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, but the latter subject is beyond the scope of this work. Yet even the subfield of the history of Victorian imperialism per se is very large indeed, and I would be remiss if I did not survey my corner of it for historiographical land mines that might destroy my thesis—a thesis, once again, about people who came to think in huge categories about the place of English-speaking democracy or the English race in world history, and who then came together in the Colonial Society. They came together because of the way they thought, not because of money. But weren’t the British always looking for ways to take over the world and make money? Isn’t that where imperialism came from? A few purported facts—that the British have always been imperialists, that they have always been ‘in it’ for the money, and that they got rich through imperial rapine—have ascended almost to the level of folk wisdom. Yet only a few scholars who study the subject believe that the desire for money explains much about the growth of the ideology of imperialism that took place in the 1870s or thereabouts.18 Besides, even as an explanation for imperial expansion instead of imperial ideology, it is not obvious at first blush what the economic explanations are really saying. Did the British get rich off colonies, or did they waste a lot of money on colonies that they might better have spent on social programmes at home? Which was it? This uncertainty makes the history of the economic explanation of imperialism a strange one.19 The first major thinker along these lines was J.A.Hobson. Working at the turn of the century, and basing his ideas upon the arguments of a small number of American theoreticians and a larger number of Cobdenite anti-imperialists, Hobson wrote that a class of ‘parasitic’ financiers was profiteering from the empire at the expense of everyone else, including most English capitalists; the empire was making England poorer.20 Following Hobson, and for much of the rest of the twentieth century, good Marxists would agree that England had exported excess capital, since the iron laws of worker exploitation ruled out using excess goods and excess finance to improve the lot of the common people at home.21 Some years after Hobson, in the socialist era after the Boer War and the First World War, people who no longer had much reason to trust the ruling classes created the opposite myth. It might be called the demotic theory of economic imperialism. This myth held that most of Britain’s prosperity (a prosperity which seemed in those lean years to be confined to the rulers) was based on the exploitation of colonies. In this period, Hobson’s fame grew, but his theory that a parasitic imperialism drained resources from England does not seem to have been widely studied.22 Believers in the demotic theory were convinced that the prosperity of England came from exploiting the empire, importing

Empire as the triumph of theory

6

surpluses from it and not from exporting surpluses to it. These sub-Hobsonians assumed a ‘zero-sum game’, with every part of a country’s riches being won at the expense of other countries. Thus their conclusion that England had simply stolen all of its wealth; was not England wealthier than many parts of the world? George Orwell showed that he belonged to this school when he wrote that a Britain stripped of its empire would be reduced to a life that centred on herrings and potatoes.23 Early scholarly refutations of this idea of economic imperialism do not seem to have made as much of an impression; the demotic theory of exploitation took off from the ideas of Orwell and other self-styled disciples of Hobson.24 Within the field of imperial history, scholars are still refuting the idea that the empire was central to British economic growth. It now seems that British industrialization in its eighteenth-century phase may indeed have been helped along by the existence of the North American market. Patrick K.O’Brien argues that no more than 15 per cent of the investment behind the first industrial revolution came from Britain’s extra-European trade.25 Even if that extra margin of investment helped to spark the British economy, the spark had already started a wildfire in England by 1815. Industry had taken off, wealth was being created at home, and empire was not economically fundamental in the age of coal and railways—although the empire did continue to grow.26 To the extent that reconstructed statistics can tell us anything about the economic effect of the empire in the mid- to late nineteenth century, well after industrial take-off, the conclusion seems to be that empire cost the British people a great deal of money. Defending the empire meant that the taxpayer (including low-income groups whose food was subject to non-progressive excise taxes) had to pay for an extra navy, one capable of defending Australians, New Zealanders, and for a time Canadians. The people of these countries could therefore build an infrastructure for themselves while keeping their own taxes low.27 These settlement colonists were indeed the chief financial beneficiaries of the empire. The British themselves could have maintained superpower military levels, as well as their dominance over the world trading system, without the expense of either running old colonies or acquiring new ones.28 Thus it remains hard to explain why the British took that extra step as the century drew to its close. If the general public was not making money out of the empire, then maybe Hobson’s finance capitalists were doing so, and perhaps it was they who gave the lead. But the facts indicate that most investors lost their money when they so much as looked towards the empire. Only a minority received the rate of return that they would have enjoyed in the bigger investment markets of Europe and the United States, even though there may have been a brief, shallow, and hard-to-pinpoint interlude of imperial profitability in the 1860s or 1870s. (Imperial profitability in that period was so diffuse that it would not have been noticeable to contemporary investors—to find out about it they would have needed masses of proprietary data, then secret.) As Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback have shown, few sectors of the economy showed much in the way of imperial profits. Two areas of economic activity where the empire did make money for people were consumer goods and infrastructure, chiefly railways. Even then, most of the profits were made in the settlement empire that had become largely self-governing in the 1850s, and not in those areas of the world which were to figure so prominently in the New Imperialism of the 1880s and after.29 That is, the British sold far more consumer goods in Canada than

Introduction

7

up the Zambezi. While there was some contemporary opinion that the possession of one very special non-settlement colony, India, brought economic profits to the empire, most people did not think so.30 Nor did businessmen behave as if it did. Even in India British enterprise refused to risk any money building railways. Only in 1849, when the East India Company agreed to guarantee firms a profit of 5 per cent (out of Indian government revenue) did railway construction start. It grew apace, but profits and labour conditions did not satisfy the British construction enterprises. Construction slowed by the late 1860s, and from 1869 until the 1880s the post-1849 system of subsidized capitalism was abandoned for outright public-private partnerships with a profit guarantee of 4 per cent.31 Most of the profitable railway investment in the empire was, once again, in the selfgoverning settlement colonies. All in all, it is hard to claim that British imperial profits were higher than British profits elsewhere in the mid-Victorian decades, or that imperial profits were thought to be very big at all during the New Imperial push into the tropics. That does not mean that the new British colonies in Africa or Asia would not suffer financial exploitation. In addition, as T.O. Lloyd has pointed out, the rates of return on different investments will tend to equalize across industries under free competition. New investment will be attracted into sectors of high profitability until that extra profitability is gone—diluted, removed by the law of diminishing returns.32 Imperial exploitation happened none the less, whether or not profits on imperial investments were especially large. What matters here, however, is that there does not seem to have been anything particularly attractive about imperial investment—either an extra margin of profitability that had yet to equalize or an extra measure of financial safety. There was little that would serve as an incentive to an acrossthe-board expansion of imperial control, formal or informal. Some people made money in far-off places that might come under imperial control, while others did not. The more exotic parts of the world—the areas where the empire might grow—were the places where crises came from, not where safe money went. During the Parliamentary session of 1868/69, when the Colonial Society was young, MPs were regaled with two more or less imperial issues: the terrible £8,000,000 cost of the diplomatic catastrophe and military adventure in Abyssinia, and the idea of removing the anti-slave-trade squadrons from the coast of West Africa—and removing them for the sole purpose of saving the government’s money.33 The places where the British did make money were not the places that they seized. Where a large amount of British money was invested, the British government usually refrained from seizing territory,34 or they were in no position to seize it anyway. Latin America, site of much investment and full of independent countries, is the classic case.35 But the history of another target area for British investment, an area where there were no Latin American-style governments to get in the way of British territorial acquisition, will make clear the tenuous connection between the spread of trade and the spread of the flag. For about a half-century prior to 1852, Britain had been taking the odd piece of territory now and then in maritime Southeast Asia. These places were taken largely in order to guard the Indian and China trades rather than for the value of the new possessions themselves, which lost money. Yet it must be underlined that for the most part these actual acquisitions, unprofitable as they were, became formal colonies directly ruled by the British.

Empire as the triumph of theory

8

After 1873, Britain’s territorial acquisitions in that area resumed and they resumed in force, this time for the profits actually available in the places seized; but the irony is that these new, now-profitable areas were taken in the form of suzerainties rather than formal acquisitions (excepting the central part of Burma, formally annexed for non-economic reasons in February 1886). Thus, expansion of control without real sovereignty took place while the scramble for formal colonial control over Africa was raging at full force.36 Where trade went, therefore, whether in Latin America or in the indirectly ruled British hegemonies erected in Southeast Asia after 1873, the British flag did not go. Around the world, meanwhile, there was very little interest—at least before the 1880s—in the economic development of those tropical colonies that were under formal British rule. Almost any attempt at development that did take place in the Tropics was focused merely on enabling the colony in question to pay a higher percentage of the cost of its own governance.37 In sum, whatever the influence of investors on any one decision about the expansion of British power, investors as a group did not succeed in putting together any coherent programme of British territorial expansion, even as late as the 1870s. There were pressure groups pushing for different particular extensions of British power. In the mid-Victorian decades, as John Darwin has argued, the existence of these ad hoc pressure groups—sometimes economic but more often not—could lead to the expansion of British control over local areas, for local reasons, using local resources, and often employing local troops, even in an era when expansion of annexation was as often rejected by Whitehall as it was allowed. Darwin, building it would seem on the observations of C.C.Eldridge, has identified a pattern of imperial expansion from these local ‘bridgeheads’, but only when there was some British constituency for annexation around the bridgehead, such as the anti-slavery movement, Free Traders, or missionaries.38 Hobson’s main concern—the hunt for some overall economic rationale for the seizure of Africa39—inspired V.I.Lenin to embark upon the same search. The result was his famous 1917 essay, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. And yet Lenin was not primarily interested in imperial expansion. ‘Imperialism’ was simply his name for the monopoly capitalism that he saw as dominant in the period after 1900. In looking for the economic origins of imperialism in his sense of the term, he was more interested in where monopolies came from than the origin of imperialism.40 Indeed, he had some choice words for those who then (as now) find imperialism looming behind all cultural phenomena, seemingly without distinctions: Colonial policy and imperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and achieved imperialism. But ‘general’ arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of socialeconomic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities.41 Still, Lenin’s flawed and incidental treatment of imperial expansion deserves some attention, since it is so famous that it might be taken as a challenge to any non-economic theory of imperialism.42 Lenin began by following Hobson in using overly broad and

Introduction

9

never disaggregated statistics. The statistics seemed to show Great Britain controlling massive overseas investments in different parts of the world, investments that must have been the cause of imperial expansion.43 When disaggregated, however, Lenin’s figures show that British overseas investment was largely outside the empire, making hay of the capital-export aspect of the cobbled-together popular idea of the Hobson-Lenin theory of imperial expansion. Moreover, even the imperial portion of British investment was largely in Australia and Canada, and to a much lesser extent in the railways of India, rather than in places seized in the second half of the nineteenth century.44 Furthermore, Lenin explained the scramble for Africa of the mid-1880s as a consequence of the transition to monopoly capitalism, which he had taken pains some pages earlier to locate in the late 1890s, after its supposed effects in prompting the Scramble for Africa.45 Again, his statistics were insufficiently disaggregated, so that imperial developments from the whole period from 1876 to 1914 were lumped together.46 In sum, Lenin is no serious threat to any social and cultural explanation of the growth in imperial enthusiasm among British people in the 1860s. Ideas about how the behaviour of individuals might add up into social trends are more interesting and in the long run more valuable than an economic conspiracy theory that Lenin himself merely glanced at in a work on another subject. Finally, a much more promising avenue of research into the economic motivations behind the British Empire has been opened up by P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins. Cain and Hopkins have tried to remove from the economic story of imperialism the antiquated Marxian idea of what British capitalism was—a more or less centrally organized industrial movement—and to look at a more important area of the economy. Their work reflects the new focus on the finance and service sector in southeast England, a focus developed by historians who debate the economic rise or fall of England in recent times.47 For Cain and Hopkins, the men of the financial and service sectors shared with government officials a common set of expectations about Britain’s role in the world economy, as well as the habit of exercising power to safeguard or extend that role. The authors define this set of economic expectations and imperialistic behaviours as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’.48 This model works quite well as an explanation for the fits-and-starts expansion of the British Empire down through the whole of the nineteenth century. Sometimes there were opportunities to make money without the expansion of British power; sometimes power had to be exercised in order to defend investments. Much will flow from the work of Cain and Hopkins.49 Still, it is not clear in their work where the threshold of scale lies between the local or parochial economic activities that would have happened anyway and, at the other end of the scale, the investments and endeavours that were prompted by the gentlemanly capitalists of London. How much of the economic activity was due to imperialism? After all, the people out in the empire would naturally have to work and support themselves in some way; that they worked and made money—and expanded British control in their local areas—does not by itself show what portion of their activities may be put down to the operation of an imperial economic network under the control of the gentlemanly capitalists of London. Building on his earlier work on the economic history of West Africa, Hopkins has pointed out that local economic activity, whether European or African, may well have been the stimulus for the Scramble.50

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In any case, the economic interests that Cain and Hopkins have uncovered do not seem to impinge upon a study of imperialism as an idea in Great Britain, and of how that idea changed at specific times during the second half of the nineteenth century. Again, studying the empire as an economic phenomenon is not the same as studying the growth of the ideology of imperialism. Both approaches are necessary. As has been suggested of the American case since the Second World War, an imperial impulse may stem from the whole Weltanshauung of a great power’s self-identity, its nationalism, and aspects of its capitalism, rather than from any imperial profit-seeking on the part of particular individuals or groups.51 Scholars who have steered clear of economic explanations have traced imperialism back to Disraeli’s Crystal Palace Speech (1872). Here, then, is the second land mine that might explode my thesis. Someone might ask whether Disraeli himself didn’t invent imperialism in order to appeal to the newly enlarged electorate after 1867. Isn’t that where imperialism came from on the British political scene? Well, no. Tracing imperialism back to 1872 isn’t going back far enough, if we are looking only at political events. And it is not nearly far enough back if we are looking at Disraeli’s own thinking. For decades, Disraeli had held true to a vision of the glorious British Empire as a power in the East, and he had proposed adding MPs from the settlement colonies to Parliament at Westminster.52 He may not have known much about particular colonies, but he was quite fond of the empire as a grand, indistinct vision. Indeed, Disraeli had spent decades working himself into just the sort of imperial generalizations and world categorizations that this study will find among members of the Colonial Society—except that this was only one of his interests, his foremost interest being appealing to the electorate. Most members of the Colonial Society, on the other hand, were not at the top of the political game, and they could afford to give freer reign to their imperial fantasies. Another possibility is for the broader political turn to imperialism in 1869, and some scholars have championed that year as the origin of imperialism. By summer, it was apparent that the Gladstone government planned to save money by withdrawing British troops from New Zealand. British forces were in the colony to fight the Maori, but they also kept the settler and Maori armies apart. In non-official London, news of the impending withdrawal caused an uproar. Some were sceptical about leaving white people to defend themselves alone—or to learn how to get along with their neighbours at no cost to the British taxpayer. This uproar was organized in large part by members of the Colonial Society, using the good offices of the supposedly non-partisan group (a political intrusion that did not please the Society’s Gladstonian members).53 Yet the Society already existed; and however important this episode was in provoking imperial sentiments on the part of some people, the Society and the broader interest in empire that it represented had already come into being.54 On occasion that interest has been traced one year further back—to two events in 1868: the Society’s foundation itself, and the somewhat later publication of the book Greater Britain. Yet the Society has not been given proper credit. Sometimes it is mentioned briefly on the way to Dilke; sometimes, indeed, its foundation is dated from the gala dinner held in March 1869, after months of great activity—and some months after Greater Britain was published.55 Or we might go the other way, and reason forward towards the New Imperialism. How much really changed across the nineteenth century? Starting in the 1880s, British

Introduction

11

governments may simply have become more willing to react to crises on the European periphery by seizing territory—but those crises, and the occasional seizure of territory, had been happening for a long time. One could point to the annexation of New Zealand itself in 1840, or of Lagos in 1861—and many others throughout the nineteenth century.56 And besides the British government’s stronger but hardly unprecedented interest in seizing territory in the latter parts of the century, there was also newly strengthened but again hardly unprecedented interest in empire on the part of families. By the 1870s or 1880s, the new professionals of the mid-century would have noticed the jobs available to their children in the then-reformed imperial bureaucracy; there would be support for the empire qua employment agency. But the empire had played that role to some degree for a century.57 Yet clearly there was some change. Imperialism as a general category became all the rage a few years after 1868. The key point about most of the founders of the Colonial Society was that they developed an imperialism of a new and more general kind, and they did this on their own as individuals sometime before 1868, only then going public with it by founding the Colonial Society in that year. But they had begun on their own, as individuals looking at the world; they did not have to rely on the support or the ideas of others to extend their idea of the British Empire to all of the settlement colonies and the tropical world besides. People could think of this more extensive kind of empire by themselves, and without the benefit of some social movement or political fracas to guide them—although they founded their own movement in 1868 to guide others. The intellectual development of the founders took years. Theirs is a story of continuity and development in imperial thinking in the face of the flow of events and information. And, as writers and thinkers, they developed their imperial ideas for intellectual rather than economic reasons.

2 The founding of the Colonial Society In 1801, London had a population of 1,000,000 people, approximately the size of the population of Merseyside or the Providence, Rhode Island, of today. By the 1871 census, the population had grown to nearly 4,000,000—London was as big as today’s Manchester or Washington, DC. Many of the new arrivals lived in the suburbs, but of course they did not stay there by day, when central London had to accommodate them.1 In the 1860s, inner London had more dust, noise, and reconstruction than at any other time in the nineteenth century; stations, rail lines, business premises, and central places of all sorts were built on the ruins of Georgian London, which had been a city of narrow private houses with small floors, unsuited to large organizations.2 Until 1876, even the Colonial Office occupied two thin and quite inadequate old houses in Downing Street. Indeed, the building had been condemned years before.3 It leaked, and the accounts office could not house a safe—which people were afraid would bring the building down.4 Yet there was nowhere in London for the Colonial Office to move to. By the 1870s, new and more specialized kinds of buildings with larger floor plans were required, not only by government departments. These new types of buildings included hotel-like clubs for professional men, and more business-oriented headquarters buildings for professional institutes; more and more of these headquarters would be erected as the century progressed and the number of professional organizations exploded.5 Professionalization increased in many areas, it is true, even away from London. Indeed, London-style club buildings and professional headquarters were also built in other parts of the country, especially when scientists and industrialists sought a common forum. Yet events in the provinces were literally isolated phenomena in comparison to club- and headquarters-building in the capital, where there was such a strong combination of ambition, crowding, sheer activity, and even the joy of being at the centre of professions, the centre of interest groups, the centre of civilization.6 London was indeed the world’s largest city; full of great poverty, it is true, but also full of people who were ever better educated, and ever more likely to travel to a meeting in town by way of the new rail lines near their homes.7 They needed places to get together. By the late 1860s, London was too big to walk across routinely. People who shared an interest might not run into each other as easily as they could have done in the smaller London of the eighteenth century. The general coffee house, the gentleman’s club (however politically focused), and the reception room, all so prominent in the social and intellectual life of the late eighteenth century, had to be supplemented as gathering places by the more specialized institutions and clubs that the Victorians have left to us. In 1872, the antiquarian John Timbs published an inventory of London clubs of the older kind; they centred on eating and drinking, most had jocular names, and many could be traced to a particular tavern. By the late 1860s, when Timbs was working, most of

The founding of the colonial society

13

these associations were indeed in the purview of the antiquarian, and the surviving coffee houses were too social and too informal to allow for them to serve as centres for new kinds of intellectual endeavour, much less for organized national associations.8 Indeed, many of the City coffee houses were disappearing—torn down to make room for the wider, purpose-built business premises.9 Very soon after Timbs published his chatty catalogue of the old clubs, Bernard H. Becker published Scientific London, in which he sought to write more substantial histories for a very different and newer kind of club. He noted that the ‘learned Societies’ whose meetings he had made a habit of attending had not as yet had their origins written up, except for the one book on the Royal Society itself. Of the thirteen non-governmental bodies whose history he went on to write in Scientific London, nine were founded after 1815, and six of these after 1830.10 With its ambitious but potted histories of science—he was looking only at science—Becker’s book was a characteristically mid-Victorian production, as were so many of the institutions he wrote about. Collectively, these institutions changed the tenor of society, first in scientific fields and then, in mid-century and after, outside of science. Lectures and journals proliferated.11 Interests that had been confined to shady, far-flung corners could now bloom and cross-pollinate in ways they never could before the concentration of humanity that came with the foundation of the new clubs. Perhaps some of the new institutions were no more than hothouses for the arcane or the archaic; others soon developed a global reach. One of the more global of the new institutions was in fact the Colonial Society. Its name would change frequently,12 as would its size and influence, but its purpose would not. The idea was to encourage ‘all objects likely to create a better knowledge and understanding of the Colonies, to strengthen the connection and good feeling between them and the mothercountry, and also to promote a closer intercourse between the Colonies themselves’.13 The Colonial Society, as an example of the new kind of interestbased, purposefully founded London institution, held many practical advantages as a meeting-place for people interested in the colonies as such. It was better than the last of the old, unspecialized meeting-places that were still frequented. These were the huge City of London coffee houses that served as centres for overseas and shipping news. Although in the 1860s a person could still find out a great deal about the colonies by taking his coffee in the right place, the main coffee houses were getting too big, too busy, and too unfocused to allow for any sustained contact between people with more specialized interests. Witness the periodical subscriptions of the three most important City coffee houses associated with overseas affairs: Peele’s Coffee House, Fleet Street, had complete files of English newspapers going well back into the eighteenth century, as well as current foreign and colonial papers; the very busy Jerusalem Coffee House, Cornhill, brought together people and publications touching on the whole of the world east of the British Isles, all the way to Australia; and the New England and North and South American Coffee House, Threadneedle Street, had a daunting 400 newspapers on file, including titles from Germany and Russia. Such buzzing coffee houses, especially the Jerusalem and the ‘New England and North and South American’, were frequented by merchants and ships’ captains interested in reviewing nearly the whole world, however cavalierly. Each of these great coffee houses was less a social institution than a key information

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centre for world trade. A few more focused coffee houses, such as the Jamaica in St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, which covered the West Indies, and the Baltic Coffee House, Threadneedle Street, which covered Northern Europe and those parts of South America which produced tallow, were frequented by people interested only in one part of the world (more or less), rather than that everywhere Britain was active colonially.14 As its circular says, the Colonial Society was founded expressly to give people who were interested in all the colonies—but not the whole world—a place to exchange views about colonies (and not about trade) with colonists and with each other. Only one person in the Colonial Society gave a coffee house, the Jerusalem, as his London address.15 Members could go to the Society instead, whether to meet each other or to read colonial newspapers in peace and quiet, undisturbed by people looking for a ship, seeking news of the tallow trade in Denmark (at the Baltic Coffee House), or looking up English political rags from the 1780s (at Peele’s). The Colonial Society would be frequented by people interested in the colonies per se, and it would be quieter and more refined than the buzzing coffee hives of the City. Indeed, the Society was also supposed to establish a library and a scholarly journal—in short, it was to be everything for which the scientists had begun to look to their societies: The intention is to establish in London a Colonial Society, consisting of Fellows and a Council, which shall occupy as regards the Colonies the position filled by the Royal Society with regard to science, or the Royal Geographical Society with regard to geography. In this Society each Colony may be represented. It is proposed eventually to open a lecture hall, a library and reading room, and a museum of science, industry and commerce, where the natural and other products of the several Colonies will be exhibited…. The library of the Society will be furnished with information on all commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, mining and other matters, coming statistical, useful, and interesting details, often urgently required by the statesman, the merchant, the colonist, the man or science, the intending emigrant, and other classed in the Mothercountry. This information will be carefully classified, registered, and made as much as possible accessible to all concerned.16 These assurances about the mission and the library show that the founders knew just the kind of formal and highly specialized institution they wanted, and they knew that they were aiming high.17 The Colonial Society would be ‘a Literary and Scientific Body’ in the words of the founder, Lord Bury, who repeated elsewhere that the Royal Geographical Society was one of the chief models.18 The founders admitted in their circular that what they had in mind was the kind of headquarters that a few other rather prestigious but not quite so specialized groups already had: The Society will also afford opportunities for the reading of papers and the holding of discussions upon Colonial subjects generally, and will undertake those investigations in connection with Colonies, which are carried out in a more general field by the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the

The founding of the colonial society

15

Society of Arts, and by similar bodies in Great Britain.19 All of those bodies held public lectures and discussions, and the Colonial Society would too. Besides, the Society would be easier to get into than the models that the founders had in mind; the Fellows may have invented some varieties of imperialism, but they did not have to invent the scientific theories or tangible objects expected from candidates for the Royal Society, or to show interest in actually making or manipulating things that united the Society of Arts.20 The early ambitions for the Society were not only fulfilled but soon transcended. In the 1870s and 1880s, as the British people grew more enthusiastic about maintaining and expanding their empire, the Society grew far beyond the plans of its founders. Some people even used the Society to organize a political pressure group—although ‘any organization for political purposes [was] forbidden by the fundamental rules of the Society’.21 And the Society quickly grew beyond London. The founders were happily surprised at the number of subscriptions (and the amount of money) that came pouring in from Canada and Australia even before the end of 1868, and the Society’s rules kept changing to accommodate overseas members.22 Over the next few years, the popularity of imperialism took off. Indeed, it would not be long before even the simple fact of London’s size would lead some people to a dream of worldwide empire. Henry James caught this aspect of London life in 1888: It is perfectly open to [the London-lover] to consider the remainder of the United Kingdom, or the British empire in general, or even, if he be an American, the total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, as the mere margin, the fitted girdle. It is for this reason—because I like to think how great we all are together in the light of heaven and the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of our glorious tongue, in which we labour to write articles and books for each other’s candid perusal, how great we all are and how great is the great city which we may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of our race—it is for this reason that I have a singular kindness for the London railway stations.23 The founders were beginning to put together the general idea of empire that James in his railway reverie would rely upon twenty years later. A misleading precedent No such idea had been shared thirty years before the Colonial Society of 1868 was founded. And yet in 1837, a ‘Colonial Society’ was founded in London to bring together men from different parts of the empire. The day-to-day aims of this society and the 1868 version were remarkably similar.24 Much as the 1868 Society would be, the 1837 version was: intended to afford a place of rendezvous to persons interested in the various

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dependencies of the empire in every corner of the Globe, by which means information may be diffused respecting the valuable resources of the British Colonial possessions, hitherto comparatively unknown. For the attainment of the above named objects, an extensive library will be formed, consisting of all important works relating to the colonies, together with a selection of the most approved Maps, Charts, and the latest Surveys. There will also be provided a regular supply of one or more newspapers from each colony.25 But the 1837 Colonial Society was not the model for the 1868 Colonial Society. Only four members of the older club joined the newer one,26 and the full council of the newer society went to the trouble of formally declining the offer of a certain Captain Whitty to donate a copy of the rules of the 1837 organization.27 Indeed, it was important to distance the new society from the old. Pointed controversies over the morality of imperialism had torn the older Colonial Society apart. It would seem that people were happy enough to go back to coffee houses—or that they found it easier to do so than to come to a general agreement about Great Britain’s imperial control. The disagreement had first broken out in Parliament. In 1840 the Tories came within nine votes of defeating the Whig government over its alleged incompetence in starting a war with China.28 It was against this partisan background that the four-year-old Colonial Society itself debated the use of British force in bombarding the Chinese—as well as in invading Afghanistan. In both places British forces had simply attacked with no formal declaration of war (until later). This fact bothered sensitive people, and the Colonial Society formed a committee to examine the issue. After months of work, the committee came back with two reports, one for China and one for Afghanistan. Each was full of complicated legal arguments about the Crown’s unique prerogatives in declaring war, pre-rogatives that according to the committee had been breached by the commanders in both theatres: The departure from these forms constitutes that difference, among the parties engaged in war…between the policeman who preserves order, and the housebreaker that infringes it—between the guardian of public safety and the assassin. A State dispensing with these formalities, recognises that it has set aside the essence of justice. But that was not all. The men on the spot were not in fact out of control; their barbarity and cruelty had been directed from Whitehall: It was the same men holding the same offices of power and trust in England, who sent British armies into Affghanistan [sic], and British squadrons into the coast of China. If we found, in the first of these transactions, certain defined characters, we may expect to find the same in the last. We found in the former a public crime, committed without a necessity—committed without an object, concealed during the course of its committal, and misrepresented after its occurrence. We found documents, mutilated, perverted, and suppressed, with a

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view, first to keep the nation in the dark, as to the acts of which it ought to have been informed, and which, if necessary, it might have prevented, and, then, to pervert its judgement respecting them, after they had taken place.29 The committee adopted its reports unanimously. Then, in the autumn of 1842, it proudly submitted them to a general meeting of the Society—which rejected them unanimously, save for the votes of the committee members themselves. The only thing that the general membership of the Society found barbaric was the way their own committee called British behaviour in China and Afghanistan barbarous—‘to be murder and piracy’, in the words of the committee.30 The committee members stuck to their anti-Whig guns. That night in 1842 was the end of the Colonial Society of 1837; any record of the society stops cold, save for an abortive meeting on colonization that fewer than twenty men attended.31 Meanwhile the committee went on to publish its reports, but under the name of the committee itself and not of the society.32 There could be no clearer demonstration that the moment had not yet come for the general imperialism reflected in the Colonial Society of 1868. It seems that some members of the 1837 society were afflicted with the morality of the evangelical era, which had barely passed. Not all of its members had the time to transform their evangelical fervour into a more diffuse Anglo-Saxon boosterism, as so many people would do by 1868. The members of the 1837 society were divided on questions of international morality—they were divided over the specifics of British conduct in two parts of the world. The members of the 1868 society would be united in a grand vision of empire that overrode specifics. Counting the founders The membership of the Colonial Society of 1868 is of interest chiefly in the period before imperialism made it into the headlines the following year. From then on, membership figures rose more steeply; we might be looking at the snowballing of imperialism rather than at the people who had been developing their own imperial ideas for their own reasons for some considerable period of time. So, for how many months or years after the Society was founded should we follow the Society’s membership? Fifty-eight men attended the first organizational meeting of the Colonial Society on Friday night, 26 June 1868, and another eleven had sent letters of interest. The members had come together because of a circular written by the Viscount Bury, MP, and two other men—Alfred R.Roche, who had been a clerk in Canada and who would become the Society’s working secretary, and Hugh E.Montgomerie, who had played a minor part in Canadian politics.33 The three prime movers were thus a nobleman, a clerk who had travelled, and a Canadian. This mix of classes and origins was to be a pattern in the new Society (see Table 2.1). The circular announced that an organizational meeting was to be held in Willis’s Rooms, a place that Londoners would associate with the RGS and with other groups that had been organized there. And Londoners do seem to have been Bury’s target audience. The circular was dated 22 June, a Monday, only four days before the meeting. Who could

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be in London so quickly in the summer besides Londoners and MPs? Parliament sat until

Table 2.1 New members by period and by status on joining

New members By first meeting, 26 June 1868 27 June 1868 to 12 August 1868 (second general meeting) 15 August 1868 to 3 November 1868 (Greater Britain still unfinished) 11 November 1868 to 30 December 1868 20 January 1869 to 25 February 1869 10 March 1869 (Inaugural Dinner) to 13 April 1869 (Dilke joins) Total

Peers MPs Others Total 3 2

4 12

45 38

52 52

1

2

19

22

0 4 1

0 3 1

16 22 50

16 29 52

11

22

190

223

Note Although the periods covered in this table are discontinuous, they match the intake of members; this table covers all members through to 13 April 1869.

the end of July that year (to finish its business before a summer break and the expected dissolution in the autumn),34 but for most people the summer had well and truly begun. Furthermore, the meeting was held on a Friday afternoon, when the well-off who had been engaged in London for the week might have been leaving town. Clearly, Bury was not considering the great and the good who had estates to leave town for. Indeed, only three peers took notice of the meeting.35 Apart from the peers, attendance was good despite the inauspiciousness of the time. Five of the six MPs joining that night were in attendance, although only one was a London member.36 Of the sixty-nine men who attended, or who sent a letter of support that was read out, fifty-two went on to join the Society (see Appendix 1B). Out of these fifty-two, a few would never appear in the Society’s membership rolls, but none the less they attended one or more meeting of the steering committee in the early days. Others had some other sustained contact with the fledgling Society over and above attending the first meeting, or writing letters to it. I have included such men in this study, while I have excluded eighteen not at all famous names whose only contact with the Society was a single silent appearance at the organizational meeting. The Colonial Society enrolled the rest of what its records call the original membership between the June meeting and that of 12 August 1868. On that day, a second large meeting was held at one o’clock in Willis’s Rooms; the attendance was still about fifty, even in high summer.37 In the interim, the Provisional Committee had met three times, each time approving new members.38 On these occasions, many aristocrats were added to the rolls of professional men and MPs who had attended the first meeting. Bury recruited some of the newer and more aristocratic members directly on to the provisional committee; the committee in turn prepared a list of officers, all great names, to be elected

The founding of the colonial society

19

at the meeting on 12 August. The few members who joined from 1 September through 3 November were not among the ‘original members’ simply because the Society’s secretary, Roche, began noting on 12 August the date of joining next to the name of each new member, whereas the ‘original’ memberships had been undated (see Table 2.1; for their names, see Appendix 1D). This was merely a change in the paperwork. But perhaps the best reason to treat these new members as part of the initial coming together of the Society is that they dribbled in very slowly and quietly over a period of more than two months, rather than being carried into the Society on some new wave of popular enthusiasm. Now that the Society’s organization was in place, new memberships were approved a few at a time by the Council in its private meetings. There were only four new memberships approved in the second half of August, none in September, and four in October; eight were approved on 3 November, among them the memberships of the officers of the Society whom we surveyed above.39 Joining took some effort. The treasurer, W.A. Sargeaunt, could not be found at the Society’s temporary offices in 80 Lombard Street, and the Society simply used that bare street address until 6 October 1868, when the words ‘Colonial Society’ were added at the top (as yet the Society had no letterhead).40 Joining also cost money. Initiation was £3, plus a £20 annual fee (£1 for non-residents of the British Isles). Twenty pounds was fully one tenth of the annual income needed to keep a small family in the ‘middle-middle class’—that stratum composed of low-ranking professionals and well-to-do tradesmen who usually sent their sons to public school and university, and then back into a life of office work or trade.41 If for the most part the Colonial Society attracted very comfortable gentlemen of a higher station than this, the £20 annual fee was one reason. Paying the Colonial Society one-tenth of one’s income would be rather too much. Yet some of the earliest members did not pay at all, and although they were struck from the rolls after a year or two, they were there at the beginning. Therefore the 126 members through 3 November 1868 hailed from a broader wedge of the population than did the membership in later years. The poorest of these 126 were sufficiently interested in the empire to help found the Society or to seek it out in its earliest period—even if, in the long run, some of them could not (or would not) pay their subscriptions. Soon after 3 November, Charles Dilke finished Greater Britain, and it was published within the month. Before that November, no one could have read much of the book, even in draft. Even then its effect was not immediate. About two months passed before it got into the bookshops, and over that Christmas season only a few people read it. The first person to record doing so was the ever-perspicacious William Ewart Gladstone, newly Prime Minister, whose diary entry for 10 November 1868 says that he ‘Read Dilke’s Greater World’ [sic].42 Dilke himself first received comments on the book in December; the people who wrote to him so early received copies directly from the publisher, or from Dilke himself.43 Soon the book would go further afield. The Governor of New Zealand had received it in Wellington at the very end of March 1869, about three weeks after reviews began to appear in the British press.44 The Times ran seven pieces about Greater Britain between 10 March and 19 April 1869, beginning with their review itself, and continuing with a

Empire as the triumph of theory

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sequence of factual criticisms from colonials that ran next to Dilke’s responses.45 But the lag between the book’s going to press and the splash it made in the newspapers had been a matter of two or three months. Perhaps to a man, the members of the Colonial Society who had joined by early November 1868 had never heard of the book. And those who joined still later in November—or indeed at any time in the three months between the release of Greater Britain and when The Times reviewed it—were as yet unlikely to have been caught up in some Dilke-inspired frenzy. They too will be included in this study.46 The day on which The Times reviewed Greater Britain, 13 April 1869, is a convenient place to stop tracing the prehistory of the imperialism that produced the Society. Those who had joined the Society by then were doing so for their own reasons, not because they had been reading about Dilke in The Times. Forty-five people joined the new society between 11 November 1868 and 10 March 1869, when the inaugural dinner was held (see Appendices 1E and 1F). Another fifty-two, mainly those who joined at the dinner, had their names approved by 13 April 1869, which was also the day when Dilke’s own name appeared on the roster for the first time (see Appendix 1G). Thus, 223 members of the Colonial Society had their names approved on or before 13 April 1869 (see Appendix 1A). Within the 223, sixty-one cannot be positively identified, sometimes because of namesakes,47 but usually because they made no impression worth speaking of outside of the Society’s own membership lists. However, over 70 per cent (162) left good evidence about themselves, since the members were a remarkably active bunch, active as travellers, professionals, politicians, and writers. Who were the members? There are intellectual links between the most distant parts of the earth, and men cannot remain strangers to each other for a single day or fail to know what happens in any corner of the world. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, ‘Conclusion’ [1835])48

An exhaustive review of the Society’s membership turns up a few interesting patterns.49 One of the larger groups that can be identified among the 223 men who had joined the Colonial Society by 13 April 1869 were the fifty-one with some kind of government job touching on the empire. These people ranged from Whitehall clerks to New South Wales legislators. But too many of these men were the Cabinet Ministers who had taken Buggin’s turn at the Colonial Office or elsewhere; therefore, the fifty-one were not a united front of men who had long been interested in empire. Slightly more numerous, but no more cohesive, were the fifty-four founders who seem to have been businessmen, either at home or abroad. Especially in the colonies, these two groups, the men in government and the businessmen, substantially overlapped. Next in line come the forty-three founders who were members of the Athenaeum, yet this number tells us little except that the establishment was well represented in the Society—because of all the Cabinet Officers drafted into the Colonial Society, this is no

The founding of the colonial society

21

surprise.50 Then come the Members of Parliament. Of the men who joined the Society by 13 April, thirty-three had served in Parliament by 1869; a few others would serve later. Next come the thirty peers, heirs to peerages, close relations of peers, and men later created peers whose political careers might very well have led them to expect ennoblement—a group that may be referred to as the aristocracy. The aristocrats overlap with the MPs and the officials. Meanwhile the number of members who may be classified as military men or missionaries or members of other familiar categories is much smaller, but once again covers many of the same people. This problem of overlap is severe. After going through all of the categories so far, we have looked at less than half of the membership. Thus, the ideas of the majority of the members still remain in the dark. But while fifty-one members had imperial employment and an overlapping fifty-four can fit into the category of businessmen, at least seventythree members published something that wound up in the British Museum or another national library or national bibliography; and sixty of these men had published something early enough to show that their interest in the empire pre-dated the Colonial Society. Another twenty-two (on top of the seventy-three) left substantial manuscripts, often showing the same intellectual interests well before 1868. To look at it in another way, if the sixty-one unidentifiable members are set aside, 162 members are left. Of these, ninety-five left meaningful prose and sixty-seven did not (except for leaving a social letter or two in some cases)—and many of the silent sixty-seven were highly placed people whose ideas we can approach in other ways. The ninety-five members who did write something were a larger, more representative, and more socially diverse group than any other subset of members. Writers were almost twice as numerous as businessmen, even when we include among the latter those who simply gave the Colonial Society a business address. Moreover, the writers are especially significant for figuring out the earliest origins of the Society. Writers joined in especially high numbers during the first summer of the Society’s existence (see Table 2.2). The number of published authors in the Society would be even higher if there were perfect knowledge of all 223 members, since some of the sixty-one who cannot be properly identified (because they shared their names with others) were indeed prolific writers—and could be counted as such if we could accept one namesake rather than another. Excluding such men, the sixty positively identified members who had published something before April 1869 made up well over one-third of the positively identified membership of 162. In addition, the ninety-five members who wrote something at some period made up more than nine-sixteenths, or nearly 59 per cent, of the identifiable membership. This is double the approximate percentage of writers and other learned gentlemen and noblemen that one scholar, R.C.Bridges, has found in the membership of the Royal Geographical Society from 1848 to 1855—while the proportion of military officers in the Colonial Society was about half that of the RGS.51 What does it signify that there were so many writers in the Colonial Society? The logorrhoea of the mid-nineteenth century is astonishing; it affected a vast number of upper- and middle-class Victorians. Statesmen, judges, medical men, bureaucrats, churchmen—all manner of men and some women could take up their pens and ponder in print the stirring social or intellectual problems of the day. Human evolution, socialism, technical progress, democracy, decimal coinage, continental literature, newly active

Empire as the triumph of theory

22

volcanoes in South America, how to build conservatories—

Table 2.2 Members who wrote

New members 26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

Published Members Non- Unidentified* Total authors (books leaving only writers or articles) MSS 19 16

3 8

19 14

11 14

52 52

12

1

6

3

22

8

2

3

3

16

11

6

4

8

29

7

2

21

22

52

73

22

67

61

223

Note *Some

may be authors—these founders cannot be positively identified, sometimes because two or more people had the same name.

upon questions like these, and so many others, the rising masses of half-educated Englishmen wanted comfort or guidance.52 In a later age, men and women from a variety of walks of life might well talk about such issues at a party, but they would hardly hold forth on very many of them in print. Nor are there many generalists today who can command thirty pages at a time in The New Yorker. In the 1860s, by contrast, practically anyone who wanted to and who could write could publish minor dissertations in major reviews. There were literally hundreds of upscale periodicals, dozens of which published long, serious pieces on the order of those in the Edinburgh or Westminster Reviews. Most of the articles shared not only the length but also the didactic tone and anonymity pioneered by the Edinburgh Review, reinforcing the homogeneity of tone in the world of what Bagehot called ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’.53 The appetite for these pieces, with all their promise of recreation, information, and self-improvement, was huge. In the mid-Victorian years, the greatest journals (such as the Edinburgh itself) had circulations of 10 to 15,000, while Cornhill had twice that and the even more popular Household Words topped 40,000. What is more, copies were passed from person to person, so a large number of the educated reading public of about 3,000,000 people saw the more famous journals. With hundreds

The founding of the colonial society

23

of titles around, there was a whole subculture, a considerable subset of the 3,000,000 readers, writing for these journals, both for the famous titles and the obscure ones. (The more exalted of these generalist journals began to decline in the face of the specialized professional journals of the 1870s and 1880s.)54 And that is not all. The Victorians published speeches, pamphlets, and books, not just articles; it was the Victorians and not Harold Robbins ‘who gave ink its great breakthrough’.55 They had no problem finding a place for all their ink, since paper had never been cheaper. With the 1861 repeal of duties on paper, and the adoption (starting in 1857) of esparto grass (alfalfa) as an alternative to rags in paper-making, the price of books and other printed materials tumbled (and prices could tumble due to the abolition of price-fixing for books in 1852).56 Pamphlets on various secular as well as theological subjects poured out. They were a stock-in-trade not only for bookstores but also for the wholly itinerant booksellers who were numerous in the streets of London; even more pamphlets would seem to have been on offer from the proprietors of semi-permanent open-air bookstalls.57 The by then 200- to 300-year-old world of print capitalism and shared literary experience, once so important for shaping British nationalism,58 exploded into cacophony. Indeed, the idea of publishing short works was so widespread in the midnineteenth century that small but quite serviceable printing presses became one of the more popular gifts for upper-and middle-class boys throughout the English-speaking world.59 The proto-imperialists of the Colonial Society put out more than their fair share of the pamphlets or privately printed speeches of the time. People actually bought items like this. Anthony Trollope, for one, accumulated pamphlets in large numbers, including a set on ‘Colonization, Emigration, &c’.60 Beyond the writers of pamphlets or articles, however, the Colonial Society could boast dozens of men who wrote real books. There were even a few professional writers—such as Delabree Pritchett Blaine, who wrote reference books on animals and sports. In his modest way, Blaine helped to interpret and tame the expanding world. When he surveyed sports, he looked back to recreation in the Bible and out to recreation in contemporary India and Africa; this was the frame he chose for his story of the leisure of Englishmen.61 But there were many more founders who, rather than being professional writers for the whole of their adult lives, simply dabbled in this field as they did in others. Perhaps some of the resulting tomes owed their existence to vanity publishing, but ‘vanity publishing’ is a modern term. In the mid-nineteenth century that line of business was not the unchallenged province of a few special vanity houses. Instead it was a key activity even for major publishers. One barrister, Alfred Hyman Louis, was keen enough to pay £50 to have a large book published by Richard Bentley. At the same time (1867) Bentley was also publishing Wilkie Collins on terms vastly more generous than what Alfred Hyman Louis received; Wilkie Collins actually got paid. For his £50, Louis was none the less able to put his own incredibly wordy opinions before the public (or anyway before the 500 lucky souls anticipated in the print run), and he did so in the name of a respectable press.62 And what issue so moved Alfred Louis to write such a long book and pay £50 for it? The subject was how Napoleon III’s ‘imperialism’ within France, plus his meddling in Italy, were the greatest danger to England—the country whose sole aim and struggle since the Reformation had been devoted to the fight against ‘imperialism’. (Again, the word ‘imperialism’ was not

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24

applied to England by any of the Society’s author-founders during this period.)63 As we will see, many of the members wrote on democratic, historical, or archaeological themes, themes that led them to think about the nature and purpose of the larger British Empire. Often these themes were injected into works with the unlikeliest of titles, such as Frederick Aloysius Weld’s Hints to Intending Sheep Farmers in New Zealand (1851). The unlikely books are often the most interesting, for they show how wide the world was, and how many paths there were to the imperial themes of 1868. Such books show how far one has to look for an imperialism of dribs and drabs, as opposed to the more public and more coordinated imperialism of a later period. We cannot restrict ourselves to the neat category of books on ‘imperial affairs’, or any other category from a later time. Whatever the members wrote, they were trying to make sense of the rich diversity of phenomena in the world. They were trying to make sense of it by appealing to ever larger categories—socially as well as intellectually. Socially, they were sharing their visions of the world with a reading public composed of people who go beyond the categories of ‘imperialists’ or ‘gentlemen’. This reading public extended further across British society than did the socio-economic or professional groups already reviewed, and the writers of the Colonial Society were more than just the gentlemanly capitalists. But before we can draw any more conclusions about the writings and habits of mind of the founders, we need to look at a few case studies. How did aristocratic position, professional identity, involvement with missionaries, and involvement with business or investment contribute to the kind of thinking and writing that was the key activity of the founders?

3 The usual suspects The aristocracy First there is the question of how many members had titles. If the empire has been called a system of outdoor relief for the upper classes, was the Colonial Society simply the indoor version—a club for aristocrats? The answer seems to be no. Only sixteen of the 126 members (by 3 November 1868) were closely connected with the peerage in some demonstrable way by the beginning of 1869. (See Table 3.1). After that the proportion fell, with only eight among the remaining eighty-seven. Yet if adding up the aristocrats in the Colonial Society is to have any value, bare calculations like these need to be weighed against a real mid-Victorian aristocrat’s concerns and attitudes. Lord Salisbury was hardly a typical aristocrat, but his example is instructive. In the 1850s, the young Lord Robert Cecil (as Salisbury then was) went to Australia and India. He had suffered from physical and nervous weakness, and travel was prescribed as the cure. So off he went, not wanting to go and not in the finest of spirits.

Table 3.1 Aristocrats joining the society

New members 26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

Peers Others* Aristocrats at joining†

Peers cr. after April 1969

3 2

3 6

6 8

2 3

1

1

2

1

0

0

0

1

4

1

5

2

1

2

3

1

11

13

24

10

Notes *Sons

of peers, brothers of new peers, and sons-in-law of Dukes and Marquesses. †Equals the sum of the first two columns.

Empire as the triumph of theory

26

Once he had got clear of the United States and had returned to British territory, he went to the Australian gold-fields. The natural scenery made the greatest impression on him, but he was also impressed by one aspect of the social scene: the refined deportment of the miners, who behaved so much better than the people he had met in California. Australia, he concluded, could boast more properly deferential working-class people and fewer uppity middle-class types than California could, and Cecil did enjoy a little deference very much. But Australians still did not show the full measure of deference; at his second-to-last dinner in Melbourne, he was caught in the middle of a food fight. He was not amused, and spent half the night fussing over his clothes. It was with social details like these, and not employment or investment opportunities, that he filled his travel diary.1 From the gold-fields, the young Cecil went off to Tasmania. He spent most of his time there as an invalid, although he would write up his experience of Tasmanian colonial politics for the Saturday Review. As it happened, he was nursed in the home of another founder of the Colonial Society, the Colonial Secretary of Tasmania—a man whom, years later, Salisbury did not recognize without a good deal of prompting; Cecil had after all spent most of his visit in a delirium.2 He was far from getting over the nervous temperament that had prompted his family to send him abroad. If there is no particular evidence of a hunger for empire on Cecil’s part in his early tour, what about later in life? Certainly he made no effort to adopt the empire as a location for his own career. Even though he was a younger son who could not have counted on inheriting the Marquessate until the death of his brother in June 1865, Salisbury did not look to the empire for employment. This was despite the fact that he was perennially short of cash until he became Marquess early in 1868. He took jobs, but he took jobs that were in the domestic economy. On returning from his forced trip to the antipodes, he worked first as a political journalist, and then in 1868 he became the director of an entirely non-colonial railway (with which he had no association before 1868).3 Nowhere in these financially straitened years did he consider any employment connected to the colonies. He did show decidedly imperialistic behaviour as Indian Secretary in 1866 and 1867, when he pushed for the expansion of British power in Burma. In doing so, he seems to have been trying to please certain well-placed China traders who wanted a new market. They warned that other European powers would move into Burma if Britain did not. Salisbury, as he was soon to be, apparently agreed.4 But during most of his service as Indian Secretary (under the courtesy title of Lord Cranbourne), he tried to do his best for the Indian people—and this meant rejecting commercial developments, including railways, that did not seem to be a compelling use of the taxpayers’ money.5 Salisbury had a mission: To defend the interests of the landed classes and to resist all of modernity, including democracy, capitalism, and imperialism. This was clear enough in 1858, in his first major publication (an article on parliamentary reform), but it became still more pronounced during the American Civil War.6 By 1865, he was openly dismissive of ‘the nuisance of “the American illustration”…[with which] for years the world has been sorely vexed’.7 While in America he saw the failure of two of the phenomena that he most wanted to resist: democracy and capitalism; in America, they revealed their inability to coexist with well-ordered civilization. The conflict in America

The usual suspects

27

showed ‘[t]he collapse of the great experiment of democracy, the sudden transition from unbroken peace to ferocious war on the part of a people whose devotion to mere gain was thought to be engrossing’.8 Indeed, arising from America’s hateful democracy and the capitalist system (which could not restrain or moderate mob violence) there was another hateful tendency—yes, imperialism, the expression abroad of the mob’s violence and greed. Cecil asserted that the Northern democracy, already guilty of war crimes on a larger scale than ever before in world history, was in a plain fight for ‘empire’. After the war, the Southerners would have to endure a police state, and the North would be made up of ‘a multitude triumphant in the gratification of its evil passions’.9 Thus, a policy of imperialism went hand in hand with the kind of mob rule prevalent in American democracy. And the future Lord Salisbury was against both mob rule and imperialism, whether they were run from Washington or London. The British settlement colonies were socially primitive places full of boasting, and full of people ready to murder the natives; it was quite understandable, he wrote, and quite right for the aborigines and the Maori to recognize the colonists for what they were, and resist them as best they could.10 In dozens of articles (mostly written before 1868), he strongly opposed the displacement or killing of native peoples (chiefly the Maori) in the name of a progress that he did not believe in.11 Salisbury thought little of the Tocquevillean thinking that led so many founders towards the imperialism of the Colonial Society. He would cite Tocqueville, but only to argue against him—Salisbury argued that neither democracy nor equality were advancing in the world, and nor should they.12 At times, he conceded that distinctions of birth might well recede, but only to be supplanted by gross distinctions of wealth.13 At other times he held firm: ‘Political equality is not only a folly—it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does.’ And therefore, he wrote on the same occasion, aristocrats—raised to uphold the family honour and never tasting want (and with it temptation or corruption)—ought to be the openly admitted leaders of any society, rather than the leaders being America’s corrupt mediocrities.14 Believing in 1862 that the American Civil War showed that ‘democratic institutions have failed’, he was thankful that measures to Americanize and democratize British institutions had been rejected by Parliament in recent years.15 Salisbury was on the side of world aristocracy, not world democracy. As Indian Secretary, he overturned precedent and the judgement of the Council of India to allow Mysore to remain under aristocratic Indian rule; he approved an adoption in the ruling family, rather than taking the traditional step when there was no male heir, which was to annex the state to the British Raj. And generally he castigated those who demeaned native Indian aristocrats.16 Unlike the other founders, Salisbury had never set himself dreaming about the transfiguration of the world at the hands of English-speaking colonists. Not for him these abstractions, for he explicitly avoided abstractions as well as empire; as he put it, ‘When great men get drunk with theory, it is the little men who have the headache.’17 Besides, why would he want an empire when most of the world’s Englishspeakers were grubby, common? As he knew too well from his own harrowing experience as a young traveller, they might throw bread at one. He had not changed his mind about the pointlessness, the democratic grubbiness of

Empire as the triumph of theory

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empire by the time the Colonial Society came along, although he did join. But he would begin not so much to change his mind but to raise his sights about the empire soon after. As Indian Secretary for a substantial period in the in the 1870s (1874–78), he grew accustomed to playing on a wider stage beyond Anglo-Saxondom. He worked against the spread of Western education and liberalism in the subcontinent; he was contemptuous of Indians who wanted education, much less political power.18 And, even more than in his first term as Indian Secretary, his aristocratic leanings helped him learn the techniques of indirect imperial rule (rule through native princes) that later British governments— notably his own—extended to Africa and Oceana.19 By 1900, Prime Minister Salisbury’s imperialism was very clear. So was his contempt for the more cheese-paring aspects of democracy at home. He bemoaned Great Britain’s lack of a secret service, of conscription, and of a military caste. The empire needed all of these things, but the Treasury had always put short-term economy before the vital task of buying the apparatus of a strong and centralized worldwide regime. (Here he prescribed for Britain all the characteristics of the police state that thirty-five years before he had predicted as the fate of America.20) Typically, he was not afraid to make these comments in public; his own Chancellor of the Exchequer almost resigned over this attack by the Prime Minister on the fiscal authorities of his own government, accusing them as he did of being too parsimonious to found a secret police.21 If he had come to terms with democracy, he had done so on his own terms, in part through the development of his ‘referendal theory’ of the role of the House of Lords. That is, he maintained that the Lords ought to prevent elected governments from carrying out any major and controversial initiative not yet put before the voters in a general election—so that in throwing out a key government bill, the Lords would be forcing a general-election-asreferendum on the controversial new policy. Here at least Lord Salisbury had found a place in his heart for general elections, especially when the Liberals were in power and in conflict with the Lords (a conflict that was not duplicated under Conservative governments). And he even found a place in his heart for democracy more generally—as the chief and most realistic bastion against socialism. But as we have seen, he also made his strange speech in favour of a secret police. He was a strange and fascinating mix of a man.22 Few of the aristocrats joining the Colonial Society in 1868 or 1869 would ever share the young Salisbury’s hearty detestation of English settlers, or the older Salisbury’s peculiar take on the policing needs of the Mother Country. As a young man, Salisbury had been weak and neurotic, and it would seem that as he grew older he overcompensated for this early weakness.23 In the end, what Salisbury shows us is not what all the aristocrats in the Colonial Society were like—far from it. What he shows us is that we cannot simply point to aristocrats, even those who were short of cash as Lord Salisbury was, and assume that their ideas about the empire were prompted by a desire to make money or find employment. Some aristocrats, Salisbury among them, may have conceived of themselves in a less modern, less cash-centred, and if you will, a more romantic way. That may be why one refers to the British aristocracy rather than the British plutocracy, at least for the Victorian period. A desire for money may have motivated other aristocrats to look in an imperial direction, but we will have to wait and see.

The usual suspects

29

All in all, the aristocracy and near-aristocracy (people closely related to the titled) were never dominant except among the Society’s officers. Among the office holders it was dominant, but the Society was hardly the only group to create enough honorary offices for all the grand people. In all, once again there were twenty-four members of the aristocracy and baronetcy (counting the title holders themselves, their heirs, the younger sons of peers, and the sons-in-law of Dukes and Marquesses) among 223 members. This was a significant but by no means overwhelming number. They represented a British and Irish aristocracy of about 550 male peers, somewhere between 850 and 950 baronets, and a much larger number of sons and sons-in-law ranking high enough to qualify for the moment as near-aristocrats.24 Meanwhile, there were ten Colonial Society founders who would receive a newly created peerage later on. Did they already expect one? In the case of Cabinet Ministers, probably yes—but there were only six such men. We can add them to the aristocratic group and make a still less than overwhelming thirty. The other four were bureaucrats who were on the job in the 1860s, and such officials were to become the first sizeable group of bureaucrats in British history to be ennobled. As late as 1868, they had no reason to expect that they would be, and they would not have fully identified themselves with the aristocracy.25 The bulk of the membership came from elsewhere. Was the Colonial Society the creature of one or another political party? What then of the 185 lesser people, those who were neither aristocrats nor neararistocrats by 1869—or rather what of the 123 of the 185 who are identifiable? They ranged from these bureaucrats to MPs of the solid and middling sort (see Table 3.2), and on down to office clerks. What were their ties to the empire? We shall work our way down the social scale. The variety of the MPs’ educations is striking, for it shows their different stations in life—they were no solid social bloc. Only nine of the thirty-eight Colonial Society members who would ever serve in the House of Commons were Old Etonians; one of the nine was Lord Bury, the heir to an earldom, and six more of these nine were aristocrats. Only eight other past, present, or future MPs in the Society had been to any of the other great public schools. That leaves nineteen MPs from outside the great English schools. Some men were educated privately, others in the army (four) or the navy (only one). At the university level, only twenty-one of the thirty-eight MPs had been to Oxbridge, with eight from Cambridge, twelve from Oxford, and one other man (Bulwer-Lytton) who attended both; only one other MP in the Society had a university education in the United Kingdom (at Trinity College, Dublin). If only a fraction of the MPs in the Colonial Society had an Oxbridge background, almost by definition most of them had an identifiable political party. In all, forty-eight members did. The party system was attenuated and confused in the mid-nineteenth century, yet by 1868 loyalties were crystallizing around Disraeli and Gladstone. Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, which came out frequently throughout this period, was able to trace the affiliation of most MPs.26 Even some non-MPs had a party affiliation. Of course peers and those who held a government office made their party or at least their

Empire as the triumph of theory

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sympathies known; commoners outside of Parliament sometimes held another office that revealed their party, such as that of London alderman (in the case of one member, Sir David Salomans, Bart, a Lord Mayor).

Table 3.2 New members by parliamentary membership

New members Former MPs Sitting by date of MPs who joined joining* 26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

Total MPs by 1869, nonaristocrats only†

New MPs after 1868

3 2

4 12

3 (2) 5 (3)

1 1

1

2

2 (1)

0

0

0

0

0

1

3

1 (0)

2‡

3

2

1 (1)

1

10

23

12 (7)

5

Notes *Many had gone on to inherit or to receive a peerage. †Sitting and former MPs who were not connected to the aristocracy (see Table 2.2) by the date they joined the Colonial Society. (The numbers in parentheses are those who would never go on to be connected to the peerage or baronetcy.) ‡One of these men did go on to receive a peerage; he was the only one of the MPs first elected after 1868 to become a peer. Since he would have had no reason to expect honours when the Colonial Society was founded, I have not classed him as an aristocrat.

As it happened, there was no Tory predominance that might have helped to explain Disraeli’s increasing interest in empire. Among the members who joined by 3 November 1868, there were sixteen Conservatives and fifteen Liberals—plus three others whom Dod’s, being a nineteenth-century publication, could identify as ‘Liberal-Conservatives’. And there were three members of the Reform Club not otherwise identifiable politically; these three may be added to the Liberal column to make eighteen. In keeping with the less exalted character of the members who joined in the later period, between November and April, only fourteen can be identified by political sympathy; five were Conservatives and ten (one identifiable politically only because he was in the Reform Club) were Liberals. Another handful belonged to the Carlton, and thus may have been Conservatives. The Carlton Club was not yet exclusively

The usual suspects

31

Conservative, but it was on its way. We may be sure that if those Colonial Society founders who belonged to the Carlton were not Conservatives, then they were certainly not Liberals either.27 Some of the members who were Liberals in this period would wind up as Liberal-Unionists in the late 1880s and the 1890s; a few even became Conservatives by that point. But when it was founded the Society was non-partisan. Lawyers How many members had a professional tie to the empire? We will begin with barristers, who were not very far socially—much less geographically—from the establishment that we have already looked at. First off, how many were there? In the 1860s, England had more than 600 barristers—almost all of them in the Inns of Court in legal London, stretching barely a mile from the Thames to the Grey’s Inn Road. This cosy world was suffering an explosion in the numbers of men at law. The old legal dinners at the Inns or out on circuit were no longer enough to bind the profession together, a point that influential members of the profession worried about in the 1860s and 1870s.28 So how many of the barristers in the Colonial Society were outside the higher political class that we have already looked at, whatever their physical proximity to that class at large dinners?29 We can check for barristers who were excluded from the law profession’s evening club, namely the House of Commons. Of the hardly overwhelming number of barristers or former students at the Bar who had joined the Colonial Society by 13 April 1869— namely twenty-six—exactly half would never be MPs. Eight of the thirteen who were never to sit in the House of Commons were members of the Colonial Bars rather than one of the Inns of Court, so there were only five English barristers who were never to sit in the Commons. And two of these five non-MP English barristers went on to serve with great distinction in the government in other capacities. They were Herman Merivale and Frederic Rogers, both of whom were senior civil servants in the Colonial Office. The other three were Alfred Hyman Louis, author of articles and some rather hectoring, privately printed books on British, European, and American politics (and whom we met in Chapter 2); Henry Philip Roche, the Registrar of the Court of Bankruptcy; and Henry Pering Pellew Crease, a Cambridge man and Middle Templer who was the Attorney General of British Columbia when the Society was founded (despite the distance, he managed to join the Society on 3 November 1868). Crease would later be a judge of the British Columbia Supreme Court, but with the likes of him—despite the fact that he was a Middle Templer—we have reached down into a more mixed part of society, about which there are new things to learn regarding the depth and variety of the Victorian world. Henry Crease was involved in various failed business ventures in Upper Canada, moved back to England for a while, and then moved back to North America, establishing himself on the Pacific Coast in the late 1850s. He failed in his attempt to keep the capital of confederated British Columbia on the mainland. He indulged in idle speculation with A.R.Roche, secretary of the Royal Colonial Society, about transcontinental routes. His wife Sarah, on the other hand, seems to have had a more satisfying, more creative

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life. A landscape and botanical watercolourist, her work on Canadian subjects was shown at the London Exhibition of 1862, and found its way into a work of travel published in London. In her pictures she made the Canadian West look busy and urban.30 Her husband’s public business seemed more provincial by contrast. We have begun to reach down to those founders of the Colonial Society who were members of the local elite of one colony or another, rather than of the imperial capital. They were making themselves at home in the empire, and trying to make sense of it. Turning then from the English barristers to the colonial ones, those who were not trained at the Inns of Court and with whom we are well and truly outside the Westminster orbit, we find a highly varied group of people. There was Adam Crooks, a highly placed Canadian lawyer who wanted to replace the self-perpetuating committee that ran the local Bar (and on which he sat) with a democratic system.31 Appropriately enough for a lawyer and a booster of the legal profession, Crooks was the son of a pioneering figure in papermaking. To boost paper consumption still further, he edited the Journal for Education for Ontario.32 Other colonial barristers included William Alexander Fane De Salis, an Oxonian barrister and Count of the Holy Roman Empire—with one brother who was a pastoralist and trader in Australasia and another who was an officer in the Indian Army.33 Most notably of all, there was Francis Peter Labilliere, the former Melbourne barrister who went on to found the Imperial Federation League in 1884 (he joined the Colonial Society on 5 April 1869). These barristers were quite a varied group, but one thing is clear: They were not, by and large, just up the road from Whitehall; they were not the average denizens of the Old Bailey. Socially, they were lower than that. Unlike the Colonial Bars, the English Bar took years of study, and was therefore closed to most (although obviously not all) young men of the more middling sort. The various colonial bars of which these men were members were easier to get into. The young H.C.E.Childers left England in part because he did not fancy his chances in the Inns of Court. After briefly serving as a bureaucrat in Victoria, Australia, he was able to join the colony’s bar with only a few months of spare-time study. Even Childers himself found the local Bar ‘weak’.34 Standards of admission and training were no higher in Upper Canada, where (until 1857) untrained attorneys could perform most of the functions of a barrister, and even the number of real if locally produced barristers was ballooning.35 Yet despite the easy access to the colonial Bars, the number of barristers—home and colonial together— who were in the Colonial Society was not very impressive. (Solicitors, for their part, are harder to trace, and ranked much lower socially, with no unified solicitor’s profession in England until 1873.36) Perhaps most of the barristers had more parochial concerns than joining a pro-imperial society. The law careers of the barristers who did join the Colonial Society do illustrate, as we have seen, that at least a few Englishmen had their own varied and more or less accidental reasons for showing an interest in the empire by 1868. Many had a family connection. A few had looked to the settlement colonies as a way to establish themselves. There was no homogeneous group of barristers in the Colonial Society—but there were individuals who become informed about the empire in a variety of ways. One other fact stands out about the legal work of the members. Some of the nonparliamentary barristers had a hand in actually running the empire out in the field. These

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were the barristers who did not practise—barristers by origin but bureaucrats by occupation. They are a window into what may have been a second profession whose connection to imperialism must be evaluated. The profession in question is that of colonial office holder. The twelve men who had been colonial ministers in Whitehall by the time they joined the Colonial Society (see Table 3.3) were of course a part of the same governing class that we have already looked at, and once again the number of members at Cabinet or subCabinet rank was less than overwhelming in the early days of the Society. Only a small fraction of the living men who had held Whitehall responsibility for the Colonies in the previous three decades joined—thirteen current or former Cabinet members and junior ministers joined, out of the twenty-six still-living full Cabinet secretaries for the Colonies or for India, plus the dozens of junior ministers who were still alive. Once again, those who did join were mostly the sitting ministers either in the Derby-Disraeli governments of 1866–68 or in the Gladstone government that took office in December 1868, sitting ministers who could hardly refuse the Society’s invitations. Six Colonial Governors or Lieutenant Governors joined (out many dozens of living veterans of such jobs, almost all of them Britons who went back to England as soon as their governorships were over). They did not make up a large contingent, especially considering that in December the Society arranged for a circular to be sent from the Colonial Office to all the sitting Governors, advising them to announce the new Society to their colonies.37

Table 3.3 Members governing the colonies

New members

Jobs by date of joining and new jobs later in life Ministers with colonial responsibility*

Whitehall bureaucrats and London Agents† (London jobs)

26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December

Colonial People with governors‡ colonial government jobs§ (Overseas jobs)

20

41

11

901

41

40

10

800

10

00

21

200

00

10

00

302

Empire as the triumph of theory 1868 20 January 5 1 to 25 February 1869 10 March to 0 0 13 April 1869 Total 12 2

34

10

10

600

20

11

500

12 1

63

33 0 3

Notes Members are counted once in the figures for jobs held on or before joining the Colonial Society; each member is counted only at the highest level reached in that period (rank descends from left to right). A member is counted again for the italicized, post-April 1869 figures if and only if he achieved a higher post after that date. Bold figures indicate the highest level reached by the three members whose first job in governing the colonies came in the period after 1869; that this figure is as low as three shows that the Society (at least in its early days) was not the kindergarten of the imperialists of later generations. *Cabinet and sub-Cabinet. †Permanent Under-Secretaries and Assistant Under-Secretaries, with one assistant clerk who was at another time Private Secretary to the Secretary of State; also, the Crown Agents; agents for specific colonies; and members of emigration commissions. ‡Includes lieutenant-governors. §British residents, chief administrators, members of colonial civil services, colonial judges, members of colonial legislatures; a colonial architect; excludes mayors.

All in all, the Governors who joined the Society were a breed of imperial careerists of mixed background, ranging from a Marquess to a Canadian. Joining before 3 November were the founding members George Augustus Constantine Phipps, 2nd Marquis of Normanby (Governor of Nova Scotia, 1858–63—already counted among the peers); Sir John Young (Governor of the Ionian Islands 1855–59, Governor of New South Wales 1861–67, and Governor-General of Canada 1868–72, and already counted as a future peer); General Sir William Thomas Denison (Governor of Tasmania 1847–55, Governor of New South Wales 1855–61, and Governor of Madras 1861–66); and Sir John Scott (Lt.-Governor of Labuan 1850–56 and Lt.-Governor of Natal 1856–64). The two who joined in the new year were Viscount Monck (Governor of Upper and Lower Canada 1861–67, and the first Governor-General of Canada 1867–68, another peer already counted; and Sir Francis Hincks (the first Canadian or colonial Colonial Governor of anywhere for decades—Governor of the Windward Islands 1856–62, and of British Guiana 1862–69). They all went on to other governorships after our period. By 1868, two of them had already been posted to the colony that Hillaire Belloc would immortalize in his advice to the fictitious and financially embarrassed Lord Lundy:

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We had intended you to be The next Prime Minister but three: The Stocks were sold; the Press was squared; The Middle Class was quite prepared. But as it is!…My language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales! Yet our six Governors were not the Edwardian stiffs of the Age of New Imperialism in which Belloc was writing. Instead, most of them were typical of the small core of professional governors who moved from place to place. John Cell has numbered such men at no more than three or four dozen out of the more than 300 governors and lieutenant-governors serving throughout the empire from 1830 to 1880.38 The members who served at lower positions in various colonial governments or in Whitehall were more numerous—thirty-one as opposed to the six governors. Seven were settlers who did not rise higher than service in the local colonial legislature. All in all, it is clear that we are looking at an unrepresentative minority of colonial or imperial office holders. Only a few of the men in each category joined the Colonial Society. The founders had a scattering of jobs, and at least initially a scattering of ideas. To say that some were colonial officials does not say how they had become aware of the empire or what they thought about it. Nor does it say why they became interested in the Colonial Society while others did not. Soldiers A similar variety of people and motivations is apparent in the other great profession which impinged upon politics, namely the military. While purchase still existed in the army, and a military career was easier for young men of means than for the poor and obscure, the military members, like the lawyers, were seldom the kind of people who sat in the Cabinet and ran the country. Out of the Society’s 223 members, there were twentyone regular (non-engineer) officers, only six of whom wound up in Parliament (one of these six was the only naval officer who can be traced in the Society). These nonparliamentary officers were the careerists (unlike the volunteers or reservists like Lord Bury) who took commissions instead of getting a university education. Certain other members were the sons of naval or army officers, but clearly the military men in the Colonial Society were not so numerous as to bespeak a military preoccupation with empire. Indeed, the near absence of the navy from the Colonial Society membership rolls is a hint that the men who guarded the Pax Britannica on the high seas were by and large unimperialistic—or they were not much for joining clubs (see Table 3.4). The soldiers in the Colonial Society were imperialists by individual accident or inclination, and they did not represent any widely shared military imperialism. There were legions of officers who could have joined the Society had they wanted to, but they did not.

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Still, most of the officers who would join the Society had seen service in the empire. Often they had developed an even deeper personal connection with imperial issues than their series of postings would indicate. Sir William Marcus Coghlan of the East India Company Army was the commandant of the artillery at Bombay (1854–63), and then became a long-serving resident and commandant at Aden.39 While there, he was caught up in the defence of the British diplomatic agent and eminent archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam from his critics in England. Coghlan became his champion of many years. Andrew Clarke was more widely travelled. He was the son and name-sake of a man who had himself been posted all over the empire, finally as Governor of Western Australia from 1845 until his death in 1847. The younger Clarke left his two years’ postSandhurst engineering training (at Chatham) early in 1846 to take up a position that his father the Governor

Table 3.4 Regular officers and engineers

New members

Officers with Officers—no colonial clear record of * experience colonial experience

26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

Royal Engineers (RE)

Civilian Engineers

Most with colonial experience

4 2

2 3

1 0

2 1

2

0

2

0

1

0

1

0

2

2

1

0

2

1

0

1

13

8

5

4

Note *Includes army

engineers.

had arranged for him. By 1868, he had served in Tasmania (where he was aide to Governor William Denison, another founder and military man). He had also served in New Zealand and Australia, and he had played a key role on the West Coast of Africa, where he advised against the expansion of British territory in the region.40

The usual suspects

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Outside of his army duties, he was Surveyor-General and sometime MP in Victoria in the same period, where he had a long-standing interest in the Museum of Natural History and the Philosophical Institute.41 He intro duced and developed the telegraph in the colony.42 He also planned the railway.43 More tellingly, it was he who designed and forced through a new and more democratic system of local government for Melbourne and its environs; his models were the strong local governments of North America, which he thought likely to foster what he would later describe as ‘order and…a healthy conservative feeling’.44 Clarke himself would go on to develop still other imperial interests, above and beyond any postings as a military engineer and democratic thinker. After 1868, he became Victoria’s Agent-General in London and a member of the Council of India. He was also a key figure in Britain’s expansion into Malaya, serving as Governor of the Straits Settlements from 1873 to 1875.45 His career stretched to 1900, when he played a part in the Australian Confederation. Clarke, like some other officers in the Colonial Society (including George Bell, Patrick Leonard MacDougall, and Francis Cornwallis Maude, nephew of an important leader of the Church Missionary Society), had such a variety of colonial billets that a big and unified concept of the empire would have come more naturally to him than to many other men of the time. But these colonial military officers were not the only professional group whose duties took them out among the colonies. Engineers A small number of Colonial Society members came from another and rather younger profession, engineering; of these, most were army engineers. Engineering was the profession that Clarke had practised before the army promoted him to more general duties, and it was the only profession for which the course at Chatham had provided him with any training.46 Purchase did not exist in the Royal Engineers, so officers were appointed on merit. Several of these men were associated with the Institute of Civil Engineers.47 One, Lt. Col. Charles Manby, wrote a great deal in his field, including a work on the harbours and railways of India. At the time of the Society’s Inaugural Dinner, Manby was Honorary Secretary of the Institute. He had been its first paid secretary, serving from 1839 to 1856. The Institute had been founded in the Kendal Coffee House in 1818, and had received its charter ten years later. The President of the Institute in 1868 was the civilian Charles Hutton Gregory, a colonial railway engineer who himself became a member of the Colonial Society. At the annual meeting of the civil engineers in January 1868, Gregory was already making much in his presidential speech of the British colonies and their railway tracks, along with the guns and ironclads in the Crimea and the American Civil War.48 Railway engineering tended to mean pari passu an interest in railways in colonies, at least by the 1860s. Britain itself had been covered in track in short order in the twenty years after 1830, and so by the mid-century many a railway engineer had to look for his work abroad; the day of replacing Great Britain’s old iron rails with steel ones had yet to

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come.49 In 1840, Gregory himself had worked on the London and Croydon line, but soon he went off into the empire.50 The Colonial Society also had another civilian engineer who did the same colonial work as Gregory. He was Abraham Coates Fitz Gibbon, who had been a government railway engineer in Queensland, Ceylon, and New Zealand. Another founder, Captain Douglas Galton, sat in the War Office for most of his life, save for a posting to study railways in the United States, about which he produced two articles.51 In the balance of his career in Whitehall he wrote one short work—brimming with pride over the railways being built by Fitz Gibbon and others in the British colonies. Galton was just as proud of Britain’s undersea telegraph lines, mentioning the work of the telegraphy pioneer Frederick Newton Gisborne—another engineer among the membership of the Colonial Society.52 With conventional as well as undersea telegraphy, the empire was being knitted together with wires as well as with the rails of the earlier technology. Despite the achievements of Gisborne, the most famous telegraph engineer in the Society was Cromwell Fleetwood Varley. Varley was more romantic than Gisborne. He came from a family of artists, microscopists, and astrologers, and he once used his own more technical kind of magic to impress an audience with remotely transmitted music. In 1858 he was involved in the laying of the first Atlantic telegraph cable, and in 1868 he retired to a private life in London when his long-time employer, the Electric and International Telegraph Company, was acquired by the government.53 By 1867, he was in any case full of details about galvanometers in Java, Australia, and a dozen other more or less imperial places that connected him—down telegraph lines—with the interests of the other founders of the Colonial Society.54 After his retirement he continued his scientific work, knitting the world together with circuit diagrams, but he also busied himself in the quest for a transcendent reality—ether rather than electricity, and spiritualism (always an interest of his) rather than engineering. Contemplating the British Empire would have been another way of approaching transcendence and unity. The other four military engineers in the Society included, besides Clarke and Denison, General Edward Charles Frome. These engineers who literally built the British Empire had the widest conception of it out of any of the groups that we have looked at so far. Frome served as Surveyor-General in South Australia in the late 1830s and then as Engineer-in-Chief in Canada in the early 1840s, where he had worked ten years before on the construction of the Rideau Canal. By the time the Colonial Society was founded, he was a General in the War Office and in line for a KCMG; the great names of the Cabinet who were in the Colonial Society knew him, and through him they knew about other men working in a variety of engineering posts out in the empire.55 (There were no engineer MPs, which may have reflected the fact that British engineers did not enjoy much social prestige, and they were not great in number; companies often had to go begging to recruit them, especially for foreign placements.56) His influence stands up besides that of Denison, who governed Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales, and the Madras Presidency. Governor Denison, author of two thick volumes of memoirs, aptly entitled them Varieties of Vice-regal Life; they were his own contribution to metro-politan awareness of colonial engineering and administration. He dedicated these memoirs to his fellow officers in the Royal Engineers, among whom he had began his career.57 In sum, these engineers had been posted all along the immense cultural, economic, and

The usual suspects

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technological border between England and the least industrial parts of the world (which in the context of 1868 means everywhere). The engineers occupied diverse but usually rather good vantage points from which to observe that border and the empire it encompassed. Their profession also depended upon their exchange of imperial information with one another, and—if more projects were to be planned—with the public. The missionary: John Clark Marshman One final group of professionals are sure to be mentioned as likely imperialists: missionaries. Yet neither missionaries nor former missionaries nor even Londoners closely connected with the missionary movement were well represented in the Colonial Society. Their near-absence is so startling that it is worth pursuing in some detail. Evangelical (rather than Church of England) missionaries had once come from the working classes, but by the 1860s even the evangelical missionaries were middle class, respectable, and well-educated.58 So of course were the Anglican missionaries. Thus, both kinds could have joined the Colonial Society if they had wanted to; they could have afforded the subscription. Yet only four of the founders out of 213 were themselves missionaries, and only a handful of others seem to have come from missionary families of whatever social class. Meanwhile, the Liberal MP and banker Arthur Kinnaird, although neither from a missionary family nor a missionary himself, was an active supporter of the Church Missionary Society, but there were no other lay supporters with anything like his involvement or his zeal. Furthermore, most of the handful of founders who were the children of missionaries showed no interest on their own part in the subject of missions. The imperial ideas of the missionary children were quite secular. So, while missionary zeal (and shame over British imperial crimes) did exist in the mid-Victorian world,59 it barely existed in the Colonial Society, except in the case of Kinnaird. Even those names on the rolls of the Colonial Society that remain hardest to identify are absent from the ample records of the missionaries. So we can prove the negative: the Colonial Society included very few missionaries, even among the unidentifiable members.60 Only three who had not come from missionary families took up the missionary life themselves, and there were two missionaries who had come from missionary families. The Society also had three non-missionary clergymen. One of them, the Revd Mr Hogarth John Swale, was Chaplain of the British Embassy in Paris—not a missionary post. What then of the three missionaries who had chosen the field for themselves—who had not, that is, come from missionary families? Had they found for themselves, in their own hearts, the enthusiasm for overseas ties? Apparently not, for although technically they need to be classed as missionaries, they do not seem to have been very keen on expanding Britain’s missionary empire. One was the Revd Robert Arthur Currey, who from 1850 to 1864 was a chaplain in Cape Town.61 The other two were, like him, members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and, like him, they worked with settlers rather than with natives. Both worked in Ontario. One, the Revd Dr Alexander MacNab, retired to London in 1857, and served on three of the Colonial

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Society’s organization committee meetings in the summer of 1868. He had been one of the Acting Assistant Superintendents (or school inspectors) in the Education Office in Canada in the 1840s, where he railed against low-level corruption and the lack of colonywide school standardization—while at the same time he insisted on separate schools for separate races, a reversal of previous educational policy in the colony.62 There was more than a whiff of late nineteenth-century racism in his love of bureaucratic standardization and racial segregation, but beyond these opinions MacNab left little evidence about his interests. About the other Ontario man we know more. He was the Rt. Revd Isaac Hellmuth, a Polish-German Jew. He trained as a rabbi before converting in Berlin. His family disowned him on the spot and he took his mother’s surname (his original surname is unknown). While still in Berlin he joined the SPG, which played some part in arranging for him to spend two years in Liverpool. There he learned English and developed the ideas and connections of a confirmed evangelical. Next, the Society sent him to complete his education in Quebec. He was ordained in 1846, and he took up a series of posts in Ontario. He ministered to German immigrants and founded schools. Thus he was a missionary who spread English-speaking culture to Europeans rather than to the native population. He married the sister of the prominent lawyer Adam Crooks (himself a member of the Colonial Society, as we have seen). Crooks would defend Hellmuth against the charge of avarice in the use of a church endowment, a charge made against Hellmuth by the presiding bishop; there was more than a touch of anti-Semitism here.63 In any case, Hellmuth’s marriage into the Crooks family was a happy one. The Hellmuths were able to travel frequently to England. Hellmuth served as London secretary to the Colonial Church and School Society for six months in 1854, then returned to Canada for a short time. At some point he and his wife visited the Near East, broadening their intellectual and social interests. Then, not long after joining the Colonial Society, Hellmuth became (as he was listed in the Colonial Society’s records) the ‘Bishop of Huron (Canada West)’, where he founded a college and endured more anti-Semitic remarks. Soon he decamped to England permanently, becoming coadjutor-bishop of Hull and later a rural rector.64 All in all, he was a very odd missionary, not at all interested in converting natives. Only two founders who came from missionary or clerical families themselves showed some interest in missionary work. One, the son of an Ulster preacher, supported the mission cause only by supporting his local Wesleyan church, first in Sydney—where he went for his health, not to spread the faith—and then in London after he repatriated himself in 1863. He became a Liberal MP, a supporter of the Aborigines Protection Society, and a leading light in plans to build more Methodist churches in London. His name was Alexander MacArthur. He was a founder of the Victoria Institute, an 1867 body (in London) which sought to reconcile science and religion. We shall return to him briefly in Chapter 4, not in a discussion of missionaries but under the more appropriate heading of colonial businessmen. Although he was keen on spreading the Gospel, he does not seem to have been particularly keen on spreading it in foreign parts at the time the Colonial Society was founded—although he was to become a key supporter of humanitarian intervention and territorial expansion in the Tropics a few years later.65 If we put MacArthur aside, the single man from a missionary family who took up the

The usual suspects

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cause himself and for a time lived the mission life was John Clark Marshman. As a man who then gave up being a missionary to become a secular imperialist, he needs to be examined straight away. Thus, the influence on the imperialism of the Colonial Society of the well-established British subculture of missionaries can be judged at once, as can the rise of ever more imperialistic kinds of thinking. Marshman was the son of the Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman of Serampore, a Danish enclave near Calcutta. (In the eighteenth century, East India Company officials had forbidden most missionary activity, especially by nonconformists; thus the British Baptist community established itself in Danish Serampore, outside EIC control.66) Following in his father’s footsteps, John Clark Marshman ran the Serampore newspaper, made a huge digest of the British-run civil law of Bengal, and helped to supervise the mission schools. While still a young man, he also supervised a college of such magnitude and with such a variety of studies that it has been cited as one model for the University of London, founded in the 1830s. To have created such opportunities for his son, John Clark Marshman’s father, Joshua, expatriate nonconformist, clearly must have been quite somebody. In fact, he was a key figure in British education in India, where he was active both in the founding of more than 100 schools and in the development of educational policy.67 He was also the chief public opponent of the syncretizing or humanistic thinking of Ram Mohun Roy, the Renaissance man of early nineteenth-century Bengal. The elder Marshman spent the years leading up to 1820 turning out article after indignant article against Ram Mohun and the idea of looking for a non-doctrinal, purely ethical Christianity. Meanwhile he could not fail to notice that the missionary effort in India was failing; there were very few converts. Embittered, the elder Marshman turned away from his intellectual encounter with the heathen ingrates of India. He left off his attempts to translate and publish Sanskrit literature.68 He stayed in India but not of it. Rather than finishing his not terribly sympathetic translation of the Ramayana, he took the time to learn Chinese and to translate the Bible into that language, with whatever degree of success (his translation was very quickly superseded).69 The younger Marshman, who is of chief interest to us, was born in 1794, so he was in his twenties during the height of the Ram Mohun Roy—Joshua Marshman controversy. In some of his early works, he did take the part of his missionary forebears in their continual jurisdictional disputes with the Baptist Missionary Society, although he took little issue with Ram Mohan Roy over Christology.70 Indeed, some of the Serampore Baptists thought him more interested in this life than in the next.71 Perhaps they were right. As we shall see, he would go so far as to abandon the whole subject of the Christian religion, much less of Christianity in India. Missionary work could still seem foremost in Marshman’s mind in 1859 when he was in his mid-sixties, for the subject naturally dominated his massive biography of his father and his father’s missionary associates. In that book, he argued that the Indians were always monotheists at heart, for St Thomas had told them about Jesus—although in the centuries after, he said, Indian popular religion had been allowed to decline into apparent polytheism.72 Yet in Marshman’s other writings after he moved to England in 1852,73 the main theme was no longer at all religious—but the secular progress of India under British rule, especially the progress made during Marshman’s own lifetime.

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42

Sometimes Marshman went further, recommending outright secular imperialism without any emphasis on making improvements, sacred or secular, in the lives of the colonized peoples. As he put it in one of his two short books of 1853, Great Britain and the United States were destined to rule all of Asia, bringing all its countries ‘tranquillity, civilization, and true religion’—a task made feasible, he argued, by divine providence and the wonderful growth in steam navigation.74 (Steam navigation had become divine providence!) He went on to mention an Anglo-American take-over of the trade of China, Indo-China, Japan, and Thailand; and he looked forward eagerly to ‘the ultimate extinction of all Asiatic independence’.75 In the other book that Marshman wrote in 1853, religion played an even smaller role (if possible) in justifying the imperial programme. Marshman observed that British ships and railways were striking out towards China in one direction, American ships and transcontinental railways were closing in from the other—and British Australasia was coming up from the South. From all three directions, then, there came people carrying out the Anglo-American duties of (if we list things in the order that Marshman did) vastly increasing the area of British rule, extending British trade, employing 5,000 sons of the British ‘educated’ classes, and taking up British shipping. Marshman mentioned missionary work only in less visionary passages elsewhere.76 By the time of his massive three-volume history of India, published in 1867 when he was in his mid-seventies, the possible spread of the Christian religion occurred to him only on rare occasions; the subject made for a set of brief and quite bald interruptions in a mass of secular narrative—chiefly it came out in a discussion of providence in the final paragraph of the last volume.77 The hero of the three volumes was no missionary, but Marshman’s friend Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India from 1847 to 1856, famous for his down-to-earth tasks of railway-building and border-stretching. Marshman had also helped to frame Wood’s Education Despatch, the groundbreaking 1854 plan for state-supported and largely secular schools to teach practical knowledge throughout India, with much of this knowledge taught in the vernacular; so much for the missionary programme of education and conversion.78 Meanwhile, Marshman had edited the Serampore mission newspaper, The Friend of India, which supported Dalhousie’s expansionist and Westernizing policies, and Marshman had also served as an adviser to a parliamentary committee on Indian governance in 1852 and 1853, making suggestions friendly to Dalhousie.79 After 1858, Marshman set about further to improve imperial communications and tighten British control: he promoted a telegraph line to India through the Red Sea. The British government adopted his proposal and backed the company that he represented, but the line failed after a month.80 In sum, Marshman de-emphasized Christian polemics and spent years writing secular works on Indian history and the fate of the English-speaking powers to rule Asia. By then his missionary interests were unrecognizable. We have examined the clergymen and the missionaries, both those who came from missionary families and those who did not. It remains to look at the founders who came from missionary families but who were never missionaries themselves. Not surprisingly, their missionary zeal was even less impressive than Marshman’s. George Marsden Waterhouse was a quite secular Australian merchant and politician who was Prime Minister of South Australia in the early 1860s. Three of his brothers became Wesleyan

The usual suspects

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missionaries, but he did not.81 Waterhouse’s only major public involvement in religious questions came in the late 1840s. Because he was both a Wesleyan and a leading citizen, he was expected on that occasion to take a position on whether the Wesleyans of South Australia ought to accept state aid, but all that he could do as a politician was go back and forth on the issue, with some measure of obfuscation each time.82 There are still a few more founders connected to the missionary movement through their families. Two were father and son. Sir Theophilus Shepstone was a key figure in South Africa. He was the son of a Wesleyan missionary who had worked among the natives.83 Sir Theophilus and his own son, Theophilus Junior, were both founders of the Colonial Society. Theophilus Senior’s missionary background led to his becoming an interpreter in the 1830s and 1840s, when different African tribes were required to sign over their independence.84 Later he rose to dominate British native policy in Southern Africa. His experiences there were hardly typical of those of most Colonial Society members. Few were in the position to report, as Shepstone did in 1848, on how ‘tribal distinctions’ could be useful in controlling the population. His was an unattractive imperialism worked out by a hard man in the field. He was ahead of his time. A final example is Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, son of the Revd Mr Joseph Wolff. Joseph Wolff, the father, was perhaps better described as ‘the missionary, the converted Jew Dr Wolff, whose eccentric and conceited autobiography set all London laughing’.85 Indeed, the Revd Mr Wolff merits a few words. He was an Asian expert, a traveller, a convert from Judaism (yes), and a German by birth. He was also the survivor of a 600mile march in the nude across Central Asia after he was captured by robbers during his search for one or more of the lost tribes of Israel; and he was the self-described ‘Apostle of Our Lord Jesus Christ for Palestine, Persia, Bokhara, and Balkh’.86 The Revd Mr Wolff, although a key founder of the Irvingite Church, was not much interested in missionary work per se outside of Europe and the Near East. His socially upward-moving son Henry, a diplomat, a Conservative MP, a founder of the pro imperial and very aristocratic ‘Primrose League’ (in 1883), and of course one of the founding members of the Colonial Society, was not someone eager to march 600 miles in the nude and become the laughing-stock of ‘all London’. Instead, he would develop an interest in banking and Egyptian finance, but after our period.87 In sum, those members of the Society connected to the missionary world were few in number. Those few who themselves served as missionaries tended to the spiritual needs of well-off white people in Ontario and Cape Town—so they were somewhat out of the missionary mainstream. Nor could the Colonial Society boast even one member who had been prominent in the anti-slavery societies, societies allied to the missionary movement both in practice and in sentiment.88 The desire to save the world, whether by converting it or by using military force to stop the trade in slaves, did not feed into the Colonial Society of 1868. Indeed, the missionary urge, far from contributing to the coalescence of imperialism in 1868, seemed in the 1860s to be dying out in Britain as a whole. We have seen missionaries’ sons who were quite uninterested in continuing their fathers’ work. The dearth in missionaries was felt at the time. The London Missionary Society blamed the rising cost of living in many parts of the world, and began sending out women in greater numbers. The Church Missionary Society was well aware that it had absorbed only fourteen university-educated recruits

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from 1862 through 1868, four of those in the latter year. There had been none in 1863 and 1865, although some recruits were coming in from outside the universities. By the early 1870s, The Times could ask whether anyone at home or abroad had ever met either a missionary or anyone who had been converted by a missionary. Of course the missionaries still had their own world, their own newspapers and organizations, but these remained distant from the secular imperialism that fed into the Colonial Society, and distant from the secular world generally. Apparently enthusiasm for missions was by its nature multicentred and not necessarily coordinated through central authorities in the imperial metropolis. Already in the mid-nineteenth century the Christians of Jamaica were sending Scottish missionaries to found stations in West Africa. But what of England? Were its missionary organizations doomed? The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society put together a national Day of Intercession for Missionaries, held in churches up and down the land, on Sunday, 20 December 1872. Recruitment did pick up after that, but so of course did secular interest in the empire.89 But that was later; the colonial connections that we have seen in the missionary group may indicate little more than this: a few people were likely to become involved in overseas affairs no matter what. Their involvement gave to them and to their children a more global horizon than other people had. Some few were missionaries. Some, as we have seen, were colonial governors or colonial engineers. Most were not.

4 Businessmen To what degree did business concerns per se set the founders down the road to imperialism? And to what degree, by contrast, did life bombard Englishmen with so many stimuli that some men were bound to become associated with the empire, as others became associated with coin collecting or cushion making? In other words, do we find an economic imperialism, or simply a bustling economic life? This question can only be approached through numerous examples. To begin only one great aristocratic name, the 7th Duke of Manchester, future President of the Colonial Society, had investments in the empire that later Victorians found notable for someone of his station and era. He became quite rabid in his imperialism as the second President of the Colonial Society (or the Royal Colonial Institute, as it then was) in the mid-1870s, when he supported pressure groups to scuttle the transfer of the Gambia to France and other groups that supported colonizing New Guinea. He began investing in the Straits Settlements (now Malaya) in 1875.1 But most of his large and numerous business interests in the empire were confined to the settlement and development of Australia, and did not come about until the 1880s (see Table 4.1).2 Perhaps his interest in this part of the world had grown out of his travels. He had been an aide-decamp in the Cape of Good Hope in 1843–44. (Later a Conservative MP, he succeeded to the dukedom in 1855.) Manchester may also have heard something about the empire without ever leaving home. His Duchess, Louisa, was a key political hostess. The Duchess herself, although an eccentric and a German, is said to have been the most powerful woman in England; both Queen Victoria and Sir Charles Dilke thought that her wide influence and less than impeccable morals had done tremendous harm to society. Still, she had connections of many kinds. One night in 1857, at one of her parties, Disraeli had an animated and informative conversation about the Indian Mutiny with the wife of one of the generals who was busy suppressing it.3 The Duke himself seems to have been controlled by this beautiful Duchess and by her lover of thirty years (and future husband), the Marquess of Hartington (later Duke of Devonshire and leader of the Liberal Party). Manchester took his mind off his marital situation—or did he dwell on it?—by working away among his family papers, writing a sizeable book on the manners and morals of the Stuart monarchs, and helping to build the empire in ways that no other peer seems to have done.4 There were two other high-ranking peers who were active in business. As peers they were even less typical, since they had financial difficulties and thus had to hold a job. They were the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and the Marquess of Salisbury—the same Lord Robert Cecil who visited the Australian gold-fields. Each ran a railway. Note that neither had business interests in the colonies, save for a small estate in Jamaica that Buckingham sold off to meet his father’s debts,5 and neither man was a businessman per

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se. Their railway jobs found them and not the other way around. A railway might need special legislation to establish its lines. There was no harm in having a great name on the letterhead, especially if that name was Buckingham. Indeed, the railways of Buckinghamshire (and of Hampshire) came knocking because they needed to secure lines across the family’s huge estates; the London and Northwestern Railway was even forced to negotiate with him for new rights of way when he was serving as chairman of the company.6 As railway chairmen go, Buckingham had wonderful entrée. It was he who arranged to present Gladstone with 500 guineas of silver plate ‘or whatever else Mrs Gladstone and you may select’, to be paid for by the directors of the London and Northwestern. Several months went by and neither Gladstone nor Mrs Gladstone had selected a thing. Buckingham and Chandos sent them a cheque. Soon came an invitation to Gladstone’s country house.7 The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos had worked for years to rebuild part of the fortune squandered by his bankrupt father, but he did it through domestic economies, investments, and railway ventures. He brought little knowledge of the empire or its governance when he became Colonial Secretary.8 He had turned down the Governorship of Victoria, Australia, in 1856, soon after he had completed his land sales, and he pleaded poverty and the need to keep his railway chairmanship when he turned down the position of Home Secretary in 1859.9 As Keeper of the Privy Seal of the Prince of Wales (1852–59), he accompanied the Prince on a tour of American and Canadian railways in 1860, but he does not seem to have invested in America or in the empire as we usually understand it (although by 1885 he did acquire some Victoria government stock).10

Table 4.1 Bankers and businessmen

New members Bankers* Businessmen (clear Other Total † †† colonial interests) businessmen 26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

4 6

10 5

0 0

14 11

3

5

1

9

1

1

0

2

2

4

2

8

4

5

1

10

20

30

4

54

Notes *Includes men who were also in other businesses. No distinction is made between bankers with some interests abroad and those who do not seem to have had such interests; there is no proof that they did not. It should be noted

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that some of the bankers or bank directors in this column had colonial rather than London banks. †Includes colonial pastoralists, colonial businessmen, and British-based businessmen with interests in the colonies or the underdeveloped world, including a few MPs with colonial railway interests. These different kinds of businessmen are classed together because many founders changed businesses and even countries at some point. ††Does not include Lord Salisbury, who was drafted as head of the Great Eastern Railroad in January, 1868, so as to bring it respectability after a collapse—see Barker, ‘Lord Salisbury: Chairman of the Great Eastern’.

Although largely unfamiliar with the empire, on becoming Secretary of State in the late 1860s the Duke immersed himself in the detail of the Colonial Office—so much so that the Permanent Secretary, Frederic Rogers, thought that Buckingham’s business career had taught him to care so much for detail that it had ruined him for the main work of setting policy—the work of generalization. As Colonial Secretary, Buckingham had a hand in everything, but he spent an inordinate amount of his time on the affairs of the Ionian Islands. And it was perhaps symptomatic of his priorities that he made the highlight of his Colonial Secretaryship a visit to rebellious Heligoland, an impoverished island of 4,000 non-English-speakers off northern Germany—clearly outside the mainstream of imperial developments in the mid-nineteenth century.11 Thus Buckingham and Chandos seem to have shared Salisbury’s attitude to imperial investment. That is to say, they shared an almost total non-interest in it until the subject came to the fore more generally, well after 1868. Among businessmen more properly so called—as opposed to the peers whom we have been looking at—bankers would certainly figure as key suspects in any search for the latent supporters of economic imperialism. British bankers would have been on the lookout for investment opportunities almost anywhere, and they had fine research facilities. Bankers would have had every opportunity to notice and make mental claims upon the wider world. Sixteen members of the Colonial Society were bankers at one level or another. The Colonial Society’s very greatest éminences grises from the banking world were Thomas Baring, Director of Baring Brothers and of the Bank of England, and George Grenfell Glyn of Glyn, Mills & Co; both men were Trustees of the Society. We will first examine Glyn’s connection to banking and imperialism. He had spent a number of years working enthusiastically in the family bank to help build up communications in Canada (although he was not a key decision-maker in the bank, which was led by his seniors). In the late 1850s, Glyn was associated with Lord Bury himself and another original member of the Colonial Society, the Hon. Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Liberal-Conservative MP for Malton (plus another half a dozen men of no interest to us), in the Halifax and Quebec Railway Company, which soon died for lack of British government money. Bury, who was in Canada during this period, seemed to be the most enthusiastic of the group about the future of Canadian railways. He parlayed his association with the ill-fated Halifax and Quebec into a seat on the board of the North West Transportation Company.12 Glyn did not do so. The only result of the

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project would be to bring together a small knot of investors (some outside banking) that overlapped with the future membership of the Colonial Society. No one made any money, nor did most people (apart from the investors themselves) think they were ever likely to. Thus, when in 1862 Glyn floated an idea for a transcontinental road and telegraph line across Canada, he was not willing to raise much of the money himself, and the Barings were even less enthusiastic.13 In December 1866 Glyn gave up all banking activity to become the Whig-Liberal Party’s Chief Whip in the House of Commons. His position as Chief Whip meant that he would become one of the Lords of the Treasury when his party came into office, since the sinecure for the Government Chief Whip was at the Treasury. Therefore, even some members of Glyn’s own party thought that a banker should never become a whip in the first place, even when the party was out of office, and they insisted on the strictest conditions when Glyn took the job. Accordingly, the rest of Glyn’s life was consumed by parliamentary business. He proved himself to be one of Gladstone’s most avid lieutenants, and he never went back to the bank. But presumably the idea of investing in Canada was still with him, even if the investments would have to be made by others.14 Barings We cannot go further in looking for economically motivated men without looking at the Colonial Society founder-member who bore the most eminent name in English banking. He was Thomas Baring Esq., a founding Trustee of the Society. Thomas Baring was also the most powerful financier in the land. He refused the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in more than one Conservative government; he even turned down the leadership of the Conservative Party when Disraeli offered it to him in 1851.15 But was he an economic imperialist? Where did his imperial interests come from, and what kind were they? Thomas Baring did have a family connection to the attempt to reform the empire into self-governing, self-supporting settlements for England’s poor—Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Colonial Reform Movement of the 1830s to early 1850s. Thomas Baring’s cousin, the Hon. Francis Baring, Liberal-Conservative MP for Thetford (3rd Lord Ashburton 1864)—who died one month before the Colonial Society enrolled its first members—was the first Chairman of the Colonial Reform Society, although he soon left politics and banking to live out a life of pleasure in Paris.16 Thomas Baring would also have known all about the imperial connections of his nephew, another Thomas Baring (2nd Lord Northbrook, 1866, and 1st Earl, 1876). Born in Calcutta (where his father was an official), this Thomas Baring was a Liberal MP from 1857 until he inherited his peerage. He was also Under-Secretary of State for India for most of the period from 1859 to 1864; in that position, he showed the typical Victorian parsimony about the cost of moving soldiers, and of governing an empire generally (he once looked into the vital subject of how to save money on stationery contracts). His closest brush with economic imperialism at the India Office was when he enquired whether the cotton trade between Great Britain and India would pick up because of the American Civil War.17 But this was no more than an idle suggestion during the course of routine business.

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Still other but much more distant relatives had helped to rule India; one became a vicepresident of the Church Missionary Society in 1812; and Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) would rule Egypt for almost thirty years after the Scramble for Africa.18 Yet in 1868 the missionary heyday was in the past, and both the missionary renaissance of the late nineteenth century and the Scramble for Africa were hardly developments that could have been predicted in 1868. North America and Australasia were the foci for the banking Barings at mid-century. The Thomas Baring of the Colonial Society, Chairman of the bank and sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer, worked out his own interest in empire.19 Thomas Baring, Conservative MP, sat for Yarmouth from 1835 to 1837, stood for that seat unsuccessfully in 1837, 1838, and 1841, stood unsuccessfully for London in 1843, and sat for Huntingdon from 1844 until his death in 1873. That he sat as a Tory was odd, since most of the Barings were Liberals. He was an early supporter of Disraeli as the party’s leader in the Commons, but he declined serious offers of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in both 1852 and 1858, as well as having declined Disraeli’s peculiar offer of the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1851. Nor was that the first time he refused office. In 1845 he turned down an offer from Peel in part to preserve his quiet life at home—he did not want to offend the Liberal ex-Cabinet ministers to whom he was closely related—but more particularly because he wanted to preserve his quiet life in the bank, an ‘honourable as well as profitable…independent station’, he thought.20 He did take time away to chair the very industrious India Committee of 1852–53, which had to renew and to some degree modify the Act under which the subcontinent was governed, but his questions to witnesses were businesslike and unrevealing.21 Having chaired the Committee, he opposed Disraeli in 1857 by (unsuccessfully) trying to save the East India Company from abolition after the Mutiny; the Company had ceased trading or investing in India in 1834, but it had remained the agency of governance.22 Yet India was not his prime focus—it was no more than one of many foci. By 1857 he was the head of Baring Brothers. He was Chairman of Lloyds from 1830 to March 1868, a director of the Bank of England from 1848 to 1867, and a Commissioner of the Great Exhibition. By the time the Colonial Society was founded, he was also President of the London Institution, an 1805 body that was an uncomfortable cross between a history library and a scientific lecture series;23 the Colonial Society catered to a similar mix of interests, but due to its imperial focus it was more successful. Thomas Baring’s own imperial focus was on North American affairs and not on the affairs of India or of anywhere else. In 1866 he did lead a group of Britons who held Venezuelan bonds, but this group had no coherent policy towards Venezuela—not coercion, not conciliation, not imperialism.24 It is true that on occasion he would dash off a letter seeking information about Latin American or Near Eastern affairs, information that someone else at Barings needed from one of Thomas Baring’s particular friends in government,25 but Thomas himself had seldom studied the matter at hand in any detail. He would ask the most perfunctory of questions. Nor was he very interested in the monetary arrangements of even the Australasian colonies, although one would think that he should have been, for he was of course an expert in currency and banking. He did serve on the committee that investigated putting a branch of the Royal Mint in Sydney, Australia, but he attended only one of the six hearings, and when he did appear he asked

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not one question.26 Yet he had travelled in North America in the late 1820s. He met former President Madison—‘Father of the Constitution’, author of a third of the Federalist Papers, and most of the American Bill of Rights. Baring visited America at least once more in the early 1850s.27 His connections in North America continued after his return to England; these connections were personal and myriad.28 It was Baring Brothers’ London-based American partner, Joshua Bates—and Thomas Baring himself—who, on the part of the bank, catered to the hundred or more well-placed Americans who were in London at any one time in the 1840s and early 1850s.29 These two men admitted that in serving the Americans they had to take special care not to offend the aristocratic sympathies which infected American democrats when abroad—the same prickliness that Tocqueville had identified.30 Thomas Baring also dealt with more exalted North American banking matters. He personally oversaw much of the English investment in America’s public debt, debt that built the United States physically in the period when the Canadian and Australasian colonies were being built constitutionally by the colonial reformers and others. This banking business was certainly a royal road towards the interest in empire that he showed in 1868; yet it was not a very profitable road even for him. Thomas Baring was not the vanguard of some capitalist imperialism in 1868. Most people in the late 1860s would not have thought Thomas Baring’s North American railway investments worth the paper they were printed on. The railways in North America on which Baring spent so much time and money proceeded from the dream of going transcontinental, an expansionist dream that Baring would seem to have shared. He suspended judgement in order to pour money into the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada (organized in 1852) and to serve on its board. Initially reluctant to join the board, he was persuaded to do so by his transatlantic acquaintances, and he joined in 1853 as the representative of the Canadian government. Soon he was the director, which showed some enthusiasm on his part. So too did the fact that he stayed on the board when the project began to unravel.31 He did see the financial warning signs, but he did not act on them. As director, Baring reproached his colleagues in Canada for their hints of colonial baksheesh, their extravagant spending, and their partisan struggles with each other, but he kept his money in. The subsequent weakness of the railway was due to there being far less economic than political demand for long-distance trade within Canada. The whole project discouraged Baring Brothers from further Canadian investment until about the time that the Colonial Society was founded. Thomas Baring’s backing of it had been too enthusiastic, the political rather than the economic decision of a banker who had travelled in North America and who had made American affairs the centre of his career.32 He accepted far too much low-grade debt, debt secured by almost nothing save the goodwill of a Canadian government in love with trains—and yet the same Canadian government had the sense to keep to itself the control of the higher grades of Grand Trunk debt (the debt that was backed by the rolling-stock).33 Thomas Baring, MP, had lost much of his own money along with the bank’s, but he held on to his Grand Trunk stock; it eventually appreciated, so that by his death in 1873 it anchored his personal fortune. But as late as 1868, the American investments still did not look like they would come right for Barings.

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In 1867, in the scare after the failure of the leading discounters, Overend Gurney, Thomas Baring had to merge his over-extended bank with the firm of Finlay Hodgson, whose director had been his colleague on the board of the railway.34 The railway was not the firm’s only North American investment. Barings, once burned, took rather less of America’s railway debt than it might have done, but the house invested heavily in the North during and after the Civil War, when it also stepped up the level of its investment in Canada.35 In the 1860s the firm, burned or otherwise, was still overcommitted in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The firm’s clients in the first half of the century had helped push the bank in this direction, since when they are compared to the clients of the other banks, Baring clients seem to have been particularly interested in British Empire investment. All in all, the family bank was known for its North American business throughout Thomas Baring’s lifetime, especially during his career as its head.36 In 1862, Thomas Baring was still willing to lend his name, albeit with great reluctance, to a doomed project to build a road and telegraph line across Canada; even he was highly dubious of the success of this project, but lend his name he did. At least one contemporary observer was shocked by the participation of Thomas Baring in so ill-starred a scheme.37 In sum, Thomas Baring, MP, inherited certain family connections to the Englishspeaking world overseas, and plunged into them with alacrity, whether as traveller, as investor, or as a founder of the Colonial Society. He seems to have been the power behind much of what some would conceive of as the empire, but the way he conceived of it remains mysterious. He did not publish, an odd omission for a pillar of affairs in the mid-nineteenth century. What is clear, however, is that he was so keen to invest in North American schemes that he ignored their weaknesses. On other occasions, too, he put his ideas about the proper development of the world above his business sense. He was one of the few great figures among those whom Peel called the representatives of the ‘Commercial Interests of the Country’38 to reject the abolition of the Corn Laws and to take up instead the protectionist cause of the landed classes. Baring explained that the idea of suddenly dropping tariffs was in his view ‘a great departure from a system of cautious and gradual application of relaxation in our existing duties which has always appeared to me the only safe policy for this country’.39 Thomas Baring was no automaton-like businessman; his business interests seem to have come second to his ideas about the ‘cautious and gradual’ development of the Englishspeaking world, whether in North America or in Britain itself. Men of wealth other than Glyn and Baring Despite the presence of Baring and Glyn, both fabulously wealthy, the Colonial Society was no club for the rich. Great amounts of liquid money were not especially noticeable in the Colonial Society. Measured by unsettled liquid assets that might have been invested in the empire (or anywhere else), the total number of British millionaires to die between 1869 and 1916, inclusive was 193.40 Out of those 193, Baring and Glyn were indeed the only two millionaires in the Colonial Society, despite all the great names on its roll.41 There were other millionaires in the Society—if we include the aristocrats qualifying

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as rich only because of settled landed estates. The owners of settled estates enjoyed only a guaranteed income and a life interest in the family lands (the ‘strict settlement’). In exchange for an income during his father’s lifetime, the eldest son of each generation was forced to agree to these restrictions, and to agree to impose them on his own heir in turn.42 Here then is much of the basis for the traditional British distinction between aristocracy and money—the aristocrats did not always have very much of the latter to spend, and they tended to look down on those who did. Estate owners could not sell much of anything or obtain a mortgage without the approval of the trustees, and the trustees cared more about the family than they did about the individual. Still, a settlement usually meant some level of comfort and financial independence. If (as we saw before) the aristocrats of the Colonial Society were not looking for imperial employment, were they looking to the empire as a place to invest surplus capital? In fact, only twenty-four members counted among Great Britain and Ireland’s top 2,500 landowners, those 2,500 holding at least 3,000 acres worth at least £3,000 in rents per annum; and, even then, the total reaches twenty-four members only if we credit four eldest sons, among them Lord Bury, with what they had yet to inherit in 1868. Out of our twenty-four, only the Duke of Argyll counted among the top 115 landowners, those who had more than 50,000 acres.43 Much of the land belonging even to parvenus would have been subject to a legal settlement and included in these figures, for the wealthy copied the practices of the landed elite; even in the 1860s the strict settlement was spreading and growing. Therefore the landed aristocrats (old or new) joining the Colonial Society would for the most part have enjoyed only life interests in their estates, rather than investment income that needed to find a home overseas.44 But one more man who was in the top 115, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam (not himself a member of the Colonial Society, but closely related to two people who were), may well have had an economic interest in empire that bears looking into. The 6th Earl was an unusually wealthy aristocrat, and he was unusually close to business concerns, just as his father had been. But his father, the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, was no imperialist. He publicly campaigned for an industrial future to be marked, in his view, by stability and prosperity for the workers. He campaigned against the foreign policy of Palmerston, and for years he was a parliamentary gadfly working to humanize or limit the British presence in Ireland.45 The 6th earl, who did not continue his father’s anti-imperial campaigning, was in part represented in the Colonial Society by his brother, the Hon. Charles William WentworthFitzwilliam, who had visited Oregon and Vancouver Island in the winter of 1852 and 1853. Back in London, the Hon. Charles would take up the case of the small businessmen of Vancouver Island who were complaining about the power of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Here perhaps there was some economic imperialism. Indeed, the Hon. Charles developed connections with coal-mining on Vancouver Island and with railway building and settlement on the lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the mainland.46 But the Hon. Charles was not the only Fitzwilliam to forge a connection to British North America and the empire. The 6th Earl was also represented in the Colonial Society by his son and heir, Lord Milton (one of the four eldest sons counted above). Lord Milton not only visited the western Canadian frontier in winter, as his uncle Charles had done, but he also

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wrote two books about the experience. In the first and much larger work, Milton seemed impressed not by the family investments or by the businessmen of Vancouver Island, but by the larger significance of British North America in knitting the empire together, Asia with the Atlantic.47 In a later work (1869), minus the co-author, the humour, and literary merit of the first,48 Milton advocated the by then hardly original plan of occupying the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound; the object was to prevent the United States from choking Canada off from the Pacific and thus absorbing Canada entirely. Certainly there was some economic imperialism running through the Fitzwilliam family. But there was something else, too. Once again, Fitzwilliam and his nephew Lord Milton both slogged across Western Canada in the winter.49 Frontiering at that time of year was hardly the action of an idle rentier, much less that of a typical banker. There was something else going on in their minds; they had emotional as well as economic ties to the empire—just as did the many landowners without such clear economic interests in the empire. A final example is Arthur Fitzgerald Kinnaird, MP (another Trustee of the Society, and later 10th Lord)—another of the twenty-four great landowners. He was a banker in the firm of Ramsom, Bouverie and Co. But he was also a diplomat, and long before he had any connection to banking he had served as Private Secretary to the Earl of Durham, the man whose ideas were responsible for the modern organization of Canada. Kinnaird went on to write about the United States and India, and his wife was a keen supporter of emigration and of missionaries. We cannot assume therefore that finances rather than these other affinities first led him to think about the empire; nor can we assume that he was ready for England to take over Africa. The other bankers of the Colonial Society Three other members were prominent in banking. They were Stephen Cave, MP (a Conservative), George Joachim Goschen, MP (a Liberal, and later a Liberal Unionist), and Sir David Salomons, Bart., all of whom were officers of the Colonial Society, and all of whom left imperial writings that make clear that their interests were not entirely economic. The lesser bankers in the Colonial Society were not great in number, but they finally take us down into a lower level of society. Yet here, with humbler people, we begin to run into the problem of dwindling evidence. First, to give some examples. Of the fourteen lesser bankers, two were minor figures in London. One was simply a name and an address,50 but Henry Samuel King left more evidence about himself. He had a clear interest in empire, since he was the proprietor of the Overland Mail and of a firm called ‘Henry S.King and Co, Bankers and Colonial Agents’, with addresses at Cornhill, Pall Mall, Calcutta, and Bombay. Was he simply a banker for Anglo-Indians who had a household to maintain in one country or the other? If so, then economic imperialism may had had more to do with the myriad personal contacts between people in different parts of the world than with gross capital flows.51 Indeed, other founders were associated with purely local banks in the settlement colonies—merely sidelines of their prominence in one colony or another. John

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Richardson Goodricke was a London solicitor who went to Natal for his health rather than for the investment opportunities. Somewhere between supporting himself in local business and becoming mayor of Durban, he acted as solicitor for at least two local banks, but that was the extent of his banking experience.52 He then returned to England. Another man, Joseph Henderson, had a bank in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, where he was a member of the Legislative Assembly. Dr Robert James Mann, a famed Natal science writer, was in the end one of the several directors of only one of the several banks in the province before himself returning to England.53 He may have owed his directorship more to his notability than to his banking skills. For a colonial bank director who was more interested in the business than Dr Mann was, we can turn to Alexander MacArthur, son of a Wesleyan minister who had migrated to Australia. MacArthur was also a landowner, a wine-producer, and a legislator. He returned to England, leaving his 28,000 acres of Australia in the hands of tenant farmers;54 from 1874 to 1892 he would serve as Liberal MP for Leicester. He made little mark in Parliament, except to say that he would vote to abolish primogeniture and entail. With opinions like these, he is yet more evidence that not every MP moved in the higher circles of the domestic aristocracy, of the City, or of clubland, or wanted to. The Hentys Some colonial bankers were below even this, below the parliamentary level of society. They were wholly immersed in a world of local economic activity. The Henty family—an extraordinary group of squatters, traders, whalers, brewers, sheep rearers, and bankers in early Australia—provided the Colonial Society with one such man. He was a banker and lawyer who lived almost in the shadow of the rest of his family. He followed them into the empire in order to get a job, a job that happened to be in his family’s bank. Out on the ground, as we shall see below, banking dissolved into general local economic activity— making a living in the colonies rather than off of them. Indeed, it seems that the Hentys were less interested in banking in Australia than they had been at home. They were originally merino farmers in Sussex in the eighteenth century, with a bank in Worthing. They emigrated in 1829 and 1830. Their patriarch, Thomas Henty, heard about Australia from two of his sons who had visited the country. His resolve to emigrate was helped along by the Crown, which for a time offered free land in Western Australia to attract a British population. (The object was to pre-empt a rumoured settlement by the French.) After a great deal of moving about, the family wound up founding Port Phillip, now Melbourne, where they were prominent for decades. They were not related to G.A.Henty, the late nineteenth-century writer of imperialistic adventure stories for boys. William Henty, the only Henty who would join the Colonial Society, was born in 1808. He was old enough to remember all his family’s movements but not old enough to have made any of the decisions regarding them. He stayed behind in England to study law, finally practising in Brighton. All the while, as his correspondence shows, he was waiting for the family settlement to grow big enough to need legal services, and for the government there to expand enough to hire him. So far, he was no banker or investor.

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In 1837 he finally emigrated. He did become active in his father’s local bank in Port Phillip in the 1840s, but he served the bank only as a solicitor, two of his brothers handling the financial side. He then went to live in Tasmania for a time, joining but playing no leading role in the campaign to end the transportation of convicts to Australasia.55 Back in Victoria, he served in the Cabinet as Colonial Secretary for four years out of a career in the Legislative Assembly of only five. During this period he campaigned (unsuccessfully) to regularize the land tenure of his family’s squattings. To that end, he wrote a pamphlet arguing that Australia ought to have more cottage farmers with regular land tenure, as did America and Canada. But apparently William Henty did not want to be an Australian farmer himself. After having waited for so many years for the right moment to emigrate to Australia, he retired to Brighton with his sick wife in 1862. He added nothing more to the story of his life after that, except of course on joining the Colonial Society (he lived until 1881). Meanwhile, the active members of the Henty family had better things to do back in Australia than to join a London club. They had all their businesses to run.56 The local nexus of banking, agriculture, and the law that the Hentys presided over in Victoria57 had little to do with any finance imperialism on the part of the City of London, and a great deal to do with the migration overseas of England’s traditional local agricultural life; the Hentys had been presiding over a slice of that life in Sussex when the First Fleet set out for Australia. William Henty was a colonial banker, yes, and from an imperial banking family; he has to be counted as such, but he was also a solicitor, a writer, a local politician, and a Henty. Colonial bankers Still other Australian lawyers and bankers returned to England in time to join the Colonial Society as resident members. Like William Henty, they were not on the surface London capitalists in their origins or affinities. There is too little evidence about some of them to demonstrate what they did have in mind, even in their economic affairs.58 One who stands out is Frederick Gonnerman Dalgety, a Canadian who had made his fortune in the Australian wool trade during the Victoria Gold Rush. He, too, is mysterious enough—Why did he go to Australia? What was on his mind when he did? But unlike some of the other colonial bankers, he rose high enough to make some of his assumptions and motivations apparent later on. As M.J.Daunton has shown, Dalgety then suffered two very lean decades before the Gold Rush of the early 1850s made his wool fortune. His chief problem up until that time had been chronic undercapitalization—which shows us that his personal and business connections were with fellow colonials rather than with mainstream City financiers. When the Gold Rush was over, the problem of undercapitalization returned. In response, he tried to run his business from London from 1854 to 1857, in partnership with a Tasmanian who would himself become one of the early members of the Colonial Society, Frederick Du Croz. In London, Dalgety would be nearer the sources of capital. Still undercapitalized, Dalgety came back to London in the 1860s and tried again. Even then, although his firm dominated both Australian wool and the financial services associated

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with it, he could not break into the magic circles of the Square Mile. Starved of capital, his business declined; it survived only because he lost effective control to noncolonials.59 He was not a finance capitalist—he was an unfinanced capitalist. By the 1870s, furthermore, his interests lay elsewhere. He had begun to see himself as an English gentleman, building a pleasant house in Hampshire, buying land, draining money from his company, and losing touch with wool-grower opinion—he tried to dictate to the wool growers and had made numerous enemies as a result. We can find the same kind of person, finally caring more about his status than his business, in Newfoundland. Charles Fox Bennett was a local banker, mine owner, shipbuilder, and trader who joined the Colonial Society as a resident member because he spent part of every year with his wife in England. Born in Bristol, he was in Newfoundland as early as the 1820s, when he became known as a leading proponent for a representative system in the colony. But he was not in favour of democracy. Bennett led the conservative interest in Newfoundland for most of the next half-century. As a businessman, he paid the price for his anti-democratic views. When some one set fire to his foundry and mill in 1856, the locals cut the fire hoses. Indeed, popularity and business sense always seemed less important to him than staying true to his own vision of how the empire ought to work. Bennett went on to be the man most responsible for keeping Newfoundland out of Canada in 1869, at the time of Confederation, even while most merchants were afraid to oppose confederation publicly.60 Then, only a few years short of his eightieth birthday, he became anti-confederation premier of Newfoundland in 1870. He was soon left increasingly isolated in the legislature. He remained in the Colonial Society—and it would seem an annual visitor to England—until his death in 1883. Standing out from this group of minor colonial bankers whose ties to the City were weak at best were two men who did stay afloat there. Were they economic imperialists? One man in particular seems to have seized on the communications possibilities of the empire, to have gone out into it on his own, and then to have raised himself into the parliamentary class. His name was Octavius Vaughan Morgan. At age 21 (in 1858) and fresh from school at Abergavenny, he helped to found Morgan Brothers Merchants and Bankers (sic), and in 1868 he founded the European Mail. In the decades after the foundation of the Colonial Society, he became a world traveller, a fellow of the Statistical Society, and a member of the Municipal Reform League. Morgan wanted elections for the upper house, and was himself elected into the lower. He would become involved in the Imperial Federation League while he was Liberal MP for Battersea (1885–92). However, as the dates show, his activities were less clearly a cause than a result of the foundation of the Colonial Society and the interests it drew together. The other colonial banker with some ties to the City, and the last colonial banker we will look at, was Jacob Montefiore. The Montefiores had made their fortune in the Barbados trade in the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, the main family businesses were run by Jacob’s cousin, Sir Moses. However, Jacob and his more prominent brother, Joseph Barrow Montefiore, prospered on South Australian real estate, and they helped to found the Bank of Australasia in the 1830s.61 The main role of Jacob the Colonial Society member was in founding another bank— like Dalgety’s, only earlier—to finance the Australian wool trade. He was indeed the first go-between for the Australians, who were just then in the midst of their earliest wool

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boom, and the London financiers, starting with the rest of the Montefiore family. Yet as with Dalgety, Jacob Montefiore’s main business was wool, not banking. Established banks were shy of loaning against future wool prices, so the trade had to be financed by the better funded wool brokers themselves; they became bankers, but only incidentally so. In Jacob Montefiore, in any case, we have found no finance imperialist, and no evidence of a more general finance imperialism. From his early wool-banking activities, he went on to involve himself in questions of colo-nial governance, not the export of capital. From 1835 to 1839 he served as one of the eleven London-based commissioners appointed to the colony of South Australia by the Act of 1834 (an unpaid endeavour).62 He would later be involved in the for-profit Western Australia Association.63 In 1854, Montefiore was a leader in the popular campaign against a nominated Senate in New South Wales, and for the more equitable distribution of seats in the lower house—hardly the act of a rapacious financier.64 While Jacob Montefiore did not create the family interest in empire, which went back for generations in the West Indies, he does seem to have helped to extend the family’s activities to the Antipodes. But as an individual, Jacob Montefiore moved away from economic and towards political affairs. And collectively, as London-based finance capitalists, the Montefiores and their friends do not seem to have been especially eager to extend their activities to Australasia, even if there were many good opportunities for putting money into the wool trade. Investments closer to home were safer or more profitable or both. Counting the bankers in another way We can approach the subject in another way as a means of review. Of the forty or so men who would serve as directors of the Bank of England between the early 1840s and 1880—and who were still alive in 1868—Thomas Baring, Stephen Cave, and George Joachim Goschen were the only ones to number among our members of the Colonial Society.65 Putting these three aside, along with the almost equally well-connected Messrs Glyn, Morgan, and Montefiore, the rest of the bankers in the Society—fourteen in number—seem a far cry from the capital exporters imagined by Hobson and Lenin. As we have seen, some served on the boards of purely local colonial banks, and their intellectual interests developed in other directions. Others served on the local boards of non-executive (or barely executive) directors employed throughout the empire by London-headquartered banks; these local boards were maintained from the origins of British multinational banking in Australia in the mid-1830s until late in the century.66 Either way, the Colonial Society founders involved were not even the greatest names in colonial banking.67 Instead, these lesser members of the banking profession were creatures of a string of small imperial towns—mostly Australasian towns, for in the midnineteenth century Australasia was where more than half of the multinational banks’ branches were, along with one-third of their assets.68 Those Colonial Society bankers who were not out in the towns of the imperial frontier were a part of the London-based service sector for those towns. Baring, Glyn, Cave, Goschen, and Montefiore were the main London-based exceptions, operating at a higher level.

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In addition, fully half of the colonial (non-London) group were minor figures who managed to go home to the British Isles and leave banking entirely, usually without rising very far in society. Yet go home they did. For them, gentlemanliness was more important than capitalism. Economic men? Apart from the bankers or bankers cum merchants already examined above, only nine more members can be identified either as intercontinental traders or as operators of shipping lines serving the colonies—economic imperialists, certainly, although never bankers. They included a major London-based broker in Australian wool, Helmut Schwartze,69 and three major shipowners: Captain George Gilmore, who founded a line serving Australia and Tasmania; J.T.Rennie, son and partial heir of an Aberdeen shipowner who died in 1849, and who had pioneered lines from England to Natal,70 and the great magnate William Mackinnon, who had a whole fleet of ships. By the 1880s, indeed, he had more ships than anyone except the Queen. By then, he had become a key figure in the development of the British Empire in East Africa. Yet even Mackinnon’s imperialism fits only uncomfortably into the economic category—in the sense that by the 1890s he turned from the India trade to investments in East Africa, investments that were so unprofitable that they opened him to the charge of being an unworldly philanthropist. He lost a fortune there. (By then, King Leopold’s own investments in Africa were considered—at least in America—as nothing more than an awful waste of the fortune of the sister he held captive, the former Empress Carlota of Mexico.71) If that is what most people thought about investing in Africa, so much for the coming of any popular economic imperialism. And if Mackinnon was not working at promising business ventures in Africa, what was he doing? Was his thinking at all similar to that of other, non-economic imperialists in the Colonial Society? Tables about social status, government employment, or economic position do not answer this question of motivation, but writings or private papers might. Twenty-one other colonials were specialized businessmen with some connection to one or another part of the empire—where they had to support themselves in some way, since they lived there. The question of why they lived there has to be examined in a way that goes beyond their economic activities.72 Dr John Learmonth MD (Edinburgh), along with his brother, exported 177 bales of wool from Port Phillip (the later Melbourne, Australia) in 1844/45. But what does this mean? Was the doctor still practising, and merely letting his brother take the lead in wool, or did Dr Learmonth himself spend days as a wool grower? We know only that he was made a district trustee of the Port Phillip Savings Bank in 1845, but this was a government appointment, and in any case he went back to England in the same year. He stayed until 1848, and was in England once again in 1854– 55 while one of his brothers ran his estate in Geelong. And the estate was ‘his’ largely because he was the eldest. He had followed his two younger brothers to Australia by 1840. How often do the individual minds of obscure people take flight away from their tabular biographical data, their economic position? One chamber of commerce man

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whose intellectual affinities sail past his rather meagre achievements in business was Alfred Waddington. He was one of the older, least settled, and most captivating members of the Colonial Society. Born into a less than grand Anglo-French banking family in 1801—although his nephew William would rise to become Foreign Minister and Premier of France in the late 1870s—Alfred Waddington attended the universities of Göttingen and Leipzig. Somewhere along the line he developed wanderlust. He directed iron works in France; he failed in that business and in others. Eventually he became a follower of gold rushes. He spent his fifties as a wholesale grocer in San Francisco. By the time the Colonial Society was founded, he was a member of the Legislature (and briefly the Education Secretary73) of British Columbia, a colony in the midst of its own Gold Rush. His first book was addressed to his fellow colonists, and it was less than utterly serious: TO MY FELLOW PIONEERS, FRIENDS, AND ACQUAINTANCE. I offer you the first book published on Vancouver Island, and I recommend it to you. Not for its own merit, which I value no more than what it has cost me, that is to say a few day’s scribbling at spare hours; but on account of its object. The circulation of truth can be but useful; so I invite each of you to buy a copy, which shall be carefully put down to your account of patriotism, and also to that of the printer.74 Like this one, all of his publications were to be about the Fraser River, but his later works were less jokey, came from a better class of publisher, and went out to a more metropolitan audience. An 1868 work, which explained how well the Fraser River area fit into worldwide imperial routes (Overland Route through British North America; or, The Shortest and Speediest Route to the East), was in part based upon papers that he had read at the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), and it was published by Longmans.75 For him to reach such forums, his message about a worldwide route must have transcended local boosterism. Waddington was in England to promote a railway from the coast opposite the northern part of Victoria Island to the interior of British Columbia at Quesnel, on the Fraser and about 200 miles due north of Vancouver. Not every railway promoter would have been invited to address the British Association and the RGS, and certainly not every promoter with so mixed a record of success. And a failed promoter he was. A few years before, Waddington had already tried to build the railway, only to run into a large obstacle (it was quite large indeed, being the highest point in British Columbia—now called ‘Mount Waddington’). On the same project, Waddington also faced an Indian war that, as a trader of guns, he seems to have brought on himself. Nineteen of his workmen were killed.76 It was hardly a glorious record. Like so many of his other business ventures, his construction project had come to naught, and his trip to England would not get it moving again; still, he was in England long enough to attend the Colonial Society’s inaugural meeting in June 1868, and he joined formally on 19 April 1869.77 The reason this failed promoter could address the BA was the timeliness of his message; he used the imminent completion of the American transcontinental route (the Central Pacific) to argue for a British equivalent which could safeguard London’s oriental trade and its place as the

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financial centre of the world.78 So it would seem that he was a British imperialist, but he had an odd career for one. When he moved to Victoria he had lived in the United States for so many years that he was accused of having taken American citizenship. Some asserted that his participation in Victorian politics was illegal, and that he would himself try to annex the colony to the United States. (If they had known about it, they probably would have made something of Waddington’s nephew having married an American, and it would hardly have mattered that the nephew was a French politician.) Was he a British imperialist or an American one? Waddington himself turned this question against others—leaving his own position even more confused. The occasion was when he tried to get someone with a quasiAmerican career very similar to his own expelled from the Victoria legislature—but in upholding the purity of British colonial politics he used American racialist arguments. The man was Selim Franklin, another founder-member of the Colonial Society who like Waddington moved from storekeeping in San Francisco to Victoria, and who served with Waddington in the legislature there. Yet he and Waddington were on opposite sides politically. Thus, Waddington tried to have Franklin unseated because he was Jewish— and because if Franklin had been unseated, the government that Waddington opposed would have been weakened. When his anti-Semitism plan failed, Waddington tried to unseat Franklin on other grounds, by rejecting the votes of the formerly American blacks (they had been allowed to swear allegiance to the Queen on the theory that they owed no allegiance to a United States that denied them full rights). The legislature also rejected this American-tinged argument of Waddington’s, the black votes stood, and Franklin took his seat. (An auctioneer who was the son of a Liverpool banker and marble merchant, Franklin was in London during the foundation of the Colonial Society; he then returned to American life in San Francisco, where he lived from 1870 until his death in 1883.)79 As always with Waddington, there are contradictions—there were always meanings within meanings in what he said and did. In his first book, he had described the social scene of the Fraser River Gold Rush as follows: Adopted citizens and others who had consulted their American patriotism rather than their interests, by stopping at Watcom, loudly lamented the necessity of stepping on British soil, whereas others, Britishers by birth and Americans by adoption, were now rewhitewashed and became Englishmen again.80 Waddington stressed that his own feelings lay on the British and not the American side,81 and yet he did come to Victoria from a settled life in San Francisco, which may as well be considered an American city. He also stressed his contempt for jobbers and profiteers (his classical tag for them was the ‘rerum novarum avidi’) but he had a grocer’s memory for the price of flour and other staples in the Fraser area.82 Was he not himself a grocer and a rewhitewashed Briton? Waddington said that he counted himself among the real ‘pioneers of civilization’ representing not Britain or America but ‘that of energetic men representing almost every nation in the world’; and yet he did not forget to distance himself from those other energetic pioneers who ‘shot [the Indians] down like dogs, and often, with shame be it said, for their mere amusement’.83 The contradictions kept flowing. In 1868, he

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bemoaned the official lack of interest in settling the Canadian prairie, reflecting as it did a lack of interest in the whole imperial mission—without which England would be ‘a small unimportant island’.84 And yet for this assertion, Waddington, the uncle of a French premier, cited a French and not a British source, an eight-year-old article from the Revue des Deux Mondes, not on the face of it the most disinterested of sources about the underlying unimportance of English civilization—and a source easy for his English audience to ignore.85 Once again, Waddington’s own standpoint seems to dissolve into conundrums. Yet whatever Waddington’s own rather evanescent views, clearly the man himself could not have been one of the New Imperialists of the 1880s; for one thing, he died in 1872. And I mean this as a serious point. The logic of his life, for all of its contradictions, had to be self-contained. Waddington’s ideas deserve to be examined for themselves. They escape the bare details of his biography and his business interests. Certainly he had come a long way from his youth in France, his education in Göttigen, his decade selling groceries in San Francisco. His views live on only in his words, not his biography or in any tabulation of his economic position. Clearly some people had an economic tie to the empire—but what they thought about the empire, and even whether they thought about ‘the empire’ as any kind of general category at all, remains to be seen.

5 Travels and ideas There is one final question to examine before we can look at the main founders and their writings. We have seen many travellers, not just Waddington. How many of them were armchair travellers, and how many had actually been to the empire? Armchair travel could lead to armchair generalizations, but seeing the size of the world for oneself could also inspire people to making the jump from having private experiences thinking about grand general categories. That jump from the private to the grand, the general, and the imperial is especially worth noting in the words of one far-seeing young man who visited Australasia in the 1830s. With travel, he wrote, The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures…. Africa, or North and South America, are wellsounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply. From seeing the present state, it is impossible not to look forward with high expectations to the future progress of nearly an entire hemisphere. The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the progress of history. It is more striking when we remember that only sixty years since, Cook, whose excellent judgement none will dispute, could see no prospects of a change. Yet these changes have now been effected by the philanthropic spirit of the British nation. But this young traveller-theorist, whose name was Charles Darwin, was moved less by the spread of organized Christianity than by something else—the spread of Englishspeaking settlements as secular entities: In the same quarter of the globe Australia is rising, or indeed may be said to have risen, into a grand centre of civilization, which, at some not very remote period, will rule as an empress over the southern hemisphere. It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization.1 In his journal entry for 22 January 1836, Darwin, still on the Beagle, was unsure about whether he was thrilled or repelled by Australian society; yet by the end of the book as he finally prepared it, distance from Australia had made him more abstract and more enthusiastic about the continent, as we saw above. Still, Darwin did not join the Colonial Society. His journey on the Beagle led to theories about a rather grander process than the

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formation of the British Empire. But any sort of travel was grand enough. This was an era when simply travelling 500 miles from London qualified a gentleman for membership in an exclusive club.2 And some of the founders had criss-crossed the world a dozen times. It should be noted that they chose many different parts of the world to be interested in. Thus they were no bloc of ‘orientalists’ in the modern sense.3 Most British people had other things to think about besides the Orient.4 In the nineteenth century, indeed, the word ‘orientalist’ referred to those Westerners who were arguing against the Westernization of Indian schools, and for the teaching of Hindu classics in India.5 Could the more modern term ‘orientalist’ really be applied to them? Further afield, could it really be applied to mid-Victorian factory owners who were interested in markets in Australia or Germany? Could it be applied to London barristers interested in legal reform and the growth of probationary system in different settlement colonies? Orientalism did not pervade British society.6 It is better to look for imperialism in English social history, and even in the findings of the archival historians of places like the Bengal of the early nineteenth century, than to look for orientalism.7 And it is better to group the founders of the Colonial Society according to the places they actually visited, and in which the largest number of them seemed to be interested. The founders in the settlement colonies The most popular area of the world for the founders was Australasia. Almost all those who had travelled to or who had lived in Australasia were old enough on their journey out to remember it for the rest of their lives. Even those who never repeated the journey by going back and forth to England would count as world travellers. Yet quite a few had made the journey more than once, seeing a great deal of the empire and continually thinking about their place in it as they crossed and recrossed the globe. Thirty-four members had seen Australia. Eight had been to New Zealand. At least twelve out of the twenty-eight who had resided in Australia were from Melbourne (some were officials posted there, some settled there on their own). The fact that they lived in the city may have had something to do with what they expected in joining an organization such as the Colonial Society. Melbourne’s population had exceeded 140,000 by the 1860, less than a decade after the Victoria Gold Rush. By then, the city had its own traditions of Georgian and Victorian architecture, its own cultural pretensions, and its own clubs for well-placed colonials. Members of the Melbourne Club (1838) would certainly have expected a similar organization to repair to in London, even if they could not expect an immediate welcome in the exclusive old clubs of the English aristocracy.8 According to one English visitor in 1867, the members of the Melbourne Club were old squatters who had metamorphosed themselves into the ‘Tory of the Tory’.9 Tory as they might be, the old squatters could hardly go to England and barge into the Carlton. Apart from the Melbourne contingent, members of the various Royal, Philosophical, or Improvement Societies set up across Australia after 1838 also needed a place in London, since the Royal Society itself would not have had them.10 A man who illustrated the

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texture of the Australian information network outside Melbourne, and the many continuing connections between Australia and England, was George Macleay. He was the son of a man who was a member of the Royal Society—Alexander Macleay, the humbly born but hard-working Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. The elder Macleay had held the Colonial Secretaryship from 1826 to 1837. This was his second career, since he had retired from the Transport Board in London in 1815 at age 48. He went to Australia because he needed the money. He died in 1848, having married his daugh-ters into the colonial gentry. This Alexander Macleay was a self-made man, a man of parts—a man of insects. His achievements in entomology had been his entrée into the Royal Society. And he was a man of taste. He built for his family a Regency manor near Sydney, Elizabeth Bay House (1832), and he was a founder of the (London) Linnean Society, and of Australia’s first subscription library and the Australian Museum.11

Table 5.1 Areas visited

New members 26 June 1868 27 June to 12 August 1868 15 August to 3 November 1868 11 November to 30 December 1868 20 January to 25 February 1869 10 March to 13 April 1869 Total

Australia NZ Canada India South Africa

West Other Indies

11 7

0 2

10 9

5 3

4 1

2 0

7 4

4

1

3

3

0

0

2

3

0

3

0

5

1

1

4

2

3

2

2

0

3

8

2

4

7

1

1

4

37

7

32

20

13

4

21

Note Members can be counted in more than one column.

Our man, Alexander’s son George, could not compete with all of that. Nor could he compete with the scientific achievements of his cousin William, FRS, who would one day explore New Guinea (William had studied under Cuvier and knew Lamarck).12 George himself did go on more than one expedition with William, including the most important of Charles Sturt’s journeys. But when in 1859 George Macleay left his father’s house for good, rather than going off into the bush or out into the jungle he moved to London.13 London had more Regency architecture than even his father could provide. He joined the Colonial Society as a UK resident on 16 December 1868. The Society fit the bill for men like George Macleay, men who were the ‘actual and potential allies of the gentry’ of Australia (in the words of one historian), and members of the urban upper classes of Melbourne and Sydney.14 When they retired to London, they wanted to do

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more than associate with other former Australians.15 They looked for the club memberships that had marked their urban gentry status in Australia, but most had no real profession save that of being a colonist. Thus, the Colonial Society seemed a good professional body to join. It should be noted that the Australasians did not form a united front. Some men who had been in Australasia were appalled at how other men were mistreating the Aborigines or the Maori. What John Eldon Gorst saw of this matter in New Zealand led him to write an impassioned book, tour Great Britain campaigning for civil rights, and vow to crush popular democracy—for in his view it was the common people and their leaders who attacked the Maori. To keep the common people and their murderous tendencies in check, he spent his life inventing and organizing the central institutions of the Conservative Party, under the auspices of Disraeli and Salisbury. In the 1880s he helped to found the so-called ‘Fourth Party’ (with fellow Colonial Society founder Henry Drummond Wolff and two men who were too young to have joined the Colonial Society in its first months, Lord Randolph Churchill and Arthur Balfour); this was a Tory pressure group that wanted a more direct attack on the Liberal government than their own front bench seemed willing to provide.16 The second most common area of travel after Australia was Canada, which thirty-two members had visited. At least four, including the banker, Thomas Baring, had on one or more occasions joined the three dozen or so men at the Canada Club at one of their fourtimes yearly dinners in London; founded in 1810, the Canada Club never had a building or an office of its own, just the regular dinner in some public establishment.17 Canada had its own learned societies and metropolitan clubs, clubs that—uniting learned men, prominent social figures, and urban businessmen—were being organized at the same time as their British and Australian equivalents.18 The thirty-two former Canadians or visitors to Canada did look to Canada rather than to Australasia, and not in addition to Australasia, for there was little overlap between these men and those associated with the Antipodes. The general category of imperialism had not yet been invented. And yet some people invented it for themselves. A.R.Roche is worth pausing over, since he was the Colonial Society’s secretary. Roche was a workaday Anglo-Canadian— outwardly an unremarkable type. He laboured as a government clerk at various places in Canada for the better part of fifteen years, then went home to England. But he dreamed of tropical empire. He was a traveller in Canada and an armchair traveller in places far beyond. Apparently Roche’s duties in Canada were stultifying and his mind overactive. While he sat in his office in the frozen north he had New Hebrides on the brain. In 1844, his brother wrote a book about the New Hebrides; this was Henry Philip Roche, a London barrister who would eventually become Registrar of the Court of Bankruptcy. He too was to be a founder of the Colonial Society, as was a third brother, E.S.Roche. Henry Philip’s book was an anonymously written sixty-six-page disquisition, very helpfully called (in full) Description of the New Hebrides Group of Islands in the South Pacific Ocean: Showing the Advantages to be Derived from the Formation of a Settlement on One of the Islands for the Purpose of Cultivating the Spices and the Many Other Articles of Commerce Indigenous to the Group; with a Brief Notice of the Objects, &c. of THE NEW HEBRIDES COMPANY, and some General Suggestions for Organizing

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an Extensive and Lucrative Trade, by means of British Capital and Enterprise, amongst the Numerous Islands and Countries Lying between our Australian and Indian Possessions, and throughout the Indian Seas Generally; thus opening a new and Almost unlimited Market for the Consumption of British Manufactures.19 The word ‘imperialism’, had it been available, would have been so much more concise, but Henry Philip got his point across without it: profit-making tropical empire. He added one more thought, an attempt to connect his mercenary ideas to some higher moral purpose: Enough has now been said to show the importance of this trade—a trade which, if conducted on judicious and liberal principles, admits almost of an unlimited extension. At present it would be premature to enter more fully into detail, as the course of action which the Company will pursue must depend, in a great measure, upon the coun-tenance which the Government may give it. To throw open the existing Dutch monopoly in spices, and to extend the field of our commerce, cannot be objects of indifference to British statesmen. Those who wish to elevate the character of a large portion of the human race, and to convey to them a knowledge of religion, cannot but view in a favourable light the substitution of a just, equitable, and regular system of trade for one which too often has been the pretext for nothing but violence and oppression.20 So, breaking the Dutch monopoly meant making a tremendous profit, and at the same time saving souls. Now if this sort of tropical adventuring had occurred on any scale prior to 1868, and if imperialists involved in it had bucked large in the membership of the Colonial Society, then our story of the interests and writings of the founders of the Society would be very different indeed. But the Roche family was not representative of a wide-spread enthusiasm for tropical empire; there wasn’t one. Nor were the Roches’ plans for bothering the peoples of the New Hebrides actually carried out. Again, the fate of Henry Philip, dreamer of the New Hebridean dream, was to work among bankrupts—high poetic justice.21 Alfred is more important to us, since he was to be the Colonial Society’s secretary. His hubris about the plans that he and his brother made kept him in Canada and kept him poor. Divine retribution came about in the following way. Nine years into his Canadian career, and a few years after his brother’s book came out, an old Canada hand and friend of his became Governor of Labuan in the East Indies. Roche’s imagination was fired. He tried to persuade his sisters in England to get him a job under his friend in Labuan, or otherwise under Rajah Brooke in Sarawak. The ‘12,000 islands of the Eastern seas’ seemed far more exciting than where he was, and Roche claimed that he would accept less money in the Far East if only he could put an end to his long years in Toronto. Roche could hardly make himself go on with his work, his official work. He sat in his Toronto office every day, but he was spending the time reading up on the Spanish language, hoping that it would come in handy in the New Hebrides.22 This fanciful notion of learning Spanish came from how he misread the book. The first quarter of it was a long description of how the New Hebrides had seemed to the Spanish explorer, Quiros, from 1606 to 1614. Yet Spain never administered the islands—and Quiros, pace Henry Philip Roche, was in any case Portuguese.23 So, while Henry Philip’s book was

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silent on matters of language, Alfred assumed that Spanish was spoken, rather than the indigenous languages, or English and French. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Alfred, his sisters did not get to see the Rajah while he was in England, so the official appointments did not come off.24 No more successful were the large-scale missionary enterprises that Alfred next planned for the New Hebrides. In a letter to a friend, he promised not only a missionary station, but also a large trading and industrial concern in the East Indies along the lines of what his brother had planned. He would have all kinds of success in the South Seas. He was sure that he would also enjoy a large measure of political power-power over, in his words, the ‘seventy thousand of the heathen savages who inhabit the islands of the New Hebrides’.25 Apparently, Roche the secretary daydreamed not so much about a British Empire as a personal one; he would be the next Rajah Brooke. And then he took a rash step. He refused a promotion to a higher secretarial grade because he was planning to leave the country and do great things. Indeed, his ‘Asia Company’ (for he had already selected the name) would go on ‘to create, to establish, and to build up, to carry the flag, the religion, and the civilization of England over a fifth portion of the globe’—even to some very rich areas of the Canadian northwest.26 Poor Roche. During the Crimean War he wrote a seventy-page work on how Great Britain ought to take Alaska from the Russians, describing his proposal further in the Montreal Gazette; no one paid attention and peace was made.27 Then, after several more years as a secretary at the lower grade where he had stranded himself, and after lord knows how much more daydreaming, he was sent home to England to testify before a parliamentary inquiry into the status of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Roche could finally tell Parliament about the great imperial destiny of the vast lands under the control of the Company. This was the zenith of his career. A moment later it became the nadir. He had testified to the riches of the northwest of his dreams. Then, under close questioning he had to admit that he had never been to the northwest. He had not even set foot in the nearer parts of the Hudson’s Bay Company territory. The members of the committee were less than impressed by his quality as a witness.28 He dreamed about places of which he knew little.29 The founders in Asia and Africa Of course, some Britons had better information about the world beyond the pale of British settlement. At least twenty had lived in India. All but two of this group maintained addresses and personal interests in the United Kingdom. (Very few Englishmen would acquire homes or estates in the subcontinent or cut their ties to England, even in those brief periods, such as just after the Mutiny, when the GovernorGeneral encouraged them to do so.30) In any case, well over half of the Colonial Society founders who were in India were well-placed officials of the Raj. They had rather nice English homes to go back to. Very few of them ever belonged to the Indian civil service, whose membership in the midnineteenth century came largely from outside the upper classes.31

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One member of the Colonial Society who had been in the civil service in India was hardly lacking in privilege. He was Lord William Hay, later 10th Marquess of Tweedale. Although a Liberal MP by the time the Colonial Society was founded, he was still travelling from time to time in the Himalayas. On his return he would report his findings to Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society. India ran in Hay’s blood. His father and brother (the 8th and 9th Marquesses) had been there, and the 9th Marquess (then Lord Arthur Hay) fought in the Mutiny.32 Humble civil servant or no, Hay was no exception to the rule that the Colonial Society founders who were in India were prominent men. The thirteen founders who were in Southern Africa are harder to get to know. Six were phantoms, while seven others left some evidence about themselves. Not very many books would come from these men. Those who wrote anything tended to produce fairly basic, mostly descriptive articles. When the Society was born, for example, a young Natal newspaperman and member of the Legislative Council, John Robinson, had just published the first of his picture portraits of Natal life in Cornhill, one of them running in November 1867 and the other in October 1868. These brief pieces of journalism were competent in their discussions of the landscape, but they did not reach questions of imperial policy, political controversy, or relations with the natives of the country. Robinson, who grew up in the bush with little formal schooling, would go on to write a novel and to become, in the 1890s, the first Prime Minister of Natal under responsible government.33 Such casual writers often revealed a more emotional and less economic variety of imperialism. Such is the case with the medical doctor who went to Natal, Dr Robert James Mann. A physician practising first in Norwich and then in Buxton, Derbyshire, he began by giving talks to local audiences, but these soon turned into numerous books on astronomy and medicine. Indeed, he became the key British popularizer of science of his era. A friend of Tennyson, Dr Mann also wrote—with the Poet-Laureate’s help—a short book defending the poem ‘Maud’; the book, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ Vindicated, was published in 1856. What needed vindicating against the general outrage of the critics was the mad narrator’s glorification of warfare (the unpopular Crimean War, in this case) as a cure for one man’s troubled inner life.34 Action and warfare are vitalizing forces, Mann believed, because ‘rational creatures do, every now and then, cut each other’s throats, and blow each other to atoms by hundreds of thousands; since the Omniscient has accorded to warfare an appointed function in human affairs’.35 Whether to pursue the Tennysonian life of action, or simply to live in a better climate—for his health was failing—Mann prepared to leave the country at the very time that he was completing his book on Tennyson. The following year, 1857, Mann accepted an invitation from Bishop Colenso to come to Natal. He lived there from 1857 to 1866, becoming superintendent of education in 1859. When he returned to England he settled in London, working as the Natal emigration agent. In that role, he went on to publish a number of guidebooks and other pamphlets for potential emigrants. Mann stressed that the main reason for anyone to go to Natal was this: It was a pleasant place 6,000 miles closer than Australia.36 One may pick up an echo here of his own thinking before he left England, namely that Mann seems to have had in mind not so much the call of a particular imperial destination, but a menu of likely places of

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settlement in the temperate empire, places that one could visit for one’s own adventure or to find solace for one’s Tennysonian heart. Mann joined the Colonial Society at the inaugural meeting.37 In contrast to the southern tip of Africa, the rest of the continent attracted almost no attention from the early members of the Colonial Society—except for three of them, plus the odd Member of Parliament who had to deal with African issues. As Dorothy Helly has shown, British interest in tropical Africa blossomed only after the mid-1870s. Until then, only about 150 Englishmen, many of them officials, showed any sustained interest. The 150 men—men who were members of the Royal Geographical Society, the early ethnographic societies, and various evangelical or anti-slavery groups—constituted, in Helly’s words, ‘[a] web of communication by which a small, dedicated, group of Englishmen interested in keeping themselves “informed”, exchanged their views and in so doing reinforced their own assumptions’.38 The Colonial Society was another such web, rather larger, and more interested in the settlement colonies. Some of its members, such as Sir William Mackinnon, would later develop an interest in Africa, but it would have been quite another thing to do so in the 1850s or 1860s. The three men of the Colonial Society whose association with tropical Africa had begun before 1868—so that their interests fed into the Colonial Society, rather than feeding on it—included Colonel Sir Andrew Clarke, who had been posted off West Africa briefly in 1864 and 1865. William Edmondstone, RN, was unique having spent some years in tropical Africa; he was stationed at Zante in 1859 with the rank of Commodore. Both of these officers had been called to defend African entrepôts, and yet neither man had chosen an African career, and neither showed any wide-ranging interest in the continent. By contrast, our third man showed a great deal. He was Lord Alfred Churchill, Conservative MP for Woodstock, and a younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. He does not seem to have visited the continent himself, but as Chairman of the Liverpoolbased ‘African Aid Society’ he pushed for the expansion of British control and trade in West Africa. His larger purpose was, in his mind, to help black people. In 1859, as an official of the Aborigines Protection Society, he had been part of an unsuccessful movement to annex Fiji and keep it out of the hands of Americans or other insensitive powers. Then, in 1860, he and his African Aid Society came up with a bigger plan. Churchill (again unsuccessfully) pressed the government to redeploy its West African stores and ships to a central place on the coast near the Cameroon Mountains; then to found a sanatorium there to save the lives of European soldiers and traders who were too weak to reach a place of rest in Europe; and finally to found a colony of free blacks from Canada, which was the main goal behind all of Churchill’s plans for the shifting about of troops. At one point in 1864, Churchill came into conflict with other founders-to-be of the Colonial Society by advocating just this sort of ambitious and intricate tropical expansion.39 They wanted nothing of the kind. Nor did the British traders who already had interests in Africa. They strongly protested Churchill’s plans for steam navigation on the Gambia, subsidized by the imperial government. The established traders did not want the competition.

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Churchill was indeed a humanitarian by intention, but he had convinced himself that a European presence was really the best for everyone. In 1864, he wrote that a ‘permanent British occupation’ would serve to advance ‘civilization’.40 By this time, he was also favourably disposed towards the settlers in New Zealand, a country that he had visited; he did not think that the New Zealand settlers meant any harm to the Maori.41 He did not examine the specifics of the case; he had let his general ideas about colonization run away with him. In sum, most of the travellers in the Colonial Society went to Australasia, North America, India, or Southern Africa. Few had any connection to tropical Africa or East Asia.42 More strikingly, only fifteen had any demonstrable connection with Ireland, despite that island’s role in providing the empire with administrators. The Irish imperialists were mostly Anglo-Irish, men who were accustomed to running hegemonic governments at home as well as abroad.43 Where has all this got us? It seems that the top one-third of the members, the people who keep showing up as aristocrats, as ministers, as MPs, and some of them even as businessmen, may very well be described as ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, a species identified by Cain and Hopkins.44 The one-third below them (namely the chamber-of-commerce types and the bureaucrats) might not be capitalists, but merely gentlemen of more modest station—men who worked, not men who invested. Yet both groups were dominated by men who wrote. While ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ is therefore a good label for distinguishing the more prominent part of the membership, ‘gentlemanly imperialist’ is more inclusive. By and large the men in the top one-third were more gentlemanly than capitalistic, and the men of the middle one-third of the membership were incapable of the kind of liquid investment that would make them capitalists. Both the top gentlemen and the middling gentlemen had mixtures of economic and non-economic motivations for their imperial interests, as it would seem for everything else. Yet they were imperialists to a man, or they would not have joined the Colonial Society and written on imperial subjects. The vital point is the uncertainty about how heavily economic concerns weighed on people’s minds. This uncertainty comes from the overlapping of social identities, occupational identities, and personal interests. But whatever the members’ reasons for going on their travels or writing their books, the simple fact that they did so demonstrates one thing: they had brushed up against some part of the cultural border at which England at its apogee was bound to meet the underdeveloped world. They had to categorize the information that poured in from elsewhere. And they wrote about all of this. The pattern of their writings Yet they did not follow the headlines very closely, or not in the way one might expect. Some of the men who were interested in overseas democracy looked at the American Civil War (1861–65)—but for most of the founders this great event was not very significant. They paid little more attention to it than they did to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, and little more attention than they would pay to the Governor Eyre controversy of 1865–66. They did not need to pay attention to these new events. Most of the founders

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had long before developed their own general theories of what the empire was and what it ought to be. The concentrated bloodshed in the American republic did not matter very much when it was seen against the background—the general destiny of the settlement empire—that the Colonial Society founders had been developing over a considerable period of time. Their British Empire did not have slavery or mob rule, which were American peculiarities that could only be distractions from the larger, normative trends of the British world. The founders were almost as good at ignoring the native rebellions within the British Empire. While the Indian Mutiny had to be put down, it did not have to be pondered, for the grand future would come despite the random eruptions of native resistance. As we will see, even the founder of the Colonial Society himself, who had been an officer in the Indian Army and who wrote voluminously on imperial subjects, seems to have paid the Mutiny no attention at all. He may have gazed at the Indian headlines in the newspaper, but he didn’t write anything about them, any more than most of the other founders would condescend to write anything about Governor Eyre’s imposition of martial law and judicial murder after the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. English society was polarized and much exercised over the Governor Eyre controversy—but the founders of the Colonial Society were not. Except for dissidents and doubters such as Lord Salisbury, neither American history nor native rebellions within the empire signified very much, for they were unpleasant and unrepresentative; what was really going on in this world were the great global trends of British expansion, settlement, and self-government. Or perhaps the great trend—if you cared more for the historical and archaeological study of the past than for the development of overseas democracy—was the expansion of British control and civilization in a way that contrasted favourably with what the Romans did, and for that matter with what the Spanish did. Either way, there were always short notices in The Times about the growth and development of different parts of the British Empire. The Colonial Society founders had made their own selections from these facts and from what they had seen on their own travels. Then they had filtered this flow of information through their reading of Tocqueville or archaeology. Finally they had developed their general ideas about the course of human history. These ideas were secure against the assault of the major unrepresentative events that from time to time made a greater noise in the newspapers, and that temporarily drew the attention of a wider group of people to imperial questions. The founders may once have had their attention caught by headlines in a similar way, but they had chosen to continue thinking and writing on the subject; they developed a steady and long-term interest in it. Thinking and writing on this subject—and, if not publishing articles and books on the empire, then writing official documents on it—led them into the kind of imperial generalizations that they would share by 1868. They had become longterm enthusiasts, and they did not react to events in the same way as those short-term enthusiasts whose interest in the empire came and went, and which extended only to one or more of the major controversies of each decade. Indeed, the fact that the founders had imposed their own pattern, their own categories upon the flow of information that reached them allowed them to filter it, to pay attention to what they wanted and ignore the rest. Their world was quieter than the world of those people who bounce around from

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subject to subject, following a large proportion of the major headlines hither and thither. Table 5.2 shows the founders who published works about the empire and other subjects before April 1869; it does not include those who wrote unpublished official or private papers, or works that were published later. Again, writers were especially prominent among the members who had joined the Society by the end of the summer of 1868. What Table 5.2 cannot show (although subsequent chapters can) is the movement towards worldwide generalizations within individual books. It is not so much that the founders began by writing books in one category (the miscellaneous category in the right-hand column, for example), and later began writing books of another kind, but that in all their writings the founders tended to move towards generalization and imperial themes, and to filter away the noisy specifics. One has to look within the books. The fact that a number of the founders moved to a new category of writing in 1857 or 1858 may seem to indicate the influence of the Indian Mutiny of those years—but only a few of those who changed subjects at this time wrote about India. The founders had abandoned the specifics well before those wars and crises of the 1860s that might have seemed to be the background of the founding of the Colonial Society.

Table 5.2 Subjects of books and articles published by the founders by April 1869; founders listed by birth year

New members

26 June 1868 ? H.Montgomerie ? L.H.Wray 1794 G.Bell 1801 A.Waddington 1803 W.M.Coghlan 1803 Bulwer Lytton 1807? D.P.Blaine 1808 W.Henty 1808 C.Nicholson 1814 E.Wilson 1816 A.Cochrane 1817 R.J.Mann 1817 H.P.Roche 1819 A.R.Roche 1823 C.Fortescue 1823 D. of Manchester 1828 C.F.Varley

Settlement colonies, the USA, emigration

NonArchaeology, Other settlement ethnology colonies and the Tropics

x x x x

x x

x

x x

x x x

x x x

x x

x x x x x x x

Travels and ideas 1829 1830 1831 1832

A.H.Louis H.D.Wolff G.J.Goschen Lord Bury Subtotal 27 June to 12 August 1868 1797 D.Salomans 1806 H.Merivale 1810 H.C.Rawlinson 1811 F.Rogers 1815 W.Westgarth 1817 C.H.Gregory 1818 S.H.Northcote 1819 C.B.Adderley 1820 S.Cave 1820 W.Jones 1827 H.C.E.Childers 1835 J.E.Gorst 1839 Viscount Milton Subtotal

New members

15 August to 3 November 1868 ? J.Bate 1804 W.T.Denison 1804 C.Manby 1809 H.Moor 1814 A.Kinnaird 1823 F.Weld 1831 Lord Carnarvon Subtotal 11 November to 30 December 1868 1802 E.C.Frome 1811 A.Croll 1817 I.Hellmuth

73

x x x 12

x

5

1

x x x 11

x x

x x

x

x

x

x x x x

x x x

x x x x x

x x x 7

5

Settlement colonies, the USA, emigration

x x

x x 4

3

8

NonArchaeology, Other settlement ethnology colonies and the Tropics

x x x x x 5

x

x 2

x x x x x 5

x x

x x

Empire as the triumph of theory 1827 A.Crooks 1834 G.F.Verdon 1839 J.Robinson Subtotal 20 January to 25 February 1869 ? T.Briggs 1812 W.Monsell 1818 J.F.V.Fitzgerald 1819 P.L.MacDougall 1822 D.Galton 1823 Duke of Argyll 1825 H.Holland 1830 Lord Salisbury Subtotal 10 March to 13 April 1869 1794 J.C.Marshman 1799 E. of Albemarle 1807 F.Hincks 1816 A.Mills 1843 C.W.Dilke Subtotal Total number of founders publishing in this area by April 1869

x x x 5

0

x

x

74

0

2

x x x x

x x

x

x 5

x 4

x 2

x

x x

x

x x 4 23

1 9

x x x 4 37

x x x x x 6

0 32

But there is one final point to make about Table 5.2. It also lists the founder-writers by age, from oldest to youngest among each of the Colonial Society’s intake groups. About three-quarters of the founders who had published something by April 1869 had reached age 30 by 1857, and more than half were significantly older than that, with at least three having been born in the eighteenth century. It would seem that most of the men had chosen what they wanted to write about by the time they were in their early thirties, and so any subsequent current events, whether the American Civil War or the Morant Bay Rebellion, seldom put them off their task, and seldom changed their generalized conclusions about the world. What these much trumpeted affairs may have done, indeed, was to push the founders even further into the refuge of abstraction and generality— especially when the wars and rebellions said things that the founders might not have wanted to hear about the nature of their imperial dream. The older men had more of a chance to write and publish, and their interests were more or less established by the time they were aged 30 or 35, which was before the Indian Mutiny. But that is where they wound up, not where they started. As we will see in Chapter 6, they had begun with more specific imperial connections and observations.

6 Tocqueville and Lord Bury The empire of democracy Many of the founder-members of the Colonial Society wrote on the subject of North America or Australia and New Zealand. But given all that was being published in Victorian England, how could a young man make his name by writing yet another description of, say, the Canadian prairie? Where was the market for such a thing? Our young author would need to spice up his book with ideology, and perhaps some breathless generalizations about the role of Great Britain in world history. As the future Lord Salisbury put it in 1861 (and he had written travel literature himself): As a general rule, travels on well-beaten tracks are a very dreary department of literature, of which the world is becoming thoroughly weary…. It approaches to an impertinence to publish a pretentious book about scenes which have been described a hundred times before, and which a few days’ luxurious travelling will enable anybody else to describe again…. The only interest in Canada that can possibly be new, is a social and political interest.1 Finding that ‘social and political’ interest in Canada meant finding some connection between Canada’s fate and that of England or the whole world. And in finding those connections, the works of Alexis de Tocqueville could be a great help. Surprisingly often, the founders tried to apply to the British, Canadian, or Australasian experience at least some of Tocqueville’s central ideas about democracy as a worldhistorical trend. The Society’s principal founder, Lord Bury, thought along these lines. His travels and writings were typical of a Tocquevillean and analytical tradition in English travel writing. So, what first set the founders apart from their countrymen was not in fact any variety of the imperialism visible in 1868, but that they wrote books on North American or Australian democratic issues in previous decades. Here their interests lay, rather than in reform (or resisting it), evangelicalism (or the Oxford Movement), free trade (or saving agriculture), making money (or shooting), or in any of the other preoccupations of midVictorian England. Democracy in America in England Indeed, the North American concerns of the founders were unusual. A close look at American democracy was not politic in the two decades prior to 1815, when Paris was ostensibly imposing democracy across Europe. Nor did democracy itself gain much

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popularity in England after 1815. Neither Robespierre and Napoleon across the Channel nor Chartism and rick-burning at home had predisposed the average man of the solid classes to listen sympathetically to Tocqueville on the worldwide advance of democracy. If the word ‘democracy’ was less than popular, so too was the word ‘America’. When America was not vilified in England, it was ignored there.2 England’s loss of what became the United States had become old news; Burke’s speeches on America had receded into the dim past of parliamentary history, and attention had turned towards domestic reform. The development of Canada, meanwhile, had receded into the dim present. Not even those North American affairs still controlled by Great Britain could enthral the vast majority of educated Englishmen. One MP referred to Canadian Confederation, on which Parliament spent only the briefest time, as the ‘Botheration Scheme’.3 One exception to English indifference was the Yankee-loving and hardly typical circle of Cobden and Bright, but they were so pro-American as to put people off. Bright, for one, did the cause of Anglo-American friendship little good when in 1865 he repeatedly expressed hope for a war between Great Britain and America. He assured everyone that America would win it; one well-placed acquaintance thought his ‘vehemence [was] hardly compatible with sanity’. More typical English opinion, however, ran against the rebellious colonies of 1776.4 This was true at the time of the Napoleonic trade dispute in 1812; it was true in midcentury, with the jaundiced views of Mrs Trollope and Charles Dickens—and it was true most notably in the 1860s, with the widespread championing of the Confederate States of America, which were teaching the rebellious former colonies of the United States what rebellion was all about.5 Before he founded the Colonial Society, Lord Bury (in a work on the roots of British policy in Canada in the first three decades of the nineteenth century) explained English anti-Americanism this way: ‘English statesmen deduced an erroneous lesson from the American Revolution. They attributed the rebellion of the thirteen colonies to the insolence of liberty unwisely conceded and fostered into license by the freedom of British institutions.’6 Americans were unsuited to real (British) liberty—or so ran the common assumption, according to Lord Bury. Tocqueville had to win his reputation despite his association with America. Yet he did become popular in England. The British could have little quarrel with what they—quite accurately—took to be Tocqueville’s high opinion of themselves. And since Tocqueville never produced the book on Great Britain for which he did indeed gather the material,7 most British people remained unaware of his analysis of the specific problems of democracy in their own country. Thus Tocqueville was famous for loving England and for finding at least some fault with America; hence the admiration in which he was held. Indeed, Tocqueville’s writings were included in English secondary school curricula and in lectures at Cambridge when Tocqueville himself was still a young man. His popularity in England even survived the attacks he made on British foreign policy in the 1840s, and it blossomed again in the 1850s and 1860s.8 Tocqueville’s argument ran something like this. In his view, the whole world was moving away from hereditary social distinctions and towards democracy. With democracy would come increasing social equality. This equality would in turn push

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people into demanding still greater levels of democracy, including progressive taxation and an end to entail and privilege. History showed that this process would keep spiralling on, with democracy and equality ever on the rise. The process could be seen best in America, where there had never been much of an aristocracy to begin with. In America, therefore, a democracy unchecked by the lingering elements of aristocracy might run to excesses that it would not yet have reached in England. Yet the United States shared with England a heritage of freedom and local self-government—the two best guarantors that democracy would not run out of control. Tocqueville went further. The democratic world (America being only the forerunner) would have fewer cultural graces and fewer excellent people than the Old Regime had, but also fewer people down in the muck. There would be a new sameness. Was sameness a good thing culturally? Tocqueville was not sure. There was yet another danger lurking in this inevitable future: Democratic equality could sometimes mean democratic slavery. Before the democratic age, there were people in society who had the power to resist the state. Some led aristocratic factions; others simply had money. Yet once equality and democracy had proceeded so far that everyone was an equal individual, then there would be no one to resist the will—the ‘tyranny’—of the majority. Atomized individuals—no longer banding together with others—would lie naked before the power of the state that claimed to represent them. The common people would find themselves absolutely equal—equal in their powerlessness, isolated from each other, obeying the despot who had promised economic security to the individual and greatness to the nation, all at the price of repression of anyone with the independent standing to challenge his authority. This was Tocqueville’s fear—a future that was democratic, equal, and unfree. But he also foresaw another possible future, one of democratic freedom. If there were no aristocrats left to challenge or thwart the despot, the necessary challenge to the centre might come instead from the culture of self-government itself. People could come together in associations and pressure groups; they could continually relearn cooperative action on town councils and on juries. Rather than becoming isolated as individuals, unable to resist a smiling dictator’s offer of bread and circuses, the people would exercise their power in cooperative movements, each of these movements serving both as a school for democracy and collective action, and as a check on any overweening tendencies on the part of the government. This vision of the coming democratic order as its own guarantor, in that citizens would continually relearn the habits and values of democratic action from participating in their own local or interest-based institutions, is what Tocqueville saw in America, despite America’s problems with conformity, money-grubbing, and not least slavery. In America the spirit of democracy and locally based self-government pervaded everything. Tocqueville could read the democratic values of the new age in America’s schools, its arts, its industries, its marriages; and even in the American preference for abstract over concrete words—for, as each untutored democratic man becomes his own theorist and judges the world by generalizing from his own case, he opts for theory-word boilerplate in preference to the painstaking concreteness of aristocratic scholarship.9 And if the New World would please the Levellers—who wanted fewer highs and lows, a greyer plain— Tocqueville himself seemed more pleased with England, where councils and juries and

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private societies schooled people in democracy, but aristocratic refinements continued uninterrupted. Emigrants to America had left many refinements behind. Tocqueville was an acquired taste in England.10 In 1840, John Stuart Mill took the readers of the Edinburgh Review on a careful search for Tocqueville’s influence. However, while Mill wrote about the spread of Tocqueville’s fame in England, later scholars have hardly begun to do so.11 Mill thus remains the key witness to how Tocqueville’s thinking became available to Bury and the other founders of the Colonial Society. Mill was deeply influenced by Tocqueville,12 and would always bemoan the fact that so few other Englishmen were. Although he could identify a Tocquevillean tradition in English thought, he said that ‘it was all too rare’, like good travel books in general.13 Too much of Tocqueville’s English reputation depended upon people who had never read him, as Mill pointed out in his 1840 review of the second half of Democracy in America. Such people assumed erroneously that Democracy in America (or the first half of it, which had come out in 1835) was an attack on both democracy and America.14 But Tocqueville claimed that his experience in America had caused his aristocratic distaste for democracy to evaporate.15 For Mill, Tocqueville’s chief virtue was the balance of grand plotting with careful analysis of detail, a balance visible in each aspect of Tocqueville’s work. Mill stressed that Tocqueville treated democracy as a single explanatory theme, and yet that he did so multidimensionally and without oversimplification. Tocqueville had identified the main theme of modern political history—and yet the subject was not exhausted, Mill thought, for Tocqueville had also provided a model of analysing the myriad social and political facts of the mass democratic age. For Tocqueville himself, the key to keeping one’s bearings was balancing the general categories, which are merely convenient fictional shorthands, with the real specifics that could easily grow too numerous to be understood without them: The deity does not view the human race collectively. With one glance He sees every human being separately…. It follows that God has no need of general ideas, that is to say, He never feels the necessity of giving the same label to a considerable number of analogous objects in order to think about them more conveniently. It is not like that with man…. General ideas do not bear witness to the power of human intelligence but rather to its inadequacy…. [They] have this excellent quality, that they permit the human mind to pass judgement quickly over a great number of things; but the conceptions they convey are always incomplete, and what is gained in extent is always lost in exactitude.16 For Mill, Tocqueville had managed to explain modern democracy both in grand conception and in concrete detail. Tocqueville had not gone on into some literal-minded political programme flying off from his main thesis; instead he left his readers with the life-long job of further analysis. This task of continuous analysis, this continuous vigilance, was in Mill’s view the way in which Tocqueville had reconciled the myriad specifics of the modern mass age with the general categories needed for thought.17 Democracy was the central phenomenon of modern history, with decision-making being

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decentralized among millions of actors—and so democracy was to be treated as Tocqueville treated it, as an almost tangible object; it was to be approached from many of what Mill describes as its ‘complicated and endless…ramifications;’18 and final or grand judgement was to be withheld. That is what Mill thought Englishmen ought to make out of the book. He then went on to explore what his fellow-countrymen had in fact made of it. At least they had liked it: It has been the rare fortune of M.de Tocqueville’s book to have achieved an easy triumph, both over the indifference of our at once busy and indolent public to profound speculation, and over the particular obstacles which oppose the reception of speculations from a foreign, and, above all, from a French source. There is some ground for the remark often made upon us by foreigners, that the character of our national intellect is insular.19 Touché. Although the corpus of British travel writing about America in the early nineteenth century was large, it was not very good; America was either an immature England or an object lesson for English politics.20 Now, this insularity had manifested itself in certain specific mistakes about Democracy in America, especially among those Englishmen who liked it most. Mill wrote that Conservatives had taken Tocqueville’s ‘tyranny of the majority’ (mentioned even in the first half of Democracy in America, published in 1835) as something to be resisted: ‘This phrase was forthwith adopted into the conservative dialect, and trumpeted by Sir Robert Peel in his Tamworth oration, when, as booksellers’ advertisements have since frequently reminded us, he “earnestly requested the perusal of the book by all and each of his audience”.’21 Perusal did not mean reading, but Mill allowed himself to hope that perusal might do people some good, despite all the misguided attempts to appropriate Tocqueville politically. Again, what mattered for Mill was Tocqueville’s method. Thus the nameless Conservative gentlemen who, Mill wrote, took Tocqueville’s work as ‘a definitive demolition of America and of Democracy’, would at least have learned something by their study. The error of these nameless gentlemen was one ‘which has done more good than the truth would perhaps have done; since the result is, that the English public now know and read the first philosophical book ever written on Democracy, as it manifests itself in modern Society’. The conclusions of this popular book, Mill went on to say, might be modified but never abandoned, for he believed that it constituted ‘the beginning of a new era in the scientific study of politics’.22 In Mill’s view, therefore, Democracy in America had a great and still growing reputation in England; as of 1840, the book was not always understood, but a proper understanding of it might spread more widely. In subsequent years, the evidence for Mill’s shining new era of Tocqueville-inspired democratic analysis does not exist—apart from odd eruptions, some of them very well traced by David Paul Crook.23 During the US Civil War, for example, Anthony Trollope bought twenty volumes of old Congressional debates. He planned to become ‘a second De Tocqueville’, as he recalled almost twenty years later; by then he had decided that the ambition was absurd, and that he would never read the debates.24 What of the Edinburgh Review itself, in whose pages Mill had lauded Tocqueville so highly? The Edinburgh would one day be edited by Tocqueville’s translator, Henry

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Reeve. Reeve was editor from 1855 to 1895. Although he did make some attempt in his own articles to pursue the kind of analysis that Mill wanted to see, he did so only in his articles on Tocqueville himself. In other articles, Reeve’s Conservative axe swung wider and wider as the years went by. Both he and his contributors treated America as a lowclass aberration from the English norm, rather than as an opportunity for learning about continuing trends in the history of European civilization itself. Reeve never visited America,25 and in his articles he tended towards a simple anti-Americanism with no sympathetic interest in the Anglo-Saxons living in between clapboard walls overseas, whether they were British subjects or not. Tocqueville had complained as early as 1839 that Reeve’s translations of his books— which would remain the English standard throughout the nineteenth century—distorted the sense of the French so as to introduce an English anti-Americanism. As Tocqueville told Reeve, ‘It has seemed to me that in the translation of the last book [the first half of Democracy in America] you have, without wanting it, followed the instinct of your opinions, very lively coloured what was contrary to democracy and rather appeased what could do wrong to aristocracy.’26 Too many people, Reeve among them, had taken up Tocqueville as a political ally, ignoring what was positive in Tocqueville’s depiction of American democracy.27 Reeve’s translation was the Tocqueville that the founders of the Colonial Society would have had closest to hand.28 Whatever distortions they may have imbibed from it, we shall see that many of them still remained truer to Tocqueville’s spirit than his translator did. If the Edinburgh Review did not beat the drum for Tocqueville, neither did Mill himself in later years. Mill drew away due to Tocqueville’s unsurprising advocacy of French rather than British imperialism. Mill’s correspondence with Tocqueville almost ceased from 1843 forward; at that point Tocqueville’s reputation also suffered a steep decline across the political spectrum in England. Tocqueville had provoked British anger because of what he was saying in the National Assembly. The subject was Britain’s commercial and naval supremacy. Tocqueville did not want the interests of the French nation and of French shipping to be given away to Great Britain, as New Zealand had been given away not long before. As part of a proposed entente cordiale, Guizot had conceded to the British the right to board certain French ships to search them for slaves. This concession, Tocqueville feared, would further alienate the French populace from their already unpopular government. The government was unrepresentative, uninterested in reform, and of course it had already lost its chance for New Zealand; Tocqueville did not want to see France further demoralized. Indeed, Tocqueville would long hold the opinion that a nation needed moral strength and confidence if it was not to seek the refuge that a tyrant provides from individual decision-making.29 As early as 1840, Tocqueville had expressed his fear that French pique at the activities of Britain might yield a new French revolution and a new war.30 Tocqueville did not want the French to be further divided and further humbled before their own government. Therefore, because of his opposition to these reactionary tendencies in the ministry of Guizot, who after all had told people who were too poor to vote that they should simply get rich, Tocqueville attacked the proposed entente. In England, almost everyone who could boast some understanding of Tocqueville’s thinking were appalled by Tocqueville’s sudden championing of what they saw as a narrow,

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nationalistic, anti-free trade, and (above all) anti-British way of looking at international politics. This episode does not loom large in the most recent French biography of Tocqueville,31 but it did among English opinion-makers. Many of Tocqueville’s English friends believed that the Frenchman had betrayed not only themselves but also his own principles. Mill wrote to Tocqueville claiming that by attacking English policy and playing to the base French instinct of amour propre he had betrayed the fundamental principles of rational political procedure about which Englishmen had looked to him for guidance.32 For Mill, then, English policy was at least in this one case synonymous with rational politics. Mill now had little confidence that Tocqueville’s stock would continue to rise in England. The empathy for the emotional needs of traditional communities that Mill showed in his work at the India Office33 did not extend to the emotional needs of the French. Despite the kind responses of Tocqueville to Mill’s less than respectful letters, and despite a further letter from Tocqueville in 1847,34 Mill did not avail himself of Tocqueville’s offer of renewed friendship until Tocqueville wrote to him yet again—in 1856.35 Reeve, for his part, reproached Tocqueville over the issue only after Tocqueville had died, but reproach him he did.36 So, while most of the English never understood Tocqueville very well, even those leading lights who had been most partial to him, and who should have understood his French patriotism, were for some years alienated from him over this issue. But humbler people—for example, travellers, writers, and Canadian officials—followed the proceedings of the French National Assembly rather less carefully; they kept the faith with Tocqueville, even if they could not always match his brilliance in deploying argumentative detail; they kept faith with what they took to be the Tocquevillean idea that the future progress of the world lay in the hands of the Englishspeaking nations.37 Mill abandoned Tocqueville; the founders of the Colonial Society did not, and kept on reading him. As Mill had seen, Tocqueville’s ideas about democracy proved to be useful in turning one’s dizzyingly varied experiences of the modern world into organized thinking. The earlier founders of the Colonial Society were not as careful in their generalizations as Tocqueville had been. They spun even bigger, ever grander theories of the fate of the whole English-speaking world and of the world-historical role of English-speaking civilization. Some of the founders even anticipated a tropical imperialism.38 It was indeed Tocqueville, whom the founders mention, from whom the founders took their inspiration; they were not inspired by Mill, whom they do not mention. All in all, what the founders took from Tocqueville was, first, the intellectual validation of their interest in overseas settlements; second, a habit of connecting the features of Englishspeaking democracy at home to apparently similar features in the English-speaking democracies abroad; third, a world-historical framework, namely the move towards democratic social equality that (for good or ill) the English-speaking world took a lead in; and fourth, at least sometimes, a focus on carefully analysing the structures of local government in order to understand a nation’s practical constitution in all its complications. Tocqueville himself put it this way in the only work that he was to publish originally in Great Britain:

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The English, who literally cover the surface of France, and who daily traverse the surface of France in all directions, are generally quite unacquainted with what is going on there. Admirable narratives are published in London, of what happens in the East and West Indies; the social and political condition of the antipodes is tolerably well known in England; but of the institutions of France the English have hardly even a superficial notion. They know still more imperfectly the ideas which have currency there.39 Yes, Tocqueville’s British readers knew their own empire and ‘what happens in the East and West Indies’ and in the antipodes, but they were hardly able to see Tocqueville’s French context; they assumed that English-speaking civilization itself, rather than the democratic and egalitarian tendencies affecting it, constituted the central phenomenon of the modern world. Lord Bury, officer and amateur Towgood had a fair talent, unspeakably ill-cultivated; with considerable humour of character: and, bating his total ignorance, for he knew nothing except Boxing and a little Grammar, shewed less of that aristocratic impassivity and silent fury that for the most part belongs to Travellers of his nation.40 (Sartor Resartus, 1831)

In the footsteps of Tocqueville there appeared the travel books and political tracts written by the founders—the books that wound up on the shelves of the Colonial Society itself, it is safe to say under the gaze of their authors.41 Pride of place must go to the main founder himself, Lord Bury, whose writings show how the influence of Tocqueville upon the founders continued into the 1860s.42 Tocqueville himself had died in 1859, but what Bury wrote shows us more than that. Bury constituted a one-man demonstration of how appropriate it is to treat the founders as a set of thinkers, however obscure most of them have since become in the history of political or archaeological thought. Bury’s multi-volume attempts at being an intellectual underscore the unashamedly bookish life led by so many Victorian gentlemen in the period before the onrush of intellectual specialization in the 1870s.43 His imperialism makes sense only when seen against this wider intellectual activity. Bury could survey information pouring in from all over the world. He not only brought people together to found the Society; despite all their variety, he wrote enough to typify them. As one might well expect, the man who founded the Colonial Society was enthusiastic about the role of the British Empire in furthering human progress. He wrote a 978-page tome on the subject. But one would not have expected Lord Bury himself to be the character behind either the Society or the book. Outwardly, he seemed to be more of a man of action than a leader or a thinker. Heir to an earldom, a Liberal, and an MP only in middle age, he was too pugnacious and fickle to make much of a mark in politics. Nor

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did his education, which took him from Eton straight into the Scots Guards, propel him into the higher intellectual circles (like many officers, he bypassed the universities). The pattern of his life—flitting from place to place and subject to subject—was set early. He began in the Guards, in which he served for only a year. Although he was not the type to maintain an extensive correspondence, he left the Guards to become Private Secretary to Lord John Russell (a position his father had held not long before); and yet after so drastic a move Bury was back in the army a few months later, albeit once again not for very long. The only part of this second period of service that Bury seemed to enjoy were the several months he spent rambling in the general direction of his post in India. More or less on the way, he visited the Holy Land and the excavations in what is now Iraq, and he stayed with Hormuzd Rassam in Kurdistan, Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh, and Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (who would himself be a founding officer of the Colonial Society) at Baghdad. For many of the Colonial Society founders, the desert camps of the archaeologists Rassam, Layard, and Rawlinson were the principal tourist attractions of the Asian continent. Bury did not stay in camp long enough to excavate anything, but it is not too much to suppose that Rawlinson, for one, shared with Bury his latest translations and discoveries about his special subject, the sequence of Mesopotamian empires. Still, Bury was soon aboard a pilgrim ship that took him part of the way to Mecca.44 Eventually, he did get to his posting, that of aide-decamp to Lord Frederic Fitzclarence in Bombay. After only a few months he was ill, out of the army again, and on his way home. Soon enough, he would spend about three years in Canada; then he entered Parliament. Nor did Lord Bury pursue most of his civilian interests for very long. In his thirteen years of discontinuous service in the House of Commons (thirteen years out of seventeen, from 1857 to 1874)45 he chiefly acted the part of enraged crusader against all proposals for army reform. His military bent also led him to the Volunteers. Only after Cardwell’s army reform of 1871, which reduced their role and which Bury of course resisted, did he settle down and turn more of his attention towards non-military matters. But the controversy was not forgotten. In 1878, when he was Under-Secretary of State for War (it was to be his only government post in Great Britain), he continued to try to carve a niche for the Volunteers despite Cardwell’s careful planning for a more professional army.46 On the civilian side, he had begun tilting at that great Victorian wind-mill, a Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill; he corresponded briefly with Gladstone on the subject.47 Bury’s interest in the Bill coincided with the Indian Mutiny and the subsequent winding-up of the East India Company. One would think that the Indian Mutiny and its aftermath would be a fitting subject for him if ever there was one, but he paid no attention to it. He showed no interest in any of the fighting nor in any of the subsequent debates, despite his Indian service. Deceased wives’ sisters loomed too large in his life just then (and he would come back to the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill from time to time in later years, including once during his period as president of the Colonial Society).48 His only more or less Indian activity at the watershed of 1857–58 was to introduce in Parliament a petition from the merchants of Singapore, asking for that island to be transferred from the Indian government to the Colonial Office.49 Bury’s interest in the non-Indian parts of the empire ebbed and flowed as well. He

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remained president of the Colonial Society for only two years after founding it; his immediate successor, the Duke of Manchester, stayed in the post for seven. One period deserves special attention for the way it revealed the development of his ideas about the empire. In 1854, between his final period in the army and his first period in Parliament, Bury took the post of Native Affairs Commissioner in Canada. The work involved frequent travel to confer with the Indians; Bury was suited to frequent travel. Indeed, a solemn council once gave Commissioner Bury the name ‘Chief White Reindeer’ (very appropriate for someone of his migratory habits).50 But Bury had good reason for his travelling, namely to seek the counsel of as many Indians as possible. He was gathering evidence for a key report on their behalf. There was a proposal to make the Indian Department self-supporting—or simply to abolish it, merging the Indians and their lands into regular Canadian society. Bury was strongly against these moves. He thought them fatally premature. The Indians, he wrote, were moving towards the level of civilization at which they could look after themselves. They would soon make enough money to keep possession of their lands in the face of white squatters and other challenges. All that still kept the Indians from doing this much, and moving with considerable success into the Europeanized economy, was their weakness in the English or French languages. That weakness would disappear in a generation if schooling were handled correctly. Self-sufficiency, then, was the future that Bury saw for the Indians, but it was a future that would be endangered if Indians themselves were to be taxed to pay for their white administrators cum guardians—and still more endangered if they were stripped of those administrators too soon.51 What, then, according to this line of thinking, were the key characteristics of a people’s modernity, the key guarantors of their independence within the capitalist world? It seemed to Bury in this 1855 report that the indispensable keys were neither British governance nor British blood—both of these, which would be the focus of much imperial pride in the 1880s and after, he took care to reject.52 He saw two other keys: the possession of the imperial language and of one’s local property. Even the Indians could aspire to these possessions.53 This idea of having a voice and a family farm would have endeared Bury to John Locke, but it would have endeared him as well to Tocqueville— who advocated the widest participation in local government, a participation guaranteed by a multiplicity of small inheritable freeholds.54 To this image of Indians turning into freeholding citizens (since they had given up the nasty Indian custom of holding property in common), Bury added one more item that would loom ever larger in his thoughts, an image of Canada as the apex of the wider history of European behaviour towards the aboriginals of the world. He contrasted British treatment of the Canadian Indians with the Indian policy of two other powers in the New World. For centuries, the Spanish policy was enslavement; the Americans, for their part, ‘deport whole tribes to more distant hunting-grounds, by peaceable means if possible, but, if necessary, by force, as soon and as often as the increasing tide of white emigration appears to demand wider bounds’.55 It was against this historical tableau that Bury set out his argument: Canada’s Indian policy was too important and too good to be subjected to budgetary salami-slicing—the Indian Department must be preserved. Lord Bury believed that the white Canadian settlers and their governments, like the Americans, would open all the Indian lands to settlement if possible. They should not be

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allowed to do so; the imperial government had to retain control over native policy and native lands. The Canadians would not have liked this, but Bury’s report was not immediately made public and he remained popular in Canada. He was the heir to an earldom, and the parents of eligible daughters were only too glad to have him around. He married Sophia MacNab, daughter of the Canadian Prime Minister. He also dabbled without notable success in two Canadian railway schemes (as noted in Chapter 4).56 Soon back in England, he would revisit Canada only once. Yet Canada was to be central to his imperial thinking for the rest of his life. Bury as writer and thinker Lord Bury paid attention to so many things that he seems the very model of the modern major-general—except that his highest rank was lieutenant-colonel of the Volunteers. His overall career, and especially his continual defence of the army from threats to make it more efficient and more military rather than social in purpose, might indeed have come to W.S. Gilbert’s attention before The Pirates of Penzance premièred in 1873. But whether or not it did, Bury was as fine a model of intellectual dilettantism as could be imagined by Gilbert or anyone else. He was no finance capitalist, no imperial careerist, no Little Englander, no man-on-the-spot—none of the characters traditionally used to explain Victorian imperial expansion or the growth of the imperialistic sentiment behind it. He simply reacted to some of what he saw in his career and in the news. One could try to fit him into one category or another, but the best of these competing categories for him is that of intellectual dilettante, reacting to the information flowing through the Victorian world. Thus it should be noted that Bury’s writings ranged from several articles on electricity to an article on modern philosophy to an 1887 handbook on bicycling (he was one of two coauthors of this handbook); it went through five editions before his death in 1895. His 1865 pamphlet on agriculture, ‘The Rinderpest Treated with Homeopathy in South Holland’, did not commend itself so well to a wide readership, even during the rinderpest epidemic of that year.57 The big book on empire, The Exodus of the Western Nations, was also published in 1865. It did rather better, garnering substantial reviews in The Times and elsewhere. It was Bury’s main publication on the subject, although he wrote four short articles on Canadian affairs in Fraser’s Magazine in 1857 and 1858, at the time of a second and shorter stay in the country. (After our period, he would go on to write a pamphlet on an 1873 border dispute with America, as well as an article on the empire in general in 1885.) The first of the 1857/58 Canadian articles anticipated much of the historical sweep that would take up hundreds of pages in The Exodus of the Western Nations. Democratic history, which Bury began by summarizing, was unfolding itself before anyone who wanted to go to Canada and look at it: Why, then, does not everyone with money and leisure, instead of making mechanically the usual Continental tour next summer, like a blind horse in a mill, determine to put his faith in Nature instead of ‘Murray’, see wonders in

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progress rather than castles in decay; and to vary the entertainment by a trip to the New World, with a view to a passing glimpse at England’s Yankee cousins, and a little more extended acquaintance with her Canadian sons?58 Bury’s other articles from 1857 and 1858 went into greater detail about Canadian geography and history, and the second speculated on sending England’s poor to that country.59 The third and most important of these articles began with a very Tocquevillean analysis of the mechanics of caucuses and the power of public opinion in the United States, and of how Canada was rather different. Later in the article, Bury borrowed some other ideas from Tocqueville: The same reasons which operate against the formation of an American regular army, would also prevent the formation of a regular army in Canada; but the latter has the advantage of a large infusion of the old-country love of order and obedience to constituted authority.60 For all the analytical flights, in none of these articles was there a hint from Bury that he was preparing a larger work. Bury must have begun his magnum opus in earnest some time after 1858, since at that point his attentions were more fully engaged by the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill and his anti-army reform campaign, for which he became quite famous in the newspapers. Perhaps he was inspired by his success in a Royal Geographical Society debate on Canada in February 1859, in which he brought the room to life with his attack on the Hudson’s Bay Company for standing in the way of the kind of transcontinental road- and railway-building that could help to unite the North American empire.61 Whenever he wrote it, with The Exodus of the Western Nations Bury surpassed himself. The book presents a rounded and fully realized picture of why he wished to see the British Empire bound more firmly together, and thus why he would found the Colonial Society. It shows how certain mid-Victorian generalists—if not generals—were led to the subject of empire. How did Lord Bury start down this road intellectually? When did details about the imperial world begin to build up in his mind? We have seen the outward details of his career in India and Canada, but there were also other ways in which the empire had come to his attention. His father, the Earl of Albemarle, had also written on imperial affairs. The way that in The Exodus of the Western Nations Lord Bury added Tocquevillean and imperialistic elements to the older kind of travel writing practised by his father is striking. If anything the father had a deeper interest in empire than the son did, but it was an interest that belonged to an older intellectual species than the son’s. Albemarle’s interest in things imperial was particularist. His interests had grown out of his own military service. Not for him generalization and abstraction; he was made of grainier stuff. Albemarle was from an in-between generation; he did not indulge in the theory-making of the older generation, the generation of the late Enlightenment, nor did he find any need to take the multiplying, ramifying facts of his own lifetime and put them into (new) meaningful categories, as his son and other mid-Victorians would. The plain facts of his life were interesting enough to him; he did not need to embroider them with philosophy. Albemarle entered the army just in time to walk home with it from

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Waterloo; he then had short postings to the Ionian Islands and Mauritius. He went on to India for two years as aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, the Marquess of Hastings, and left India when the Marquess resigned.62 He wrote an account of his journey home— a journey that he undertook overland; here was the precedent for Bury’s partially overland journey to a post in India thirty years later. The title of his father’s book gives a hint of the particularist flavour: Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England, by Bussorah, Baghdad, the Ruins of Babylon, Curdistan, The Court of Persia, The Western Shore of the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, Nishney Novogorod, Moscow, and St Petersberg in the year 1824, by Captain the Hon. George Keppel.63 It was dedicated to his own father, then Earl, from Dublin Castle, where the young captain was serving as aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant. There was no general idea of empire at all in the book, much less in the title, a detailed and largely non-British list of places. George Keppel, as he then was, does not seem to have connected his Indian and Irish experiences with his short service in the Ionian Islands and in Mauritius. But Bury grew up with a father who was simply full of stories like this: The principle person of the Prince’s establishment, was a Persian Syuud, a man of some information, and not deficient in humour. As I could speak Persian with tolerable fluency, I used frequently to amuse myself by asking his opinion respecting the improvement of our nation in different branches of science. Amongst other subjects, I tried to explain to him the properties of a steam-boat lately established in Calcutta, which, from the power of its stemming wind, tide, and current, has been called by the Indians ‘Sheitoun Koo noo’, the Devil’s Boat.64 Notice that he happened to be able to speak Persian, still employed by British as the official language of Indian diplomacy (until 1828).65 The fact that a short-term governorgeneral’s short-term ADC should go so far as to learn the language in conversational detail shows that he took some measure of interest in his imperial surroundings. If George Keppel would not generalize, he could certainly think. He could discuss English technical progress with a foreign courtier. Nor was he a chauvinist. He felt secure enough in his cultural position to report the Syuud’s reply to his story about the Devil’s Boat: ‘When arts were in their infancy, it was natural to give the devil credit for any new invention; but now, so advanced are the English in every kind of improvement, that they are more than a match for the Devil himself.’66 Keppel enjoyed the Syuud’s joke rather than refuting it. He passed immediately from the Syuud’s rejoinder into an analysis of the ‘Mahometan’ response to the technological superiority of infidels. In sum, Lord Bury’s father embodied the imperialism of Britain in India and Ireland (where he was posted), and mixed with it a bent for learning, conversation, analysis, and irony, but not generalization. He did not leave India entirely behind, as his son would do; the father always kept himself focused on specific cases. Years later, indeed only one year before the Mutiny, Keppel (now the Earl of Albemarle) crusaded in the Lords against the torture carried out by the native tax collectors working for the British in India. ‘By making our rule really beneficial to the people,’ he would write, ‘we can hope to

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maintain our anomalous government, and to fulfil that which is, I trust, our destiny—to remain forever the lords of India.’67 Here was an imperialism phrased so as to apply only one place, albeit a very important one. Keppel could admit that the government of India was merely ‘anomalous’—he did not have to resolve the anomaly into some great theory of empire. There was one more font of imperial experience in the family: George Keppel’s younger and rather less thoughtful brother Henry. Henry Keppel was the naval officer who had helped Rajah Brooke put down a rebellion in Borneo in the 1840s, and he went on to command the China station from 1867. He sometimes went a dozen years without seeing his brother, Lord Bury, but he put his imperial experiences before family and friends in other ways.68 In 1846 he published a two-volume account of the Borneo adventures, and while he took most of the material for these volumes from Rajah Brooke’s journal, Henry Keppel put the work together with a keen eye for detail. He included despatches, minutes, Brooke’s report on sending five orang-utans home to the London Zoo in 1841, and several pages by Brooke on Malay philology, including a long vocabulary table.69 There were no general conclusions worth speaking of. Unlike his brother, Henry Keppel kept his specific areas of imperial service discrete in his mind, dwelling on the details and the local colour. Many years later, Henry Keppel would publish an autobiography—three volumes of disconnected social and scenic detail reported in mini-paragraphs. It was accompanied by more than a hundred line drawings commissioned from various illustrators. The book was published in 1899 when the word ‘imperialism’ was on everyone’s lips, and yet it bore no trace of thought about that subject or about any other. In The Exodus of the Western Nations, Lord Bury attempted a larger and more synthetic analysis, one covering all of Western civilization. His father had simply produced a book on the mysterious East, for all the colourful stories, military details, and comments on Western technical prowess, the rambling and colourful book was the opposite of pretentious. Henry Keppel attempted no more. But Lord Bury’s focus was the idea of Anglo-Saxon purpose that he, for one, saw in the whole sweep of history. Tocqueville had noted that a certain type of history-writing was typical of the democratic frame of mind; it was history of the kind that seeks to look beyond particularities and resolve them into universal laws.70 This democratic kind of history-writing stood in contrast to aristocratic history, which was marked by localism, detail, and the portrayal of individuality. Tocqueville attempted to unite both kinds of history in his major works, yielding the mixture of the analytical and the particular that Mill had liked so much.71 Lord Bury’s The Exodus of the Western Nations, published in 1865, is a good example of democratic history, even though its author was (like Tocqueville himself) a scion of the aristocracy. Bury very definitely tried to resolve the particular into the general. He meant the book to be a history of the whole of European and American humanity from the last years before Columbus. Moreover, he devoted twenty pages to putting that sweep of history into an even wider context, ranging back to the Crusades and beyond; he proved to his own satisfaction why Europe had been the continent to generate an age of discovery.72 Even the book’s generalizing title, which suggests a plot for the whole of Western history, pointed away from the aristocratic fondness for particularity that was clear in the title of George Keppel’s book.

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The Exodus of the Western Nations was democratic in another sense. Bury chose to highlight the development of democracy itself. His theme was democracy’s advance westwards throughout history—a theme conceived in such a way that it might have been taken from those few world-historical pages near the beginning of Democracy in America. ‘Running through the pages of our history, there is hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality’, Tocqueville had written. He continued: ‘This whole book has been written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread inspired by contemplation of this irresistible revolution [democracy] advancing century by century over every obstacle and even now going forward among the ruins it has itself created.’73 In The Exodus of the Western Nations, as well, history is teleological. Writing about the eventual discovery of America by Europeans, Lord Bury claimed that every person in ‘the masses that crowded half-civilized Europe played, albeit unconsciously, his part in it. The history of the discovery of America is the history of Europe’.74 The grand movement of history, ‘the irresistible development of a free people’,75 was a racial move to the West, from Palestine to Greece to Rome to England, and finally, yes, to Canada. Alongside runs the more Tocquevillean theme of the growth of democracy and equality. Of course Tocqueville and Bury are not identical. Part of Bury’s explanation for both the westward trend of colonization and the growth of democracy involved the use of some very broad racial generalities. Writing after Tocqueville had insisted on the AngloAmerican cultural underpinnings of US democracy, Lord Bury was ready to point out that The races of America are vigorous, but they are young: Three centuries and a half is the life of the oldest of them. Race has more to do with their peculiarities than any other cause. The Mexican or Peruvian is emphatically Spanish. The English Canadian, or the United States man, Anglo-Saxon; and certainly no one ever watched a Canadian habitan take off his hat to a friend without seeing that he was a Frenchman.76 Meanwhile little of Bury’s evidence came from this kind of direct observation. Most came from the discussions he had with influential North Americans. Tocqueville, too, based his work on political conversations with political people; he and Gustave de Beaumont arrived in North America with some seventy letters of introduction, although they entered high society without having to use many of them.77 In Bury’s official conversations, one can hear a similar if less self-assured research methodology. Beginning on the first page of his Preface, Bury explained his experiences in North America as Civil Secretary and at the same time Native Affairs Commissioner (under Governors-General the Earl of Elgin and Sir Edmund Head): A Governor-General is compelled by his position, as the representative of a constitutional sovereign, to surround himself chiefly by those who form his Cabinet for the time; it therefore becomes the duty of the Secretary—the only Englishman besides his chief in the civil employment of the Crown,—to associate with public men of all parties, and maintain intimate relations with politicians of all shades of opinion: the writer had thus an opportunity of

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watching closely the working of our colonial system in the most important of four provinces. Since then, circumstances have made him acquainted with most of the leading public men in our other North American colonies, and with many in both the Northern and Southern States of America.78 Out of conversations like these came the political travel books that so many of the founders wrote. There were still other points of resemblance between Bury and Tocqueville. Both men picked liberty as the central historical condition shaping North America, and both men put forward a genetic theory of North American history cantering on a liberty inherited from England, then reinforced by distance and by a migration of the persecuted.79 Both men saw what they were doing as an advance on the technique of earlier writers. ‘A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new’, Tocqueville wrote, possibly prompting some of Mill’s praise of Tocqueville as a founder of all future political science.80 Bury associated himself with a new current of social rather than military or Rankean history. He did not name Ranke, but the good historians in his view ran from Voltaire to Guizot, Macaulay, and Buckle, among many others. What he thought he was adding to their achievement was the emphasis on two continents at once.81 Thus Bury was aware of his own generalizing tendencies, and he saw them as being different from the history written by certain earlier figures, presumably including his father. He was interested in the social preconditions behind politics, and he was sure that these preconditions held the key to the new history: A great change has of late come over both readers and writers of history. As in other sciences isolated facts must be patiently accumulated before generalization is attempted, so in the science of history there was necessarily a period during which facts were stored up without comment…it is only in comparatively modern times that the real objects of history have been understood. Voltaire led the way in France…. He said that his aim was rather to discover what society was like, how men lived in the privacy of their families, what arts were cultivated, than to recite in the ordinary fashion of history a mere record of disasters, combats, and human wickedness.82 Well, Bury did not live up to all of that. Perhaps, like many historians, he was overdrawing the contrast between the approach of his own generation and the approaches that had gone before. Certainly he was overdrawing the social element that would appear in his own work; it was full of official political reports rather than history from the bottom up. Yet he had plenty of Tocquevillean or analytical ambition. He was quite deliberate about moving away from his father’s particularism. He was quite deliberately drawing attention to the myriad facts of modern life, and to the way his generalizations could bring order to them. In The Exodus, the subject of Western history down the centuries did not make for brevity, a fact noted even by the most appreciative of the book’s contemporary reviewers.83 The most hostile of the reviews took the book to task for encumbering its colonial theme with so many ‘wearisome and trivial details’ about Early Modern French inns and so much else, included to illuminate worldwide rather than merely colonial

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history.84 The plan of his book was significant. Events had moved from the Near East, across Europe from Southeast to Northwest, and then across the Atlantic to North America. A Victorian reviewer put it as only a Victorian could: It is a remarkable fact in ethnology that the tide of human wandering, everywhere its direction has been known or ascertainable, has invariably set from the east towards the West. The successive waves of population which have flowed over Europe were continually rolled in from Asia, till the consolidated Gothic power opposed an insurmountable barrier to their encroachments?85 So which nation was, quite literally, in Bury’s main line of history? Which nation was now the chosen one? That nation was Canada, Bury said—which was ‘ten times larger than the old thirteen states hemmed in between the Mississippi and the Atlantic’.86 To portray this movement of history and give Canada what he thought was its due, Bury announced his intention to do in his book something he asserted that no one had done before, which was to disregard ‘the fictitious boundary line of the Atlantic and give us the old and new world in the same picture, the action of providence working through physical laws and human nature on America and Europe contemporaneously’.87 He would do both continents in one book by looking for the underlying laws. The result was not, perhaps, the most balanced of world histories. Lord Bury spent most of his first volume detailing the general social, religious, and political history of Europe since the fifteenth century; he stopped now and then to describe the voyages of discovery to America, and the racial and political consequences of Spanish colonial policy. In the second volume, he looked in detail at the Seven Years War, sped past the American Revolution,88 and spent the bulk of the volume on Canadian affairs of recent decades. Writing during the US Civil War, Bury mentioned that North America was already occupied by two English-speaking federal states; Canada would most likely be the third, and ‘a Federal union must in its nature be democratic’.89 So Bury was as optimistic for the survival of Canada, his third federal state, as he was for the Confederacy, his second.90 Indeed, the gunnery manual that he had some involvement in producing in 1864 had paid some attention to Confederate advances in gun design, advances that might have seemed to augur well for the Southern cause.91 Yet to Bury, North America offered rather more profound subjects to consider than the survival of the Confederacy. Once again, the continent held federal states, and as we saw above, Bury believed that these federal states had to be democratic rather than aristocratic or monarchical. There was the grand theme. Bury spent the final two chapters of The Exodus describing what an increasingly democratic Canada would look like. The inevitable separation from the mother country should and probably would come about without the intervention of the United States, and without leading to the messiness of the American version of democracy. Bury went so far as to propose a native Canadian monarchy. It would prevent the constant and prolonged excitement typical of America’s regularly scheduled elections.92 He wanted even more steps like these to be taken in preparation for Canada’s eventual self-government—for if there were enough preparation, the Canadians would preserve the empire’s unity of

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feeling after the advent of self-government.93 Canada would have the best of both worlds, namely British decorum and North American populism. The happy vision of a self-governing empire is worth pausing over. Bury’s expectation that Canada would indeed govern itself has convinced some scholars that he had to undergo a conversion from the pro-separatism of the Exodus in order to found the Colonial Society.94 But I do not think that Bury underwent any such conversion. In his early years, as we have already seen, he argued against any diminution in British involvement with native affairs in Canada, and against any cut in imperial expenditure on that score. The Indians still needed British intercession against the settlers. Bury’s was always a tempered separatism; indeed, his was less a separatism than a fondness for the spread of the English-speaking world, and an acceptance of the Tocquevillean spread of democracy within it. He reached this position early and he did not move away from it, even after 1868. He came out against the Imperial Federation League when it was founded in 1886; federation would mean a weakening of the self-governing colonies.95 Bury’s position was consistent; self-government could not loosen the most important imperial ties, for they were emotional. They were safe in his head. He always posited an enlarged and friendly (and self-governing) English-speaking world as the teleological end of world history. Bury was no separatist who had to convert himself, or be converted, to the imperialism on view in the 1868 society he founded. The old category of ‘separatist’ does not apply. The better category is ‘intellectual imperialist’. And if the intellectual break between separatism and imperialism must go, so must the chronological break. The idea of his conversion in 1868 must be replaced by a picture of continuity in his thinking. (The discontinuity—the change—in 1868 was that he and other like-minded men came together, not that each of them suddenly developed his own imperial interests.) Bury’s travels and ideas and writings came together in his mind over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, as his own (as well as his nation’s) activities and interests ebbed and flowed around the world, and he tried to find some general meaning to it all. After the loss of America, Bury wrote, Canada was a second chance for the British Empire—a second chance for Great Britain to separate amicably from some of her North American daughter democracies, with whom she would share what might be called the new world order. Bury had a huge cultural empire in mind. This was the higher imperialism, and it was far more important than preserving London’s direct powers of governance abroad. North America (north of the United States) held the next thrust, the next locus, on the grand path of European history from Southeast to Northwest. Bury had found his universal law. The British Empire of the 1860s could stand, under that law, alongside the empires that furnished the Victorian mind; it was the newest and by far the worthiest example of empire within a world history that is the story of empires, moving from East to West—but it would have to develop into a freer association. The tight control that had been tried after the American Revolution, and even before, had been a mistake that the Englishmen of his day should learn from.96 And not only Englishmen. Bury believed the Scots should be interested, too, and after The Exodus came out he tried to restart his political career by appealing to their imperial instincts. The occasion was December 1868, after the foundation of the Colonial Society. Bury campaigned to take back the seat he had once held for the Northern Burghs (Wick),

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a Scottish constituency. He had already sat for Wick from 1860 to 1865, when he had lost to a former Finance Minister of India, a Scotsman named Samuel Laing. In 1868 they once again stood against each other. The contest was therefore between two men who had both represented the area and who were both members of the Liberal Party. And both had served in India; they both addressed colonial themes in their campaigns. In accordance with his idea of what the empire was, Lord Bury encumbered his speeches with lessons about American politics.97 He had already prepared a speech on that subject for public consumption in 1866. The handbill advertising it had announced in dark letters more than an inch high that Viscount Bury would lecture on the ‘HISTORY AND PRESENT POLITICAL CONDITION OF AMERICA’.98 (Bury had also incorporated what were at the time quite topical reflections on America into the 1865 election addresses to his constituents.99) Was this supposed to be a campaign speech or part of a course of public instruction? One local newspaper was more impressed with Laing’s Indian experiences than anything Lord Bury had to offer in 1868, and made special note of his short attentionspan: Lord Bury, like some long missing comet, has suddenly appeared among his constituents in these northern parts. For long months his Lordship seems to have totally disappeared from the realms of political existence, and though he must have been aware of certain movements in the Burghs, of whose character and influence he still seems to be greatly in ignorance, Lord Bury seems to have looked on them with the greatest indifference, attaching to them as little importance as he appears to have done to questions of the highest moment that were under debate and division in Parliament during the last session…. There are certainly personal considerations that may be regarded as an important element in the case. Mr Laing, for example, is one of ourselves. He is a native of one of the burghs. He is a man whose abilities greatly outshine those of Lord Bury, [and] whose brilliant services in India entitle him to high regard.100 Of course what preoccupied Lord Bury at the time was founding the Colo nial Society. He was concerned with Canada, America, and the idea of empire in general—had he not visited the remains of the Near Eastern empires?—rather than in the particular interests of mere constituents or localities. And although neither he nor Samuel Laing was returned for Wick, Bury was returned for another constituency (Berwick-upon-Tweed). Lord Bury exemplified an intellectual trend towards focusing more and more on societies as a whole, rather than on the particular classes, occupations, or social circles within a society. A similar trend towards general laws was visible in the sciences properly so called; the future Lord Salisbury commented on it in 1862, ascribing it in part to the influence of Darwin.101 The use of grand generalities to describe human affairs, and especially the affairs of the English-speaking world, is visible among many of the founders-to-be who followed Tocqueville. But apart from participating in this great trend, the founders were by no means united in their non-Tocquevillean interests prior to 1868. They were notable instead for their

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diversity. Indeed, the English Tocquevilleans of the 1860s were the best evidence for the intellectual diversity of England that Henry Adams, for one, could find. Adams, the son and secretary of the American ambassador from 1861 until May 1868, was a dyspeptic epicene and a scientific reductionist. A Boston Brahmin, he perverted Darwinism and thermodynamics to support his own hatred of diversity, along with his hatred of any achievement outside of or below his own circle in Boston. He noted (in the course of making some rather dubious points about John Bright) that: The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual opposites of Bright, seemed to the American bystander the weakest and most eccentric of all. These were the trimmers, the political economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire class, the followers of De Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class they were timid,—with good reason,—and timidity, which is high wisdom in philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of these men haunted London society.102 Well, Lord Bury was no trimmer, nor was he timid—but nasty and inaccurate as Adams was, he did manage to attest to the existence of England’s Tocquevilleans and to the diversity or oddity of their beliefs, beyond what they had taken from Tocqueville. Here only lay their unity until 1868; they did not all move as well within the international fraternity of geologists or stamp collectors or radicals or aristocrats. In a modern society and against the background of modern information flow, one always has the chance to decide what to pay attention to, and around what groups to construct one’s identity. The English-speaking world was what they chose.

7 Adderley discovers the pattern of the world There was a further tradition of political analysis that, focusing as it did on the role of America in world history, set some of the founders down the road towards thinking in imperial categories. This was colonial reform, a movement founded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield around 1830. Most of the key figures in colonial reform had died before 1868. Those colonial reformers who are of interest here, those who joined the Colonial Society, had by that time moved away from Wakefield’s categories and towards Tocqueville’s. Their thinking traced out an arc, from Wakefield to Tocqueville to the broader imperialism of 1868. Wakefield and his vicars Edward Gibbon Wakefield wanted to use American society as a model for promoting further settlement in Canada, Australasia, and elsewhere. The New Worlds of the Western and Southern Hemispheres, to be filled with democracies that would be attractive to emigrants, would redress the over-population of the Old World and especially of Great Britain itself. Wakefield published his first important book in 1829.1 What was the appeal of Wakefield’s thought? Wakefield addressed himself more fully to English emigration questions than Tocqueville would. The Frenchman examined America to understand the course of democracy in France; Wakefield examined America to understand how to build countries that British people would emigrate to. Wakefield began with the observation that Indian pressure had kept the North American colonists bottled up in their towns, and those towns flourished. By contrast, the colonists of Canada and Australia had not been blessed with a native foe strong enough to keep the settlers huddled together. Therefore a dense and socially stratified colonial society had not developed. People had gone off into the wild to settle hither and thither. The problem was that without a sufficiently dense population, the colonies could not absorb the English people whom Wakefield most wanted to get rid of, namely underemployed tradesmen and servants. Such people could not go out into the wild to farm. They needed to be employed as servants and labourers. That is, there had to be rich colonists for the poor colonists to work for. The poor could be transplanted only if English society in all its density and inequality could itself be transplanted. A colony of socially equal backwoodsmen could not draw enough people away from overcrowded England.2 Accordingly—and differing mightily from Tocqueville, the ambivalent prophet of social equality—Wakefield proposed a bottling strategy that was designed to preserve social inequality. Land outside town would be sold to ranchers at a price guaranteed to make them guard it from homesteaders, ‘the sufficient price’. The ranchers would

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become a local aristocracy, helping to complete the colony’s social pyramid, and so there would be healthy towns. Within these towns, there would be a balance between the spirit of local self-government and the spirit of loyalty to the British nation. While loyalty might not figure in the life of a cabin dweller on the unregulated, unbottled frontier, town dwellers would retain the habit of deference.3 It should also be noted that in his early works Wakefield stressed that his colonies would be self-governing only on the municipal level. They would not be fully independent, since they could not be allowed to succumb to the local pressure to give away their rural lands—to do so would frustrate the emigration plan, which was to be financed by the land sales. All of these ideas appeared in Wakefield’s 1829 book, A Letter from Sydney…, which he actually wrote during his three years in Newgate Gaol (he earned his three years by eloping from Gretna Green to Calais with a young heiress). The emphasis on American land use, American prosperity, the American townscape, and the nature of American local government (all key themes in Tocqueville) may be found throughout the book. But it was in his England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (1833) that Wakefield first probed more deeply into land tenure and townfounding in the United States. The book appeared two years before the first half of Democracy in America would come out in France, and it is full of examples from South Africa and Canada as well as England and the United States.4 This list of emigrant destinations makes up a working definition of the British Empire that would remain quite serviceable in 1868. A final basic idea of the Wakefieldians that appeared in these early works of their founder was the sense of their own wisdom and purity, certainly in comparison with ordinary settlers. The Wakefieldians did not want the common folk to overrun the colonies before paternalistic Wakefieldian estates could be set up. Therefore the common people had to be controlled in accordance with the higher plan.5 To Wakefield’s mind, the opportunities offered by all that land had been ignored and wasted by allowing people to live on it where they pleased. Not for the Wakefieldians a Lockean dream of the paterfamilias clearing the forest and making value where none had existed before. The Wakefieldians envisioned a utopia of title-deeds and cheap servants. After some years, even Wakefield could see that his plans had failed to transform English society. Well into the hungry forties, almost two decades after England and America, the poor were still with the English. In those colonies where Wakefield’s ideas had been tried, the economics were found to be shaky; the land sales did not pay for emigration, and the lower orders were so impolite as to run off and squat where they could not legally homestead. Wakefield’s response came in A View of the Art of Colonization (1849). In it, his most substantial work, Wakefield went his deepest into the subject of US land law and local government. He wound up disagreeing with Tocqueville in a key way. For Wakefield, whose chief concern had been making rural land expensive enough to keep people in the towns, the precise details of town government had now become everything. Wakefield had changed his mind. Now he thought that America’s advantage lay not so much in land law in general or in absence of primogeniture, which Tocqueville had stressed,6 but in the nature of local municipal institutions. In Wakefield’s mind, self-

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governing municipalities were the key to the social stability and to the attitude of selfreliance in a new society. From that fact many others flowed. Local government in his colonies had been compromised by constant meddling from Whitehall—on this he blamed the financial instability of each colony. Local government had not been local enough. This was to be the main preoccupation in later colonial reform writings—a constant carping about the permanent officials of the Colonial Office. Wakefield’s new focus on the independence of local government had important intellectual consequences. If, like Tocqueville, one concentrated on the influence of land law on inherited mores in a new settlement, then the details of the higher constitutional ties of that new settlement to the metropolitan power would be less than crucial—royal colonies and self-governing ones would have similar fates, since land would pass from father to son (or to whomever) in the appointed way. But if the larger and more formal structures of town and colonial government were the key, as Wakefield had come to believe, then the structure of the imperial connections would matter more. Wakefield’s new views invited the interest in the role of colonial governments within an imperial system that marked imperial thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. To Wakefield’s mind, nothing could be more inimical to local self-reliance than supervision from the absurd figure of ‘Mr Mothercountry’, a Whitehall bureaucrat who specialized in micro-management, and whose gender-bending name could only add to his absurdity in the view of someone who abducted young heiresses.7 A View was written as an epistolary dialogue between a ‘colonist’ and ‘statesman’ back in England. They discussed the various sins of Mr Mothercountry. For all Tocqueville’s interest in overweening central authorities, the Frenchman did not focus on overseas suzerainty by a metropolitan power. Britain’s overseas empire was not, for Tocqueville, the natural place to observe important or interesting expressions of central power. Independence was the natural course for a colony, and yet there need be no worry, in the strict Tocquevillean view, that the Anglo-colonial connection would be broken if it were not formalized in a clear imperial structure. Referring to the American Revolution as ‘the most just of struggles, that of a people escaping from another people’s yoke’, Tocqueville did not think that the Revolution had marked much of a break in ‘the chain of opinions which binds around the whole of the Anglo-American world’.8 Wakefield was not so confident. The question of what the British connection is, or might be, and the not unrelated question of why it might or might not survive, vexed many of the founders, as it vexes some Commonwealth citizens today.9 Anglo-Saxon ties can seem less binding from the inside. Wakefield was a very good salesman. He pointed out the looming poverty in England, and he had convincing if high-handed plans for ameliorating it by shipping people overseas. He changed the homesteading policy of much of the British Empire, and inspired the foundation of the New Zealand cities of Wellington (1840), Wanganui (1840), New Plymouth (1841), and Nelson (1842),10 and, with the greater involvement of Wakefield himself, Otago (1848) and Canterbury (1850).11 Wakefield also deserves credit for South Australia, whose organization in 1834 had marked the first real if illfated attempt to put his ideas into practice.12 On Vancouver Island, Wakefield-inspired government land prices were so high as to give the colony a commercial rather than an agricultural cast.13 If few of these colonies were ever under Wakefield’s direct control, all

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were founded on his principles and with the explicit use of his name, and England was dotted with the emigration recruitment agents of his various companies.14 But the man himself eventually left for Canada, and then for New Zealand, where he fell ill and spent the last seven years of his life as an invalid. He died in 1860.15 The leadership of the colonial reform movement had already passed to others. Towards another imperialism: Charles Bowyer Adderley The man was gone but not forgotten. ‘In face of Mormon prosperity’, Charles Dilke wrote in 1868, ‘it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plough was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.’16 In these words Dilke was testifying to the influence of Wakefield—if not on Brigham Young then on young English writers such as himself, and many other founders of the Colonial Society. As Dilke showed, ‘Wakefieldian’ and ‘Wakefieldianism’ remained common words in politics and popular economics. But as a movement colonial reform was gone. Because it had been predicated on a fear of the over-numerous poor, it was doomed in 1848 when the revolutions that broke out on the continent stayed there. Britons of the better orders were relieved at the peacefulness of their lessers. On the day when excited men of the upper and business classes patrolled the city of London and the Thames bridges, what was to be the last large meeting of Chartists ended peacefully in the drizzle some distance away.17 The conclusion of the upper classes was that England was not so full of undesirables after all. Colonial reform did not immediately melt away in that drizzle, but it began to erode. The British economy continued to improve. Good feeling spread, especially when the masses who converged on the Crystal Palace in 1851 looked at the exhibits rather than breaking the glass and over-throwing the monarchy. Some in the comfortable classes continued to take an interest in colonial emigration, but colonial self-government became a more popular theme. The adherents of colonial reform had to reformulate their interest in the empire or abandon it. Chief among them was a man named Adderley. He began a Wakefieldian. He ended up with beliefs very similar to those of Lord Bury and the other founders of the Colonial Society. Charles Bowyer Adderley was uncomplicated enough to note that ‘The track of human affairs, though traversed by a thousand cloudy theories of each passing day, comes out wonderfully simple in review.’18 Such simplicity came at the price of turning away from detail and towards generality. Meanwhile he rose to a peerage, along the way playing an instrumental role in Australasian and West African affairs and in the confederation of Canada. Adderley was born in 1819. He inherited sizeable estates when he was 12, at which point he was taken out of school and given a low-church minister as his tutor. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, where his DNB entry suggests that he excelled in piety, music, art, horse riding, and tobacco smoking. Much that he would learn in his long life he learned on his own or from his friends. This included his interest in Tocqueville and the empire.

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As had Wakefield, Adderley began by pondering what to do with England’s worse off. His largest estate was near Birmingham, and on turning 18 Adderley built a new neighbourhood for the poor of that city. It was called Saltley, and it swelled the population of his estate from 400 when he began work in 1837 to 27,000 by the turn of the century (Adderley died in 1905). Saltley was a complete town rather than a speculative subdivision of the kind forming Georgian and early Victorian London. Adderley planned for the employment and the recreation of his new tenants; he also used writs to keep the sewage outflows off of the estate.19 Adderley was at one point President of the National Sanitation League. In 1856, he gave Birmingham its first important municipal park; again it was carved from his estate. The city took some time to agree to the terms, which included his continuing right to plan the public facilities.20 The conditions he placed on the gift were in character; Adderley was not one for charity at a distance. He wrote: ‘The only superiority in upper classes over lower in human society, giving any reason whatever for a difference of station in a common probation, must consist in their having been, and always being, trained for higher social services, and greater services make greater men.’21 Adderley’s interest in empire began at university. He became a Wakefieldian at Oxford through his friendship with John Robert Godley (1814–61). They read together, and after leaving university they travelled together.22 Godley was a Leitrim magistrate, and he and Adderley had both studied Irish overpopulation. Indeed, on their 1840 summer holiday the two young friends went on a riding tour of Killarney, paying an accidental visit to Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator. Adderley’s horse fell near O’Connell’s house, where the young Oxonians presented themselves for comfort and assistance. O’Connell did receive them, but not very warmly. His sudden guests returned the coldness. Adderley recalled of the Liberator that ‘the great man was treated as royalty’. ‘He sat at dinner with a cap of maintenance on his head.’23 Indeed, the young men were not in favour of Irish nationalism, but of colonial and imperial growth. After they left university, Adderley helped to edit and promote Godley’s first book, an 1844 work called Letters from America that refers explicitly to Tocqueville. (Adderley, who had entered Parliament as a Tory in 1841, did not go with Godley on this post-Oxford trip across the Atlantic.) Adderley sent the book to Sir Robert Peel and to W.E.Gladstone, among others.24 One reason that Adderley cited for recommending the book all round was its timely treatment of Irish poverty.25 Indeed, mass starvation soon gave a special poignancy to this issue—the issue of the relevance of America and the colonies to conditions in Ireland. Witness the case of another young man who was on the same undergraduate riding tour, who was part of the same discussion circle about Tocqueville and Wakefield, and who was with Godley and Adderley in O’Connell’s house that night in 1840. His name was William Monsell. Long in favour of some variety of reform in Ireland,26 he was a staunch Roman Catholic who would one day attempt to resign from the Aberdeen government over an anti-Catholic speech by the Foreign Secretary (and former Prime Minister) Lord John Russell.27 Yet the Famine did not make this Irish Catholic and reformer a nationalist and a follower of O’Connell. Like Adderley, Monsell became instead a follower of Wakefield; and also like Adderley, Monsell would maintain and develop his interest in Wakefieldian emigration for long enough to become an early member of the Colonial Society.28

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For Monsell, there was a global context that put to shame O’Connell’s narrow nationalism; this was the Roman Catholic Church, in whose universal, 200,000,000strong reach (as he put it) Monsell took great pride.29 For Godley and Adderley, the global context that could be used to dismiss O’Connell’s nationalism as niggling and parochial was a different one. England was a part (and the major part) of the AngloSaxon vanguard of civilization and self-government. Surely emigration within the larger empire could solve the problems of Ireland. For O’Connell, England was instead the obstacle before a more localized advance. Irish events moved quickly, further and further out of control. Local solutions appealed first. Godley and his family stored grain for their dependants.30 When the crisis continued, Godley and Monsell, together with O’Connell and many others, formed a committee to consider reforming Irish land tenure and thus alleviating starvation permanently. The committee met in Dublin in January 1847 (Adderley lived in London, and was not involved).31 When nothing came of its report—calling as it did on the whole empire to send food and relief—Godley (on 31 March 1847) went further. He published a plan for sending 2,000,000 Irish to Canada. He would send the people to the food since the food could not be sent to the people.32 Here, he had reached a truly global and quite Wakefieldian plan for ending the suffering. Despite O’Connell’s ideas, this solution was predicated upon the continuation of the British Empire rather than its end. Parliament rejected the plan, perhaps because Godley proposed that the Roman Catholic Church be invited to sponsor the scheme; neither the Roman Church nor the British state was enthusiastic. Meanwhile, as one historian has put it, ‘While the [Parliamentary] Committee sat considering these limitations, one-sixth of the people of Ireland died, and one-sixth fled to America in poverty and degradation.’33 Since shipping people out of the country was by no means a popular idea even in Ireland, in August 1847 Godley lost what would be his only bid for a parliamentary seat. Monsell, a future Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Colonies under Gladstone, stressed relief not through emigration but through public works, and he was indeed elected.34 (Once again, Adderley had been in Parliament since 1841, and for an English seat.) Finally in 1848 the potatoes came in. Where did that leave the three Oxford friends, Godley, Adderley, and Monsell? After the mass destruction of the Irish people, they had the rest of their lives to think about emigration, and the empire needed to make it work. We do not know whether, all the while, they had in their minds a category analogous to the modern idea of holocaust, but they must have thought about something of the kind. That was the main difference between their imperial thinking and the more abstract, generalized kind of thinking indulged in by younger men such as Lord Bury. Adderley on the Colonial Reform Society and why Gladstone ought to join it In 1847, Godley introduced Adderley to Wakefield. Adderley later called Wakefield ‘the strangest genius I ever met, though intriguing and without scruple in carrying out his designs’, as well as ‘sulky’, ‘satanic’, and ‘machiavellian’.35 Late in 1849, these three men, plus Francis Baring and Lord Lyttelton, together planned the Colonial Reform

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Society. It was to be a more effective pressure group for Wakefieldian policies than the separate settlement companies could be. The most carefully planned of the Wakefieldian settlements, Otago and Canterbury, were being founded in the late 1840s, and Wakefield was more involved in the preparations for these settlements than he had been in preparing any of the others. Thus it was Adderley who took the initiative in founding the Colonial Reform Society itself, to push for Wakefieldian schemes generally and for reform at home.36 Soon Wakefield would be obsessed with yet another specific project in 1849, this time the society colonizing Canterbury, New Zealand, while Adderley continued to work on establishing the more general organization.37 Adderley had entered Parliament on the urging of his neighbour Sir Robert Peel, whose government needed all the reforming Tories it could get. Adderley’s position in the Tory ascendancy of Staffordshire assured him of a seat. Indeed, Peel and Adderley often breakfasted together in the country. Adderley told one story about Peel getting up from the breakfast table to herd a covey of partridges into his own breakfast room, so as to show them to Adderley. When the two neighbours weren’t looking at Peel’s partridges indoors, they were shooting Adderley’s pheasants outdoors.38 Despite his connection to Peel, however, the young member remained a Tory throughout the political confusion of the 1840s and 1850s, abandoning Peel over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Yet Adderley himself would go on to abandon protectionism in 1851, about a year before the rest of the protectionist rump of the Tory Party. The constant factor in his changing position on the Corn Laws was this: Adderley could not help agonizing over what might actually be done to help the poor. Meanwhile there was the question of empire—a place where the poor might be sent. Early in his career, Adderley was one of the few MPs in favour of Colonial Reform or of the empire in general.39 In 1849, he spoke a great deal on matters having to do with Ceylon and the Cape. Neither area would prove to be fertile ground for Wakefieldian emigration. Yet both of these places were fertile enough for Adderley—he could use them to raise a great many Wakefieldian objections to the policies of the Colonial Secretary. That Colonial Secretary was Lord Grey.40 Adderley also asked questions in the House about the policies of Lord Grey’s kinsman, Sir George Grey, who was hated by colonial reformers in New Zealand (among them, by this point, Godley) and in England alike.41 Soon Adderley began trying to recruit to the Colonial Reform Society Lord Grey’s immediate predecessor as Colonial Secretary, none other than William Ewart Gladstone. In January 1846, Gladstone had been the first imperial official to frame as a policy the idea that the New Zealand colonies would become self-governing (although not many colonial secretaries had had the chance, since Great Britain had taken control of New Zealand only in 1840).42 Given Gladstone’s actions, Adderley thought he would make a fine chairman of the new Society. Yet Gladstone was not sure of the need for a Colonial Reform group. He suspected that it would simply attack Lord Grey. So Adderley tried to convince him otherwise. Adderley began to reassure Gladstone by listing the membership, and by promising in very calm tones that he and his friends would be constructive; they would even produce a government scheme for Australia by Easter. But before very long, Adderley’s letter had

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turned into an attack on Grey over affairs in the Cape of Good Hope. Grey had hoped to settle convicts there, to the horror of, among others, colonial reformers—with their plans for the careful social engineering of British colonial society. The convict plan was thwarted in South Africa by joint mass meetings of the Boers and the English-speakers alike, one held on the auspicious occasion of the Fourth of July.43 Adderley assured Gladstone that self-government in the Cape would stop the Boers and the Englishspeakers ‘combining only for separation’—self-governing colonists would remain loyal. Adderley went on to set out for Gladstone a rather ambitious programme for the Colonial Reform Society: ‘The intention of such a Society as is proposed, with agents or correspondents keeping it informed, and a systematic line of action of its own…is not so much to correct the individual mischiefs of the [Colonial] office, as to replace the whole system, and introduce a new one.’44 So much for keeping the Wakefieldian focus on emigration to Australia. Colonists everywhere, not just in the settlements founded under Wakefield’s supervision, were pulling away from England anyway, for such was the democratic tendency of all settlement colonies, said Adderley—but he believed that the tendencies towards separation could be acknowledged, contained, and redirected towards building a new imperial system based upon self-government. Perhaps Adderley understood that this letter of mollification had run off the rails in embarking upon an anti-Grey screed, so he hastily (and rather inconsistently, given all that he had said) added that the Society would be ‘free and elastic’, and even nonpolitical. In any case, Gladstone proved quite unwilling to join the movement that Adderley had described, much less lead it; nor did he think that an Australian government bill, from whatever source, would get very far in the coming year. Gladstone obviously needed more convincing, so Adderley sent him the Society’s printed prospectus. Adderley should have known better than to think that it would help very much: ‘The general object of the Society,’ the prospectus read, ‘is to aid in obtaining for every dependency, which is a true Colony of England, the real and sole arrangement of all local affairs by the Colony itself, including the disposal of the Waste lands, and the right to frame and alter its local constitution at pleasure.’45 (Again, the Wakefieldians had moved from wanting to lock up Crown lands to a strong focus on the unfettered rights of local government.) If all this seems like a loyalty to the Crown that Patrick Henry would have been proud of, Adderley did not see it that way. The prospectus went on to look to the economic benefits of all of this to England herself. The Society ‘also [wanted] to promote the advantage of both Colonies and the mother country, by removing the worst impediment and affording a new and powerful encouragement to Colonization’. That encouragement was to be a new political arrangement, that of self-government under the Crown, with which the colonies would be satisfied; they would never seek further independence. The 1848 prospectus showed that at a time when most people ignored the empire, and may have assumed that it would go away, Adderley for one was trying to put it on a more permanent and productive footing. As in South Africa, as Adderley saw the situation there, colonial ties that were looser would bind longer. The attachment of colonies to the Mother Country should be social and economic, rather than formal and illusory— Adderley did not think that Secretary Grey’s many federation schemes for different parts

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of the empire would amount to anything more than red tape, frustrating local initiatives.46 To make sure that everyone who read the prospectus, including Gladstone, understood that unfettered local government would draw the empire together and not drive it apart, Adderley followed his rather bold statement about ‘The general object of the Society [being] the sole arrangement of all local affairs by the Colony itself’ with a whole paragraph of qualifications: According to the views of the Society, this municipal or local independence, this entire relief of distant colonies from the inconvenience of being ruled in local matters by a department of the Administration in London, instead of being incompatible with allegiance to the Crown of England, is really calculated to substitute from growing disaffection, and from the present danger of a dismemberment of the British Empire, a loyal and devoted attachment on the part of the colonies towards the mother country.47 To these ends, in fact, Adderley and his friends had decided to introduce a Bill despite Gladstone’s doubts about getting it passed. That way they could pre-empt further action by Grey. Adderley told Gladstone about it in the cover letter for the prospectus. Sir William Molesworth would introduce a constitution bill for New South Wales, one giving the colony complete self-government except in foreign affairs and judicial appeals; such a constitution would leave ‘the colony to form as all will their own imitation of the English Constitution, bound only by allegiance+their own certain inclination, interest, +similarity of habits language+feeling−a healthy free attachment’.48 In developing his own views and pushing them beyond the by then discredited technicalities inherent in Wakefield’s earlier land price theories, Adderley had worked himself into a good, general, if rather strangely punctuated facsimile of the better half of British imperialism. It would come true soon enough, although in the event Gladstone was right—no Bill was passed until 1850. Gladstone never did join the Colonial Reform Society, but he was idealistic and wideranging in intellect, and his correspondence with Adderley on colonial subjects continued.49 The two men could not agree about the importance of the English-speaking world overseas, but Gladstone was sufficiently interested to seek out other opinions. He even had the benefit of seeing Adderley’s correspondence with other people. Lyttelton, who had been Gladstone’s Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office and who was Mrs Gladstone’s brother-in-law, forwarded Adderley’s letters to himself on to Gladstone.50 In this strange three-way correspondence between Gladstone, Lyttelton, and Adderley, a key intellectual gulf was made plain. Gladstone’s continuing complaint against empire was that it was based upon greed, exactly the complaint of Edwardian anti-imperialists half a century later. Adderley protested against the way Gladstone identified colonialism with national greed, and emigration with expatriation.51 Indeed, to combat the charge of expatriation, Adderley had developed an idea of a larger British citizenship, an idea that Gladstone did not share. Gladstone was less than excited about the future of some grand idea of the worldwide English-speaking system. The parliamentary manoeuvres of Adderley and his

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friends made Gladstone protest to Lyttelton: against the idea that our Colonial Empire beyond the seas can be made an equivalent for American self-extension within seas; against the whole notion that the principal purposes of colonisation depend upon the indefinite continuation of political connection; against making home and colonial appointments interchangeable otherwise than according to circumstances in each and rather by way of exception than otherwise; against all wars with nature and the fundamental conditions of space and time.52 Adderley and the Colonial Reformers did indeed want, again in Gladstone’s words, ‘our Colonial Empire beyond the seas [to] be made an equivalent for American self-extension within seas’—just what Gladstone himself rejected. In The Australian Colonies Government Bill Discussed,53 a short work written at the same time, Adderley attacked the Bill in question (and Grey) for not going far enough and giving the colonists complete control over their own affairs. But the Bill gave them control over everything but wastelands, official salaries, and tariffs. What was lacking? Complete independence? Adderley simply argued that without tariffs to raise money and without the explicit right to ban the further transportation of convicts, none of the Australian colonies could support themselves independently. To escape the burning question of just how independent the colonies were supposed to be, Adderley actually began to criticize the detailed nature of Wakefieldian plans themselves; fleeing from Wakefieldian detail, he once again took refuge in a more abstract view of the development of Anglo-Saxon countries in world history. He was at pains to assert that independence was not what he was advocating: With these views I would, by Act of Parliament, do no more than render public and permanent the conditions, or rather permissions, and the reservations under which the free spirit of British enterprise might safely form itself into new offset nations under the allegiance of the British Crown. I would not attempt to dictate system to constitutions, which the British are accustomed to build up gradually out of the accumulating accidents of freedom, and which, out of such materials, none can build so well as they. It was not a system that he had in mind; it was an overall vision of imperial emotional ties. ‘Still less,’ Adderley concluded, ‘would I so irritate and obstruct such tendencies as to leave no vent but democratic emancipation to the thwarted yearnings of affectionate dependence or the rejected sympathies of hereditary attachment.’54 Adderley’s friend, neighbour, and patron, Sir Robert Peel—the departing giant who had repealed the Corn Laws—also received advance word from Adderley on the new Colonial Reform Society. Adderley passed along Gladstone’s ringing non-endorsement: ‘Mr Gladstone has twice very kindly written to me on the subject, declining to become a member, but expressing great interest in the scheme, +offering to correspond with me upon it.’55 Adderley also pointed out that the Chairman would be the Hon. Sir Francis Baring, of the banking family. Baring was a friend of Lord Grey, and the brother of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer; Adderley was trying for reassurance by association.

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Peel was no more pleased by the whole thing than Gladstone had been. In fact, he was inordinately displeased. For decades, Peel had rejected any attempt to ameliorate poverty through emigration.56 Now he would not even go so far as to entertain a discussion of colonial reform, as Gladstone had done. In the depths of his displeasure with Adderley, Peel demonstrated the difference between the old indifference to any grand theory of empire and the excited generalizations possible among the new generation of men. Peel simply thought that the whole thing was political folly, and nothing to disturb a parliamentary career over. His previous opinions on the colonies might help explain this view. In 1845, he went so far as to complain to his Colonial Secretary that the North American colonies, for their part, ‘might become an onerous possession’; he claimed that he ‘always had misgivings’ about them, although he would not countenance their forcible annexation to another power.57 In Peel’s words, one hears the particularism of George Keppel’s generation. Peel’s word was ‘colonies’, not ‘emigration’; he did not need to think of them in general, as a system. Now, in responding to Adderley, Peel would not even address the younger man’s arguments. All he would say was that Adderley should drop all of this colonial nonsense at once. It could only hurt his career. The whole venture was indiscreet, and in Peel’s view the Society was likely only to provoke Parliament to greater inaction on Wakefieldian legislation (if greater inaction was conceivable). The Society smelled of disloyalty to the former governments, including his own, whose policies it called into question. It was not, Peel believed, too late to let the Colonial Reform Society die.58 Adderley’s response was one of respectful but thunderstruck disagreement.59 Yet Peel was right about something. More was at stake in the prospectus than Adderley was willing to admit. The kind of local government in the colonies that may have been needed to institute a Wakefieldian land policy was desired for its own sake, with the land policy almost forgotten.60 Such colonial self-government would have an interesting effect if it came to pass. Although the right to vote might not be extended beyond the upper one-third of the male population of Great Britain for some time to come (Peel had promised that it would not be),61 the prospectus assumed that the middle classes could none the less vote with their feet. They could go off to the colonies, and soon enough enjoy powers of self-government in their new homes that they could not enjoy in England. They could join the Tocquevillean world. Adderley after colonial reform Colonial Reform as a specific system of emigration and investment may have faded away by the early 1850s, but the colonies got reformed anyway. To most MPs, it seemed strange that Great Britain should continue the direct supervision of obviously booming colonies. As early as the eighteenth century, there was already a tradition of thinking about the Australian colonies as another, younger USA in the making.62 As the colonies grew in the nineteenth century, that vision seemed ever nearer. There was also the question of how practical it would be to continue the colonial connection. In the 1850s, communications between Great Britain and Australasia still took weeks or months. (Although undersea telegraphy had been attempted, it would enjoy little success until the

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1860s.63) Given delays like that, many people in the United Kingdom and in the colonies alike simply assumed that routine colonial decisions could no longer continue to be postponed until an answer could be received from London.64 Meanwhile, many colonists certainly pushed for home rule. They pushed even harder after the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851. The Colonial Office did not seriously resist its loss of control over most of the colonies’ internal affairs. By the end of the 1850s, self-government was achieved in all but one of the colonies of white settlement that the colonial reformers usually had in mind.65 Thus there were multiple, selfgoverning, bustling little English-speaking countries across North America to the Pacific, all across the continent of Australia, in New Zealand, and, although without quite the same powers of self-government, here and there in the Caribbean and in Southern Africa. Suddenly, the empire was full to the brim with all the new capital cities and their cabinets and prime ministers. Colonial reform was passé—the colonies were already reformed. Mid-Victorian Britain and the mid-Victorian British colonists had achieved a record of decolonization that seems astonishingly big and astonishingly peaceful.66 The first step was the tacit recognition by the governors of Canada and Nova Scotia of responsible government in their colonies in 1846 and 1847. But this tacit recognition took place with the approval of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Adderley’s nemesis Lord Grey, who indeed, with his own now watered-down Wakefieldianism, deserves much of the credit.67 He was interested in colonial self-government and emigration, but no longer perhaps in imposing every detail of a certain economic system on each colony. He bowed to local pressure and allowed events to take their own course. Responsible government, then, first came into operation on 2 February 1848 in Nova Scotia. To the West, the Governor of what was then the colony of Canada also deserves some credit for helping Lord Grey to get the ball rolling. That Governor was Earl Elgin.68 The imperial government, as John M.Ward has shown, went on to impose responsible governments of the kind developed for Canada and then New Zealand upon the very different Australian colonies, and to do so well before many segments of Australian society knew or cared what responsible government was. Indeed, few people really did know what the term meant: Cabinet government responsible to the popular house of the legislature, and serving at its pleasure, rather than at the pleasure of a colonial governor or some other executive. Westminster MPs, ranging from Colonial Secretary Lord Grey down to the backbenchers, assumed that the system of responsible government so recently entrenched in the United Kingdom itself—the last of the interfering Hanoverian brothers had left the scene less than twenty years before, leaving Parliament in command—must of course be erected in the farthest reaches of the empire as soon as possible. The Imperial Act of 1850, the fruit of Westminster’s (or at least Lord Grey’s) wish to make the Australian colonies follow the example of Canada and Great Britain, led to the achievement of responsible government in New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, and Victoria in 1855, and in Queensland in 1859.69 English-speaking democracies were being erected in a dozen outposts, most of them independent from Britain in all matters except foreign policy and large questions of defence. Canada even placed a tariff on British goods in 1858.70 Democracy and the franchise tended to be further developed in these new countries

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than in Great Britain. The colonies seemed to offer the same democratic lessons and innovations that Tocqueville observed in America. Thus in Great Britain, to cite only one example, the secret ballot was usually referred to as the ‘Australian Ballot’. Under that name it was much discussed in Parliament for many years before it was adopted in the United Kingdom itself.71 In the 1850s, anyone who was interested in Tocquevillean or Wakefieldian issues could have had a field-day with all of the newly self-governing colonies. Each new colonial government bill gave Adderley, for one, plenty of opportunity to refine his ideas. Yet while he had much to think about as self-government spread, he had little real role to play in the spread itself; even Wakefield, who was never an MP, had more direct influence on the framing of legislation.72 When a number of Peelites went back into government in December 1852 (after more than six years as a splinter group in the political wilderness), Parliament became unusually interested in things colonial. Some of the Peelites were especially keen to spread the blessings of the Canadian system to the antipodes, but they did not need the help or participation of the sometime Peelite Adderley, annoying as his colonial reform outbursts tended to be.73 Yet Adderley’s own career continued apace, largely because he could separate his domestic views from his less than popular imperial ones. He refused the Secretaryship of the (Indian) Board of Control in the ‘Who? Who?’ ministry of 1852, formed as it was just before Disraeli brought the Tories around to free trade; he chose instead to remain independent and vocal. In the brief Tory government of 1857–58, however, Adderley was simultaneously vice-president of the Board of Health and vice-president of the Board of Education; he had responsibility for the domestic rather than the imperial forms of social amelioration. Soon after the Imperial Act of 1850, Adderley began sorting out his imperial thinking about the wishes of the ‘new offset nations’ from his still-Wakefieldian ideas about the importance of getting rid of the surplus population at home. While some colonial reformers kept up the focus on the control of wastelands and the construction of Englands abroad, Adderley turned his attention to the continuing transportation of convicts. Here was a wonderful issue on which to attack Lord Grey. It was a matter of concern to the colonists who were already abroad. They had their own ideas about colonial gentility, and those ideas did not include convicts from England. In taking up the antitransportation crusade, and in agreeing to serve as one of the London agents for the main Australian anti-transportation pressure group, Adderley showed that he was willing to listen to the ideas of democratic colonists, rather than treating them as Wakefieldian ciphers. He saw English-speaking settlements everywhere as equal, with the same wants and needs. Soon enough Adderley was writing on punishments within England, too. He developed a whole theory of punishment—touching on general rather than particularly colonial or particularly English features of Anglo-Saxon civilization. In the jeremiad Transportation not Necessary, both Greys (the Governor and the former Colonial Secretary) came in for a great deal of abuse, as did the whole policy of transportation, but this is abuse that is worth quoting at length for the speed with which Adderley continually turned the argument against England itself:

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Our criminals are our most favoured children—we punish them with education, and sacrifice the best interests of commerce and industry, in order to devote all our extensions of empire to the exigencies of crime. To be well-instructed a poor English child had better get into gaol—if his father seeks to emigrate, he can only get a free passage as a transported convict. Surely there is something vicious in this. If we mean our penal system to fall back and altogether subside into its proper antecedent, a scheme of national education, let us give honest industry an equal share in its advantages; and those whom we dare not or cannot punish we had better cease to designate as criminals. If we suspect that some of our prisoners are really honest folk, or, at worst, what Sir George Grey called his Cape cargo, ‘technical convicts’, by all means let us abandon the idea of correcting them, and supply them to any extent with better education, or the means of emigration, or any other of the principal benefits with which the nation can encourage an intelligent but ill-finished industry.74 The point of this essay, one learns soon after, is that Adderley was trying to rise to a challenge that he had received from his opponents in the Cape debates, a challenge to develop a completely new system of criminal punishments and social services within England—‘to complete the Cape argument, by showing the possibility of such colonial services being dispensed with by this country’. Adderley devoted the parliamentary recess to developing his domestic schemes.75 Adderley was now thinking about social processes within self-contained democratic societies, both at home and abroad. He was no longer thinking about an imperial system that, alike for the old Mercantilists, for Wakefield, and for Chamberlain in the 1890s, maintained a simple division of labour between the Mother Country and those colonies which would receive the goods and emigrants. When he published a speech by Godley in the same year, Adderley underscored the new generality of his ideas.76 Adderley’s substantial introduction cited Tocqueville by name on the subject of what the constitutions of new societies ought to look like if the British government were to arrange ‘for the retention of our present colonial empire’.77 As Adderley said in the House of Commons, if the colonies were to be retained, less money ought to be spent on interfering with them—before Parliament grew tired of the expenditure and cut them off entirely.78 Colonial self-government was the key. In 1851, still in the shadow of colonial reform, Adderley produced what was perhaps the most efficient of his early works on empire. It pointed in the most direct way possible towards the British Empire that would be extant from the 1860s until the Statute of Westminster of 1931, under which the dominions could take charge of their own foreign affairs. Adderley’s Statement of the Present Cape Case was an attack in only thirty-six pages on Earl Grey’s attempt as Colonial Secretary to institute federation, transportation, and a Wakefieldian scheme in South Africa. What was wrong with this Wakefieldian plan? Earl Grey was not instituting a selfgovernment of exactly the right kind. Grey did not seem to recognize the wishes or the grand destiny of the self-contained democracies that he had spread around the world, or even of England itself. Not only would Grey’s plan harm the South African wing of the settler empire, but it would distract people from the need to replace transportation with a

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more constructive policy at home. So much for Wakefield’s insistence that colonies offered the ideal solution to English overpopulation and crime. The colonies did not exist to help solve English problems, Adderley now believed. He now cared more about the separate domestic interests of England and the self-governing colonies. In each country, social reform and political self-government were equally important. England and the colonies were simply different parts of the same worldwide civilization. From this conviction there arose in Adderley a vision of the destiny of the empire so lofty (and so geographically accurate) that might have been written in the imperialistic 1880s. The fact that one of the colonies, South Africa, did not enjoy in full measure the system of responsible government being instituted in the other colonies of settlement distressed Adderley. After discussing how much better education was in South Africa than in England, Adderley concluded the Cape pamphlet by claiming that education in South Africa would be better still if the South Africans could be sure that they would enjoy: the rule of an English colony on English principles. Thus it [the Cape Colony] may become a thriving outpost of empire instead of a jobbed location. Thus, we may have a real pied-à-terre in our Indian and Australian route, where, if we please, we may place our forts and naval stations, dockyards, or ports, amongst friends and fellow-countrymen. And if a future, like that of India’s history opens on our South African frontiers, we may find on the spot a self-acting power controlling and regulating a destined extension of our empire, without adding another chapter of peculation, and waste, and bloodshed, to the annals of our country. But if the representative institutions be withheld, or only partially given, still more if the promise of them be retracted or neutralized, we shall not only have a colony of dogged discontent to deal with, but there will spring up from our irritations, and devolve on our incapable handling, endless questions of disputed frontier, and rival sovereignties of subjects turned into rebel refugees.79 Perhaps Adderley was right in his narrower political message. Two Boer wars and so much else have come from South Africa’s frontier politics, and from the expansions and contractions of British imperial control there; the responsibility of paying for their own defence in the 1850s and 1860s might have been very good for the settlers. As it happened, Parliament was for once convinced that Adderley was right about Grey’s plans for the Cape. In the view of contemporaries, the government seemed ready to fall on Adderley’s motion of censure against Grey—Adderley’s wonderful day had come—but Grey’s resignation pre-empted the debate, and saved many aspects of his Cape policy from further enquiry or reform.80 The six-year-old government had to fall fairly soon anyway, but it was not about to fall over colonies, and Grey was allowed to go. He had never been popular with his Cabinet colleagues, who did not understand why his apparently unimportant colonial measures should bring forth so much carping in Parliament from men like Adderley.

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Adderley, 1861 Adderley was left to ponder a world dominated by ‘complete transmarine Englands’—a phrase he would coin for his 1861 open letter to Disraeli on the colonies. This letter was Adderley’s next and even more collectivist vision of the empire of the future.81 By the time Adderley reissued the letter the following year, revising it somewhat, the world looked more and more like it would belong to a multitude of English-speaking states; what had been the USA would fragment, and the other settlements would retain their ties to the British Crown. Yet although the United States had grown so big as to ‘exceed the utmost possibility of human extension’ and of federal government, the American people would continue to expand: ‘Manifest Destiny,’ Adderley explained, ‘…pervades every American breast.’ The process of Anglo-Saxon multiplication was the goal of history, a history that had moved (as Adderley detailed it in the letter) stage by stage from Asian despotism, through various forms of aristocracy, at last to the overly pure democratic principle of cultural life that was rooted in North America’s soil. The whole of this letter, with its ever more democratic stages of world history, was pure and undisguised Tocqueville. Could these free Anglo-Saxon states live next to each other peacefully, when they grew out of their isolation? This question occurred to Tocqueville and to Adderley as well. Adderley simply elided the French parts of Tocqueville’s introduction, and he had failed to pick up on the complex interrelationship between democracy and equality. What was left when Tocqueville’s thinking was redone without its French and egalitarian emphases was a vision of the spread of Englishspeaking countries. Here is the descent from Tocquevillean thought into British imperial pride. Adderley was four years away from taking a position in the Colonial Office, home of the once dreaded Mr Mothercountry. Soon after the beginning of the American Civil War (about which he wrote little, since he had moved on to grander things), Adderley argued that Canada ought to be left to organize and pay for its own defence in a mature spirit of self-government. For some reason the Canadians balked at this level of maturity, as they would continue to do for some time.82 Perhaps they did not take the large view, as Adderley did. Indeed, Adderley was thinking about the whole half-imaginary category of the English-speaking world, whose destiny could not be interfered with—even if its individual pieces had to be left open to American attack. Disraeli took Adderley to task in the Canadian troop controversy for indulging in ‘mere reasoning, however just and wise’.83 But there was an important distinction between Adderley’s position (an imperialism so lofty in its categorization of the empire that it was undisturbed by such formalities as the existence or non-existence of actual political connections among the parts of that empire) and the woolly-minded separatism that Disraeli accused him of. Adderley’s ‘separatism’ was a part of a collectivist world view that was itself imperialistic. The world would belong to English stock, speaking the English language. The Colonial Society was concerned, at bottom, with uniting the Londoners who were moved by the worldwide spread of their own collective culture, as they saw it, and rather less moved by British parliamentary control per se. By contrast, there was Lord Salisbury. A future ex officio member of the Colonial

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Society but not, as we have seen, a Tocquevillean, Salisbury thought Adderley’s proposal that the Canadians should be asked to defend themselves and learn self-government was ridiculous. For him, colonial self-defence had already been tried. It had led to the independence of America—‘a nation which, in spite of unexampled material advantages, has broken up from its own inherent rottenness after a national existence of eighty years’. The rottenness Salisbury mentioned was not the presence of slavery but the absence of the English upper classes. Cut loose from their connection to England, the colonies were hardly civilized, and they had no decent future as independent countries—look at the United States.84 Adderley’s imperialism, in contrast, had grown large enough to include all continents and races. As early as 1865, Adderley had extended his Tocquevillean thinking to cover West Africans; he wanted to institute self-government and Tocquevillean mores among them, and thus reduce the drain upon the British taxpayer. While Adderley’s criticisms of West African garrisoning were indeed responsible for the 1865 parliamentary committee that recommended the abandonment of most of the garrisons, abandonment was not Adderley’s intention. He wanted to hand the garrisons off to some modernizing native state—perhaps one of the Muslim powers, or perhaps Dahomey, he was not sure which. He had in mind a policy that would move the Africans towards eventual self-government. Adderley was no anti-imperialist in the mid-1860s, but a self-government imperialist; his empire was an empire of the mind, an empire of grand categories. He did not as yet anticipate the Scramble for Africa, much less the centrality of Africa to the late Victorian empire. In the period that led up to the founding of the Colonial Society, and which encompassed his service as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Adderley usually confined his imperialistic attentions to Asia, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the antipodes, rather than Africa—five continents rather than six.85 Adderley on democracy in Europe: the late 1860s Adderley was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies for two and a half years, from mid-1866 to late 1868. One of the Secretaries of State for whom he worked, Lord Carnarvon, thought Adderley so set in his opinions that he was prone to ‘inaccuracy and confusion of mind’.86 Indeed, Adderley’s contribution to the great imperial event of those years, Canadian Confederation, was not as great as it might have been. There were the colonial secretaries who outranked him (first Lord Carnarvon and then his successor, the somewhat less than impressive Duke of Buckingham).87 On the other side there was also the brilliant permanent secretary, Frederic Rogers. Adderley’s sweetest accomplishment in the Colonial Office was that he was able to draw blood in the old battle—he helped to arrange Governor Sir George Grey’s retirement in apparent disgrace. Grey, in his last period as Governor of New Zealand, had disobeyed orders and had falsified his reports home. However, Adderley was unable to get Grey summarily removed for these offences, and the Governor was allowed to serve out the small balance of his term.88 Neither in this matter nor in any other, therefore, did Adderley enjoy decisive power in the Colonial Office. Still, surrounded as he was by the old records of the office, he was in a fine position to second-guess the actions of his

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predecessors there. He began work on a big book. The predecessor that he was fondest of second-guessing was Lord Grey, not Sir George. Still, Adderley had to wait till the end of the decade to publish his attack on the former Colonial Secretary, for he could not very well expound his private views while he was in office. When it came, the attack on Lord Grey turned out to be by far the largest book Adderley ever wrote. Published in 1869, it was a tome that Adderley none too enticingly called Review of ‘The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration’, by Earl Grey, 1853; and of Subsequent Colonial History.89 Lord Grey’s book was 893 pages long, all directed against his colonial reformer critics. Adderley’s response, sixteen years later, was 423 pages long. If nothing else, it was an object lesson in how not to review a book. Let the battle go unjoined. Neither Lord Grey’s book nor Adderley’s review of it need detain us for very long, since Adderley’s review came out well after the founding months of the Colonial Society, whose foundation might have further informed his views. What matters is that Adderley was still citing Tocqueville explicitly. He was still basing his arguments on a Tocquevillean appreciation, namely the importance of fitting the constitution of a new extra-European state to the temperament of its population.90 In accordance with this long-held view, he thought that the best way to make a constitution fit the people was to allow them to habituate themselves to the exercise of selfgovernance. He did not think that small outposts taken for military reasons qualified for their own legislatures, any more than did ships at sea.91 The Adderley of a few years before—the Adderley who helped to found the Colonial Society—revealed himself better and far more briefly in Europe Incapable of American Democracy (1867), a mere pamphlet far less preoccupied with twenty-year-old controversies than the book on Earl Grey was to be. Here Adderley even managed to include some tantalizing ideas about tropical empire, so general had his ideas become. Adderley’s view of the sweep of history from East to West, and from monarchy to democracy, was now identical to Bury’s, except for Adderley’s greater stress on the role of Providence. Adderley put Bury’s central device, the exodus of the Western nations, this way: There is little of intricacy in the mighty plans of Providence. Broad-featured, slow in process, and to be recognized by all, are the ways of God in the affairs of men. The world has plainly exhibited a regular development of social economy, progressing from its first inhabitation by man, taking one westward direction as the sun, never ceasing, and never retreating. Political institutions have been based on one of three principles successively, and in three several stages of experiment. Human government naturally began as monarchy, and Asia was the first scene of its action. In its westward course, Europe saw its next development on the wider base of aristocracy. It is now spreading itself in broad democracy, over the gigantic areas apparently prepared for its utmost expansion, in America.92

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Adderley had once assured his readers that America could be trusted to expand, even if the Union stayed fragmented, for ‘Manifest Destiny’ beat in every American breast; the phrase had been coined in the 1840s.93 Now in the form of ‘Providence’ it was burning in Adderley’s, too. In addition to this Providential motif there is Adderley’s thesis, contained in the very title of Europe Incapable of American Democracy. Democracy could not flow back to the East, to Europe. Each of the three continents that Adderley mentioned—Asia, Europe, and North America—must forever remain true to the kind of government that had been characteristic of it.94 European democracy would be European in character, and the universal solvent of democracy could never dissolve that European aspect: ‘such great writers as Arnold, De Tocqueville, and others erred in supposing that Democracy…is destined to universal conquest over every former kind of government, as Christianity has been a dissolvent of heathendom.’95 What Europe with its established aristocracy had to be ready for was European and not American democracy, for the latter belonged only to the newly built English-speaking societies overseas. In that sense, Europe Incapable of American Democracy showed a disagreement with Tocqueville about how much democracy Europe was capable of. Yet Adderley’s disagreement was chiefly with the young Tocqueville, who was not yet sure what kind of democracy it was that loomed over Europe. Adderley’s views were closer to those in Tocqueville’s later work, the Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). There Tocqueville showed that certain French habits, such as political centralization and the withdrawal of the individual into private life, had grown out of pre-revolutionary conditions. As Adderley himself put it, ‘The apparent democratic revolutions in France have not affected the fundamental principle of its constitution in the least. The people do not govern themselves the more; but the old government governs more in their name.’96 Adderley was using Tocqueville to bolster the Tory case against the Reform Bill then in the offing. England was a part of Europe; ergo, it should make the best of its aristocratic constitution and not lean too far towards a democratic one. But what of places that were not ready for any democracy at all? Africa, as Adderley noted with imperialistic relish, was not yet sufficiently advanced to be included in a discussion of the relative preparation of the continents for self-rule. Whatever opportunity Adderley had seen in 1865 for black Africans to be prepared for democracy, that opportunity had been lost when the committee had recommended a withdrawal from the West African coastal settlements. Or perhaps Adderley had simply lost his enthusiasm for spreading self-government to blacks: Left aside from the course of social development, it [Africa] may be wholly omitted from our present study. It may, like many portions of the Southern Hemisphere, afford outlets such as Algeria for the enterprise of the Northern nations, or constitute supplements such as the Cape to their career; but it can never rank among the great self-stages of human history. The series, indeed, must cease with the completion of the present chapter…it is Arnold’s ‘last age’.97 Look out for ‘the enterprise of the Northern nations’.

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Just after mentioning the ‘enterprise of the Northern nations’, Adderley launched into yet another Tocquevillean round-up of world history—now he was working himself up into a general theory of world history. The different native states, colonies, and nations were, he believed, predisposed to be governed by different admixtures of the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. By looking at who might rule themselves and who might have to be ruled by others, Adderley produced a thirty-page outline of what was to be the world imperial system of the 1890s. He began with the Canadians. They had begun with semi-French institutions, but their new ‘scheme of Confederate ViceMonarchy is a novelty in the world; and in the new world must practically assume a democratic basis. Who, for instance, would dream of an hereditary or territorial aristocracy there?’ He continued: ‘The link between America and the freest of European nations must partake of the character of both. The spirit of English institutions may adopt to itself the exigencies of American government, as the spirit of American democracy may expand without violating English institutions.’98 Things could not more general than that. It is significant that when Canadian Confederation had yet to make its way through Parliament, Adderley fought against naming the enlarged country ‘Canada’. He wanted to call it ‘British North America’ instead (and the act of Confederation is of course ‘The British North America Act’).99 Adderley wrote on that occasion that the longer and more abstract name was, in its very abstractness, ‘in the large spirit of the age’. Yes, ‘the large spirit of the age’—and, as we have seen, Adderley’s own ideas about democracy and the global English-speaking world had broadened and ballooned from immigration into Australia to exactly that large spirit of the age. Yet Adderley himself continued with his town-building in England, his evangelical work properly so called, and the more workmanlike and routinized phase of his political career. He was not simply an imperialist; he had other concerns. He was responsible for the first Acts for reformatory and industrial schools, and the first Acts for taking care of discharged prisoners. The imperialism that he demonstrated in the 1860s had grown along with more humanitarian interests such as these. The books to which he gave imperial titles need to be understood in the context of those whose titles did not touch on empire. Adderley deserves that much charity. Had he not helped to nurture colonies in which prisoners and the poor could prosper?

8 Conclusion The Colonial Society came about because of big history and little history, but not the middling kind. Big history is made of long-term events, such as the industrialization of Europe and America and the globalization of world trade patterns. Little history is the allimportant activity of private individuals, families, intellectual kin, and small groups. Individuals can think. They can look at the big-history events of their time and then draw their own conclusions. Sometimes they may rely on deeper thinkers like Tocqueville, but they are free to misunderstand or misremember such thinkers as decade follows decade. By contrast with big and small history, there is the middle kind, the history of those grand governmental institutions on the national stage. Neither the British government nor any other established social institution created the Colonial Society, nor even the imperial urge out of which it grew. Instead, the imperial urge grew out of the fascination of some people (little history’s individuals) with big history’s global trends. Using Tocquevillean categories, they tried to practise the grand, trend-spotting kind of history that Tocqueville identified as a product of the democratic mind. They did so in a country with an aristocratic mien, where history and social science tend to be detailed and concrete; the founders were thinking against the grain. Yet in trying for big history, they usually succeeded only in weakening their own grasp of detail. Their pet theories, their pet collectivities, began to jump out at them from every corner of the world. And this may have brought them some comfort at a time when their image of England was under threat. Although Great Britain was the world’s dominant power in the midnineteenth century, it was not always clear what ‘England’ stood for. There were too many competing grounds for identity; there was a torrent of discordant information flowing in about the rest of the world and about England itself. What made England stand out from the myriad places that the English visited or studied? Certain Englishmen felt the need to limn out a new, more collective, and more mythical cultural identity for the country. Looking back on the process, Nikolaus Pevsner thought England had adopted its new identity or collect-ive self-image in the years between 1840 and 1860. Pevsner noted that to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American, England in the 1840s had seemed startlingly noisy and obsessed with money (Pevsner cited dozens of similar observations in Emerson’s English Traits [1856]). Yet England soon became quieter. The English developed a pride in their collective decorum and in their talent for governance. By the mid-nineteenth century, Englishmen were startled by America’s noise and America’s obsession with money.1 In other words, the largest English-speaking countries on either side of the Atlantic had swapped stereotypes. The once-Jeffersonian Republic, founded in the Enlightenment and still (even in the Jacksonian era) the country to which Tocqueville had gone to examine democracy rather than capitalism, became, in the second half of the nineteenth century,

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the land of the industrial robber-barons, the land where Thorstein Veblen would discover conspicuous consumption. Meanwhile, the land that invented industry in the hundred years before 1840, and which had seemed to Emerson so noisy and so money-grubbing— that land went on to discover decorousness and propriety. England reformed its elite schools in the mid-nineteenth century; the young were offered a Greco-Roman ideal of public service and imperial governance, with nary a thought for the grubby achievements of industrialists. Napoleon I, when he claimed that England was a nation of shopkeepers, had gone on to remind his British gaolers that: no man of sense ought to be ashamed of being called a shopkeeper. But your prince and your ministers appear to wish to change altogether the espirit of the English and to make you into a different nation; to make you ashamed of your shops and your trade, which have made you what you are, and to sigh after nobility, titles and decorations.2 Napoleon was right, but it wasn’t only the English ministers who were sighing. In England, shopkeepers and ministers alike wanted something more for their country than an honoured place in the table of industrial production. They proceeded to invent a purpose and destiny—the myth of decorous governance;3 thus the concern of some people with Anglo-Saxon democracy overseas, and thus the swap of stereotypes with America, the stiff upper lip replacing the age of improvement. But the construction of a new idea of England would occur only over a span of decades and not overnight. The members of the Colonial Society came between the period of English industrialism and the twentieth-century era of collectivist values.4 When the Colonial Society was founded, conditions in England had yet to reach the level that Tocqueville had seen in France in 1836—conditions which prompted him to make this observation: The natural tendency of a democratic people to centralize the business of government, becomes chiefly manifest, and has the most rapid growth, in an age of struggle and transition, when the aristocratic and democratic principles are disputing with each other for ascendancy.5 That is where England was by 1900. Looking at the imperial role that their country had blundered into, some late Victorians decided to replace the imperial world that had sprung up with no plan and seemingly of its own volition; if accident could produce so much, surely planning could produce something better.6 The imperialists of 1900 tried to transform the empire into an apparently more rational and better planned system, with a federal structure and a Zollverein. (They were not successful in the attempt.) The founders of the Colonial Society were men of their era; their focus upon imperial collectivities could be pushed only so far. Some of them found the imperialism of the Colonial Society in later years to be distasteful, since they saw that it was in conflict with their earlier and more concrete thinking. By the end of 1884, the year when the Imperial Federation League was founded and the Scramble for Africa was in full swing, Adderley, Albemarle, and at least seventy more of the surviving founders had formally resigned from the Colonial Society.7 Only about half of the founding members who were still alive

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in 1884 remained in the Society at that date. Almost half of the resignations in just over sixteen years (twenty-nine out of seventy-two) came in the four years from 1873 to 1876. This was the worst of the Great Depression of the nineteenth century, so money may have been scarce for some of the members, but that period was also when Disraeli was making imperialism his own, and when the movement for imperial federation was gathering steam. It was indeed this grand idea of imperial federation that many of the members objected to. Adderley and Albemarle (Bury’s father) both resigned from the Society in 1875. They did so because of their beliefs, certainly not because they were strapped for cash. It will be remembered that Albemarle was old enough to recall a more aristocratic and particularistic age which had formed him—he was old enough to remember the first Napoleon. He had spoken up for the rights of Indian peasants. He had been the only speaker at the Society’s inaugural dinner in 1869 not to mention the ‘empire’ or any other grand collectivity; he merely referred to his own ‘colonial remembrances’, in the plural.8 Adderley, too young for that kind of particularity, had other reasons for dissent. He was at bottom an evangelical Christian—rather than a worshipper at the church of Englishspeaking culture. Adderley was furthermore a partisan of colonial home rule. Like Albemarle, he was appalled by the idea of imperial federation. Adderley was not the only advocate of colonial self-government likely to notice that federalism would mean a step backward from the near-independence achieved by the colonies in the half-dozen years after 1848. Federal schemes for the white empire as a whole had died out then, only to be reborn in the 1870s.9 As C.C.Eldridge has shown, it was mostly the younger imperial enthusiasts who supported imperial federation, not men like Adderley. The younger men had little experience living in the colonies or helping to govern them, while the older men understood that the colonists had no intention of handing their powers of self-government back to some new-fangled federal structure in London.10 Federation would have meant the smoothing away of many local differences in colonial governance. It would also have meant the smoothing away of the forced accommodations that different weak colonies had made with neighbouring native peoples. A unified imperial power would wipe away those forced accommodations, and the native peoples to boot. Frederic Rogers, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1860 to 1871, and another ex officio early recruit to the Colonial Society, put the anti-federation cause best. Although he would not be one of those to resign from the Colonial Society over the issue of federation, he did believe that the growing enthusiasm in the 1870s for a more tightly organized empire was unwise. A worldwide alliance would not behave morally.11 By 1885 the prominence of the imperial federation movement prompted him to write that: The notion of a great Anglo-Saxon alliance, not formed with a specific object, as to arrest the superiority of some overgrown power or immoral principle… seems to me likely…if it should last long enough, to degenerate into a successful or unsuccessful contrivance for bullying the rest of the world. To contend for such an alliance on the grounds that Anglo-Saxons—the great exterminators of aborigines in the temperate zones—would, when confederated, set a new and exceptional example of justice and humanity, seems to me a somewhat transcendental expectation.12

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Lord Bury also disapproved of the Imperial Federation League when it came, although he did not resign his position as vice-president of the Society. He thought the League was simply ‘another instance of that craze for over-legislation’ carried out by people who liked ‘tinkering with our Institutions’.13 Strains between the federalists and the advocates of colonial self-government were evident even at the Inaugural Dinner of the Society on 10 March 1869. After the American Ambassador mentioned that Canada would soon join the United States, many of the remaining speakers gave their good-humoured assurances that Canada would never be American. In some of these assurances there was more than a hint of British Empire federalism.14 The Duke of Manchester hoped ‘that this social gathering may, at some future day, lead to a council in which the colonies and Great Britain may be represented in due proportions’.15 But other speakers bristled even at this hint of federalism. Their idea of the empire was looser and more dynamic; the empire was less of a static governmental monolith and more of a permanent catalyst for the shared processes of representative government. Speakers of this bent praised colonial self-government explicitly rather than embracing the cause of unity—they even paid compliments to the offensive American Ambassador.16 As this split between the partisans of federation and the partisans of unconfederated cultural unity showed, the different perspectives on the empire pursued by the individual founders prior to 1868 would not entirely disappear after they had launched the Society on to the historical stage. After 1868, the founders kept on going in their private directions, sometimes away from the point of intersection; hence the defections from the Society by 1884. But what was achieved, what was shared, was a general idea of British imperialism as a whole, an imperialism that covered all the settlement colonies together, plus the idea of tropical empire as well. So, while Lord Bury, C.B.Adderley, and the other anti-federationists may have expected Canada to move ever closer to independence, the idea of the empire that these men shared with the pro-federationists should not be called into question. They all shared a grand, Romantic vision that sailed above rational arguments about whether or not Canada or any other place could put tariffs on British goods; the founders had an idea of empire which was far more global than that, one so global that the particular policies of one or another colony could not shake it; nor could the specific crises in India in 1857 to 1858, the United States in 1861 to 1865, and Jamaica in 1866. The global pattern was of far greater magnitude than any of these discrete events. It was long before all of this that most of the founders began developing their globespanning ideas of the place of the British Empire in geography and history. Their average age was a key factor. Most were mature men by 1857. They began to write about the empire in the days of emigration in the 1840s or self-government in the 1850s. Thus, the ideas behind the foundation of the Colonial Society reflected the perspectives of those days, not so much the period of imperial or English-speaking upheaval—the period that began with the Indian Mutiny in 1857, that continued through the American Civil War and the Governor Eyre controversy, and that ended with the Confederation of Canada, the Abyssinian Expedition, and the foundation of the Colonial Society itself. The selfgoverning emigration and settlement empire of the 1850s would always be with the

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founders as part of their general vision. And yet pace C.C.Eldridge17 and many other scholars, the founders did not have to wait until some special time—1868 and the Abyssinian affair, the Disraeli government of 1874 to 1880, or what you will—to extend their analysis beyond the settlement colonies to include tropical expansion as well. The founders got to the Tropics (at least in their own minds) on their own and at different times, as individuals, because of their need to generalize about and categorize the broad flow of information about the world that they had been faced with in the 1830s, 1840s, and indeed all the way through to the 1860s. Turning one’s mind from focusing on the settlement colonies alone to take in the Tropics was not a communal or a social act that happened all at once for everyone somewhere between 1868 and 1880; it was a step that could be taken at any time. Adderley is one example. In his voluminous writings, he generalized about the world ever more broadly, so that he was able to include the need for imperial rule in the tropics in his works on the possibility of democracy and self-rule in other parts of the world. Other men, too, worked themselves up to the level of global analysis and global generalization, grinding away the differences and the specifics. J.C.Marshman did so (with his ideas about a British and American carve-up of East Asia); so did A.R.Roche (with his plan to rival Rajah Brooke); and so did Lord Bury himself (with his great tome on the history of Western civilization and its culmination in Canada). So too did many others, not least those whose lives took them back and forth from the settlement to the non-settlement empire—such as the career governors and the railway engineers. If anything, what they were projecting on to the world was a picture of a settlement empire marked by the mid-Victorian ideas of duty, destiny, self-reliance, and self-government, and not so much by ideas of race or status. Pace David Cannadine,18 it wasn’t the idea of English county status hierarchies that they projected—what they projected on to the world was a number of different ideas. What their thinking had in common was not so much its subject matter as its order-ofmarch: the shift from the noisy specifics of the world to ever quieter, ever grander abstractions about it as the years went by. That the founders had begun thinking about the empire as a huge general category, and had founded the Society to propagate their views, had real effects. While, as Eldridge has indeed shown,19 the Colonial Society stayed out of politics until the mid-1870s, the fact that there was a Colonial Society made up of men who were willing to take small controversies and inject into them their idea of the requirements of an ever-growing, proud, worldwide empire does seem to have made the difference. That is, the smaller territorial questions of the 1860s had stayed small. The controversies over territorial expansion or contraction that Great Britain faced in the 1860s did not—all of them—call forth a pro-imperial lobby to look after whatever someone might fancy to be the larger imperial interest. But that is what did happen again and again in the 1870s, with the Royal Colonial Institute (as it then was) openly and successfully interfering on the side of annexation and imperial aggrandizement on every conceivable occasion, a policy that it seems to have adopted in 1875. Many of the members, although not the Institute itself, had begun interfering in this direction as early as the New Zealand troop withdrawal controversy of 1869. In the end, the picture is one of a continuous development in the individual thinking on the part of many of these people as one period of Victorian history passed into another.

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There was little that was new under the sun in 1868; and the empire on which the sun had never set was not new. What was changing was people’s attitudes towards what they could see under all that sunshine—those men who chose to look. Prior to 1868, the empire already had its partisans, but they did not always know that they were imperialists. They spent years building different parts of the imperial bandwagon, and they did it for different reasons. By 1868, and often well before, most had expanded their ideas into general categories of world history, geographical or historical categories based on the emigration and self-government empire of the 1840s and 1850s, but broadened in the minds of many of the founders to include the Tropics. Then the members came together, and soon enough some of them parted again over federation. But because they did come together the bandwagon was ready for all to see. They had drawn attention to the overall British role in the world. It is simpler and better to look at them as writers and thinkers on that intellectual journey—constructing a set of empire-scaled categories and generalizations that helped them to manage the flow of information with which they were confronted—than to separate them into static, overly rigid, and often inappropriate categories along the lines of ‘colonial reformers’, ‘colonial separatists’, ‘officials’, ‘federationists’, ‘investors’, ‘colonists’, and ‘armchair travellers’. Individually, the founders had run up against the empire in one way or another; they decided to keep up the connection and make sense of their impressions. They should be distinguished in the first instance not from each other, but from the majority of midVictorians—the majority who did not choose to follow imperial affairs, and who did not want to join a club for those who did.

Appendix 1 Members of the Colonial Society NB: Names are given as of early in 1869; later titles or ranks are omitted. Italics denote members who cannot be identified beyond the Society’s own records. In Appendices 1B through 1G, members are listed for the period in which they first became active in the Colonial Society, even if they had yet to join formally (see Chapter 2). Appendix 1A The membership up to 13 April 1869 Adderley, Charles Briggs, Thomas Bowyer Broad, Charles Henry Albemarle, George Broadwater, Robert Thomas Keppel, 6th Earl Buckingham and Chandos, Richard Plantagenet of Campbell Temple Nugent Brydges-Chandos Allen, Charles H. Grenville, 3rd Duke of Allen, Lewis Philip Bulwer, Henry Argyll, George Douglas Bury, William Coutts Keppel, Lord Campbell, 8th Duke of Cardwell, Edward Arnold, H.J. Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, 4th Baring, Thomas Earl of Barr, E.G. Cave, Stephen Bate, John Challis, John Henry Beale, Montague Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley Beer, Julius Churchill, Lord Alfred Spencer Bell, Sir George, KCB Clarke, Col. Andrew Bennett, Charles Fox Clifford, Sir Charles Bergtheil, Jonas Coates, James Bevan, G.P. Cochrane, Alexander Dundas Ross William Baillie Birch, Arthur Nonus Coghlan, Maj.-Gen. Sir William Marcus Black, James Coghlan, William Mant Blaine, D.P. Crease, Henry Pering Pellew Blaine, Henry Blane, Capt. Blyth, Arthur Boutcher, Emanuel Brand, William Croll, Alexander Croll, Col. Alexander Angus Crooks, Adam

Franklin, Selim Freshfield, William D. Frome, Maj.-Gen. Edward Charles

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Currey, Revd Robert Arthur Dalgety, Frederick Gonnerman Davidson, I.B. Davis, Revd James De Mornay, Henry De Salis, William Andrew Fane Denison, Maj.-Gen. Sir William Thomas Dickinson, S.F. Dietz, Bernard Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth, 2nd Bart. Dobson, I.T. Douglas, James A. Du Croz, Frederick Augustus Ducie, Henry John ReynoldsMoreton, 3rd Earl of Duddell, George Duff, William Duncan, William Dunell, H.S. Edmondstone, William Edwards, H.A. Elliot, Frederick B.D. Elliot, H.T. Elmsley, Henry Elsey, Col. William Erskine, Hon. James Augustus Etheridge, Henry Fanning, William Fielder, C.H. Filby, M.B. Firebrace, R.T. Fitz Gibbon, Abraham Coates Fitzherbert, Hon. Sir William Fitzwilliam, Hon. Charles William WentworthFleming, C. Fortescue, Hon. Dudley Francis Fortescue, Chichester Samuel Parkinson Foster Vesey Fitzgerald, John

Fuller, Frederick W. Galton, Capt. Douglas Ghinn, Henry Gilmore, Capt. G. Gisborne, Frederick Newton, CE Glyn, Hon. George Grenfell Goodliffe, Francis G. Goodricke, D.G. Goodricke, John Richardson Gorst, Sir John Eldon Goschen, George Joachim Grain, William Granville, Granville George LevesonGower, 2nd Earl Gregory, Sir Charles Hutton Haliburton, Arthur Lawrence Hall, John Frederick Hamilton, Archibald Harbottle, William Harrington, Thomas Moore Hay, Lord William Montagu Hay, R.Bryce Hellmuth, Revd Isaac Henderson, Joseph Henty, William Hetherington, A. Hill, John S. Hincks, Capt. Alexander Hincks, Sir Francis Hoare, Robert Holland, Henry Thurston Hopcraft, George Hume, William Burnley Ingles, Henry Inman, William Irwin, J.V.H. Jamieson, Hugh Jones, Sir Willoughby, 3rd Bart. Joseph, Samuel Aaron Julyan, Penrose Goodchild Kiell, George Middleton King, Henry Samuel

Kinnaird, Hon. Arthur Fitzgerald Labilliere, Francis Peter Learmonth, Dr John Leveson, Edward John

Mort, William Muttlebury, James W. Nicholson, Sir Charles, Bart. Normanby, George Augustus

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Levey, Charles E. Constantine Phipps, 2nd Marquess of Lindsay, Lt-Col. Robert James Lloyd Northcote, Sir Stafford Henry, Bart. Linnington, A.H. Paterson, John Louis, Alfred Hyman Pauw, Klaas Lynn, W.Frank Porter, Richard, Jnr Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton Pratt, J.J. Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Rae, James MacArthur, Alexander Rawlinson, Maj.-Gen. Sir Henry McDonald, H.C. Creswicke, Bart. MacDougall, Col. Sir Patrick Leonard Reeve, John MacGarel, Charles Rennie, J.T. Mackenzie, J.H.C. Ridgway, Lt-Col. A. Mackinnon, Lauchlan Robinson, Sir John Mackinnon, William Roche, Alfred R. Macleay, Sir George Roche, E.S. MacNab, Revd Dr Alexander Roche, Henry Philip McPherson, Allan Rogers, Alexander Maitland, William Rogers, Sir Frederic Manby, Lt Col. Charles Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Manchester, William Drogo Montagu, Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of 7th Duke of Salomans, Ald. Sir David, Bart. Mann, Dr Robert James Sargeaunt, William Charles Marsh, Matthew Henry Sargood, Frederick Marshman, John Clark Schwartze, Helmuth Maude, Col. Francis Cornwallis Scott, G.A.G. Merivale, Herman Scott, Sir John Mills, Arthur Searight, James Milton, Viscount William Shepstone, Theophilus Molineux, Gisborne Shepstone, Theophilus, Jnr Monck, Charles Stanley Monck, 4th Silver, Stephen William Viscount Soloman, N. Monsell, William Spowers, Allan Montefiore, Jacob Stephens, William Montgomerie, Hugh E. Stevens, James Moor, Henry Swale, Revd Hogarth John Morgan, Octavius Vaughan Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood Morgan, Septimus Vaughan Verdon, George Frederick Morrison, J.R. Waddington, Alfred Morrison, John Walker, Edward Walker, William Waterhouse, G.M. Webb, William Frederick Weld, Frederick Aloysius Wentworth, J.H. Westgarth, William Wharton, Revd Joseph Crane

Wilson, Edward Wolff, Henry Drummond Wood, Frederick A. Wray, Cecil Wray, Leonard Hume Wray, Leonard, Jnr Youl, James Arndell

Appendix Wiggins, Frederick A. Williamson, George

124 Young, Sir John, Bart.

Appendix 1B The members as of the first meeting on 26 June 1868 Bell, Sir George, KCB Bergtheil, Jonas Birch, Arthur Nonus Blaine, D.P. Blaine, Henry Blane, Capt. Blyth, Sir Arthur Bury, William Coutts Keppel, Lord Clarke, Col. Andrew Cochrane, Alexander Dundas Ross William Baillie Coghlan, Maj.-Gen. Sir William Marcus De Mornay, Henry Douglas, James A. Elliot, Frederick B.D. Erskine, the Hon. James Augustus Fortescue, Hon. Dudley Francis Fortescue, Chichester Samuel Parkinson Franklin, Selim Gisborne, Frederick Newton, CE Goschen, George Joachim Henty, William Hincks, Capt. Alexander Hume, William Burnley Ingles, Henry Irwin, J.V.H. Louis, Alfred Hyman Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron

MacGarel, Charles Mackinnon, Lauchlan MacNab, Revd Dr Alexander Manchester, William Drogo Montagu, 7th Duke of Mann, Dr Robert James Marsh, Matthew Henry Montgomerie, Hugh E. Morrison, J.R. Muttlebury, James W. Nicholson, Sir Charles, Bart. Normanby, George Augustus Constantine Phipps, 2nd Marquess of Pratt, J.J. Roche, Alfred R. Roche, E.S. Roche, Henry Philip Stephens, William Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood Waddington, Alfred Walker, Edward Waterhouse, G.M. Wiggins, Frederick A. Wilson, Edward Wolff, Henry Drummond Wray, Leonard Hume Youl, Sir James Arndell

Appendix 1C New members, 27 July to 12 August 1868 (second general meeting) Adderley, Charles Bowyer Arnold, H.J. Baring, Thomas Barr, E.G.

Hamilton, Archibald Harrington, Thomas Moore Hay, Lord William

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125

Beale, Montague Bennett, Charles Fox Boutcher, Emanuel Buckingham and Chandos, Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple Nugent Brydges-Chandos Grenville, 3rd Duke of Cave, Stephen Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley Clifford, Sir Charles Dalgety, Frederick Gonnerman Du Croz, Frederick Augustus Ducie, Henry John Reynolds-Moreton, 3rd Earl of Duff, William Dunell, H.S. Edmondstone, William Firebrace, R.T. Fitzwilliam, Hon. Charles William WentworthGhinn, Henry Glyn, Hon. George Grenfell Goodliffe, Francis G. Gorst, Sir John Eldon Grain, William Gregory, Sir Charles Hutton

Montagu Hetherington, A. Jones, Sir Willoughby, 3rd Bart. Julyan, Penrose Goodchild Kiell, George Middleton Lynn, W.Frank Merivale, Herman Milton, Viscount William Molineux, Gisborne Northcote, Sir Stafford Henry, Bart. Pauw, Klaas Rae, James Rawlinson, Maj.-Gen. Sir Henry Creswicke, Bart. Reeve, John Ridgway, Lt-Col. A. Rogers, Sir Frederic Salomans, Ald. Sir David, Bart. Sargeaunt, William Charles Searight, James Stevens, James Swale, Revd Hogarth John Walker, William Westgarth, William Wray, Cecil Young, Sir John, Bart.

Appendix 1D New members, 15 August to 3 November 1868 (Greater Britain still unfinished) Bate, John Bevan, George Phillip Cardwell, Edward Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, 4th Earl of Challis, John Henry Crease, Henry Pering Pellew Davidson, I.B.

Moor, Henry

Denison, Maj.-Gen. Sir William Thomas Duddell, George Freshfield, William D. Inman, William King, Henry Samuel Kinnaird, Hon. Arthur Fitzgerald Manby, Lt-Col. Charles Silver, Stephen William

Appendix Morgan, Septimus Vaughan Mort, William Scott, Sir John

126 Spowers, Allan Weld, Frederick Aloysius Wood, Frederick A.

Appendix 1E New members, 11 November to 30 December 1868 Croll, Alexander Crooks, Adam Currey, Revd Robert Arthur Dietz, Bernard Frome, Maj.-Gen. Edward Charles Haliburton, Arthur Lawrence Hellmuth, Revd Isaac Henderson, Joseph

Linnington, A.H. Macleay, Sir George McDonald, H.C. Robinson, Sir John Shepstone, Theophilus, Jnr Verdon, George Frederick Webb, William Frederick Wentworth, J.H.

Appendix 1F New members, 20 January to 25 February 1869 Argyll, George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Beer, Julius Briggs, Thomas Coates, James Coghlan, William Mant Elliot, H.T. Elmsley, Henry Fanning, William Fielder, C.H. Fitzherbert, Hon. Sir William Foster Vesey Fitzgerald, John Galton, Capt. Douglas Gilmore, Capt. G. Goodricke, D.G. Goodricke, John Richardson Granville, Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl

Holland, Sir Henry Thurston Lindsay, Lt-Col. Robert James Lloyd MacArthur, Alexander MacDougall, Col. Sir Patrick Leonard Mackenzie, J.H.C. Mackinnon, William McPherson, Allan Monck, Charles Stanley Monck, 4th Viscount Monsell, Rt. Hon. William Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Sargood, Sir Frederick Scott, G.A.G. Wray, Leonard, Jnr

Appendix 1G New members, 10 March (the Inaugural Dinner) to 13 April 1869 (the day Dilke joined) Albemarle, George Thomas Keppel, 6th Earl of Allen, Charles H.

Allen, Lewis Philip Black, James Brand, William

Appendix Broad, Charles Henry Broadwater, Robert Bulwer, Henry Churchill, Lord Alfred Spencer Croll, Col. Alexander Angus Davis, Revd James De Salis, William Andrew Fane Dickinson, S.F. Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth, 2nd Bart. Dobson, I.T. Duncan, William Edwards, H.A. Elsey, Col. William Etheridge, Henry Filby, M.B. Fitz Gibbon, Abraham Coates Fleming, C. Fuller, Frederick W. Hall, John Frederick Harbottle, William Hay, R.Bryce Hill, John S. Hincks, Sir Francis

127 Hoare, Robert Hopcraft, George Jamieson, Hugh Joseph, Samuel Aaron Labilliere, Francis Peter Learmonth, Dr John Leveson, Edward John Levey, Charles E. Maitland, William Marshman, John Clark Maude, Col. Francis Cornwallis Mills, Arthur Montefiore, Jacob Morgan, Octavius Vaughan Morrison, John Paterson, John Porter, Richard, Jnr Rennie, J.T. Rogers, Alexander Schwartze, Helmuth Shepstone, Theophilus Soloman, N. Wharton, Revd Joseph Crane Williamson, George

Notes

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standing with his sketchpad on the ruins of London Bridge. See Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, in John Hall (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. xii, ns 5 and 4. This device of a traveller surveying the ruins of an ancient imperial city has its own history; see J.B.Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (1932; New York: Dover Publications, 1955), pp. 198–9; and J.W.Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 68–9. In an 1872 engraving, Doré would show the New Zealander on the wreck of London Bridge, giving him a Dantesque cloak—see Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant & Co, 1872; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), p. 102, and the plate facing p. 188. 4 Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 98–115. 5 Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 29. 6 [Goldwin Smith], ‘Imperialism’, Fraser’s Magazine, 55 (May 1857), p. 493. 7 An early work of this kind was C.A.Bodelson, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1924; reprint, London: Heinemann, 1960). See also Klaus E.Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944); and Stanley R.Stembridge, Parliament, the Press, and the Colonies (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982). For a similar analysis, but one relying more on official papers than on Victorian monographs, see the final chapter (‘The Climax of Antiimperialism’) in Robert Livingston Schuyler, The Fall of the Old Colonial System: A Study in British Free Trade, 1770–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 234–84. Ronald Hyam, in Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: Batsford, 1976), touches on a tremendous number of people and of subjects, but seldom for more than a sentence or two, barely describing people’s careers or how they changed their minds over time. 8 Studies showing that the growth in popular or official imperialism came later include Koebner and Schmidt, Imperialism, pp. 85–91; W.David McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics: A Study of British Colonial Policy in West Africa, Malaya, and the South Pacific in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 384–5; Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 3–7, 126–33; and Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, rev. edn, vol. 1, The Durham Report to the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 34–57. 9 J.E.Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity (1868–1895), Imperial Studies, no. 16 (London: Longman, Green & Co, 1938), p. 8. 10 Freda Harcourt, ‘Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing’, Historical Journal, 23 (March 1980), pp. 80–107. 11 Nini Rodgers, ‘The Abyssinian Expedition of 1867–1868: Disraeli’s Imperialism or James Murray’s War?’, Historical Journal, 27, 1 (1984), pp. 129–49; C.C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of the New Imperialism, The Past in Perspective (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 27–31. 12 For these aspects of Victorian life, see W.L.Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), ch. 2.

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13 The ecological factors behind long-term European expansion in the pre-industrial period, such as the unusual and agriculturally significant ability of adult Caucasians to digest milk, and the disease resistance that came from living towards the middle of the Eurasian-African world, are explored by Alfred W. Crosby in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). In the nineteenth century, Europeans took over large areas of farmland similar in ecology and potential productiveness to where they had come from—B.R.Tomlinson, ‘Empire of the Dandelion: Ecological Imperialism and Economic Expansion, 1860–1914’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 26, 2 (May 1998), pp. 84–99. Technological improvements gave Europe an advantage over most of the rest of the world, and the ability to survive in the Tropics—see Daniel R.Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Peter Burroughs, ‘The Human Cost of Imperial Defence in the Early Victorian Age’, Victorian Studies, 24, 1 (autumn 1980), pp. 7–32; Philip D.Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and idem., ‘The End of the “White Man’s Grave”?: Nineteenth-century Mortality in West Africa’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21, 1 (summer 1990), pp. 63–88. Among its other virtues, Curtin’s work details the puzzling health improvement at mid-century, which apparently preceded most of the identifiable medical improvements, save all-important quinine (Death by Migration, pp. 1–39, 159–60). For some of the economic and political effects of the disequilibrium between travelling Europeans and stationary non-Europeans, see D.K.Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire: 1830–1914, rev. edn (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 460–2. Long-term cultural and economic factors behind European preeminence in nineteenth-century industry, global transportation, and communications are reviewed in David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 12–39; and idem., The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Others are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). 14 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 334, 360. As the history of habits of mind—such as generalization and systematization—this study would seem to be a part of the historical epistemology described (in the context of Victorian studies) by Mary Poovey in Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–9. If eighteenth-century thinkers supplemented abstraction with Baconian fact-gathering, then the subjects of this study—facing a flood of information about the rest of the world—moved back to abstraction. 15 With the monarchical principle of the Old Regime in retreat, as Benedict Anderson has argued, people cast about for a new focus for their collective identity. Some people chose ‘the nation’, and others chose one or another religio-linguistic identity,

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something on the order of English-speaking Protestantism, the Roman Catholic Church, Disraeli’s Hebraic fantasies, or (beyond Europe) the language religion of Islam. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 13–22. While Anderson’s is a key study, he dates English nationalism about a century too late, and he dates the appearance of colonials in the House of Commons and as colonial governors about half a century too late: see pp. 93–4 and 94, n. 24. He is also wrong to assume that the rise of British imperial sentiment as a new focus for the loyalty of the people was in any way accompanied by a loosening of the popular attachment to the monarch. As has been said of the situation in France, ‘New “churches” appeared, each believing in its mission of reconciling the self to the social order and politics to historical destiny. But…none produced a new messiah or a new civilization. They produced exaltations and despairs of ideology.’ See George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 143. For some thoughts on the connection between mid-nineteenth-century French intellectual yearnings and French imperialism, see idem., pp. 204–5. 16 On the peripheral approach, see John S.Galbraith, ‘The Turbulent Frontier as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1960), pp. 150–68; and Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, pp. 76–84, 460–3, 464–75. Examples of this approach are John S.Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963); Alan Lester, ‘Settlers, the State and Colonial Power: The Colonization of Queen Adelaide Province, 1834–37’, Journal of African History, 39 (1998), pp. 221–46; and McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics. See also C.M.Andrew and A.S.Kanya-Forstner, ‘Centre and Periphery in the Making of the Second French Colonial Empire, 1815–1920’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 16 (May 1988), pp. 9–34. The many military conflicts produced on the British periphery are tabulated in Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 364–71. 17 As Norman Etherington has pointed out, there is an important difference between explanations of ‘imperialism’, understood as a changing set of British (or indeed European) attitudes to the empire or potential empire over the past several centuries, and explanations of the actual expansion of that empire in the late nineteenth century. Norman Etherington, ‘Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism’, History and Theory, 21, 1 (1982), pp. 1–36. 18 One is A.Syzmanski, in The Logic of Imperialism (New York: Praeger, 1981). 19 It is most evocatively detailed in A.P.Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1959). 20 For the role of the Americans as precursors of Hobson, see Norman Etherington, ‘Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism’; idem., ‘The Capitalist Theory of Capitalist Imperialism’, History of Political Economy, 15, 1 (1983), pp. 38–62; and idem., Theories of Imperialism (Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 1–39, 165–75. For the Cobdenite aspects in Hobson’s thought, see P.J.Cain, ‘J.A.Hobson, Cobdenism, and the Radical Theory of Economic Imperialism, 1898–1914’,

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Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 31, 4 (1978), pp. 565–84. See also P.J.Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance, 1887–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21 The clearest and most balanced exposition of this point of view remains that of Richard Pares, ‘The Economic Factors in the History of the Empire’, Economic History Review, 1st ser., 7, 2 (May 1937), pp. 119–44. Pares concludes that capital was exported chiefly to bring fertile lands outside Europe into profitable relationships with metropolitan economies, rather than simply to remove the excess capital from Europe. 22 Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies, p. 346. 23 J.A.Hobson, Imperialism: A Study [1902] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), pp. 46, 56–9, 221, and (on the surplus capital of the rich) pp. 84–5; Rudolph Hilferding, Finance Capital, trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon [1910] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 336, 365–9; and George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier [1937] (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1961), p. 136. 24 For a précis of the early refutations, see Richard Koebner, ‘The Concept of Economic Imperialism’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 2, 1 (1949), pp. 1–29; for a recent refutation of the idea that surplus capital from the domestic economy went abroad, see Roger Burt, ‘Segmented Capital Markets and Patterns of Investment in Late-Victorian Britain: Evidence from the Non-ferrous Mining Industry’, Economic History Review, 51, 4 (November 1998), pp. 709–33. 25 Patrick K.O’Brien, ‘Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25 (1982), pp. 1–18. Phyllis Deane stresses that numerous marginal advantages may together have helped England to achieve industrial take-off, and therefore she gives the American trade more credit for Britain’s industrialization than O’Brien would, for it must have been one of the marginal advantages—Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 57–9, 66–7. But for a short criticism of the data behind Deane’s conclusion that foreign trade contributed to industrialization, see D.C.M.Platt, Mickey Mouse Numbers in World History: The Short View (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 58–9. On the large portion of eighteenth-century trade that was composed of the re-export of Asian or American commodities, bringing money into England but never touching the industrial sector directly, see Jacob M.Price, ‘What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History, 49 (June 1989), pp. 267–84. A speciality of this trade, namely the exportation of Africans to the Americas, certainly provided its margin of profit to Great Britain, but it was not a key margin, and the whole economy of the West Indies was smaller than many a domestic British industry; thus it has been argued that slavery was not a key contributor to British industrialization—David Eltis and Stanley L.Engerman, ‘The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Economic History, 60, 1 (March 2000), pp. 123–44. For the contributions of the post-1763 empire to Britain’s economy more generally, to the employment of British people overseas, and to Britain’s status as a great power, see P.J.Marshall,

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‘Empire and Employment in Britain, 1763–1775: The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 6, vol. 5 (1995), pp. 111–28. 26 On the subject of informal empire and free trade, the formative statement was John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’. 27 See Lance E.Davis, Robert A.Huttenback, and Susan Gray Davis, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 145–65, 244–52, 303–7. 28 Patrick K.O’Brien, ‘The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846–1914: Reply’, Past & Present, 125 (November 1989), pp. 192–9. See also Paul Kennedy, ‘The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846–1914: Comment’, Past & Present, 125 (November 1989), pp. 186–92; Avner Offer, ‘The British Empire, 1870–1914: A Waste of Money?’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 66, 2 (1993), pp. 215–38. 29 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, pp. 87–110, 307–16; and Patrick K.O’Brien, ‘The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846–1914’, Past & Present, 120 (1988), pp. 163–200. According to O’Brien, Davis and Huttenback’s own summary tables show that returns on imperial investment prior to the 1880s were indeed impressive in comparison with returns on investment elsewhere, although imperial investment was much less profitable after that period (O’Brien, pp. 179–80). Davis and Huttenback note, however, that the data behind their summary tables about relative returns on investment across different sectors of the economy are unreliable before some unclear point in the 1870s. It was in 1870 itself that a great many companies incorporated and released financial information under the limited liability provisions of the Companies Act of 1862; even then, family firms did not stampede into public ownership, and those operating abroad or in the empire (plus companies in certain industries) were especially unlikely to go public and release financial data until the 1880s or later (idem., pp. 74, 81–2,106– 10). This skewing effect is not the only problem with the company data in the Davis and Huttenback tables; see O’Brien’s review of Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire in the TLS, 24 July 1987, pp. 799–800; A.G.Hopkins, ‘Accounting for the British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 16 (January 1988), pp. 234–47; and Offer, ‘The British Empire’. I am relying not on the summary tables of profitability across industries but on Davis and Huttenback’s more detailed, more narrative, and thus slightly more reliable industry-by-industry analyses (pp. 87– 104). Two points made by Davis and Huttenback—that imperial investment was not particularly significant before the 1870s, apart from railways, and that some imperial investments may have been especially profitable during a brief moment in the late 1860s (when other investments sank of their own accord)—also emerged from a study by an earlier pair of computerized cliometricians, Harvey H.Segal and Matthew Simon, ‘British Foreign Capital Issues, 1865–1894’, Journal of Economic History, 21, 4 (December 1961), pp. 566–77 (see Chart III). Segal and Simon examined The Investor’s Monthly Manual, not the company records that Davis and Huttenback would use. Thus, if we put the findings of Davis and Huttenback next to those of Segal and Simon, it would seem that imperial railway investment in the settlement colonies was reasonably profitable, and that other imperial investments

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had one unusual moment of profitability just as the Colonial Society was being founded. Since the profitability of these imperial investments was a new concept, any investors attracted to them would have been risk-takers, and their money would have flowed back out of these investments after a few years. The relative profitability of imperial investment did not last long enough to attract longer term investment. And long-term ‘investment’ remained, in the 1860s, far more socially acceptable than short-term ‘speculation’. See David C.Itzkowitz, ‘Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 45 (autumn 2002), pp. 121–47. 30 S.Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India, Cambridge South Asian Studies, 21 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 49–52. 31 Ian J.Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 17–20, 187, 210–12. 32 T.O.Lloyd, ‘Africa and Hobson’s Imperialism’, Past & Present, 55 (May 1972), pp. 130–53. 33 T.A.Jenkins (ed.), ‘The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1868–1873’, Camden Miscellany, 5th ser., 3, 4 (1994), pp. 329–513—see the entries for 5 and 8 March 1869, pp. 348–9. 34 Nor did businessmen push for annexation in such places, at least until the mid1880s, after the New Imperialism had got its start—W.G.Hynes, ‘British Mercantile Attitudes towards Imperial Expansion’, Historical Journal, 19, 4 (1976), pp. 969– 79. 35 For Latin America, see D.C.M.Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Latin America became a more crowded market in the late nineteenth century, and British money tended to shift elsewhere (pp. 306– 8, 310–13). Some money shifted earlier; the huge guano trade with Peru of the 1840s and 1850s went into decline, and the firm of Anthony Gibbs & Sons lost its monopoly contract in 1862. The firm’s profits in the 1850s had been large in absolute terms but not in relation to the volume of the trade. W.M.Matthew, ‘Antony Gibbs & Sons, the Guano Trade and the Peruvian Government, 1842–1861’, in D.C.M.Platt (ed.), Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 337–70; see esp. pp. 338, 339–50, 369. 36 D.R.SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1830–1914 (Columbus, MI: South Asia Books, 1977), pp. 144–52, 264–71, 274–80; idem., ‘British Expansion in Southeast Asia: The Imperialism of Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roger D.Long (ed.), The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire History, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, 31 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 7–20; Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, pp. 173–98, 384–93; McIntyre, Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, pp. 154–210. 37 Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 24–69; see esp. pp. 45–6. 38 John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (June 1997), pp. 614–42; for further

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cases, and a consideration of anthropological perspectives on clientelism, see Colin Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, Journal of World History, 11, 2 (autumn 2000), pp. 227–63. At many bridgeheads, the amount of local collaboration decreased and the amount of violence increased in the later second half of the nineteenth century, thus feeding into the desire for formal European control: A.E.Atmore, ‘The ExtraEuropean Foundations of British Imperialism: Towards a Reassessment’, in C.C.Eldridge (ed.), British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Problems in Focus (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 106–25. As Darwin acknowledges, the theoretical aspects of this process were first explored in Ronald Robinson, ‘NonEuropean Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 118–40—referring back to the AngloEgyptian history powerfully set out in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1961). See the extended and clear discussion of the missionary and humanitarian pressure groups of the 1870s in Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 144–70. 39 There is a helpful synthesis of recent scholarship on what Hobson was trying to do, plus a new exploration of the subject, in P.J.Cain, ‘J.A.Hobson, Financial Capitalism, and Imperialism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 13 (May 1985), pp. 1–27. For some interesting comments on the Afrocentric nature of Hobson or of his followers, see SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, pp. 4–5; and Lloyd, ‘Africa and Hobson’s Imperialism’. 40 V.I.Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline [1917] (New York: Progress Publishers, 1939). The vital point that Lenin, the supposed theorist of imperialism, was not really writing about the subject of countries taking over territory in the less-developed world was only recognized in the literature in 1969, in Eric Stokes, ‘Late Nineteenth-century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?’, Historical Journal, 12, 2 (1969), pp. 285–301. 41 Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 81–2. 42 The questions of whether Hobson and Lenin agreed with each other, and whether Lenin was concerned with territorial imperialism, are answered in the affirmative in A.M.Eckstein, ‘Is There a “Hobson-Lenin Thesis” on Late Nineteenth-century Colonial Expansion?’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 64, 2 (1991), pp. 297– 318. Eckstein also notes that some scholars continued to answer these questions one way or the other without reading the scholarly debate; see esp. p. 298 and 298, n. 7. 43 Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 62–5, 79–80—these pages comprise parts of chs IV and VI. 44 This is the burden of Michael Edelstein’s study, although Edelstein does not want to let go of the hold of economics on imperial history—Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850–1914 (London: Metheun & Co, 1982), pp. 288–314. 45 Lenin, Imperialism, p. 46. 46 Lenin’s sampling dates for the extent of European empires, dates figuring in the key

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table of ch. VI (Table 3), were 1876 and 1914. When, as in the first table of that chapter, he did mention the date 1900, he did so with no comment on its relevance to his previous argument about monopolization. The period of monopolization as he had identified it began at about 1900; thus judging by Table 3 of Chapter VI he could find an effect from before that year (the expansion of empires) and give a cause from afterward (monopolization)—Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 46, 76–83. For a different, more detailed, and if possible even less friendly account of HobsonHilferding-Kautsky-Leninist imperialism, see L.H.Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1967), pp. 39–71. The economic theory of imperialism and its weaknesses are also explored in Koebner, ‘Concept of Economic Imperialism’; Mark Blaug, ‘Economic Imperialism Revisited’, Yale Review, ser. 2, 50 (1961), pp. 335–49; and D.K.Fieldhouse, ‘“Imperialism”: An Historiographical Revision’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25, 2 (1961), pp. 187–209. 47 The argument in favour of a dominant service sector is contained in W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1900 (London: Routledge, 1993). In the nineteenth century and ever since, British manufacturers were reputed to possess wealth far in excess of what they actually had. They had a reputation as a large group helping to guide British policy, when in fact manufacturers made up only a tiny fraction of society, even in manufacturing centres—Stana Nenadic, ‘Businessmen, The Urban Middle Class, and the “Dominance” of Manufacturers in Nineteenth-century Britain’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 44, 1 (1991), pp. 66–85. 48 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688– 1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993). 49 It has appeared in a new edition: P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 2002); and it has inspired new work: see Raymond E.Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London and New York: Longman, 1999). ‘Gentlemanly capitalism’, first proposed by Cain and Hopkins in 1986, has proved to be a fruitful idea for investigating British domestic history quite apart from imperialism: see e.g. W.D.Rubinstein, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry, 1820–1914: Comment’, Past & Present, 132 (August 1991), pp. 150–70; M.J Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry, 1820–1914: Reply’, Past & Present, 132 (August 1991), pp. 170–87; and Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry, 1820–1914’, Past & Present, 122 (February 1989), pp. 119–58. For the fons et origo, see P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, ‘Gentleman Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. I. The Old Colonial System’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39, 4 (November 1986), pp. 501–25; and ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. II. New Imperialism’, Economic History Review, 40, 1 (February 1987), pp. 1–26. See also Cain and Hopkins, ‘The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 33, 4 (November 1980), pp. 463–90. 50 A.G.Hopkins, ‘The “New International Economic Order”, in the Nineteenth Century: Britain’s First Development Plan for Africa’, in Robin Law (ed.), From

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Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenthcentury West Africa, African Studies Series, 86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 240–64. 51 See comments in Jerome Slater, ‘Is United States Foreign Policy “Imperialist” or “Imperial”?’, Political Science Quarterly, 91, 1 (spring 1976), pp. 63–87. Slater cites William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1959). See also idem., Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 6–11 and passim. By 1980, Williams could draw a direct line from Elizabethan plans for Virginia through the adoption of a strong federal government in 1787–88, the seizure of half of Mexico in 1849, and the American intervention in Vietnam. For Williams, Adam Smith rather than J.A Hobson best understood imperialism: the metropolises (whether London and Manchester in 1851, Boston and New York in 1865, or New York and Washington, DC in 1965) always control the economy and thus the culture and political destiny of the whole countryside, even the countryside overseas. 52 Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of the New Imperialism, pp. 13–25; Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 180–1. 53 Trevor R.Reese, The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868–1968 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 33–5; Michael Burgess, ‘Imperial Federation: Continuity and Change in British Ideas, 1869–1871’, New Zealand Journal of History, 17 (April 1963), pp. 60–80 at pp. 70–1; Charles Stuart Blackton, ‘The Cannon Street Episode: An Aspect of Anglo-Australian Relations’, Historical Studies, 13 (April 1969), pp. 520–32. Perhaps the earliest account by a professional historian of the events of 1869–70 as a turning point in the history of imperialism— turning England towards the New Imperialism of later in the century—is George Burton Adams, ‘The Imperial Federation Movement in England’, Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society (1898), pp. 93–116. 54 After the autumn of 1869, Whitehall seemed more and more anxious to maintain imperial control during frontier crises. See James Patterson Smith, ‘The Riel Rebellion of 1869: New Light on British Liberals and the Use of Force on the Canadian Frontier’, Revue d’études canadiennes (Journal of Canadian Studies), 30, 2 (summer 1995), pp. 58–73. 55 Even Koebner and Schmidt date the Society from March 1869. They focus on the first advent of the word ‘imperialism’ rather than on the slightly older phenomenon represented by that word—Koebner and Schmidt, Imperialism, pp. 87–91. Unconcerned either with Dilke or with where the Society came from—save a few lines on Lord Bury—and dating the Society’s organizational meeting five months too early, while otherwise giving a good précis of its early days, is Daniel William Younker, ‘The Practical Origins of the Colonial Conference of 1887’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1968), pp. 68–72. 56 On continuities between British imperial practice in mid-century and in later periods, see J.S.Galbraith, ‘Myths of the “Little England” Era’, American Historical Review, 67 (October 1961), pp. 34–48; Richard Pares, ‘The Economic Factors in the

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History of the Empire’, p. 133; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 6, 1 (1953), pp. 1– 15; C.C.Eldridge, ‘The Myth of Mid-Victorian Separatism: The Cession of the Bay Islands and the Ionian Islands in the Early 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 12, 3 (March 1969), pp. 331–46; and Sydney Kanya-Forstner, ‘A Final Comment on Robinson and Gallagher’ (not a prescient title) in William Roger Louis (ed.), Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), p. 229. See also Paul Kennedy, ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in British Imperialism’, pp. 25, 31; and James Sturgis, ‘Britain and the New Imperialism’, pp. 85, 97–100; both in C.C.Eldridge (ed.), British Impe-rialism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 20–38, 85–105. Gann and Duignan reject any new creation of imperialism at about 1870, but they accept that people wrote much more about the subject after that date, and wrote friendlier things—Gann and Duignan, Burden of Empire, pp. 18–19, 361–2. On what may have changed in the 1880s, see Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, pp. 464–75; D.C.M.Platt, ‘Economic Factors in British Policy During the “New Imperialism”’, Past & Present, 39 (April 1968), pp. 120–38. Governments had not been completely unwilling to throw their weight about even before the 1880s, as witnessed in India in 1857 and in China from the Opium Wars through the Tai-Ping Rebellion; D.C.M.Platt goes too far in minimizing Britain’s role, especially in China: D.C.M.Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 21, 2 (August 1968), pp. 296–306; and idem., ‘Further Objections to an “Imperialism of Free Trade”, 1830–60’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 26, 1 (February 1973), pp. 77–91. 57 On the empire as employment agency, see W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 183–4; Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy, pp. 43–8, 53; and on the step-by-step institution in the 1850s and 1860s of competitive examinations for positions in the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Office, see John W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 26–34. The literature on the professionalization of the general culture is huge. Besides the works of Harold Perkin, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

2 The founding of the Colonial Society 1 Figures are for metropolitan areas. B.R.Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 19. On the building boom, see John Summerson, The London Building World of the

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Eighteen-Sixties (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 7–8. 2 For example, the new universities were hard pressed to fit themselves into the narrow buildings of British cities. University officials responded by building their laboratories, museums, and lecture halls on new sites outside of town, or by converting old gymnasia, court buildings, gaols, or—as in the case of Liverpool— madhouses; see Sophie Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 20 (1989), pp. 405– 34. 3 The Colonial Office was in No. 13 Downing Street until 1827, when it added No. 14—John W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 3–4. 4 Brian L.Blakely, The Colonial Office, 1868–1892 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972), p. 18. 5 John Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), pp. 82, 94. The mid-century burgeoning of new professional institutes for engineers, chiefly in London but also in some provincial cities, is a notable example of the process; see Tables 1 and 2 in R.A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1989), pp. 232–5. For the opening of the older and less professional institutions to a new class of railway-borne suburbanites, see R.C.K.Ensor, England 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, \ 1936), pp. 164–6. One example is the growth in the Royal Society of Arts, whose membership quadrupled between 1850 and 1870—Derek Hudson and Kenneth W.Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754–1954 (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 364. Some intellectual trends implicated in the growth or foundation of so many learned societies during this period are explored by Stefan Collini in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 210–18. The professional or intellectual societies of this period can be contrasted with the social clubs founded in the Napoleonic period, clubs such as The Carlton and White’s—see John Summerson, Georgian London [1945] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 242–9. 6 T.W.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 57–8. For the building of association headquarters in the other metropolises of Great Britain, see Gary S.Messinger, Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-known City (Manchester, and Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 90, 118–19, 132. The character of this age of railways and cities may also be read in the growth of societies in the provincial cities of other countries. Of the thirty intellectual or pseudo-intellectual societies in Lyons in 1900, the ten oldest were founded between 1700 and 1856, and the next ten were founded in the fifteen years from 1861 to 1876: Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, vol. 2, Intellect, Taste, and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 38–9. Zeldin cites H.Delaunay, Annuaire internationale de sociétés savantes (1903). A similar impression for Marseilles as well as Lyons may be gathered from H.Delaunay, Les sociétés savantes de france (Paris: Imprimerie Générale Lahure, 1902)—this compilation also reveals that Paris’ Société des Études

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coloniales et maritimes was founded in 1876, and that no earlier societies interested in colonies were extant in France at the turn of the century, except for sections of the Société de Ethnographie (itself founded in 1859). 7 They might even be drawn to live in one of the new specialized neighbourhoods, so full of journalists or artists or what you will. A wonderfully evocative picture of the expansion and sorting out of the metropolis into the neighbourhoods so prized today—from teeming Soho to journalistic, domestic Islington to international Bayswater to up-scale artistic Hampstead, and so many more—is to be found in Donald J.Olsen, ‘Victorian London: Specialization, Segregation, and Privacy’, Victorian Studies, 17, 3 (March 1974), pp. 265–78. 8 John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London. With Anecdotes of its former coffeehouses, hostelries, and taverns, from the seventeenth century to the present time (London: Chatto and Windus, 1872; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1967). Two witnesses to the disruption of traditional sociability and club life caused by the growth of London by the mid-nineteenth century—one being Henry James—are mentioned in Francis Sheppard, ‘London and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), pp. 51–74. 9 David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 1, A World of its Own, 1815–1890 (London: Pimlico, 1995), pp. 244–7. 10 Becker began well back, with the Royal Society; he did not look at all the new scientific institutions of his day, only at the well-established ones and one or two of the oldest but least successful remnants—Bernard H.Becker, Scientific London (London: Henry S.King & Co, 1874), p. v. 11 Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, p. 59. Not all the journals were of the highest quality. Stefan Collini, building on the work of J.W.Burrow, notes that the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (itself founded in 1868) were for some years ‘more a collective form of vanity publishing than of con-certed scholarly enquiry’—Collini, Public Moralists, p. 218. Some of the less serious journals, such as that of the Royal Institution, quickly failed; see Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 141–5. 12 In June 1869 it became the ‘Royal Colonial Society’, only to become the ‘Royal Colonial Institute’ nine months later, after the Royal College of Surgeons objected to sharing the initials. In 1928 the name was changed to ‘Royal Empire Society’, and yet again in 1958, this time to ‘Royal Commonwealth Society’. Apparently there are now so many societies in the London universe that the Royal College of Surgeons no longer cares about the duplication. However, the surgeons do insist that the Fellows of the Royal Commonwealth Society refrain from using the initials ‘FRCS’. See Reese, Royal Commonwealth Society, pp. 17, 131–2, 217–18. Since this study concentrates on the Colonial Society’s membership between August 1868 and April 1869, and on what the members were doing before 1868, I will use the name ‘Colonial Society’, and the word ‘Society’ itself for short. 13 Circular of 26 June 1868, General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, p. 1, RCSA. 14 For the coffee house world, see John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the

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Most Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis; With Fifty Years’ Personal Recollections (London: David Bogue, 1855), pp. 200–5. The coffee houses that survived the end of the nineteenth century, such as the Baltic and the Jerusalem, transformed themselves into commercial exchanges—Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encydopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983). 15 M.B.Filby of East Croydon, who joined the Colonial Society on 13 April 1869, and who left little more information about himself than that. 16 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 1. 17 Becker, Scientific London, pp. 317–19; Ian Cameron, To the Farthest Ends of the Earth: The History of the Royal Geographical Society 1830–1980 (London and Sydney: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1980), pp. 16–18. 18 Bury to Russell, 25 January 1869, C.S. Gen. Corresp., vol. 1, fo 31, RCSL. 19 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 2. 20 See (for the social wing of the Royal Society) Sir Archibald Geike, Annals of the Royal Society Club: The Record of a London Dining-Club in the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan & Co, 1917); and (for the main organization) Sir Henry Lyons, FRS, The Royal Society, 1660–1940: A History of its Administration under its Charter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), pp. 230–4 and 252–66. For the Society of Arts, see Hudson and Luckhurst, Royal Society of Arts, pp. 5–20, 58, 171–9, 218–20, 234–53. For another body beginning to undergo the same processes of formalization at the same time, namely the Royal Institution, see Berman, Social Change, pp. 127–33, 187–8. 21 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 2. 22 C.S.Coun. Min., 18 August 1868, fo 5; 6 October 1868, fo 11; 16 December 1868, fo 21; 20 January 1869, fo 25. See also A.R.Roche to William Denison, MP, 10 September 1868, C.S.Gen. Corresp., vol. 1, fo 10. 23 Henry James, ‘London’, in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1993), p. 38. The passage is given as it appeared in James’ 1905 collection, English Hours. The original wording, from Henry James, ‘London’, Century Magazine (December 1888), pp. 219–39, was identical except for the words coming after ‘globe’ at the end of the first paragraph: ‘as the margin of the agglomeration on the Thames.’ 24 Colonial Society [1837], Rules and Regulations of the Colonial Society, with a list of members (London: Harrison & Co, 1842), pp. 8–10. 25 Colonial Society [1837], The Rules and Regulations of the Colonial Society, with an Alphabetical List of the Members (London: George Nichols, 1837), p. 7. 26 One member remains mysterious, although not completely obscure. He was William Walker of 48 Hilldrop Road, Tufnell Park. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he would serve on the Council of the 1868 Colonial Society from 1868 until 1889. About the other three men who would be members of both societies there is much more to be said. William Thomas Denison and Patrick Leonard MacDougall, both Army men, were on the twelve-member Committee of Management appointed on 5 July 1837 at the earlier Society’s meeting; Denison joined the Council of the later Society on 8 September 1868. A greater name yet is that of George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll. He joined the first Colonial

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Society in 1840, and was appointed one of the Trustees in 1842. But it is hard to say what Argyll’s views on the empire were in this period. He made his views known very extensively in a later era, as Secretary of State for India, and as a voluminous writer on anthropology and race. 27 A.R.Roche to Captain Whitty, 12 October 1868, General Corresp., vol. 1, fo 15, RCSA; Council Minutes, 6 October 1868, vol. 1, p. 10, RCSA. 28 See Glenn Melancon, ‘Honour in Opium? The British Declaration of War on China, 1839–1840’, International History Review, 21, 4 (December 1999), pp. 855–74. 29 East India Committee of the Colonial Society [1837], Report of the East India Committee of the Colonial Society on the Causes and Consequences of the Military Operations in China, 2nd edn (London: James Maynard, 1843; David Bryce, 1857), pp. 2–3. 30 Ibid., p. 1. 31 The Times, 7 April 1843, p. 5. 32 East India Committee of the Colonial Society [1837], Report of the East India Committee of the Colonial Society on the Causes and Consequences of the Military Operations in China, p. iii; idem., Report of the East India of the Colonial Society on the Causes and Consequences of the Afghan War (London: James Maynard, 1842); Papers of the Colonial Society of 1837, RCSL. 33 General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, n.p., RCSA. See Reese, Royal Commonwealth Society, p. 14. 34 Annual Register (1868), p. 167. 35 Two of these three numbered among the eleven founding members who sent letters of regret, joining in that fashion rather than in person. The only peer actually in attendance was the Marquis of Normanby. A colonial governor, he was the son of a man who had been Colonial Secretary and who, as Ambassador to France, had befriended Tocqueville. 36 The London member was George Joachim Goschen; the absentee was the Hon. Dudley Fortescue, who was represented by his brother (and fellow MP), the Rt. Hon. Chichester Fortescue. General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, n.p., RCSA. 37 General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1,12 August 1868, n.p., RCSA. 38 A fourth meeting of the provisional committee was held at lunchtime on 12 August, a few hours before the general meeting. The committee would have met more often if some of the members at the June meeting had not left town during August and September (General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1., RCSA; A.R. Roche to Col. Sir William Denison, 9 September 1868, RCS Letter Book, I, fos 8–9, RCSA). For the rest of the year, most of the meetings of the Council (as it was soon called) were held in the offices of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at 12 Spring Gardens (Coun. Min., pp. 4, 6, 15, 17). These meetings were in August, September, and December. October and November saw only one meeting each, and these meetings were held in Lombard Street. Later in December, the Council began meeting at the Institution of Civil Engineers, and continued doing so until the Society’s own rooms were ready in late May. 39 Membership figures are collated from the Society’s Minutes. Donald Simpson,

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Librarian Emeritus of the Royal Commonwealth Society, made the original study of the Minutes, and he was kind enough to share his work with me. See his brief reviews of the early membership in the ‘Royal Commonwealth Society Library Notes’, new ser., nos 262 and 263 (August and October 1984). Unlike me, he aggregates the whole of the membership of the first five years, and he excludes active members of the Provisional Committee from the membership if they did not go on to join the Society. 40 A.R.Roche to the Marquis of Normanby, 6 October 1868, C.S. Letter Book, vol. 1, fos 12–13, RCSA. 41 F.Musgrove, ‘Middle-class Education and Employment in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 12 (1959–60), pp. 99–111. To look at it another way, personal (not real) property worth £5 (£10 in London) was all it took to send an estate into probate—granted in only 13.3 per cent of deaths in London in 1850. Thus, people who could afford the Society’s dues were well up in the top one-tenth of society. See David R.Green and Alastair Owens, ‘Metropolitan Estates of the Middle Class, 1800–50: Probates and Death Duties Revisited’, Historical Research, 70, 173 (October 1997), pp. 294–311. 42 H.C.G.Matthews (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, 1861–1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 635. 43 Blanc to Dilke, 3 December 1868 and 27 July 1871, DP vol. XI, BL Add. MS. 43884, fos 38–9. 44 Postscript to the dispatch of Governor Sir G.F.Bowen to Lord Granville, 29 March 1869, given in the PP, Correspondence and Papers Relating to New Zealand, No. 307 (1868–69), p. 392. 45 The Times, 10 March p. 7, col. 3; 31 March p. 4, col. 2; 6 April p. 5, col. 1; 7 April p. 10, col. 2; 14 April p. 5, col. 6; 15 April p. 11, col. 2; 19 April p. 6, col. 1. 46 Meanwhile, a few people might have glanced at a short-lived periodical called The Anglo-Colonial: A Monthly Magazine & Review for the Colonies. This substantial and intriguing production, published by Sampson Low, ostensibly debuted on 1 January 1869. It had a second issue on 1 February, although the British Museum acquired both issues on 20 March: The Anglo-Colonial: A Monthly Magazine & Review for the Colonies (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1869). The Anglo-Colonial never appeared again. There is no internal evidence of who wrote for it or of who the editor was, much less of who if anyone read it (many pages in the Museum’s copies, at least, remain unopened). Still, it may have been connected to an ‘R.Currey, M.A.’, who made an abortive attempt sometime in March 1869 to secure the Minutes of the Colonial Society for his own new (and unspecified) periodical on the colonies; the Society was indeed willing to supply him with its transactions, but nothing seems to have come of the idea. A.R.Roche to R.Currey, 29 March 1869, C.S. Letter Book, vol. 1, fo 72, RCSA. Perhaps The Anglo-Colonial was founded as a successor to the similar magazines which had existed in the 1840s, as the Colonial Society’s secretary assumed that it was. From 1840 to 1842, there was The Colonial Magazine, edited by Robert Montgomery Martin; Fisher’s Colonial Magazine appeared from 1842 to 1845; Simmond’s Colonial Magazine, founded in 1844, went through several mergers and changes of name before its

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ultimate demise as The Colonial and Asiatic Review in 1852. One thing that is clear is that The Anglo-Colonial itself was independent of and came rather after the Colonial Society and Greater Britain alike. And neither of the two issues gave Dilke very much space or attention. Thus there was not as yet any Dilke-inspired frenzy among Londoners interested in the colonies. The first of the two issues that appeared did review Greater Britain accurately enough, but in only a page and a half, and with more than one suggestion of hurry (again, both issues seem to have appeared in March). Anon., ‘Books of the Time’, The Anglo-Colonial, 1 (1 January 1869), p. 74. 47 Even London’s hundreds of business and residential directories would be unhelpful in identifying such people, so prevalent were certain names and combinations of initials, and so spotty was the coverage of the directories themselves. P.J.Atkins, using the names of fifty randomly chosen individuals, found that the directories raised more questions of identity than they answered. Many of the fifty disappeared from The Post Office Directory after a short time. Did they die or did they move—or did they join the vast majority of individuals who were omitted from each edition? P.J.Atkins, The Directories of London, 1677–1977 (London and New York: Mansell, 1990), pp. 121–3. 48 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 412. 49 I have taken some data about careers, addresses, club membership, and of course families and honours from Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, 1868 edn, and Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 1900 edn. Both editions feature a surname index, important for finding younger sons and sons-in-law. Supplementary data come from the 1845, 1878, and 1881 editions. Burke’s is more useful than Debrett’s, which periodically discarded data on collateral branches. Burke’s never did so, and thus it became increasingly cumbersome as the nineteenth century went by. The information that it retained or invented for periods before 1800 is less than reliable, but for the lives of nineteenth-century people the book is quite good, and I have tried to check personal details elsewhere—see the ‘Standard References’ and ‘Specialized References’ sections in the Bibliography (this volume). Among the other places used for checking identities are these: The British Library Catalogue; the British Library Manuscript Catalogue; the indices and reports of the National Register of Archives; and the personal name drawers maintained at the (British Library) India Office Library and Records. Also of value were the indices in John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (New York: 1903); in Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967); and in W.F. Monypenny and G.E.Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 6 vols (New York: The Macmillan Co, 1910–20). The nineteenth-century biographical references held in the (late and lamented) Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Northumberland Avenue, were invaluable for identifying people who had already come to the attention of harmless prosopographical drudges like myself. So were the open-shelved back-number journals held in the library of the University of California, San Diego, and at the Institute of Historical Research, Malet Street. 50 Members had to be well established in their fields—Anthony Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London (London: Bracken Books, 1979), p. 39.

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51 R.C.Bridges, ‘Europeans and East Africans in the Age of Exploration’, Geographical Journal, 139, 2 (June 1973), pp. 220–32. While Bridges correctly notes the impossibility of exact figures, since many men moved back and forth between categories over the course of their lives, he is able to show that the proportion of writers in the Royal Geographical Society fell by two-thirds or more from 1856 through. 1870. Meanwhile the proportion of military men held firm, and the proportions of traders, Indian officials, surveyors, and non-publishing, not apparently scholarly gentlemen-about-town all rose. 52 For a key statement of this social context for mid-Victorian article-writing, see Walter E.Houghton, ‘Victorian Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’, Victorian Studies, 22, 4 (summer 1979), pp. 389–412. 53 Quoted in Dallas Liddle, ‘Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and MidVictorian Theories of Journalism’, Victorian Studies, 41, 1 (autumn 1997), pp. 31– 68 at p. 40. 54 Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 27, 33. 55 The remark about Harold Robbins comes from Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing (London: Secker, 1992), quoted in the TLS, 1 January 1993, p. 18. 56 Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), pp. 333–40, 432– 40. 57 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London: Griffin, Bohn, & Co, 1861–62; reprint, New York: Dover Press, 1968), vol. I, p. 292. 58 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 37–46. 59 See Elizabeth Harris, The Boy and His Press, the catalogue from a 1992 exhibition in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 60 Andrew Wright, ‘Anthony Trollope as a Reader’, in George Guffey and Andrew Wright, Two English Novelists: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, May 11, 1974 (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975), pp. 45– 68. 61 Delabree Pritchett Blaine, An Encyclopaedia of World Sports, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1858). 62 For Louis, see the Richard Bentley Papers, vol. LXVII, BL Add. MS 46617, fo 253, Contract of 6 February 1861; for Collins, fo 256, Contract of 11 March 1861. 63 Alfred Hyman Louis, England and Europe: A Discussion of National Policy (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), pp. 6, 58, 393.

3 The usual suspects 1 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], Lord Robert Cecil’s Gold Fields Diary, ed. Ernest Scott (1935; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1945), pp. 9, 19, 32.

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2 R.H.Vetch, Life of Lieut.-Gen. the Hon. Sir Andrew Clarke, GCMG CB CIE, Colonel-Commandant of Royal Engineers, Agent-General of Victoria, Australia (London: John Murray, 1905), p. 33. 3 T.C.Barker, ‘Lord Salisbury: Chairman of the Great Eastern Railway, 1868–72’, in Sheila Marriner (ed.), Business and Businessmen: Studies in Business, Economic, and Accounting History (Liverpool University Press, 1978), pp. 81–103. 4 D.R.SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1830–1914 (Columbus, MI: South Asia Books, 1977), pp. 131–5; Oliver B.Pollak, Empires in Collision: Anglo-Burmese Relations in the Mid-nineteenth Century, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, 1 (Westport, CI: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 165–7. 5 E.D.Steele, ‘Salisbury at the India Office’, in Robert Blake and Hugh Cecil (eds), Salisbury: The Man and his Policies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 116–47 at p. 134. 6 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘The Theories of Parliamentary Reform’, Oxford Essays 1858 (London: John W.Parker, 1858), pp. 52–79; idem., ‘Canada’, Saturday Review, 11 (26 January 1861), pp. 100–1. 7 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘The United States as an Example’, Quarterly Review, 117 (January 1865), pp. 249–86 at p. 265. 8 Ibid., p., 249. Apparently since the first few months of the war, Cecil had believed that the Northern conquest of the South was hopeless militarily, and so the continuation of the war by the North was ‘objectless devastation’: [idem.], ‘The Confederate Struggle and its Recognition’, Quarterly Review, 112 (October 1862), pp. 535–70 at p. 537. 9 Cecil [Salisbury], ‘The United States as an Example’, pp. 252, 258, 270–85. 10 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘Queensland’, Saturday Review, 11 (29 June 1861), pp. 672–3; idem., ‘The Story of New Zealand’, Saturday Review, 9 (7 January 1860), pp. 19–20. 11 Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The Political Thought of Lord Salisbury 1854–1868 (London: Constable, 1967), pp. 64, 88–93, 132–5; Robert Stewart, ‘“The Conservative Reaction”: Lord Robert Cecil and Party Politics’, in Blake and Cecil (eds), Salisbury: The Man and his Policies, pp. 90–115. Pinto-Duschinsky catalogues several hundred of Salisbury’s articles, mostly short pieces in the liberalbaiting Saturday Review, with more substantial pieces appearing in the Quarterly Review or elsewhere—Pinto-Duschinsky, Political Thought, pp. 157–88. 12 See Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘Democracy on its Trial’, Quarterly Review, 110 (October 1861), pp. 227–88—see pp. 266–8, 275 and 280. ‘Equality’, Saturday Review, 18 (29 October 1864), pp. 530–1. 13 Cecil [Salisbury], ‘Equality’. 14 Cecil [Salisbury], ‘Confederate Struggle and its Recognition’, p. 547. 15 Ibid., pp. 538–9. 16 Donovan Williams, The India Office, 1858–1869, Vishvesharanand Indological Research Series, 76 (Hoshiarpur, India: Vishvesharanand Vedic Research Institute, 1983), pp. 40–1, 230–1, 235–6, 260–1; idem., ‘The Council of India and the Relationship Between the Home and Supreme Governments, 1858–1970’, English Historical Review, 81, 318 (January 1966), pp. 56–73 at pp. 70–1.

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17 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquis of Salisbury], ‘Letters from Canterbury, New Zealand’, Saturday Review, 3 (14 February 1857), pp. 156–7. 18 Marc Jason Gilbert, ‘Insurmountable Distinctions: Racism and the British Response to the Emergence of Indian Nationalism’, in Roger D.Long (ed.), The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire History, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, 31 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 161–81. 19 The point about indirect rule in post-1857 India serving as a model for imperial policies in Africa in later decades is made by Thomas R.Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 236–7. 20 Cecil [Salisbury], ‘The United States as an Example’. 21 Henry Roseveare, The Treasury: The Evolution of a British Institution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 183–5. 22 Corinne Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and Ideological Politics: Lord Salisbury’s Referendal Theory and the Conservative Party, 1846–1922, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 215 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1995); David Steele, Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1999). 23 See Judith M.Hughes, Emotion and High Politics: Personal Relations at the Summit in Late Nineteenth-century Britain and Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 78–98. 24 Figures for the size of British and Irish aristocracy are adapted from Tables A1, A2 and A5 in J.V.Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 482–91. 25 Among them were William Monsell, MP (1st Lord Emly 1874), among whose government jobs (all below Cabinet level) was that of Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1868–71; Arthur Haliburton (1st Lord 1898), who made a career in the War Office, who never sat in Parliament, and who was Assistant Commissary General when the Colonial Society was founded; and Henry Thurstan Holland, a hereditary baronet who was Legal Adviser to the Colonial Office from 1867 to 1870, and after 1870 was Assistant Under-Secretary of State there—notably, he would cross into the world of politics, entering Parliament in 1874 and serving as Colonial Secretary from 1887 to 1892 (he was made 1st Lord Knutsford in 1888 and 1st Viscount in 1895). There was also Sir Frederic Rogers, a Colonial Office Permanent Secretary with a seventeenth-century baronetcy. 26 The entries from Dod’s have been collated in Michael Stenton (ed.), Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. 1, 1832–1885 (Hassocks, SX: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976); and in Michael Stenton and Stephen Lees (eds), Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. 2, 1886– 1918 (Hassocks, SX: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978). Dod’s listed MPs’ addresses, clubs, schools, constituencies, dates of parliamentary service, offices held, and political inclinations. 27 The Carlton did not start out political, but by the 1860s the Whig and Liberal members were no longer made to feel welcome. In 1855, Lord Monck (who would join the Colonial Society, and whom I have not counted as a member of the Carlton)

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resigned because other members objected to his politics, and to the fact that he belonged to the liberal Brooks’ Club. Gladstone resigned from the Carlton in 1860. Sir Charles Petrie, Bt, The Carlton Club (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955), pp. 83–7. 28 Daniel Duman, ‘Pathway to Professionalism: The English Bar in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Social History, 13, 4 (summer 1980), pp. 615–28. 29 The Colonial Society had no civil lawyers. 30 For the husband, see Gordon R.Elliott, ‘Henry P. Pellew Crease: Confederation or No Confederation’, BC Studies, 12 (winter 1971–72), pp. 63–74; and for the wife, John Sebastian Helmcken, The Reminiscences of Doctor John Sebastian Helmcken, ed. Dorothy Blakey Smith (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1975), p. 46 and n. 4. Barbara Powell, ‘The Diaries of the Crease Family Women’, BC Studies, 105–6 (spring/summer 1995), pp. 45–58, focuses on appointment books, and says nothing about Sarah Crease’s life on the public stage, or her art. More helpful for the whole family is Christina B. Johnson-Dean, The Crease Family Archives: A Record of Settlement and Service in British Columbia (Victoria: Provincial Archives of British Columbia, 1981), which also reproduces some of Sarah Crease’s paintings. 31 R.D.Gidney and W.P.J.Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-century Ontario, Ontario Historical Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 82–3. 32 J.A.Blyth, ‘The Development of the Paper Industry in Old Ontario, 1824–1867’, Ontario History, 62, 2 (June 1970), pp. 119–33. Another man was Sir George Frederick Verdon, an English vicar’s son who joined the Bar of Victoria, Australia, who went into politics there, and who became Victoria’s Agent-General in Great Britain in 1868—his main interest was the development of municipal government. G.F.Verdon, The Present and Future of Municipal Government in Victoria (Melbourne: W.Fairfax & Co, 1858). 33 C.E.Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London: Swan, Sonnenschein & Co, 1906; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 118; Frank Broeze, ‘Private Enterprise and Public Policy: Merchant Shipping in Australia and New Zealand, 1788–1992’, Australian Economic History Review, 23, 2 (1992), pp. 8–32 at p. 11. 34 Childers at Melbourne to his mother, 6 and 22 July 1851, quoted in Lt.-Col. Spencer Childers, The Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Hugh C.E. Childers, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1901), pp. 20, 39. On the unlikelihood of a boy from the mid-middle class getting a good start in the English Bar, see Musgrove, ‘Middleclass Education and Employment’. 35 Gidney and Millar, Professional Gentlemen, pp. 75–80. 36 Harry Kirk, Portrait of a Profession: A History of the Solicitor’s Profession, 1100 to the Present Day (London: Oyez Publishing, 1976), pp. 1, 48–9, 207–13. In Canada the separate profession of solicitor never did establish itself, since most barristers there were also solicitors. ‘Attorneys’ no longer existed in Ontario after a professionalizing act in 1881, leaving only the heavily overlapping categories of barrister and solicitor—Gidney and Millar, Professional Gentlemen, pp. 32, 82.

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Solicitors as such were common enough in New Zealand, where legal training was at best variable in quality; most New Zealand solicitors occupied themselves with conveyancing and the other day-to-day affairs of the business community— R.C.J.Stone, ‘An Anatomy of the Practice of Law in Nineteenth-century Auckland’, New Zealand Journal of History, 22, 2 (October 1988), pp. 91–104. 37 Coun. Min., vol. 1, pp. 15–17, RCSA. 38 Cell, British Colonial Administration, pp. 48–9. 39 William Marcus Coghlan does not seem to have been related to William Mant Coghlan, an Indian judge who joined the Colonial Society on 25 February 1869, and who was author of An Epitome of Hindu Law Cases (London: Stevens & Haynes, 1876). 40 Vetch, Life of Clarke, pp. 7–14. Clarke provided Earl de Grey (later 1st Marquess of Ripon), Secretary of War, with assurances about the general adequacy of British barracks and garrisons on the West African coast. De Grey needed these assurances to stave off the total withdrawal from West Africa then being examined; Parliament would not pay for a single new barracks in the area. See Ripon to Cardwell (with an apparently incomplete enclosure from Clarke to Ripon in Ripon’s hand), 20 August 1864, Ripon Papers, vol. LXI, BL Add. MS 43551, fos 63–6. In the same year, Clarke also advised against the formal extension of British Colonial control, ‘a costly and profitless experiment’ of forcing ‘our opinions and laws upon a people to whom they are neither suited nor applicable’: McIntyre, Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, p. 97. 41 For the municipal aspects of Clarke’s career, see W.H.Newnham, Melbourne: The Biography of a City (Melbourne: F.W.Cheshire, 1956), p. 182. For Clarke and the Philosophic Institute, see Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), p. 367. 42 Serle, The Golden Age, pp. 142–3. 43 Clarke’s railway plan is outlined in Peter J.Rimmer, ‘Politicians, Public Servants and Petitioners: Aspects of Transport in Australia 1851–1901’, in J.M. Powell and M.Williams (eds), Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 182–225; and Powell and Williams, ‘The British Expert Cometh: The Imprint of the Indi-vidual on Australia’s Economic Landscape’, in J.N.Jennings and G.J.R.Linge (eds), Of Time and Place: Essays in Honour of O.H.K.Spate (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1980), pp. 48–71; Serle, The Golden Age, pp. 237–8. 44 David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis: Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne 1850–1891 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984), pp. 56–9, 67; Serle, The Golden Age, pp. 192–3. 45 C.Northcote Parkinson, British Intervention in Malaya, 1867–1877 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1964). Parkinson’s book (but not his law) begins in the year that responsibility for the colony of the Straits Settlements was transferred from India to London; Britain’s main push into the area came somewhat later, and Clarke arrived there as Governor in 1873. 46 Vetch, Clarke, pp. 9–12. 47 Buchanan, The Engineers, pp. 70–3; and idem., ‘Institutional Proliferation in the

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British Engineering Profession, 1847–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 38 (February 1985), pp. 42–60. 48 C.H.Gregory, Address of Charles Hutton Gregory, Esq., on his Election as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Session 1867–68 (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1868), pp. 6–30. 49 Phyllis Deane and W.A.Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959: Trends and Structure, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 230–2; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, pp. 259–60. 50 Charles Hutton Gregory, Rules for the Management of a Locomotive Engine (London: John Weale, 1841), pp. 4, 43. 51 He was generally impressed with the speed of construction and with certain other features of American railway development (including a high standard of comfort for all passengers without distinctions of class). Captain Douglas Galton, ‘Railways of the United States’, reprint, 2 parts, Sydney Magazine of Science and Art, 1 (1858), pp. 91–3 and 114–15. 52 Capt. Douglas Galton, ‘Ocean Telegraphy’, Edinburgh Review, 113 (January 1861), pp. 113–43. 53 DNB. 54 Cromwell F.Varley, Esq., MICE, MRI, ‘On the Atlantic Telegraph’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution (1867), pp. 45–59. 55 Edward Charles Frome, ‘Account of the Causes which Led to the Construction of the Rideau Canal’, given in Royal Engineers, Papers Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers, 2nd edn (1837; London: John Weale, 1844), vol. I, pp. 69–98; Secretary of State for War Edward Cardwell to Colonial Secretary the 2nd Earl Granville, 18 February 1869, Cardwell Papers, PRO 30/48/28, fos 20–3. 56 Charles Harvey and Jon Press, ‘Overseas Investment and the Professional Advance of British Metal Mining Engineers, 1851–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 42, 1 (1989), pp. 64–86. 57 London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1870, vol. I, p. v. 58 Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp 31–46; Stuart Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives, and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India, Evangelicals and Society from 1750, 2 (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: The Sutton Courtney Press, 1984), pp. 28–47. 59 The British had committed crimes, and it was their duty to remake the world the best way they could: ‘Our idea should be to act as public teachers, making a good principle extend. It could not be the will of heaven that the Natives of divers lands should melt away before their fellow man’s aggressive arms. Europeans exterminated the Aborigines in more ways than by fire and sword. Our countrymen emulated Apollyon the Destroyer. We introduced poisonous liquors to peoples unaccustomed to the effects of ardent spirits…. We had introduced new diseases too: therefore it was the more our duty to supply the means of alleviating them. But above all, we must not forget moral inculcation, and to propagate the truths of Christianity’—The Rev. C.Gribble addressing the Aborigines Protection Society, Aborigines Protection Society, Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Society

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(London: W.Watts, 1849), p. 13. 60 Evidence comes from the general biographical sources for this book, plus the exhaustive rolls or indices in C.F.Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the SPG: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1900 (Based on a Digest of the Society’s Records) (London: SPG, 1901); W.O.B.Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698–1898 (London: SPCK, 1898); Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its Environment, Its Men, and Its Work, 3 vols (London: CMS, 1899); John Owen Whitehouse, A Register of Missionaries, Deputations, etc., from 1796 to 1877 (London: London Missionary Society, 1877); Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society 1795–1895, 2 vols (London: Henry Froude, 1899); G.G.Findlay and W.W.Holdsworth, The History of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 5 vols (London: The Epworth Press, 1921–25); and John Brown Myers, ed., The Centenary Volume of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1892, 2nd edn (London: BMS, 1892). Nor were the members of the CS involved with another group of missionary organizations, the handful that came into existence in the mid-nineteenth century—see A.E.M.Anderson-Morshead, The History of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. 1, 1859–1909 (1897; London: UMCA, 1955); and Marshall Broomhall, The Jubilee Story of the China Inland Mission (London: Morgan & Scott, 1915; reprint, San Francisco, CA: China Materials Centre, 1977). 61 He receives no mention in J.Du Plessis, A History of Christian Missions in South Africa (London: Longmans Green, & Co, 1911; reprint, Cape Town: C. Struik, 1965). 62 Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men?: Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 65, 128–9, 143–4. 63 Adam Crooks, Correspondence Arising out of the Pastoral Letter of the Right Reverend Francis Fulford, Lord Bishop of Montreal (Toronto: W.C.Chewett & Co, 1862); idem., A Letter to the Right Reverend Francis Fulford, D.D., Lord Bishop of Montreal and Metropolitan (Toronto: The Globe Office, 1862). 64 Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the SPG, pp. 762b–3, 870–1; DCB XIII, pp. 461–4; DNB. 65 Findlay and Holdsworth, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, vol. III, pp. 131 n., 141 n.; H.L. Malchow, Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social And Political World of Victorian Businessmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 78, 82, 186, 247, n. 104; on his later activities, see Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 152–5. 66 Perhaps John Clark Marshman’s first interest in formal British expansion in India was prompted by the EIC acquisition of Serampore from the Danes, which only took place in 1845. R.C.Majumdar, A.K.Majumdar and D.K.Ghose, eds, British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part 1, The History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1963), p. 46. 67 John Clark Marshman, Guide to the Civil Law of the Presidency of Ft. William (1842; 2nd edn, Serampore: The Press, 1848); M.A.Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal, 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 84, 149, 231;

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E.Daniel Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837: The History of Serampore and its Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 116–19, 133, 198–9. 68 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 155–60; idem., The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 11– 12; S.Cromwell Crawford, Ram Mohan Roy: Social, Political and Religious Reform in 19th Century India (India: Gulab Varizani for Arnold Heineman Publishers, 1984; reprint, New York: Paragon House, 1987), pp. xi, 48–64; Penelope Carson, ‘Missionaries, Bureaucrats, and the People of India, 1793–1833’, in Nancy Cassels (ed.), Orientalism, Evangelicalism, and the Military Cantonment in Early Nineteenth-Century India: A Historiographical Overview, 125–55 (Lewiston, Maine; Kingston, Ontario, and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 127– 9, 150–2; Lynn Zastoupil, ‘Defining Christians: Ram Mohun Roy and the Unitarians’, Victorian Studies, 44, 2 (winter 2002), pp. 215–43; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 [1950], trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 41–3, 92, 246–7. 69 Potts, British Baptist Missionaries, pp. 89–92. 70 J.C.Marshman, Reply of Mr. J.C.Marshman to the Attack of Mr. Buckingham on the Serampore Missionaries. To which is prefixed, Reply of the Serampore Missionaries to the Attack Made on Them in No. III of the Oriental Magazine, 2nd edn (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1826); idem., Review of Two Pamphlets, by the Rev. John Dyer, and the Rev. E.Carey and W.Yates. In Twelve Letters to the Rev. John Foster. Together with an Appeal, by the Serampore Missionaries, on Behalf of the Labours in which they are Engaged; and a Communication on the same subject, by the Rev. William Robinson, of Calcutta (London: Parbury, Allen & Co, and Hamilton, Adams & Co [1830]). 71 Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal, p. 148. Joshua Marshman had suffered under the same charge of worldliness back in his English days, when he was one of the first students at the new Bristol Baptist Academy in the 1790s. He was thought to be trying to learn his way towards ordination, rather than accepting it as the free gift of God. Thus for seven years he was refused not only ordination but also baptism—Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, pp. 169, 171, 255. 72 John Clark Marshman, The History of India, from Remote Antiquity to the Accession of the Mogul Dynasty, Compiled for Use in Schools, 3rd edn (Serampore: The Press, 1842). See also idem., The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward. Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859). 73 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 210. 74 John Clark Marshman, How Wars Arise in India: Observations on Mr. Cobden’s Pamphlet, entitled, ‘Origin of the Burmese War’ (London: William H. Allen, 1853), pp. 54–5. For the context of Richard Cobden’s pamphlet, which was an expose on

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the British role in starting hostilities, see Oliver B.Pollak, ‘A Mid-Victorian Cover-up: The Case of the “Combustible Commodore” and the Second Anglo-Burmese War, 1851–1852’, Albion, 10, 2 (summer 1978), pp. 171–84 at p. 181. Cobden argued that an empire of conquest in Asia would be Great Britain’s ruin just as an empire of conquest in the Americas had been the ruin of Spain. Pollak points out that the pamphlet was aimed at Radicals on the eve of the East India Company’s charter review debate. 75 Marshman, How Wars Arise in India, p. 59. 76 John Clark Marshman, Letter to John Bright, Esq., MP, Relative to the Recent Debates in Parliament on the India Question (London, William A.Allen, 1853), p. 37. 77 John Clark Marshman, The History of India from the Earliest Period to the Close of Lord Dalhousie’s Administration, 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1867), vol. I, p. 20, and vol. III, p. 457. 78 R.J.Moore, ‘The Composition of “Wood’s Education Despatch”’, English Historical Review, 114 (January 1965), pp. 70–85; Prashanto K.Chatterjee, ‘Authorship of the Education Despatch of 1854’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 29, 2 (August 1973), pp. 188–93. 79 PP, Report of the Select Committee on Indian Territories, No. 426 (1853), pp. 341– 2ff.; for Marshman, see The Friend of India; for Dalhousie, see Arthur Kinnaird to Gladstone, 8 June 1870, GP vol. CCCXXXIX, BL Add. MS 44424, fos 30–3. 80 Cell, British Colonial Administration, pp. 228–33. 81 Their father left England in 1838 (when George Waterhouse was 14) to be made a bishop of his church, and to become the ‘General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Missions in Australia and Polynesia’. Findlay and Holdsworth, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, vol. III, pp. 76–7, 78, n. 1, 217, 318–19, 402, 444, 458–61; ADB. 82 Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2nd edn (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 381–2, 430. 83 Findlay and Holdsworth, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, vol. IV, p. 255 and passim. 84 See extracts from PP of 1836, 1847 and 1848, given in Kenneth, N.Bell and W.P.Morrell (eds), Select Documents in British Colonial Policy, 1831–1860 [1928] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 477, 511, n. 1, 515–18; see also R.E. Gordon, Shepstone: The Role of the Family in the History of South Africa (Cape Town: A.A.Balkema, 1968), pp. 86–91. 85 Lord Stanley in his diary, 8 November 1862, given in John Vincent (ed.), Disraeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1849–1869 (Hassocks, SX: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 192. 86 Joseph Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara in the Years 1843–1845, to Ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly, 7th edn [1852] (ed. and abridged by Guy Wint) (New York: Frederick A.Praeger, 1969); Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians During the Qajar Period, 1787–1921 (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 116–17; John Keay, When Men and Mountains Meet: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1820–75 (1977; Hamden, CT: Archon Books,

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1982), pp. 63–76; John H.Waller, Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 45– 6. 87 Another member with a family connection to missionaries, Francis Cornwallis Maude, was more military than devout, although his uncle was a bulwark of the Church Missionary Society. Stock, Church Missionary Society, vol. I, p. 256, and vol. II, p. 377, and passim; Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography, p. 118. 88 Except for a few sidelong references to imperial officials, the members of the Colonial Society simply do not appear in such works as Thomas C.Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832– 1938 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); William A.Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); and Howard Temperley, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London: Longmans, 1972); or even in works focused upon more select groups and periods, such as C.Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). Most of the London-based anti-slavery societies disappeared in the 1830s or early 1840s. The two exceptions are the British and Foreign Antislavery Society, which continues to this day, and the London Emancipation Committee (later the London Emancipation Society), which existed from 1859 up until about 1866—Temperley, British Antislavery, pp. 271–2. 89 Lovett, London Missionary Society, vol. II, pp. 689–93, 712–15, 722–3, 727–8; Stock, Church Missionary Society, vol. II, pp. 390, 409–10, 654; AndersonMorshead, Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. I, p. 64; Donald M.Macfarlan, Calabar: The Church of Scotland Mission Founded 1846, rev. edn (1946; London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1957), pp. 6–14.

4 Businessmen 1 C.C.Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli 1868–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 161–5. 2 Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, 6 vols (London: Privately printed, 1892–1921; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), vol. II, pp. 715–16. For some of Manchester’s imperial investments in the 1880s, see G.P.Taylor, ‘Business and Politics in Queensland, 1859–1895’, New Zealand Journal of History 1, 1 (April 1967), pp. 75–92. 3 Disraeli to Mrs Brydges Williams, given in Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. III, p. 87; Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century England (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 93–4. 4 William Drogo Montagu [7th Duke of Manchester], Court and Society from

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Elizabeth to Anne: Edited from the Papers at Kimbolton, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864)—and for the editorial and ghost-writing assistance that the Duke received, see vol. I, p. v; and Patrick Jackson, The Last of the Whigs: A Political Biography of Lord Hartington, Later Eighth Duke of Devonshire (1833–1908) (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 20–3. 5 Or so it would seem. The Jamaican estate existed and then was gone, so presumably it went during Buckingham’s great forced land sales in the late 1840s. For the estate see Frederick B.Heath, ‘The Grenvilles in the Nineteenth Century: The Emergence of Commercial Affiliations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 25, 1 (November 1961), pp. 29–49 at p. 35. 6 Frederick B.Heath, ‘Richard Greville, Third Duke of Buckingham and Chandos: A Case Study of the 19th Century “Amphibious” Aristocrat’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1959), p. 34; Heath, Grenvilles; John Beckett, The Rise and Fall of the Grenvilles, Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, 1710–1921 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 192–278. 7 Lord Chandos to Gladstone, May 1857, enclosure in Lord Chandos to Gladstone, 10 July 1857, fos 19–21; Lord Chandos to Gladstone, 26 September 1857, fo 59; Lord Chandos to Gladstone, 30 September 1857, fo 75, GP vol. CCCIII, BL Add. MS 44388. 8 Geoffrey Searle, ‘New Light on the Colonial Office, Sir George Bowen, and the Victorian Constitutional Crises’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 13, 52 (April 1969), pp. 533–8; Dorothy P.Clarke, ‘The Colonial Office and the Constitutional Crises in Victoria, 1865–68’, Historical Studies (Australia. & New Zealand), 5, 18 (May 1952), pp. 160–71. 9 Angus Hawkins, Parliament, Party, and the Art of Politics in Britain, 1855–59 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 208. 10 Heath, ‘Richard Greville’, p. 78; Beckett, The Rise and Fall of the Grenvilles, pp. 226–81 (esp. pp. 264–5, 280). 11 George Eden Marindin (ed.), Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, 1860–1871 (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 264; Warwick P.N.Tyler, ‘Sir Frederic Rogers, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, 1860–1871’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1963), pp. 64–5; Fred D.Schneider, ‘Deadlock on the Rock: Constitutionalism and Counteraction in Heligoland, 1864–1868’, Canadian Journal of History, 8, 1 (March 1973), pp. 23– 35. 12 For the affair of the Halifax and Quebec Company, see John S.Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 362–4. 13 Ibid., pp. 376–7, 386. 14 Roger Fulford, Glyn’s, 1753–1953: Six Generations in Lombard Street (London: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 179–81; Andrew Robb, ‘Edward Watkin and the Pacific Telegraph, 1861–1865’, Ontario History, 65, 4 (December 1973), pp. 189–209 at pp. 196, 201; A.F.Thompson, ‘Gladstone’s Whips and the General Election of 1868’, English Historical Review, 43 (April 1948), pp. 189–200. 15 On Baring’s refusal of the leadership, see Blake, Disraeli, p. 307; and Monypenny

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and Buckle, Disraeli, vol. III, pp. 81, 307–8. On the Hon. Francis Baring and his lack of involvement with the family bank, see R.B.Madgwick, Immigration into Eastern Australia (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1937; reprint, Sydney University Press, 1969), p. 93, n. 4; Winch, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, pp. 109ff.; Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762–1929 (London: Collins, 1988), pp. 119–23. 16 Adderley to Gladstone, enclosure, 20 December 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add. MS. 44368, fo 309. 17 Baring to Clerk, Clerk MSS, IOLR, MSS Eur D.538/2, chiefly fos 150–74. For the cotton trade, Baring to Clerk, 19 November 1861, fos 195–6. For stationery and larger economies, Baring to Clerk, 30 September 1860, fos 160–7. 18 Bernard Mallet, Thomas George Earl of Northbrook, GCSI, A Memoir (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1908), pp. 5–9; Stenton and Lees, Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, vol. I, pp. 21–2; Stock, Church Missionary Society, vol. I, p. 109. 19 Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power, pp. 158–9, 161–2. 20 Thomas Baring to Peel, 31 January 1845, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXXVIII, BL Add. MS 40588, fos 428–30. 21 PP, Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, No. 533 (1852–53); PP, Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories, Nos. 426, 479, 556, 692, 768, 897 (1853). 22 Boase, Modern English Biography, vol. I, sect. 162; Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. III, pp. 78, 84–5, 295, n. 1, 349, 510–11, and vol. IV, pp. 94, 107–8, 166. 23 Becker, Scientific London, pp. 189–200. 24 Lord Stanley’s diary, 6 August 1866, given in Vincent, Dismeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party: Journals of Lord Stanley, p. 263. 25 Baring to Peel, 20 July 1844, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXVIII, BL Add. MS 40548, fos 320–1; Baring to Austen Henry Layard, 3 May 1860, AHLP vol. CXC, BL Add. MS 39120, fo 18; Baring to Layard, 26 August 1862, AHLP vol. CLXXIII, BL Add. MS 39103, fos 436–7; Baring to Layard, 13 March and 20 March 1863, AHLP vol. CLXXV, BL Add. MS 39105, fos 149 and 167; Baring to Layard [March 1864], AHLP vol. CLXXIX, BL Add. MS 39109, fo 18. 26 PP, Report from the Select Committee on the Sydney Branch Mint, No. 421 (1862); for testimony to his expertise, see Peel to Baring, 13 January 1845, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXXVIII, BL Add. MS 40557. 27 For the latter journey, see Charles Greville to Mrs Baring, 26 August 1852, given in Johnson, Letters of Greville and Reeve, p. 182. 28 For banking connections, see e.g. Michael J.Piva, ‘Continuity and Crisis: Francis Hincks and Canadian Economic Policy’, Canadian Historical Review, 6, 2 (March 1985), pp. 185–210. 29 Ralph W.Hidy, The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763–1861, Harvard Studies in Business History, 14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Guildhall Library, ‘Catalogue of the Baring Papers’, H.C. 1.20.4/3. The Papers were withdrawn from deposit by

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Baring Bros in July 1992. 30 Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. III, p. 295, n. 1; Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power, pp. 143–61; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 567–71. 31 Guildhall Library, ‘Catalogue of the Baring Papers’, H.C. 5.15, fos 2–103, Grand Trunk Railway of Canada; Currie, Grand Trunk Railroad, pp. 31–2. 32 D.C.M.Platt and Jeremy Adelman, ‘London Merchant Bankers in the First Phase of Heavy Borrowing: The Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 18 (May 1990), pp. 208–27 at pp. 215–22 and 226, n. 30; and Careless, Union of the Canadas, pp. 142–4. 33 Ann M.Carlos and Frank D.Lewis, ‘The Creative Financing of an Unprofitable Enterprise: The Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, 1853–1881’, Explorations in Economic History, 32, 3 (July 1995), pp. 273–301 at pp. 276, 287, n. 25 and 288. Carlos and Lewis note that smaller British investors were unaware of the first call on Grand Trunk assets, but pace their own argument, Carlos and Lewis also show that Thomas Baring would have known all about it, yet he personally took the largest share of the risk. 34 Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power, pp. 182–3, 199–201, 210–20. 35 D.C.M.Platt, Foreign Finance in Continental Europe and the United States, 1815– 1870: Quantities, Origins, Functions and Distribution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 140–71. 36 For the five years after 1848, however, the clients seemed to prefer United States investment. Hidy, House of Baring, p. 475; Ziegler, Sixth Great Power, pp. 143–57. 37 Galbraith, Hudson’s Bay Company, pp. 376–7. 38 Peel to Baring, 11 January 1845, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXXVIII, BL Add. MS 40557, fos 350–1. 39 Baring to Peel, 30 January 1846, Peel Papers, vol. CCCCIII, BL Add. MS 40583, fos 300–1. 40 W.D.Rubinstein, ‘British Millionaires, 1809–1949’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 47, 116 (November 1974), pp. 202–23. The year 1916 is a good stopping point for counting millionaires because it marked the death of the second-to-the-last known surviving founder member of the Colonial Society. (The last member to die was Leonard Wray, Junior, no millionaire; he was the son of another founder-member, and he joined the Society on 25 February 1869, aged 16 or 17. He died in 1942.) See also Anon., ‘English Millionaires’, The Spectator, 2316 (16 November 1872), pp. 1454–6. 41 The picture does not change when wills proved in Scotland are added into the picture—no new names reveal themselves. Sir William Mackinnon, about whom something will be said below, proved to be a half-millionaire in Scotland; he died in 1893. See Rachel Britton, ‘Wealthy Scots, 1876–1913’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 68, 137 (May 1985), pp. 78–94. Rubinstein, ‘British Millionaires’. 42 Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, pp. 58–84. 43 John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain & Ireland, 4th edn (London: Harrison, 1883; reprint, New York: Augustus M.Kelley, 1970). I am including among the twenty-two landowners several who had died by the time of

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Bateman’s fourth edition (1883), but whose immediate heirs Bateman listed. One cautionary note: Bateman took no account of London property. Scholarly attempts to correct for this fact and for other less serious problems in Bateman do not seem to change the picture that Bateman presents, at least for the Colonial Society founders—see Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, pp. 44, n. 40, 79 and 79, n. 140, 290–3. By contrast, death duty registers might pick up financial conditions from late in the age of New Imperialism, unlike Bateman’s snapshot of conditions near 1868; in any case, the registers would provide fragmented data, although not as fragmented or incomplete as the data from the probate records of the dioceses and the two provinces of Canterbury and York—see Barbara English, ‘Probate Valuations and Death Duty Registers’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57, 135 (May 1984), pp. 80–91. 44 Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, pp. 70–9. The question of what proportion of nineteenth-century businessmen bought large estates has been debated by F.M.L.Thompson, who believes that many businessmen did buy land, and W.D.Rubinstein, who believes that they did not: W.D.Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981); F.M.L.Thompson, ‘Life After Death: How successful nineteenth-century businessmen disposed of their fortunes’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 43, 1 (1990), pp. 40–61; W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Cutting Up Rich: A Reply to F.M.L.Thompson’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 45, 2 (1992), pp. 350–61; Thompson, ‘Stitching It Together Again’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 45, 2 (1992), pp. 362–75; and Rubinstein, ‘Businessmen into Landowners: The Question Revisited’, in Negley Harte and Roland Quinault (eds), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914: Essays in Honour of F.M.L.Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 90–118—this most recent paper also maps other contributors to the debate, as well as providing a useful defence of the continued applicability of Bateman. Since 1996, the battle has been joined again in Eileen Spring, ‘Businessmen and Landowners Re-engaged’, Historical Research, 72, 177 (February 1999), pp. 77–92, which includes a rejoinder from Rubinstein. 45 For the many industrial and estate-centred activities of the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, see Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, pp. 221–3, 232–3, 248–51, 291–2, 338–41, 358–60, 398, 431, 442–4; on the Fitzwilliam mines, see Graham Mee, Aristocratic Enterprise: The Fitzwilliam Industrial Undertakings, 1795–1857 (Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1975). For some comments on the 5th Earl’s political role as Whig grandee, pacifist, communitarian reformer, and fierce foe of the Corn Laws, see Ellis Archer Wasson, ‘The Old Whigs: Bedford, Fitzwilliam, and Spencer in the House of Lords, 1833–1861’, in R.W.Davis (ed.), Lords of Parliament: Studies, 1714–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 116–33. 46 PP, Report from the Select Committee appointed to consider the State of those British Possessions in North America which are under the Administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company, or over which they possess a Licence to Trade, No. 224.260 (1857), pp. 113–20; Margaret A.Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Vancouver: The Macmillans in Canada, 1958), pp. 125, 150–1, 215; Galbraith,

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Hudson’s Bay Company, pp. 341, 362. 47 Viscount William Milton, FRGS, FGS, etc., and W.B.Cheadle, MA, MD Cantab., FRGS, The Northwest Passage by Land. Being the narrative of an expedition from the Atlantic the Pacific, undertaken with the view of exploring a route across the continent to British Columbia through British Territory, by one of the northern passes in the Rocky Mountains (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1865); Viscount Milton, MP, A History of the San Juan Water Boundary Question, as Affecting the Division of Territory between Great Britain and the United States (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1869). 48 For the other man’s humour undiluted by Lord Milton, see Walter Butler Cheadle, Cheadle’s Journal of Trip (sic) Across Canada, 1862–1863, A.G. Doughty and Gustave Lanctot (eds), The Canada Series 1 (Ottawa: Graphic Publishing, 1931). 49 Fitzwilliam had reached Vancouver Island by March 1853—PP, Report from the Select Committee appointed to consider the State of those British Possessions in North America which are under the Administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Milton saw the worst of the winter weather—Milton, The Northwest Passage. 50 Thomas Moore Harrington is only a name and an address—the National Bank of Australasia, 47 Cornhill. Since he lived in England and was present at the inaugural dinner, the bank would seem to have been his employer rather than his post-box, but that is all that can be said. 51 Cf. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, which does look at the service sector, but chiefly in the aggregate. 52 See the ‘Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Natal’ notice on p. 9 and the ‘Durban Bank’ notice on p. 11 of the advertisements at the end of John Robinson, Natal: A Practical Guide to that British Dependency in Southern Africa (London: G. Street, Colonial Newspaper Office, 1863); see also the Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 3. 53 See the ‘Natal Ban’ notice on p. 7 of the advertisements at the end of Robinson, Natal. 54 Governor Denison to Mrs Denison, 6 September 1855, given in Denison, Varieties of Vice-regal Life, vol. I, p. 314. 55 Australian League Conference, Sessional Papers, etc., of the Australian League Conference, Held in Hobart Town and Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land, in the Months of April and May, 1852 (Tasmania: Australian League Conference, 1852), pp. 2–3. 56 Marnie Bassett, The Hentys: An Australian Colonial Tapestry (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 33–8, 112, 215–17, 410, 440–1, 496–505; Noel F. Learmonth, The Portland Bay Settlement: Being a History of Portland, Victoria, from 1800 to 1851 (Melbourne: Historical Committee of Portland, 1934), pp. 66–9, 102, 178–9, 186–90, 199, 275–80; S.J.Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank: The Bank of Australasia and the Union Bank of Australia Ltd, 1828–1951 (London: Longman, 1961), pp. 78–9, 98; Thomas Francis Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers [1898] (Melbourne and London: William Heinemann, 1969), pp. 119–29 at p. 127, n. 1; W.Henty, On Improvements in Cottage Husbandry (Launceston, Tasmania: Henry Dowling, Jnr [1850?]); Philip Mennell, The Dictionary of

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Australasian Biography from the Inauguration of Responsible Government down to the Present Time (1855–1892) (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1892). 57 Australia began to be drawn into a tighter relationship with the City of London after 1850, as shown in Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 241–6. 58 Samuel Aaron Joseph is really little more than a name. Another man, James W.Muttlebury, was a local figure in Victoria, Australia. He rose to a directorship of the National Bank of Australasia, which sent him to London as its agent in or about 1863. Paul de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria, 1850– 1880 (South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford, 1991), p. 423. 59 M.J.Daunton, ‘Firm and Family in the City of London in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of F.G.Dalgety’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 62, 148 (June 1989), pp. 154–77. 60 DCB. 61 For his own part, Joseph explored New Zealand in 1830, where he learned to speak a native language—PP, Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to Inquire into the Present State of the Islands of New Zealand, and the Expediency of Regulating the Settlement of British Subjects therein, No. 680 (1837– 38), pp. 55–71. Joseph Montefiore moved to New South Wales in 1840, helping to establish the Jewish community in that colony. From 1846, he played the same role in the Jewish community in South Australia, and he finally moved back to London in 1860. 62 Suzanne D.Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Collins Australia, 1988), pp. 37, 39, 43; Hilary D.Rubinstein, Chosen: The Jews in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 22–3; Learmonth, Portland Bay, p. 275; Pike, Paradise of Dissent, pp. 88, 96–8, 115–16, 173; D.E.Fifer, ‘The Sydney Merchants and the Wool Trade, 1821–1851’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 78, 1–2 (1992), pp. 92–112; Peter Burroughs, Britain and Australia 1831–1855: A Study in Imperial Relations and Crown Lands Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 174, 176 n.; and for valuable background material that none the less fails to identify its Montefiores unimpeachably, Butlin, Australia and New Zealand Bank, pp. 20–3, 28. Jacob Montefiore should not be confused with a younger relative of his who was also in Australia, Jacob Levi Montefiore. Jacob Levi was resident in Australia from long before 1868 until at least the end of 1869, while the Jacob Montefiore who joined the Colonial Society in early April 1869 was not at that time living in Australia— Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, p. 68. J.L.Montefiore wrote a Catechism of the Rudiments of Political Economy, published in Sydney in 1861—see J.A.La Nauze, Political Economy in Australia: Historical Studies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1949), p. 16. 63 Burroughs, Britain and Australia, p. 350. 64 PP, Further Papers Relative to the Alterations in the Constitutions of the Australian Colonies, No. 1915 (1854), pp. 1–3. 65 Richard Roberts and David Kynaston (eds), The Bank of England: Money, Power, and Influence, 1694–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Appendix 2, pp. 266–9.

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66 Geoffrey Jones, British Multinational Banking, 1830–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 44. According to Jones (p. 14), the English (or rather Irish) model for multi-branch, London-headquartered banking, the Provincial Bank of Ireland, came only in 1825, although it had certain Scottish antecedents. 67 See the names mentioned or listed in A.S.J.Baster, The Imperial Banks (London: P.S.King, 1929; New York: Arno Press, 1977), pp. 68, 96,120–1,128. 68 Half the assets but far fewer branches were in Asia. Jones, British Multinational Banking, p. 23, and Appendices 3 and 4, pp. 414–17. 69 See Alan Barnard, The Australian Wool Market, 1840–1900 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958), pp. 39, n. 90, 74, 195. 70 For the Rennie family’s ‘Aberdeen Direct Line’, see Marischal Murray, Ships and South Africa: A Maritime Chronicle of the Cape (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 177–9, 220; for J.Rennie’s continued involvement in the Natal trade in the late 1860s, see the records for the ship Umgeni in Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping for 1864–65, 1865–66, 1866–67, 1868–69, and 1869–70, and for Umvoti (1869) in Lloyd’s Register for 1870–71. I should like to thank Professor Andrew Porter of London University for his help in identifying Rennie, who had some namesakes, and for news of the Umvoti. 71 George Blake, B.I.Centenary, 1856–1956 (London: Collins, 1956), pp. 18–26. See John S.Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878–1895: A Study in the ‘New Imperialism’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 29–33, 227; and Marie de Kiewiet, ‘History of the Imperial British East Africa Company, 1876– 1895’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1955), pp. 16–20. A different view, exploring the mail contracts that Mackinnon might have expected to profit from, is given in J.Forbes Munro, ‘Shipping Subsidies and Railway Guarantees: William Mackinnon, Eastern Africa, and the Indian Ocean, 1860–1893’, Journal of African History, 28 (1987), p. 209; ‘Poor Carlotta’s’ Fortune’, Washington Post (17 March 1890), p. 4. 72 William Westgarth, Commercial, Statistical, and General Report on the District of Port Phillip, New South Wales, for the Half Year ended 31st of July, 1845 ([Melbourne?]: S.Goode, Courier Office, n.d. [1845?]), p. 43; ADB; C.P.Billot, Melbourne: An Annotated Bibliography to 1850 (Geelong, Victoria, Australia: Rippleside Press, 1970), p. 194; ‘Licences issued from 1 July 1840’, NSW Government Gazette, 9 September 1840, given in Michael Cannon and Ian MacFarlane (eds), Historical Records of Victoria: Foundation Series, Vol. 6, The Crown, the Land, and the Squatter, 1835–1840 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991), p. 157. 73 B.A.McKelvie, ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Israel Wood Powell, MD, CM’, British Columbia Historical Quarterly, 11 (1947), pp. 33–54 at p. 39. 74 Alfred Waddington, The Fraser Mines Vindicated, or, the History of Four Months (Victoria, Vancouver Island: P.de Garro, 1858), p. 1. 75 Alfred Waddington, Overland Route through British North America; Or the Shortest and Speediest Route to the East (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1868). 76 Ormsby, British Columbia, pp. 205–8, 230.

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77 Again, I consider those who were at the early meetings and who showed continued interest in the Society (by joining it at some point) to have been early members within the scope of this study, even if they joined somewhat after the cut-off date of 13 April 1869. 78 Waddington, Overland Route, pp. 5–7, 15–16. 79 For the American taint on Waddington and Franklin, see Helmcken, Reminiscences, p. 173; and for the nephew, Philip R.Marshall, ‘William Henry Waddington: The Making of a Diplomat’, Historian, 38, 1 (November 1975), pp. 79–97. For the details of Franklin’s life, see David Rome, The First Two Years: A Record of Jewish Settlement on Canada’s Pacific Coast, 1858–1860 (Montreal: H.M.Caiserman, 1942), pp. 52–105; and Sheldon J.Godfrey and Judith C.Godfrey, Search out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995), pp. 219–25. Franklin first lived in San Francisco from 1849 to 1852. The American character of western Canada is further illustrated by the case of William Alexander Smith (not a member of the Colonial Society)—but the second-place vote-getter who would have taken Franklin’s seat if it had been vacated according to Waddington’s plan. A Nova Scotian, Smith came to British Columbia politics by way of the Californian goldfields, where he was a photographer; while in Northern California he legally changed his name to ‘Amor de Cosmos’. Under that name he became premier of British Columbia in the 1870s. He was known for his irascibility. 80 Waddington, Fraser Mines Vindicated, p. 16. 81 Ibid., pp. 9, 20, 36, 39. 82 Ibid., pp. 16–17, 25. 83 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 84 Waddington, Overland Route, p. 24. 85 Ibid., p. 28.

5 Travels and ideas 1 Charles Darwin, Journal of the Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S.Beagle, 1832–36 (London: Henry Coulburn, 1839; reprinted as The Voyage of the Beagle, introduction by Leonard Engel, New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1962), pp. 443–4, 502. 2 The Travellers’ Club—both the club and the qualification date from 1814. The 500mile rule is still in effect, but it hardly remains the basis for the club’s exclusivity; the potential membership is more than 6,000,000,000. See Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London, p. 199; Lejeune, Gentlemen’s Clubs, p. 265. 3 As James Clifford has shown, Edward Said was himself unsure about whether orientalism was a marked tendency among a large number of individual Westerners, or was instead part of a Foucauldian episteme running through Western books but

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hardly through their authors’ minds. See Clifford, ‘On Orientalism’, in idem., The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 255–76. 4 As Lynn Zastoupil has argued in a recent study of John Stuart Mill, to explore the English side of the Channel instead of the French as the locus classicus of ‘orientalism’ would require redefining the term so that it no longer pointed to a wellworked-out ‘colonial discourse’. Zastoupil, Mill And India, pp. 171–81. 5 Marshman, History of India, vol. III, p. 65. 6 Dennis Potter, in Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), has chapters on Boswell, Diderot, Bouganville, Cook, Stendahl, Darwin, Flaubert, Freud, D.H.Lawrence, T.E.Lawrence, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Naipaul. Darwin has to carry the can, as it were, for British imperialism all the way from Captain Cook to D.H.Lawrence. Neither India nor its Mutiny appears at all. Why wouldn’t scholars of orientalism look to mid-Victorian England, which had the biggest oriental empire and the biggest oriental wars? In choosing their evidence, they seem to concentrate on the darker and sexier writers, rather than employing a sampling technique to see how representative such writers were. The result of concentrating on the dark and sexy is to more or less omit mid-Victorian England, apart from amusing neurotics such as Sir Richard Burton and General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon. There is more than a bit of circular reasoning built into the pursuit of the sexy. Literary scholars seem to assume that a psychic Sturm und Drang was at the basis of European imperialism, and so they proceed to look for the Sturm und Drang in writers who suffered from stormy souls. 7 On the latter point, see David Kopf, ‘European Enlightenment, Hindu Renaissance, and the Enrichment of the Human Spirit: A History of Historical Writings on British Orientalism’, in Nancy Cassels (ed.), Orientalism, Evangelicalism, and the Military Cantonment in Early Nineteenth-Century India: A Historiographical Overview (Lewiston, Maine; Kingston, Ontario; and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 19–53. In ‘Occidentalism: Counterpoint and Counter-polemic’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19, 3 (1993), pp. 339–44, John M.Mackenzie offers a balanced view of the controversy over theories of orientalism; see also his Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 3–39. The common-sense (even positivistic) approach of historians to evidence is defended with great humour and equal power by Joyce Appleby in ‘One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving Beyond the Linguistic; A Response to David Harlan’, American Historical Review, 94, 5 (December 1989), pp. 1326–32. 8 W.H.Newnham, Melbourne, The Biography of a City (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1956), p. 27. The Melbourne Club met for at least twenty years in houses and taverns; its building was planned in the late 1850s, a boom decade in Melbourne— Granville Wilson, Building a City: 100 Years of Melbourne Architecture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 26; C.P.Billot, The Life and Times of John Pascoe Fawkner (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1985), pp. 204, 209, 222; Paul de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne Before the Gold Rushes (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 57–9, 63–6, 86–7, 160;

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idem., Pounds and Pedigrees, pp. 253–5. 9 Charles Dilke to his father, 20 January 1867, DP vol. XXVIII, BL Add. MS 43901, fos 7–12. 10 For these clubs, see George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men, and Institutions in Mid-nineteenth Century Eastern Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 87. Britons in the know were rather sceptical about the learned clubs of the colonies. Charles Kingsley delivered to the ‘British Association of Melbourne, Australia’ a rather dry paper on the subject of water-babies in the far future year of 1999 (although in at least one posthumous edition it is 1839, one year after the foundation of the Melbourne Club). Kingsley also fancied that ‘hundreds of thousands of years’ from now, the Geological Society of New Zealand would be astonished to find a fossilized water-baby—a human child who had drowned after its parents were exiled to Botany Bay. For Kingsley, the Australians and New Zealanders of the distant future would study nature to the exclusion of the injustices which had created their countries so long before. Charles Kingsley, The WaterBabies (London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co, 1863), pp. 157, 293.; idem., The Water-Babies (London and Glasgow: Blackie, n.d.), pp. 51, 94, 174. 11 Arthur McMartin, Public Servants and Patronage: The Foundation and Rise of the New South Wales Public Service, 1786–1859 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1983), pp. 152–67; Hazel King, ‘Man in a Trap: Alexander Macleay, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 68 (June 1982), pp. 37–48; Max Dupain, Morton Herman, Marjorie Barnard, and Daniel Thomas, Georgian Architecture in Australia, with Some Examples of the Post-Georgian Period (1963; Sydney: Ure Smith, 1965), pp. 36–7, 141, 147; Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture, pp. 81, 87n.; Ronald Strahan, ‘The Dog That Did Not Bark: Alexander Macleay and the Australian Museum’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 75 (December 1989), pp. 224–9; Peter Stanbury and Julian Holland (eds), Mr. Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet: The History of the Macleays and their Museum (Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, 1988), pp. 9–19, 24–6. 12 Ann Mozley, ‘Evolution and the Climate of Opinion in Australia, 1840–76’, Victorian Studies, 10, 4 (June 1967), pp. 411–30. 13 David S.Macmillan, A Squatter Went to Sea: The Story of William Macleay’s New Guinea Expedition (1875) and his Life in Sydney (Sydney: Currawong Publishing, 1957), pp. 5–12; Ann Mozley Moyal (ed.), Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia: A Documentary History (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1976), pp. 88, 108–9; Dymphna Clark, ‘Baron Charles von Hügel and the Macleays’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 75 (December 1989), pp. 211–23; Stanbury and Holland, Mr. Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, p. 151. 14 Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835–1851 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), pp. 54–5, 83. 15 Although they did that as well. See J.B.Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales, 1848–1884 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 185. 16 J.E.Gorst, The Maori King, ed. Keith Sinclair (1864; Hamilton and Auckland, NZ: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1954); idem., ‘Our New Zealand Conquests’, Macmillan’s, 12

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(1865), pp. 168–75; J.R.Vincent, ‘“A sort of second-rate Australia”: A Note on Gorst and Democracy, 1865–1868’, Historical Studies, 15, 60 (April 1973), pp. 539–44; Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, pp. 65–6, 165–7; M.P.K.Sorenson, ‘The Maori King Movement’, in Robert Chapman and Keith Sinclair (eds), Studies of a Small Democracy: Essays in Honour of Willis Airey (Hamilton, NZ: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1963), pp. 33–55; idem., ‘Maori and Pakeha’, pp. 154–8; Keith Sinclair, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1961), pp. 71–7; James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period, 2 vols (Wellington, NZ: R.E.Owen, Government Printer, 1922; 1955), vol. I, pp. 233–7; Archie Hunter, A Life of John Eldon Gorst: Disraeli’s Awkward Disciple (London: Frank Cass, 2001). 17 The club’s Chairman from 1859 to 1888 was Gisborne Molineux, a member of the Colonial Society about whom there is little more to say. Two other guests who were also in the Colonial Society were Sir David Salomons and Sir Edward BulwerLytton. Although most of the Canada Club’s records are missing for the 1860s, see J.G.Colmer, The Canada Club (London): Some Notes on Its Origin, Constitution and Activities (London: Canada Club, 1934), pp. 23, 58, 60–1, 64. 18 J.K.Johnson, ‘The U.C.Club and the Upper Canadian Elite, 1837–1840’, Ontario History, 49, 3 (September 1977), pp. 151–67. 19 London: Jeremiah Howe, 1846. 20 [H.P.Roche], New Hebrides, p. 66. 21 He also published a not entirely polite fourteen-page legal brief against the establishment of Roman Catholic bishoprics in England—The Recent Apostolical Letters of the Pope an Infringement of the Queen’s Prerogative, as far as the New Roman Catholic Sees of Shrewsbury and Nottingham are Concerned (London: V.& R.Stevens and G.S.Norton, 1850). His next publication was a legal tome that lacked the verve of his New Hebrides pamphlet or his screed on the papacy—William Hazlitt and Henry Philip Roche, A Manual of the Law of Maritime Warfare (London: V.& R.Stevens and G.S.Norton, 1854). In this book, American examples of English law are extolled. He later took busman’s holidays to write on bankruptcy law: William Hazlitt and Henry Philip Roche, The Bankruptcy Act of 1861 (V. & R.Stevens and Sons; H.Sweet & W.Maxwell, 1861). 22 Roche to R.Owen, 4 July 1851, Owen Papers, BL Add. MS 39954, fos 216–17. 23 [H.P.Roche], New Hebrides, pp. 3–18. 24 Roche to R.Owen, 4 July 1851, Owen Papers, BL Add. MS 39954, fos 216–17. 25 Roche to R.Owen, 11 February 1853, Owen Papers, BL Add. MS 39954, fos 280– 3. 26 Ibid. 27 A.R.Roche, A View of Russian America in View of the Present War (Montreal: J.Lovell, 1855); see also W.L.Morton, The Critical Years: The Union of British North America, 1857–1873, The Canadian Centenary Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964), pp. 26, 31; Galbraith, Hudson’s Bay Company, pp. 163–9. The Crimean War included no hostilities on the Russian/British inland frontiers in North America; at that time these frontiers were visited only by explorers and fur traders, and so the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Russian Fur Company had arranged for

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the neutralization of Alaska and, with similar logic, New Caledonia. 28 PP, Report from the Select Committee appointed to consider the State of those British Possessions in North America which are under the Administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company, pp. 248–53. 29 Shortly before the Colonial Society was founded, he shared some transcontinental transport dreams with Henry Crease in British Columbia, whom we looked at some time ago; nothing came of the matter. See Roche to Crease, 26 October 1867, quoted in Elliott, ‘Henry P.Pellew Crease’. 30 John Riddy, ‘Some Official British Attitudes Towards European Settlement and Colonization in India up to 1865’, in Donovan Williams and E.Daniel Potts (eds), Essays in Indian History in Honour of Cuthbert Collin Davies (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973), pp. 16–41. 31 Bradford Spangenburg, British Bureaucracy in India: Status, Policy, and the I.C.S., in the Late 19th Century (Columbia, MI: South Asia Books, 1976), pp. 14–25; Clive Dewey, ‘The Education of a Ruling Caste: The Indian Civil Service in an Era of Competitive Examination’, English Historical Review, 88, 347 (April 1973), pp. 262–85—see esp. Appendix 1; J.M.Compton, ‘Open Competition and the Indian Civil Service, 1854–1876’, English Historical Review, 83, 327 (April 1968), pp. 265–84. 32 Lord William Hay to Roderick Murchison, 31 May 1869, Murchison Papers, vol. II, BL Add. MS 46126, fos 389–90; Bawa Satinder Singh (ed.), The Letters of the First Viscount Hardinge of Lahore to Lady Hardinge and Sir Walter and Lady James, 1844–1847, Camden Fourth Series, 32 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986), p. 142. 33 [John Robinson], ‘By the Sea-Side in South-East Africa’, Cornhill, 16 (July 1867), pp. 629–40; [idem.], ‘Colonial Parliaments’, Cornhill, 18 (October 1868), pp. 484– 95; see also his first bound work, the 1863 pamphlet Natal: A Practical Guide, the kind of thing that a newspaperman would run up on his own presses. 34 Robert James Mann, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ Vindicated: An Explanatory Essay (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1856; New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986); Michael Thorn, Tennyson (1992; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 286–92, 294–5. 35 Mann, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ p. 76. 36 Robert James Mann, The Emigrant’s Guide to the Colony of Natal (London: Virtue & Co, 1868), pp. v, 2. 37 After 1868, Mann went on to publish twenty scientific articles in the Edinburgh Review—he had published only two before going to Natal. As before, some of his scientific works were a part of the colonizing project: Robert James Mann, Medicine for Emergencies, for the use of Settlers in Colonies, Sailors on Shipboard, and Students of Every Class (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1861)—see esp. pp. iii–iv; Mann described people being too far from doctors in Natal, so that when he was there he had to teach the lessons of this book again and again to new people heading out into the bush. 38 Dorothy O.Helly, ‘Informed Opinion on Tropical Africa in Great Britain, 1860– 1890’, African Affairs, 68, 272 (July 1969), pp. 195–217 at pp. 195, 204, 215.

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39 C.C.Eldridge, ‘The Imperialism of the “Little England Era”: The Question of the Annexation of the Fiji Islands, 1858–1861’, New Zealand Journal of History, 1, 2 (1967), pp. 171–84 at p. 174; Richard Blackett, ‘In Search of International Support for African Colonization: Martin R.Delany’s Visit to England, 1860’, Canadian Journal of History, 10, 3 (December 1975), pp. 307–24; Churchill to Lord Palmerston, with enclosures, 31 December 1862, PRO CO 267/279; John D.Hargreaves, Prelude to the Partition of West Africa (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 71, 75. 40 Churchill and T.Lyons McLeod of the African Aid Society, to Lord Palmerston, 1 February 1864, given in PP, Copy of Correspondence on the Subject of an Application from the Company of African Merchants (Ltd), for a Subsidy towards establishing Steamers on the River Niger, 1864, no. 124, p. 2. For the protesting traders and the Foreign Office view that they were biased, see Austen Henry Layard to the Secretary of the Treasury, 30 May 1864, given in ibid., pp. 14–15. 41 W.P.Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Mid-Victorian Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 305. 42 Cf. the rather different classification of a much smaller number of the early members in Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 115–16. 43 For Ireland as the training ground of key imperialists, see the final pages of D.M.Schreuder, ‘Ireland and the Expertise of Imperial Administration: Hercules Robinson, the “Irish Fairs and Markets Commission” (1853), and the making of a Victorian Proconsul’, in Roy MacLeod (ed.), Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators, and Professionals, 1860–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 145–65. New entrance exams for the Indian civil service were taken by men socially much inferior to those whom Schreuder examines; this led to Irishmen winning between one-fifth and a quarter of the new places in the 1850s and 1860s. Ministers thought these proportions too high and lowered the numbers out of anti-Irish prejudice—Scott B.Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1914’, Journal of Social History, 20, 3 (spring 1987), pp. 507–29. 44 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism.

6 Tocqueville and Lord Bury: the empire of democracy 1 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘Canada’, Saturday Review, 11 (26 January 1861), pp. 100–1. 2 Back in the days of the younger Pitt, some Englishmen did come to America to write books about industry and society. Henry T.Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, with a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864; reprint, New York: Augustus M.Kelley, 1970), pp. 193ff. 3 See e.g. W.S.Neidhardt, Fenianism in North America (University Park, PA:

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Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), pp. 109–10. 4 Donald Road, Cobden and Bright (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1968), pp. 2– 14,112–14; John Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memories of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1849–1869 (Hassocks, SX: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 228. Although an interest in America was apparent among reformers outside the Parliamentary intelligentsia, the interest in Tocqueville’s ideas did not spread that far, perhaps because the Tories had co-opted his thinking. For Chartist and working-class opinion about America, see G.D.Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom: The Impact of American Democracy upon Britain 1830–1870 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955); and for the opinions about America that were held by British humanitarians and abolitionists, see Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-American Aspects, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). 5 H.C.Allen, Great Britain and the United States, rev. edn (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969); and Ephraim Douglas Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (New York: Russell & Russell, 1925). 6 William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], The Exodus of the Western Nations, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1865), vol. I, p. 20. 7 See J.P.Mayer’s introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, trans. George Lawrence and K.P.Mayer, ed. J.P.Mayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), pp. 17ff. Seymour Drescher’s Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) details the importance of England for Tocqueville’s mental development, and the importance of the English examples that Tocqueville used in Democracy in America and elsewhere. 8 Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 55, 152–69, 217–20. See esp. p. 218, n. 3. 9 On the latter point, see the chapter entitled ‘How American Democracy has Modified the English Language’—Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 477–82. 10 In The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860–86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), pp. 1–12, 42–4, 156, Christopher Harvie has shown that in the 1860s certain dons who would be highly influential in the later nineteenth century—dons committed to Comte and positivism—turned to Democracy in America as a practical guide to the methodology of searching for historical evidence and pattern, a search that grew out of their original devotion to Comte. Nevertheless, their exploration of Tocqueville’s work began too late to lead them into the Colonial Society. Among the older and more influential of these dons were Goldwin Smith, Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and the DNB, and son of the Colonial Office Permanent Secretary), James Bryce (the English Tocqueville—his work on America appeared in 1888), and Frederic Harrison (the chief Comtean Positivist of late nineteenth-century England, and a cofounder of the Church of Humanity). In Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 86–7, Christopher Kent points out that Comte and Harrison set an example of anti-imperialism for their followers. 11 In an important work, J.W.Burrow acknowledges Tocqueville’s influence on some major Whig thinkers from the 1830s through the 1860s—thinkers so major that,

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excepting John Stuart Mill himself, they do not come into this study of protoimperialists. See Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), esp. pp. 19–22 and 45–6. Burrow also clarifies Tocqueville’s influence on Mill’s ideas about historical progress (pp. 77–8, 93, 106). Someone who sees the Tocquevillean thinking behind questions of governance as they were framed in English-speaking colonies is Bruce Knox, in ‘Democracy, Aristocracy, and Empire: The Provision of Colonial Honours, 1818–1870’, Australian Historical Studies, 25, 99 (October 1992), pp. 244–64 at p. 249, n. 21 and passim. For another reference to the wide dissemination of Tocquevillean ideas, see A.G.L.Shaw, ‘Agitation for the Separation of the Port Phillip District from the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1850’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 68, 1 (June 1982), pp. 1–17 at p. 8. Tocqueville’s name and some hints of his influence also appear in Brian Jenkins, Great Britain and the War for the Union, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), pp. 69–71. 12 See Iris Wessell Mueller, John Stuart Mill and French Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 134–69; Terence H.Quilter, ‘John Stuart Mill, Disciple of Tocqueville’, Western Political Quarterly, 13 (September 1960), pp. 880–9; and H.O.Pappé, ‘Mill and Tocqueville’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (April–June 1964), pp. 217–34. For Pappé, Mueller over-emphasizes the influence of Tocqueville on Mill. However, Pappé himself does not pay sufficient attention to what that influence was, and to the reasons for the estrangement between the two men in the 1840s. Those reasons, as I will show, were personal and political rather than intellectual. The intellectual similarities between Tocqueville and Mill, quite apart from the question of influence, are explored by Joseph Hamburger in ‘Mill and Tocqueville on Liberty’, in James and John Stuart Mill/Papers of the Centenary Conference, eds John M.Robson and Michael Laine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 11–25. 13 Mill to Sir Charles Dilke, 19 February 1869, DP vol. XXIV, BL Add. MS. 43897, fos 5–6. 14 John Stuart Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840), pp. 1–47 at pp. 2–3. 15 André Jardin, Tocqueville, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (London: Peter Halban, 1988), pp. 85–7, 117, 176. 16 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 437. 17 Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, p. 3. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 20 Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 101–3. Still valuable is the interesting account of preTocquevillean travel writers in J.L.Mesick, The English Traveller in America, 1785– 1835 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), pp. 2–16. Many of Mesick’s travellers addressed their books to working-class emigrants (pp. 26–63, 347–52). Except for Cobbett and Mrs Trollope, these authors did not achieve fame, yet many showed a fine eye for detail. Mesick did not discuss why she ended her book in 1835; that was of course the year when the first part of Democracy in America came

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out, but Tocqueville is nowhere to be found in Mesick’s otherwise admirable study. 21 Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, p. 2. Tocqueville’s phrase ‘the tyranny of the majority’ echoes Madison in Federalist, No. 10: ‘Complaints are everywhere heard…of an interested and overbearing majority.’—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers [1788] (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987), p. 123. 22 Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, pp. 2–3. 23 Crook, American Democracy in English Politics, 1815–50 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 177–86. 24 Anthony Trollope, ‘The Migration of a Library’, Pall Mall Gazette (17 September 1880), p. 11; see also Wright, ‘Anthony Trollope as a Reader’. 25 John Knox Laughton (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, CB, DCL., vol. 1 (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1898), pp. 309–18. 26 Tocqueville to Reeve, 9 September 1839, given in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Completes, eds J-P.Mayer and Gustave Rudler, vol. 6, Correspondance Anglaise: Correspondance D’Alexis de Tocqueville avec Henry Reeve et John Stuart Mill (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), vol. VI, p. 49. For the translation, see Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. xi. 27 Many Englishmen still do. For a French assessment of the generally friendly, even optimistic conclusions about America that Tocqueville expressed in his Democracy, see Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 207–11, 215–21. For an American assessment of the optimism of Part I of Democracy, and of the more apprehensive and less concretely American ideal types that make up Part II, see Robert Nisbet, ‘Many Tocquevilles’, American Scholar, 46 (winter 1976/77), pp. 59–75. 28 A recent discussion of the influence of Henry Reeve’s translation of Democracy in America—upon English leader writers—is Hugh Dubrulle, ‘“We are Threatened… with Anarchy and Ruin”: Fear of Americanization and the Emergence of an AngloSaxon Confederacy in England during the American Civil War’, Albion, 33, 4 (winter 2002), pp. 583–613. Dubrulle’s ‘Anglo-Saxon Confederacy’ is a group of supporters of the Confederacy in the US Civil War. 29 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution [1856], trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co, 1955), pp. 107–11, 115– 20. 30 A.H.Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Charles Greville and Henry Reeve, 1836–1865 (London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1924), pp. 21–2 and 22, n. 1. 31 Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 351–4. 32 Mill to Tocqueville, 9 August 1842, 20 February 1843, and 3 November 1843, in Tocqueville, Oeuvres Completes, vol. VI, pp. 337–47. 33 Zastoupil, ‘Mill and India’. 34 Tocqueville to Mill, 9 February 1843, in Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VI, pp. 339–49. 35 Mill to Tocqueville, 15 December 1856, in Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VI, pp. 349–50. In his Autobiography [1873], Mill gave Tocqueville ample credit. The animus of earlier years was gone—see pp. 149–51, 156. For a brief account of Tocqueville’s position in the Chamber of Deputies, and of some of the English

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reaction to his statements there, see Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 155–61. Drescher’s chief focus is what Tocqueville thought about all this. 36 Henry Reeve, ‘Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville’, Edinburgh Review, 113 (April 1861), pp. 427–60. 37 Interest in Tocqueville was also apparent in the thinking of certain officials who did not join the Colonial Society. As John Cell has noted, Lord Grey, the sometime Colonial Secretary, did quote Tocqueville extensively in 1858. Cell has also noted the American cast in the arguments of J.A.Roebuck and Edward Gibbon Wakefield (both of whom died before 1868). Cell even notes similar elements in the writings of one founder of the Colonial Society, Herman Merivale—Cell, British Colonial Administration, pp. 88–92. As Cell points out, another scholar, C.M.H.Clark, also saw Tocquevillean perspectives in the thinking of two sometime Colonial Secretaries, Grey and Lord Stanley: Clark, A Short History of Australia (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 107; and idem., A History of Australia, vol. 3, The Beginning of an Australian Civilization, 1824–1851 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1973), pp. 93–4, 380. Clarke had done his Master’s thesis on Tocqueville—Haig Patapan, ‘Melancholy and Amnesia: Tocqueville’s Influence on Australian Democratic Theory’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 49, 1 (2003), pp. 1–16 at p. 202, n. 5. In addition, Tocquevillean elements in the thinking of Merivale and Grey have been commented upon by John Manning Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), pp. 57, 153–4, 243–6. 38 In the necessarily general concluding pages of the first volume of Democracy in America (published thirteen years before the Mexican War), Tocqueville had predicted the spread of the ‘English’ race to the North under the Queen and to the South under the American Union, into what was then Mexico. Both those Americans still under British rule and those in the great republic, or so he asserted, shared not only superior municipal institutions, but also superior ‘civilization, energy, and power’ in comparison to the French race of the New World. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 408–11. 39 [Alexis de Tocqueville], ‘Political and Social Condition of France’, London and Westminster Review, 3, new ser., and 25, old ser. (April–July 1836), pp. 137–69. This article was intended to be the first in a series, but no other articles were published. The London and Westminster Review was quite the likeliest journal to publish Tocqueville, since its editor was John Stuart Mill—see Houghton, ‘Victorian Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’. 40 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1834] (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 90. 41 The pre-1868 writings of the founders were well represented in the Royal Commonwealth Society Library. See Evans Lewin, Subject Catalogue of the Royal Empire Society, 4 vols (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, for the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1967), especially the geographically unrestricted headings in volumes 1 and 3. Some of the founders donated books to the Society’s Library before the end of 1868, and before the Library had a home: Coun. Min., vol. 2, 16 December 1868, fo 21. Some made it known that their own books were included.

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A.R.Roche, the Secretary, thanked such donors on 21 January 1869 (Gen. Corresp., vol. I, fo 31) and 3 February 1869 (Gen. Corresp., vol. I, fo 38); see also Coun. Min., vol. 1, 14 February 1869, fo 30. 42 Some scholars have asserted that Harriet Martineau’s 1838 treatise, How to Observe: Manners and Morals, was the methodological sourcebook for Englishlanguage travel writing as it developed into ethnography. But it was never referred to by any member of the Colonial Society. The founders were working in the mental territory of Tocqueville (as translated by Reeve) and not of Martineau. She would have had them employ in their travel books any valid analytical categories they might find to get the feel of a place, and then she would have them turn to the tangible pieces of material culture that would prove their points. The founders, by contrast, employed a Tocqueville-inspired set of analytical categories that showed their excitement about questions of democracy, equality, local government, the growth of English-speaking colonies, and above all the centrality of the Englishspeaking world in the progress of world history. For the idea that Martineau influenced all subsequent travel writing, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 153–4, 191; Sarah Winter, ‘Mental Culture: Liberal Pedagogy and the Emergence of Ethnographic Knowledge’, Victorian Studies, 41, 3 (spring 1998), pp. 427–54. 43 The literature on professionalization is huge. On the growth of professionalism among intellectuals after 1880, see the latest work by Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 83–7. Some intellectual professionalization was already visible in the 1860s and 1870s, as shown in Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 199–236. 44 CAM Press, Norfolk Notabilities [1893]. Excerpted in the British Biographical Archive. 45 His service was discontinuous in part because he kept losing his seat, once for bribery. A Liberal, Lord Bury sat for Norwich from April 1857 until June 1859, when he was unseated for bribery (Bury denied the charge in a letter to The Times, 9 December 1859, p. 6, col. 5). He sat for Wick from October 1860 to July 1865, the year he stood unsuccessfully at Dover. He then sat for Berwick-on-Tweed from December 1868 until the end of Gladstone’s government in 1874. He stood unsuccessfully as a Tory at Stroud in 1875, and sat as a Tory once he was called to the House of Lords in his father’s barony of Ashford in 1876. 46 For the character of the Volunteers and Bury’s place in them, see Ian F.W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 170, 185, 188. 47 Bury to W.E.Gladstone, 30 July 1858, GP vol. CCCV, BL Add. MS 44390, fos 72– 3. 48 Other members of the House, Chichester Fortescue among them, acknowledged Bury’s involvement with the Bill. Fortescue noted that Bury was pre-senting a petition on the Bill on 25 March 1858—Osbert Wyndham Hewitt (ed.), ‘…and Mr. Fortescue’: A Selection from the Diaries from 1851–1862 of Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford, KP (London: John Murray, 1958), p. 26. See also Jenkins (ed.),

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‘Parliamentary Diaries of Trelawny, 1868–73’, p. 358—entry for 21 April 1869. 49 SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, p. 64, n. 91. 50 Press, Norfolk Notabilities, in the British Biographical Archive. 51 Bury to Governor-General Sir Edmund W.Head, 5 December 1855, in PP, Copies or Extracts of Recent Correspondence Respecting Alterations in the Organization of the Indian Department in Canada, No. 247 (1856), pp. 18–19, 25–6. 52 Ibid., pp. 25–6, 29. 53 This material rather than racial definition of ‘civilization’ was shared by other Canadian writers on Indian affairs, both in Bury’s time and later on—Mark Francis, ‘The “Civilizing” of Indigenous Peoples in Nineteenth-century Canada’, Journal of World History, 9, 1 (spring 1998), pp. 51–87. As Francis shows, both the material and the racial definitions of civilization contrast with yet another, older definition, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century view that civilization was a matter of civil and controlled behaviour; in this Enlightenment sense, great Native American chiefs were indeed civilized, despite their lack of the outward riches of European ‘civilization’. 54 In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), John Stuart Mill would sound a different note. He did stress that it was difficult to maintain free institutions where people did not share a common language (ch. XVI), but his examples were from Eastern Europe, and went to the question of the rectification of borders and the creation of Little Englands. That is, he was looking at European countries which he believed might travel down the road to free institutions. Pace Mill, in North America the situation called for different reasoning. In the continent-wide societies of the New World, a long period of separate national development for each ethnic group was not on the table, and instead the key issue was how different kinds of people could live together. 55 Bury to Head, 5 December 1855, in PP, Correspondence Respecting the Indian Department in Canada, p. 7. 56 He would become Chairman of the Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway in 1882— Currie, Grand Trunk Railway, p. 218. 57 For the English epidemic, see Burn, Age of Equipoise, pp. 212–16. 58 William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], ‘A Few Notes on Canadian Affairs’, Part 1, Fraser’s Magazine, 55 (March 1857), pp. 312–28. The article was in three parts. The first and second were signed ‘Beta Mikron’. The third appeared under Bury’s own name and a slightly altered title; it was identified as Part 3. For the fourth article in the series, which had a new title, Bury made a strange attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube, signing himself ‘Beta Mikron’ once again. 59 William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], ‘A Few Notes on Canadian Affairs’, Part 2, Fraser’s Magazine, 55 (May 1857), pp. 554–68. 60 William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], ‘Notes on Canadian Matters’, Part 3, Fraser’s Magazine, 56 (July 1857), pp. 90–105. For Tocqueville on caucuses or public opinion, see Democracy in America, pp. 246–50, 254–6, 513–24; for the nature of democratic armies, and how weak they are in peacetime, pp. 645– 59. See also William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], ‘British

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Columbia, Vancouver’s Island’, Fraser’s Magazine, 57 (March 1858), pp. 493–504— this article was largely about the Gold Rush on the Fraser River, and territorial disputes with the United States. 61 Robert A.Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration, and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 76–7. 62 DNB. 63 London: Henry Coulburn, 1827. 64 George Thomas Keppel [6th Earl of Albemarle], Personal Narrative, pp. 3–4. 65 There was still much affection for the Mughal form of Persian among the older British officials—C.A.Bayley, Empire and Information; Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 285–7. On when it was abolished see T.O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558–1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 151. 66 George Thomas Keppel [6th Earl of Albemarle], Personal Narrative, p. 4. 67 George Thomas Keppel [6th Earl of Albemarle], Speech of the Earl of Albemarle on Torture in the Madras Presidency, delivered in the House of Lords, 14th April 1856 (London: James Ridgway, 1856), p. 21, 68 Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Keppel, A Sailor’s Life under Four Sovereigns, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1899), vol. I, p. 254. 69 SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, p. 64, n. 91; DNB; Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy: With extracts from the joumal of James Brooke, Esq., of Sarawak, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846); idem., A Sailor’s Life. 70 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 493–6. 71 On this balance, see George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 232–5. 72 Bury, Exodus, vol. I, pp. 32–53. 73 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 1–12. 74 Bury, Exodus, vol. I, p. 32. 75 Ibid., p. 26. 76 Ibid., p. 5. See also vol. I, pp. 11–15, and Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 39–52. 77 Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 107–10. 78 Bury, Exodus, vol. I, pp. v–vi. 79 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 31–57, 417; Bury, Exodus, vol. I, pp. vi, 3–5. 80 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 12; Mill, ‘Democracy in America’, pp. 2–3. 81 Bury, Exodus, vol. I, pp. 7–9. 82 Ibid., p. 8; citing Voltaire, ‘Essai sur les Moeurs’, p. xxxi. 83 Clippings, Albemarle Scrapbook, fos 1–11, RCSA. 84 Athenaeum, 961 (27 May 1865), pp. 713–14. 85 Morning Post, Albemarle Scrapbook, fos 9–11, 86 Bury, Exodus, vol. I, p. 7. Recall Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s assertion less

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than four decades later that the new century would belong to Canada. 87 Ibid., pp. 7–8. The book’s reviewers tended to agree that the project was an urgent one. See The Times, 14 June 1865, p. 6, cols 1–4, 88 Bury, Exodus, vol. II, p. 333. 89 Ibid., p. 403. 90 The idea of North America being reformed into a larger number of states, of whatever kind, and thus looking more like Europe, seems to have blossomed during the US Civil War, and even Adderley played with it then, See Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837–67 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), p. 183. 91 William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury [7th Earl of Albemarle], Manual of Rifling and Rifle Sights (London: National Rifle Association, 1864), 92 Bury, Exodus, vol. II, pp. 487–92. 93 Ibid., vol. I, pp. vi–vii. 94 Reese, History of the Royal Commonwealth Society, p. 18; Avaline Folsom, The Royal Empire Society, formerly the Royal Colonial Institute: Formative Years (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933), p. 38. 95 Quoted in Reese, History of The Royal Commonwealth Society, pp. 65–9. 96 Bury, Exodus. For Colonial America, vol. II, pp. 302–3, 309, 312–14; for Canada, vol. I, p. 349. 97 Albemarle Scrapbook, fo 12, RCSA. 98 The lecture was held on the evening of 15 February 1866, under the auspices of the London and Southwestern [Railway] Literary and Scientific Institution, Brunswick House, Wandsworth Road, and admission was charged, Bury was a director of the railway, Albemarle Scrapbook, fo 31, RCSL. 99 Albemarle Scrapbook, fo 23, RCSA. 100 Albemarle Scrapbook, fo 12, RCSA. 101 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil [3rd Marquess of Salisbury], ‘Sir Henry Holland’s Essays’, Saturday Review, 13 (3 May 1862), pp. 503–4. 102 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [1918], in Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michael, The Education, Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1983), p. 896, It is not clear that Adams had read Tocqueville; for example, he was unaware of Tocqueville’s prediction of the 1848 upheaval in France (p. 750). Paul Crook has shown that the Social Darwinism that Adams embodied had no real existence in England until sometime after the turn of the century, if then; it existed chiefly in the minds of its anti-imperialist critics, while most of the actual imperialists who might be thought to have grounded their thinking in Darwinism seldom referred to Darwin or Darwinian thinking—Paul Crook, ‘Historical Monkey Business: The Myth of a Darwinized British Imperial Discourse’, History, 84, 276 (October 1999), pp. 633–57.

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7 Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 1 Under the name ‘systematic colonization’, Wakefield also provided a coherent view of emigration and how it might be accomplished, unlike a number of earlier authors dealing with the subject. They are quoted in Klaus E.Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944), pp. 269–94. 2 The plan is elaborated in Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations [1833] (New York: Harper & Bros, 1834; reprint, New York: Augustus M.Kelley, 1967), pp. 261–331. 3 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney (1829; London: J.M.Dent & Sons, 1929), pp. 192–7. 4 Wakefield, England and America, pp. 260–74, 320–9. 5 On the condition of the lower-middle class, see Wakefield, England and America, pp. 71–4. 6 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 50–5. Tocqueville did go on to look at town government, but only as a microcosm for state and national government—pp. 50–6, 61–80. 7 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization (London: John W.Parker, 1849), pp. 224–321. Both Wakefield’s romanticism and his romantic adventures are detailed in Paul Bloomfield, Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1961). 8 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 200, 397. 9 See Richard Maltby and Peter Quartermaine (eds), The Commonwealth: A Common Culture? (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989). 10 W.J.Gardner, ‘A Colonial Economy’, in W.H.Oliver and B.R.Williams (eds), The Oxford History of New Zealand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 57–86 at pp. 59–61. 11 Raewyn Dalziel, ‘The Politics of Settlement’, in W.H.Oliver and B.R.Williams (eds), The Oxford History of New Zealand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 87– 111 at p. 92. 12 Clark, A History of Australia, vol. III, pp. 42–50; Mel Davies, ‘Establishing South Australia’, in Pamela Statham (ed.), The Origin of Australia’s Capital Cities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Pike, Paradise of Dissent. For the complicated business history of the more famous New Zealand Company, see Patricia Burns, Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland, NZ: Heinemann Reed, 1989). 13 See Richard Mackie, ‘The Colonization of Vancouver Island, 1849–1858’, BC Studies, 96 (winter 1992–93), pp. 3–40. 14 For an extended analysis of Wakefield’s arguments and his influence, see the final third of Winch, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, pp. 90–155. See also A.G.L.Shaw, ‘British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820–1850’, Journal of British

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Studies, 9 (November 1969), pp. 71–95; and Burroughs, Britain and Australia, pp. v., 8–9, 382. For Wakefield’s place at the end of an earlier tradition of thinking, see Bernard Semmel, ‘The Philosophical Radicals and Colonialism’, Journal of Economic History, 21, 4 (December 1961), pp. 513–25; and Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment in Post-Enlightenment Experimental Practice’, New Zealand Journal of History, 31, 2 (October 1997), pp. 198–218. For his place at the beginning of a later tradition, see H.O.Pappé, ‘Wakefield and Marx’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 4, 1 (1951), pp. 88–97. While the surplus capital that Europe needed to export was, for Wakefield, people, for Marx it was money and manufactures. For emigration agents, see Paul Hudson, ‘English Emigration to New Zealand, 1839–1850: Information Diffusion and Marketing a New World’, Economic History Review, 54, 4 (November 2001), pp. 680–98. 15 For his time and influence in Canada, see J.M.S.Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions 1841–1857 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), pp. 72–3, 83–5; for New Zealand see Peter Stuart, Edward Gibbon Wakefield in New Zealand: His Political Career, 1853–4 (Wellington, NZ: Price Milburn for Victoria University of Wellington, 1971); and Edward Jerningham Wakefield, The Founders of Canterbury: Volume I, being letters from the late Edward Gibbon Wakefield to the late John Robert Godley, and to other well-known helpers in the foundation of the settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand (Christchurch, NZ: Stevens & Co, 1868), p. xiii. 16 Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Bart., Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-speaking Countries (London: Macmillan 1869), p. 116. 17 Sir Frederick Young, ‘Memoirs’, p. 42, Young Papers, RCSL. See also Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (London: Temple Smith, 1984), pp. 321–7. Miles Taylor has argued that the reason why the 1848 disturbances in the British world were relatively mild was the empire itself, with its stock of land and its revenues— alongside a less militaristic response to those crises that did break out (from Ceylon to Canada) than was in evidence on the European continent—see Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions in the British Empire’, Past & Present, 166 (February 2000), pp. 146– 80. 18 C.B.Adderley, Europe Incapable of American Democracy: An Outline Tracing the Irreversible Course of Constitutional History (London: Edward Stanford, 1867), p. 3. 19 R.B.Pugh (ed.), A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 7 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 19, 40, 341. 20 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams Books, 1963), p. 217; Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 66,246. 21 C.B.Adderley, Essay on Human Happiness: The Second Part (London: Bickers and Bush, 1860), p. 97. 22 C.E.Carrington, John Robert Godley of Canterbury (London: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 10–11. Adderley does not seem to have visited North America, and the party of young travellers with whom John M.Ward says Adderley went to America would seem to have included Lord Stanley of Alderley instead. Cf. the

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relevant DNB entries and John M.Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, 1846– 1857: A Study of Self-government and Self-interest (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958), p. 178, n. 52. 23 Carrington, John Robert Godley of New Zealand, pp. 12–13. 24 John Robert Godley, Letters from America (London: John Murray, 1844), vol. I, pp. iii, viii, xiv, and vol. II, pp. 182–7; Godley to Adderley, 27 November 1843, given in C.B.Adderley (ed.), Extracts from Letters of John Robert Godley to C.B.Adderley (London: Savill & Edwards, 1863), p. 80. See Godley to Adderley, 9 October 1842, given in Adderley (ed.), Extracts from Letters of Godley, p. 27. Godley first mentions ‘the arbitrary power of a democracy’ in a letter that he sent to Adderley from Dublin on 23 November 1840 (p. 7). See also a very Tocquevillean letter on the links between equality and democracy, Godley in Dublin to Adderley, 21 January 1843, pp. 33–9. See also Adderley to Peel, 8 March 1844, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXI, BL Add. MS. 40541, fo 99; Adderley to Gladstone, 21 March 1844, GP vol. CCLXXXVI, BL Add. MS. 44361, fo 82. 25 Adderley to Peel, 8 March 1844, Peel Papers, vol. CCCLXI, BL Add. MS. 40541, fo 99; Adderley to Gladstone, 21 March 1844, GP vol. CCLXXXVI, BL Add. MS. 44361, fo 82. 26 Monsell to Peel, 1 December 1839, Peel Papers, Vol. CCCCXXII, BL Add. MS 40602, fo 287. 27 J.B.Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition: 1852–1855: A Study in Mid-nineteenthCentury Party Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 31, 108–10. 28 For his presence at colonial reform meetings see Carrington, John Robert Godley of New Zealand, p. 169. Monsell joined the Colonial Society on 8 February 1869. 29 When the Society was founded, Monsell was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. In one publication he had argued that Pius IX should retain temporal power in the face of Napoleon III. Rt. Hon. William Monsell, MP, A Lecture on the Roman Question, delivered at Limerick December 1st, 1859 (London: Burns & Lambert, 1860). 30 Carrington, John Robert Godley of New Zealand, p. 32. 31 John Robert Godley, Observations on an Irish Poor Law: Addresses to the Committee of Landed Proprietors Assembled in Dublin, January, 1847 (Dublin: Grant & Bolton, 1847). 32 Carrington, John Robert Godley of New Zealand, pp. 12–13, 32–9. 33 Ibid., p. 39. 34 Ibid., p. 44. 35 Carrington, John Robert Godley of Canterbury, p. 82. 36 For Wakefield’s closeness to these later colonies, and for more than a bit of Colonial Reform venom against the Greys, see the pious Introduction by Wakefield’s son to a collection of his father’s letters: Wakefield (ed.), The Founders of Canterbury, pp. iii–viii. For Adderley’s role in the Colonial Reform Society, see William S.Childe-Pemberton, Life of Lord Norton (Right Hon. Sir Charles Adderley, KCMG, MP) 1814–1905, Statesman and Philanthropist (London: John Murray, 1909), pp. 69, 81.

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37 Adderley was a member of the Canterbury Association itself, as well—Carrington, John Robert Godley of Canterbury, pp. 68–9. 38 Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–1850 [1953] (New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1971), pp. 181–2 and 253–6; idem., Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London: Longman, 1972), p. 170; Adderley to Peel, 12 December 1842, Peel Papers, vol. CCCXC, BL Add. MS. 40520, fos 214–15. 39 In the debates on emancipation in 1833, the young Gladstone might have been counted as another such member, He was a spokesman for his father’s slave interests in the Caribbean. He based his pro-slavery arguments on the need to accommodate the independence of colonial legislatures, since they might one day control important British markets: ‘it [may] be by the colonies, and by the colonies alone, that the country may yet flourish,’ Of course he would change his mind about slavery, See Peter Stansky, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 1979), pp. 27–33; and Paul Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy [1927] (New York: Archon Books, 1966), pp. 23–7, 39–47. Gladstone later maintained an intellectual interest in empire, but not a primary interest, even when he was Colonial Secretary, Therefore he cannot be put into Adderley’s camp of colonial reformer MPs. Someone who was in that camp, but who died young, was the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Buller, MP. Adderley’s chief allies in the House were therefore the Rt. Hon. Sir William Molesworth, Bart., who would die in 1855, and the Rt. Hon. John Arthur Roebuck, both authors. 40 A decade later, Lord Grey would himself write at length about Wakefield’s works and the Tocquevillean issues that pervaded them. Childe-Pemberton, Norton, pp. 68, 73–6; Cell, British Colonial Administration, pp. 88–9, 41 Sir George Grey (1812–98) was educated at Sandhurst. In the 1830s, he achieved fame as an explorer of the coasts of Australia—Cameron, ‘Agents and Agencies in Geography and Empire: The Case of George Grey’, in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Hefferman (eds), Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 13. Grey was Governor of South Australia (1840–45), then Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand from 1845, when the colony was subordinate to New South Wales, and Governor-in-Chief of New Zealand from 1848 until he took a leave of absence in 1852. He was for a time Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for South Africa (1854–59). From 1861 to 1868, he was again Governor of New Zealand, which by then had responsible government. He was elected to the New Zealand House of Representatives in 1875, holding the office of Prime Minister from 1877 to 1879. He remained active in New Zealand politics for another decade. He became a Privy Councillor in 1894, See J.Rutherford, Sir George Grey, KCB, 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government (London: Cassell, 1961), pp. 659–70. One reason the colonial reformers hated him was that as Governor of New Zealand in 1847, he had refused to implement Parliament’s plan for self-government there, saying that the indirect electoral system was too complicated, and objecting that the plan favoured the colonists over the Maori; Lord Grey in London had the enabling act suspended, Rutherford, Sir George Grey, pp. 149–53, Self-government was not finally instituted until 1854.

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42 Dalziel, ‘The Politics of Settlement’, p. 91. 43 See the record of an almost disloyal meeting held on 4 July 1849, given in Bell and Morrell (eds), Select Documents, pp. 312–14. 44 Adderley to Gladstone, 24 November 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add. MS. 44368, fos 278–81. 45 Adderley to Gladstone, enclosure, 20 December 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add MS. 44368, fo 309. 46 Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, pp. 160–3, 168, 186–8. 47 Adderley to Gladstone, enclosure, 20 December 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add MS. 44368, fo 309. 48 Ibid., fos 303–8. 49 Adderley kept attacking Grey in a tone that Gladstone did not much like, Adderley to Gladstone, 20 December 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add. MS. 44368, fos 303–9; Adderley to Gladstone, 25 June, 26 June, and 1 July 1851, GP vol. CCLXXXV, BL Add. MS. 44370, fos 167–8 and 175–8. Adderley to Gladstone, 19 January and 26 January 1852, GP CCLXXXVI, BL Add MS. 44371, fos 127–8 and 144–5, In 1861, Adderley wrote to Gladstone in the same anti-Grey vein, even though the purpose of the letter was to entice Gladstone to lay politics aside and testify before the Colonial Committee—Adderley to Gladstone, 14 May 1861, GP vol. CCCXI, BL Add MS. 44396, fos 78–9. See also Knaplund, Gladstone’s Imperial Policy, pp. 55–8 and 81–3. Gladstone went on to speak for Colonial Reform measures as late as 1852. See Morley, Life of Gladstone, vol. I, pp. 360–4, 645. 50 For Gladstone’s contacts with Lyttelton and Wakefield, see H.C.G.Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1974 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 74–5. 51 Adderley to Lyttelton, 22 October 1855, GP vol. CLIII, BL Add. MS. 44238 fos 313–15. 52 Quoted in Knaplund, Gladstone and Imperial Policy, p. 81. The matter of appointments concerned the selection, supported by Adderley, of the Canadian Francis Hincks for a colonial governorship in the West Indies. See Adderley to Lyttelton, 22 October 1855, GP vol. CLIII, BL Add. MS. 44238, fos 313–15. Hincks, the first colonial Colonial Governor in the mid-nineteenth century, was himself to be a founder of the Colonial Society. 53 London: Savile & Edwards, Printers, 1849. 54 Ibid., p. 32. He made the same points in Some Reflections on the Speech of the Rt. Hon. Lord John Russell on Colonial Policy (London: Published for the Society for the Reform of Colonial Government by John W.Parker, 1850). 55 Adderley to Peel, 11 December 1849, Peel Papers, vol. CCCCXXXII, BL Add. MS. 40602, fos 337–8. 56 Edward Brynn, ‘The Emigration Theories of Robert Wilmot Horton, 1820–1841’, Canadian Journal of History, 4, 2 (September 1969), pp. 45–65. 57 Peel to Stanley, 13 August 1845, quoted and put into context in John S.Galbraith, ‘France as a Factor in the Oregon Negotiations’, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 44, 2 (April 1953), pp. 69–73. 58 Peel to Adderley, 13 December 1849, Peel Papers, vol. CCCCXXXII, BL Add. MS.

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40602, fos 339–40. 59 Adderley to Peel, 14 December 1849, Peel Papers, vol. CCCCXXXII, BL Add. MS. 40602, fos 342–3. 60 Adderley to Gladstone, 20 December 1849, GP vol. CCLXXXIII, BL Add. MS. 44368, encl., fo 309. 61 Tamworth Manifesto. Given in Peel, Memoirs, vol. II, pp. 58–67. 62 Philip Bell and Roger Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Australian Retrospectives (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 19–22; Bell and Bell cite Alan Frost, ‘“As it were another America”: English Ideas of the First Settlement in New South Wales at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 7 (spring 1974), pp. 255–73. 63 Headrick, Tools of Empire, pp. 157–61. 64 Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, pp. 336–42. 65 Adderley set forth a scheme for classifying colonies in Some Reflections, p. vii. 66 Cell, British Colonial Administration, pp. 211–12; Cell’s observation was in turn quoted in Eldridge, England’s Mission, p. 39. 67 For Grey’s support of federalism and self-government around the British world during the six years of his colonial secretaryship, and even before, and for the details of how Grey and the recently retired James Stephen drafted self-government plans in the Privy Council ‘Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations’, dusted off for the occasion, see John M.Ward, ‘The Third Earl Grey and Federalism, 1846–1852’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 3, 1 (November 1957), pp. 18–32; and idem., Colonial Self-government, pp. 247–50, 268–96. 68 For Elgin’s alacrity, see Ward, Colonial Self-government, pp. 277–83. 69 A convenient précis of these developments is in David Lindsay Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485, 9th edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), pp. 445–8; a précis of the thinking behind the original act is W.A.Townsley, ‘English Opinion on the Australian Colonies Government Act (1850)’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 5, 17 (November 1951), pp. 38–46. For a good analytical review, see Burroughs, Britain and Australia, pp. 373–9. For in-depth analysis, see John Ward, Colonial Self-government; idem., ‘The Responsible Government Question in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, 1851–1856’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 63 (March 1978), pp. 221–47; and idem., Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies. The exception to the spread of responsible government was the Cape of Good Hope, which refused responsibility because it did not want to pay for its own defence from the natives. The Cape received representative but not responsible government in 1854, and responsible government itself only in 1872. For the history of the idea of responsible government, and reflections on whether the colonists who received it in the 1850s knew what they were getting, see Graeme Patterson, ‘An Enduring Canadian Myth: Responsible Government and the Family Compact’, Revue d’études canadiennes/Journal of Canadian Studies, 12 (spring 1977), pp. 3–16; and J.P.Main, ‘Making Constitutions in New South Wales and Victoria, 1853–1854’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 7, 28 (May 1957), pp. 369–86. T.H.Irving argues that a rough but serviceable definition of responsible government emerged in

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New South Wales only in 1853—Irving, ‘The Idea of Responsible Government in New South Wales before 1856’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 11 (April 1964), pp. 192–205. W.P.Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), is still useful as a unified narrative of the British colonial policies around the world from 1841 to 1852, although its larger judgements about popular movements to or from imperialism have been superseded. 70 Donald Creighton, A History of Canada, Dominion of the North, rev. edn (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 280–1; Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, vol. I, pp. 57–8. 71 For a ready example, see Stansky, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics, p. 103. 72 See Susan H.Farnsworth, The Evolution of British Imperial Policy During the MidNineteenth Century: A Study of the Peelite Contribution (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 333–4; Wakefield to Godley, published in the Lyttelton Times, 30 October 1852, quoted in J.S.Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand (1927; London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), p. 293. 73 Charles Stuart Blackton, ‘The Australasian League, 1851–1854’, Pacific Historical Review, 8 (1939), pp. 385–400. 74 C.B.Adderley, Transportation not Necessary (London: John W.Parker, 1851), pp. 7–8. 75 Ibid., p. 10. 76 J.R.Godley, ‘Self-government for New Zealand: Extract from Mr. Godley’s Speech at the Public Meeting at Lyttelton, on Thursday, August 14, 1851, as Reported, along with Mr. Fitzgerald’s and several other Gentlemen’s Speeches on that occasion, in the ‘Lyttelton Times’ of August 16. With Remarks by C.B. Adderley, MP and An Epitome of New Zealand Politics, with dates and references’ (printed in London for private circulation by Savile & Edwards, Printers, Chandos Street, Covent Garden, 1852). 77 Adderley in Godley, ‘Self-government for New Zealand’, p.18. 78 Hansard, 10 April 1851, quoted in Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, p. 498. 79 C.B.Adderley, Statement of the Present Cape Case (London: John W.Parker, 1851), p. 36. 80 John M.Ward, ‘The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 9 (November 1960), pp. 244–62. 81 C.B.Adderley, Letter to the Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, MP on the present relation of England with the Colonies, rev. edn (London: Parker, Son & Bourn, 1862), p. 7. 82 Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. IV, p. 329. The Canadians wanted to confederate with each other instead, and in 1864 they began talks to that end. See P.B.Waite, The Life and Times of Confederation, 1864–1867: Politics, Newspapers, and the Union of British North America, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 28–35 and 263–81; Brian Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations During Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1969); and C.P.Stacey, ‘Britain’s Withdrawal from North America, 1864– 1871’, Canadian Historical Review, 36 (September 1955), pp. 185–98. The

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withdrawal of troops from Canada in 1870s was carried out despite the Canadians. 83 Disraeli to Adderley, 26 January 1862, given in Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. IV, p. 329. 84 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoine Cecil [3rd Marquis of Salisbury], ‘Mr Adderley’s Colonial Policy’, Saturday Review, 13 (18 January 1862), pp. 72–3. 85 For the anti-imperialist interpretation of Adderley, see Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, p. 9. For Adderley and the idea of preparing West Africans for self-rule, see J.F.A.Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841– 1891: The Making of a New Elite, Ibadan History Series (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 172–3; Hargreaves, Prelude to the Partition, pp. 66–7, 73–4; and Adderley himself, especially his draft resolutions for the West Africa committee, given in PP, Report from the Select Committee on Africa (Western Coast), No. 412 (1865), pp. x–xvi. For Adderley’s opinions on the alternative pressures for the extension and retraction of British authority on the Southern African frontier, see Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Mid-Victorian Age, pp. 59–60, 164, 167–8, 176–7—Adderley was not in favour of spending money on defending South Africa, although he expected the colonists to thrive and expand if left on their own. 86 Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Mid-Victorian Age, p. 25. 87 On who would carry the Bill, see Cardwell to Monck, copy, 7 July 1866, PRO 30/48/40, fos 21–2; on the extent of Adderley’s contribution, see Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, pp. 281, 370, n. 248. 88 B.J.Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, 1855–1870 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), pp. 256–8; Rutherford, Sir George Grey, pp. 546–59. 89 London: Edward Stanford, 1869, The essential similarity of this book to Adderley’s previous work, as explored above, is made clear by the outline of Adderley’s Review that is given in Koebner and Schmidt, Imperialism, pp. 91–3. 90 Adderley, Review of ‘The Colonial Policy’ pp. 15–16, 21. 91 Ibid., p. 14; cited in E.A.Benians, ‘The Empire in a New Age, 1870–1919’, in E.A.Benians, James Butler, and C.E.Carrington (eds), The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Empire-Commonwealth, 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 1–2, 92 C.B.Adderley, Europe Incapable, p. 3. 93 Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), p. 5. 94 Adderley, Europe Incapable, p. 4. 95 Ibid., p. 7. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., p. 9. 98 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 99 Adderley, Minute of 28 September 1866, CO 42/656, as quoted in Martin, Britain and the Origins of the Canadian Confederation, pp. 282, 370, n. 250.

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8 Conclusion 1 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art [1956] (London: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 201–5; see also C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York and Oxford: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 40–51. Pevsner derived some of his ideas from the works of historians G.M. Young and George Kitson Clarke. 2 Napoleon, speaking in 1817, quoted in J.Christopher Herold, The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words (1955; New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 193. 3 Matthew Arnold convinced himself of the truth of this myth, As he put it, ‘Nations now existing may be said to feel or to have felt the power of this or that element in our humanization so signally that they are characterized by it. No one who knows this country would deny that it is characterised, to a remarkable degree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our feeling for religion is one part of this; our industry is another. What foreigners so much remark in us,—our public spirit, our love, amidst all our liberty, for public order and for stability,—are parts of it too,’ Matthew Arnold, ‘Equality’ [1878], in Stefan Collini (ed.), ‘Culture and Anarchy’ and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 222, 4 These are not the stages of collectivism posited by A.V.Dicey in 1905 and criticized by Harold Perkin in 1977—Perkin, ‘Individualism Versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-century Britain: A False Antithesis’, Journal of British Studies, 17, 1 (autumn 1977), p. 10548. The nineteenth-century stages in the rise of collectivism imply, for both of these scholars, the control of economic activity by government bureaucrats, I am arguing that nineteenth-century collectivism stages meant thinking in bigger categories, Collectivism as an ideology—‘ideology’ in the strict sense, meaning a way of knowing—was, I believe, on the rise, while economic governmental collectivism (an ideology in the popular or political sense of the term) was not much in evidence in 1868, See Burn, Age of Equipoise, pp. 150–1, 194, 220–2, and 287–92, on how the same people could be individualist and collectivist on different issues at the same time, 5 [Tocqueville], ‘Political and Social Condition of France’, p. 158. 6 A key imperialist work along these lines was Arnold White’s Efficiency and Empire [1901] (reprint; Brighton, SX: Harvester Press, 1973). 7 No more than 190 out of the 223 were still alive. Thirty-three others simply disappeared from the books without explanation, either because they too died, because they could not pay, or because they had lost interest, 8 PRCI, 1869, pp. 23–4. 9 Compare Ged Martin, ‘Empire Federalism’; and Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 120–41, 10 Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 128–41.

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11 For Rogers, see David M.L.Farr, The Colonial Office and Canada, 1867–1887 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), pp. 39–40. 12 Rogers in the Pall Mall Gazette, 19 January 1885, as quoted in Farr, The Colonial Office and Canada, pp. 40–1, 13 As quoted by Reese, Royal Commonwealth Society, pp. 65–9. Reese has Adderley leaving the Society in 1884, but the connection between Adderley’s departure and the formal foundation of the Imperial Federation league was not so direct, For his part, Lord Bury would not have been happy with the rising fame of Dilke in imperial affairs. He launched poorly received attacks on Dilke for being a republican, and thus (in Bury’s mind) in violation of his parliamentary oath: Jenkins (ed.), ‘Parliamentary Diaries of Trelawny, 1868–73’, p. 453—entry for 19 March 1872. Perhaps Dilke was one of Bury’s tinkerers. 14 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 1869, pp. 37, 43. 15 Ibid., p. 31. 16 Ibid., pp. 30, 35. 17 Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 242–5. 18 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19 Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 163–5.

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Notes 1 Introduction 1 For a tally of these references, see Ged Martin, ‘Empire Federalism and Imperial Parliamentary Union, 1820–1870’, Historical Journal, 16 (1973), pp. 65–92. 2 Ged Martin, ‘“Anti-imperialism” in the Mid-nineteenth Century and the Nature of the British Empire, 1820–1870’, in Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin (eds), Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 88–120. 3 John Stuart Mill’s daytime job was in East India Company. In Principles of Political Economy, he argued that England’s surplus of capital was so large that the cost of colonies would not even be missed, and England’s surplus of population could live in them. Meanwhile, Thomas Carlyle, by the end of the 1860s, had turned himself into the champion of Jamaican repression; and in Daniel Deronda even George Eliot considered imperial themes of that decade. See Book IV, Chap. V, sect. 1 of John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols (1848; New York: D.Appleton, 1882), vol. II, pp. 327–30; Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); C.C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 28–33; R.J.Moore, ‘John Stuart Mill at East India House’, Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 20 (October 1983), pp. 497–519; Lynn Zastoupil, ‘J.S.Mill and India’, Victorian Studies (autumn 1988), pp. 31–54; idem., John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Trevor Lloyd, ‘John Stuart Mill and the East India Company’, in Michael Laine (ed.), A Cultivated Mind: Essays on John Stuart Mill Presented to John M.Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991), pp. 44–79. See also Mill’s closing argument for a wider study of India in his Considerations on Representative Government [1861] (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), pp. 353–75. On Governor Eyre of Jamaica and his British champions and detractors, see Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962). Anthony Trollope wrote of his travels in the West Indies, Australasia, and elsewhere, and set a short novel in the Queensland bush. See Asa Briggs, ‘Trollope the Traveller’, The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs, vol. 2, Images, Problems, and Standpoints (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 89–115; J.H.Davidson, ‘Anthony Trollope and the Colonies’, Victorian Studies, 12, 3 (March 1969), pp. 305–30. Trollope related the observations of a colonial visiting England far in the future. The book was called The New Zealander [1855–56, but unpublished until 1972]. He was borrowing Macaulay’s device of Antipodean

Index Aborigines Protection Society 40, 69 Abyssian expedition (1867) 3, 7, 119 Adams, Henry 95 Adderley, Charles Bowyer 99–115,117–20; Colonial Reform 100–9; in office 107, 112,114; prison and social reform 107–10,115; writings 105, 108–11,112–4 Aden 36 Afghanistan 16–7 Africa 7, 9, 11, 44, 69, 112, 114; scramble for 1, 5–6, 8–9, 49, 117 African Aid Society, 68 African officials, residents, and travellers 34–5, 39, 43,45, 53, 58, 67–9 Albemarle, Earls of see Keppel Algeria 114 Anglo-Saxon peoples (destiny of) 4, 15, 27, 42, 53, 62–,68, 70–1,81, 89–93,96–8,101, 105–,108– 11,112–4,117, 118; see also imperialism as an ideology; Tocqueville anthropology 4, 42–3 anti-imperialism 16–7, 26, 52, 104–6,118 antisemitism 40, 43, 59 antislavery 7–8, 43 archaeology 35, 71, 83, 87 architecture 12, 64 Argyll, Duke of see Campbell aristocracy 52 army officers 35–9,69 Arnold, Matthew 114,185 n3 Athenaeum 20 Australia 1, 6, 9, 26, 50, 103, 105–,106–7 Australian officials, residents, and travellers 32, 34–8, 43, 53–8,62–4, 149 n32, 160 n58 authorship 20–4 Bagehot, Walter 22 Baghdad 84, 88 ballot 108 Bank of Australasia 56 Bank of England 46, 49, 57

Index

202

bankers 45, 46–51,53–8 banking (structure of) 57 banks see individual entries Baptists 41 Barbados 56 Baring family 48, 101, 105 Baring, Thomas 47–51,57, 65 barristers 31–2 Bates, Joshua 50 Becker, Bernard H. 13 Bell, George 37 Belloc, Hillaire 35 Bengal 41 Bennett, Charles Fox 56 Bentley, Richard 23 Birmingham, 98–100 Blaine, Delabree Pritchett 23 book publishing 19,22–3 Borneo 89 Bridges, R.C. 21 British Association for the Advancement of Science 58–9 British Columbia 31, 52, 58–60 British Empire: growth and size 1, 5–, 7–9; parsimony toward 1, 7, 10, 48, 85; question of profits 5–9, 50–1,58, 65–7 British Guiana 34 Brooke, Rajah James 66–7,89, 120 Buckingham and Chandos, Duke of see Grenville Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 29, 166 n17 Burma 8, 26 Bury, Lord 35, 47, 52, 83–94, 99, 118–20; founds Colonial Society 14, 17–8;83–4; writings 76, 86–7,88–93,112 businessmen 20, 45–60 cabinet ministers 20, 27, 33 Cain, P.J. 9 California 26, 58–60 Campbell, George Douglas (8th Duke of Argyll) 52, 142 n26 Canada 1, 6, 9, 34, 50, 53, 86–7,92–3,107–,111, 119–; Confederation 3, 56, 77, 115,119; Rebellions (1837) 1 Canada Club (1810) 64–5 Canadian officials, residents, and travellers 17, 32,34, 38–40,47, 52–3, 55, 58–61,63–7,85–,98, 166 n17 Cannadine, David 120 Carlton Club 30

Index

203

Carlyle, Thomas 82 Carnarvon, Earl of see Herbert Cave, Stephen 53, 57 Cecil, Lord Robert (Lord Cranbourne, Marquess of Salisbury) 25–8, 45, 94, 111–2 Cell, John 34 Ceylon 38, 102 Childers, H.C.E. 32 China 7, 16–7, 40–2 Church Missionary Society 39, 43–4, 48 Churchill, Lord Alfred 68–9 Civil Engineers, Institute of 37 Clarke, Andrew 36–7,69 clubs and associations 12–4, 64–5; see also individual club names Cobden, Richard 5 coffee houses 12–3, 37 Coghlan, William Marcus 36, 150 n39 collectivism 116–7,185 n4 Colley, Linda 4 Collins, Wilkie 23 Colonial Church and School Society 40 Colonial Governors 33–4,38 Colonial Office (decreptitude) 12 Colonial Reform movement (E.G.Wakefield) 47–8,96, 98; decline 99, 106 Colonial Reform Society 101–6 Colonial Secretaries and Undersecretaries 46, 112, 148 n25; see also Henry Grey colonial self-government 1, 93,96–7, 102–3,105, 106–7,111, 117–8 colonial separatism 92–3,102–3,105, 111, 119 Colonial Society (of 1837–42) 16–8 Colonial Society 2, 10–1, 141 n12; foundation and purpose 13–5; inaugural dinner 118–9 Colonial Society (membership) 120–9; age of members 74, 119; definition of membership 18, 143 n39, 163 n77; education 29–30; number of members 17–8,20; resignations from 118; writers 20–4,58–60,68,70–4, 119; see also entries for geographical and occupational groups colonies, British see British Empire; names of individual colonies Cornhill 22, 68 cotton trade 48 Cranborne, Lord see Cecil Crease, Henry Pelling Pelew 31

Index

204

Crease, Sarah 31 Crimean War 67 Crook, David Paul 80, 176 n102 Crooks, Adam 32, 40 Currey, Robert Arthur 39 Dalgety, Frederick Gonnerman 55 Dalhousie see Ramsay Darwin, Charles 62,95 Darwin, John 8 Davis, Lance 6 decolonization 107 democracy (views of) 26, 57, 65, 76,90–,92–3,105–8,113, 116–7; see also Tocqueville Denison, William Thomas 34, 36, 38, 142 n26 Denmark 40 De Salis, William Alexander Fane 32 Devonshire, Duke of see Hartington didactic tone of periodicals 22 Dilke, Sir Charles, 2nd Bart. 10, 18–9,45, 98–9 Disraeli, Benjamin 3, 30, 45, 48–9,65, 111; on empire 10, 117 diversity of Victorian society 3, 70 Du Croz, Frederick 55 East Africa 58 East India Company 7, 35, 40, 49, 84 Edinburgh Review 22, 79–81 Egypt 49 Eldridge, C.C. 8, 118–20,168 n42 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 116 emigration 47–8,53, 87, 96–9,101, 102, 104–6 Empire, British see British Empire empire as the triumph of theory 3–4, 11, 70–4,120; see also imperialism engineers 36–8 estates 52 ethnology and archaeology 4, 35, 42–3 Eyre, Edward John see Jamaican Rebellion Fiji 69 Filby, M.B. 142 n15 Finlay Hodgson (bank) 50 Fitz Gibbon, Abraham Coates 38 Fitzwilliam, Charles William Wentworth- 47, 52 Fitzwilliam family 52 Fitzwilliam, William (Lord Milton) 52 Fortescue family 143 n36

Index

205

France 45, 54, 59, 61, 81,117– Franklin, Selim 60 Fraser River 59–60 Frome, Edward Charles 38 Galbraith, John S. 132 n16, 138 n56, 156 n12, 157 n37, 158 n46, 162 n71, 166 n27, 180 n57 Galton, Douglas 38 Gambia 45 generalization (of intellectual categories) 1–4, 15, 24,36–7,38 47, 62–,71–,74, 79, 91–,94, 109, 116, 120–,131 n14; contrasted to earlier particularism 87–9, 100, 106, 117; see also imperialism as an ideology, world history Gilbert, W.S. 86 Gilmore, George 58 Gisborne, Frederick Newton 38 Gladstone, W.E. 30, 46; and Colonial Reform 100, 102–5; Prime Minister 19; views on empire 104, 180 n39 Glyn, George Grenfell 47,57 Glyn, Mills & Co. (bank) 46–7 Godley, J.R. 10, 100–1,109 gold 26, 59,107 Goodricke, John Richardson 54 Gorst, J.E. 65 Goschen, George Joachim 53, 57, 142 n36 Grand Trunk Railway of Canada 50 Great Exhibition (1851) 49 Gregory, Charles Hutton 37 Grenville, Richard (3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos) 45–6,112 Grey, George 102,112–; biog. note 179 n41 Grey, Henry (3rd Earl) 101–3,106–10,112 Guizot, François 81 Haliburton, Arthur 148 n25 Halifax and Quebec Railway 47 Harcourt, Freda 3 Harrington, Thomas Moore 160 n50 Hartington, Lord 45 Hay, Lord William 67 Heligoland 47 Hellmuth, Isaac 40 Helly, Dorothy 69 Henderson, Joseph 54 Henty, Thomas 54 Henty, William 54 Herbert, Henry Howard Molyneux (4th Earl of Carnarvon) 112

Index

206

Hincks, Francis 34 Hopkins, A.G. 9 Hobson, J.A. 5 Holland, Henry Thurstan 148 n25 Hudson’s Bay Company 52, 67, 87 Hughes, Judith M. 148 Huttenback, Robert 6 Imperial Act (1850) 107 imperial expansion see British Empire Imperial Federation League (1884) 32, 56, 93, 117–8 ‘imperialism’ (history of the word) 1–2, 23 imperialism as an ideology 1–5, 11, 15, 40–2,43, 58–60,65–9,93–8,104, 109–14,120; see also Anglo-Saxon peoples (destiny of); generalization; world history imperialism (informal) 7 imperialism (theories of): demotic (Orwell) 5; economic 5; centring on Disraeli 10; ecological 120 gentlemanly capitalism, (Cain and Hopkins) 9, 24, 58, 70; Hobson’s ideas 5, 8, 57; Leninism 7–8, 57; Marxism 5; Orientalism 63; theories of expansion on the periphery (Galbraith and Darwin) 7–8; theories of outdoor relief for the upper classes 11 income levels 52; and Colonial Society dues 18 India 7–9, 26 Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857–58) 45, 49, 70–4,88, 119 Indian officials and travelers 26, 27, 35–8, 41–2,48, 63, 67–,84–,88, 93 Indian Secretaries and Undersecretaries 26, 27, 48 Indians (Canadian) 85,93 Indo-China 42 Indology 40 investment 6–9, 45–7,50–1,55–8 investors 45–8 Ionian Islands 34, 47, 88 Ireland 70, 88; starvation in 100 Irvingite Church 43 Jamaica 44, 46 Jamaican mission to West Africa 44 Jamaican Rebellion 71–4,119

Index

207

James, Henry 16 Japan 42 Keppel, George Thomas (6th Earl of Albemarle) 87–8, 106, 117 Keppel, Henry 88 Keppel, William Coutts (7th Earl of Albemarle) see Bury, Lord King, Henry Samuel (bank) 52–3 Kinnaird, Arthur Fitzgerald 39 Koebner, Richard 2 Labilliere, Peter 32 Labuan 34, 66 landed wealth 51–2 Latin America 7, 49–50 Layard, Austen Henry 84 legal profession 31,54– Lenin, V.I. 8–9 Lloyd, T.O. 7 Lloyd’s of London 49 London Exhibition (1862) 31 London (growth of) 12 London Institution 49 London Missionary Society 43 London and Northeastern Railway 46 Louis, Alfred Hyman 23, 31 Lyttelton, George William (4th Lord) 101, 104 MacArthur, Alexander 54 MacDougall, Patrick Leonard 37 142 n26 Mackinnon, William 58 Macleay, Alexander 64 Macleay family 64 MacNab, Alexander 40 MacNab, Sophia 86 Madison, James 50 Malaya 34, 45, 88 Manby, Charles 37 Manchester, Duchess of see Montagu Manchester, Duke of see Montagu Mann, Robert James 54, 68 Maori 10, 27, 65, 70 Marshman, John Clarke 41–2,120 Marshman, Joshua 41 Martineau, Harriet 173 n42 Maude, Francis Cornwallis 37, 155 n87 Mauritius 88 Melbourne Club 63 MPs 18,29–30,93–4,100

Index

208

Merivale, Herman 31 Middle Eastern travel 40, 43, 83 military conflicts 1, 10, 16–7, 26, 67 military officers 29, 35–8 Mill, John Stuart 79–81, 91, 95, 146 n3 millionaires 51–2 Milton, Lord see Fitzwilliam Ministers of the Crown 20, 27, 33 ministers of religion 40 missionaries 8, 36, 39–44 missionary movement (decline of) 43–4 Molesworth, William 104, 179 n39 Molyneux, Gisborne 166 n17 Monck, Charles (4th Viscount) 34 Monsell, William 100,148 n25 Montagu, Louisa (Duchess of Manchester) 45 Montagu, William Drogo (7th Duke of Manchester) 45,118 Montefiore, Jacob 56–7 Montefiore family 56 Montgomerie, Hugh E. 17 moral objections to empire 16–7, 52, 61, 65, 118, 151 Morant Bay Rebellion see Jamaican Rebellion Morgan, Octavius Vaughan 56–7 Municipal Reform League 56 Muttlebury, James W. 161 n58 Napoleon I on shopkeepers 117 Napoleon III 2, 23 Natal 34, 54, 58, 68 national identity, 116 National Sanitation League 100 naval officers 29, 35, 69 Netherlands 66 New Guinea 45 New Hebrides 65–6 New South Wales 34, 49, 63–4,104, 107 New South Wales officials, residents, and travellers 34, 38, 57, 63–4 Newfoundland 56 newspapers 13, 16, 42; see also individual titles New Zealand 1, 6, 11, 81, 98, 102, 106; troop withdrawal 10, 120 New Zealand officials, residents, and travellers 24, 36–7,62–3,69, 98 noblesse oblige 100 Normanby see Phipps Northwest Transportation Company 47 Norton, Lord see Adderley Nova Scotia 107

Index

209

Nova Scotia (official in) 34 O’Brien, Patrick K. 6 O’Connell, Daniel 100 Ontario 17, 32,40– Oregon 52 Orwell, George 6 Overend Gurney (discount house) 51 Overland Mail 53 pamphlets 23 papermaking 22 Peel, Robert 80, 100, 102; opinions on empire, 105–6 peers 18, 25, 29,45–6 periodicals 22; see also individual titles permanent secretaries 31, 47, 112, 118 Persia 88 Persian language, 88 Pevsner, Nikolaus 116 philology 89 Phipps, George Augustus Constantine (2nd Marquis of Normanby) 34, 142 n35 physicians 53, 58, 67–8 political affiliations 30 politicians (colonial) 20, 34–5, 53–4,67 Port Phillip Savings Bank 58 Portugal 66 Primrose League (1883) 43 Prince of Wales 47 printing 23 protectionism 51, 102 publishing see book publishing, newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals Queensland 38, 107 races (ideas about) 4, 84–5,90 railways 6, 9, 26, 37,46–7,50, 52, 58–9; see also names of individual railways Ramsay, James (1st Marquess and 10th Earl of Dalhousie) 42 Ransom, Bouverie & Co. (bank) 52 Rassam, Hormuzd 36, 84 Rawlinson, Henry 84 readership (size of Victorian) 22 Reese, Trevor 138 n53, 141 n12, 143 n33, 176 n94, 186 n13 Reeve, Henry 81 Reform Club 30 Rennie, J.T. 58

Index

210

responsible government 106–7 Revue de Deux Mondes 60 Robinson, John 68 Roche, Alfred R. 17, 31, 65–7,120 Roche family 65–6 Roche, Henry Philip 65–6 Rogers, Frederic 31, 47, 112, 118, 148 n25 Roman Catholicism 100 Royal Colonial Society see Colonial Society Royal Engineers 36–8 Royal Geographical Society 13, 17, 21, 58, 67–8,87, 142 n26 Royal Society 12, 14, 63–4 Roy, Ram Mohun 41 Russell, Lord John 83 Russia 87 Salomans, David 30, 53, 165 n17 Salisbury, Marquess of see Cecil Schmidt, Helmut Dan 1–2 Schwartze, Helmut 58 Scottland 58, 93 Scotland, Church of 44 Scott, John 34 Secretaries of State for India 26, 27 Secretaries of State for the Colonies 46, 102, 112; see also Henry Grey Serampore 41 service sector 9 Shepstone, Theophilus 43 Shepstone, Theophilus, Junior 43 shipping 42, 55, 58 shipping news see coffee houses Singapore 84 Smith, Goldwin 2 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 39, 44 Society of Arts 14 solicitors 32, 53–4 South America 49 South Australia 38, 42, 56–7,98, 107 Southeast Asia 7 Southern Africa 39, 43,45, 53, 63, 67–8,101–3,109–10 Spain 66, 85, 92 Statistical Society 56 Straits Settlements 34, 45 Swale, Hogarth William 39 Tasmania 107 Tasmanian officials, residents, and travellers 26, 34, 36, 38, 55, 58

Index

211

taxes on knowledge (repeal of) 23 telegraphs 37, 42, 47, 51 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 67–8 Thailand 42 Timbs, John 12 The Times of London 19 Tocqueville, Alexis de 19, 49, 94–8,100, 113, 116–7; basic ideas 77–9; on history-writing 89, 116; influence on Colonial Society founders 3–4, 71, 81–3,87, 90,94, 109, 111, 113, 142 n35; method 80, 90; reputation in Great Britain 76–83 transportation of convicts 55, 105, 108 travel literature 76, 82 Trollope, Anthony 23, 80, 129 n3 undersea cables 38,42, 107 United States of America 49–50,52, 58–60; British views on 26,41, 76–,89–90,92–3,97–8,112; Civil War 3, 26, 48, 50, 70–4,80, 92, 119; imperialism of 9, 26, 69, 85, 118; possible loyalties of Vancouver Island politicians 59; travel in 50 universities 29–30 Vancouver Island 52, 59–61,98 Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood 38 Verdon, George Federick 149 Victoria (Australia) 46, 54,58, 63–4,107 Victoria (Australia) officials, residents, and travellers 26, 36, 55, 63, 149 n32, 160 n58 Victoria Institute 40 Victoria (Queen) 45 Victoria (Vancouver Island) 59–60 Waddington, Alfred 59–60 Waddington, William 58 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 48,96–8; and New Zealand 98; writings 96–8,104; see also Colonial Reform movement Walker, William 142 n26 Ward, John M. 107 Waterhouse, George Marsden 42 Weld, Frederick Aloysius 24 Wesleyanism 40,42, 53 West Africa 68–9,112 Western Australia 57 West Indian officials and travellers 35, 63

Index

212

West Indies 57 Westminster Review 22 Whitty, Captain 16 Willis’s Rooms 17–8 Windward Islands 34 Wolff, Henry Drummond 43, 65 Wolff, Joseph 43 wool trade 55–8 world history (Victorian metanarratives) 15, 42,58–60,91–2,112–4,116; see also generalization, imperialism as an ideology world travel 19, 36–8,62, 106 Wray family 157 n40 writers as a group 20–4,58–60,67–8,70–4,119 Young, John 34