Beasley E. Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (British and Foreign and Colonial Policy)

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

1829 A.H.Louis x

1830 H.D.Wolff x x

1831 G.J.Goschen x

1832 Lord Bury x x

Subtotal 12 5 1 11

27 June to 12 August

1868

1797 D.Salomans x

1806 H.Merivale x x x

1810 H.C.Rawlinson x x

1811 F.Rogers x

1815 W.Westgarth x x x

1817 C.H.Gregory x

1818 S.H.Northcote x x x

1819 C.B.Adderley x x x

1820 S.Cave x x

1820 W.Jones x

1827 H.C.E.Childers x

1835 J.E.Gorst x

1839 Viscount

Milton

Subtotal 7 5 3 8

New members Settlement

colonies, the

USA,

emigration

Non-

settlement

colonies and

the Tropics

Archaeology,

ethnology

Other

15 August to 3

November 1868

? J.Bate x

1804 W.T.Denison x x x x

1804 C.Manby x x

1809 H.Moor x

1814 A.Kinnaird x

1823 F.Weld x x x

1831 Lord Carnarvon x x x x

Subtotal 4 5 2 5

11 November to 30

December 1868

1802 E.C.Frome x

1811 A.Croll x

1817 I.Hellmuth x x

Travels and ideas 73

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 reache

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.

1827 A.Crooks x

1834 G.F.Verdon x

1839 J.Robinson x

Subtotal 5 0 0 2

20 January to 25

February 1869

? T.Briggs x x

1812 W.Monsell x

1818 J.F.V.Fitzgerald x

1819 P.L.MacDougall x x x

1822 D.Galton x x

1823 Duke of Argyll x x x

1825 H.Holland x

1830 Lord Salisbury x x x x

Subtotal 5 4 2 6

10 March to 13 April

1869

1794 J.C.Marshman x x

1799 E. of Albemarle x x

1807 F.Hincks x

1816 A.Mills x x

1843 C.W.Dilke x x

Subtotal 4 4 1 0

Total number of

ounders publishing in

this area by April 1869

37 23 9 32

Empire as the triumph of theory 74

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 anothe

description of, say, the Canadian prairie? Where was the market for such a thing? Ou

young author would need to spice up his book with ideology, and perhaps some

reathless 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.

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 world-

historical 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 o

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 mid-

Victorian 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

popularity in England after 1815. Neither Robespierre and Napoleon across the Channel

nor Chartism and rick-

urning 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.

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

resent. 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’.

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, fo

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’.

ore typical English opinion, however, ran against the rebellious colonies of 1776.

This was true at the time of the Napoleonic trade dispute in 1812; it was true in mid-

century, 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 o

America, which were teaching the rebellious former colonies of the United States what

rebellion was all about.

Before he founded the Colonial Society, Lord Bury (in a work on the roots of British

olicy 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.’

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,

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.

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

Empire as the triumph of theory 76

eople 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 tha

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,

ut 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’—o

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 thei

own local or interest-

ased 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 ove

concrete words—for, as each untutored democratic man becomes his own theorist and

udges the world by generalizing from his own case, he opts for theory-word boilerplate

in preference to the painstaking concreteness of aristocratic scholarship.

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

Tocqueville and Lord Bury 77

rivate societies schooled people in democracy, but aristocratic refinements continued

uninterrupted. Emigrants to America had left many refinements behind.

ocqueville was an acquired taste in England.

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, late

scholars have hardly begun to do so.

Mill thus remains the key witness to how

Tocqueville’s thinking became available to Bury and the other founders of the Colonial

Society.

ill was deeply influenced by Tocqueville,

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.

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.

But

Tocqueville claimed that his experience in America had caused his aristocratic distaste

for democracy to evaporate.

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.

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

olitical 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.

Democracy was the central phenomenon of modern history, with decision-making being

Empire as the triumph of theory 78

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 o

what Mill describes as its ‘complicated and endless…ramifications;’

and final or grand

udgement 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.

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.

Now, this insularity had manifeste

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”.’

Perusal did not mean reading, but Mill allowed himself to hope that perusal might do

eople 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’.

In Mill’s view, therefore, Democracy in

merica had a great and still growing reputation in England; as of 1840, the book was no

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.

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.

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

Tocqueville and Lord Bury 79

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 wide

and wider as the years went by. Both he and his contributors treated America as a low-

class 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,

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 o

emocracy in America] you have, without wanting it, followed the instinct of you

opinions, very lively coloured what was contrary to democracy and rather appeased what

could do wrong to aristocracy.’

Too many people, Reeve among them, had taken up

Tocqueville as a political ally, ignoring what was positive in Tocqueville’s depiction o

American democracy.

Reeve’s translation was the Tocqueville that the founders of the

Colonial Society would have had closest to hand.

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 o

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 ange

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 ha

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.

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.

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,

Empire as the triumph of theory 80

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 o

Tocqueville,

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

rinciples. 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

rinciples of rational political procedure about which Englishmen had looked to him fo

guidance.

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 Office

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,

Mill did not avail himself o

Tocqueville’s offer of renewed friendship until Tocqueville wrote to him yet again—in

1856.

Reeve, for his part, reproached Tocqueville over the issue only after Tocqueville

had died, but reproach him he did.

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

rilliance 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 English-

speaking nations.

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 worl

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.

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 thei

interest in overseas settlements; second, a habit of connecting the features of English-

speaking 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:

Tocqueville and Lord Bury 81

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.

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 o

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.

(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, i

is safe to say under the gaze of their authors.

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.

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 o

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.

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-

age

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. No

Empire as the triumph of theory 82