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.

Adderley had once assured his readers that America could be trusted to expand, even i

the Union stayed fragmented, for ‘Manifest Destiny’

eat in every American breast; the

phrase had been coined in the 1840s.

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.

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.’

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 o

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.’

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 fo

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’.

Look out for ‘the enterprise of the Northern nations’.

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 113

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 o

monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. By looking at who might rule themselves and

who might have to be ruled by others, Adderley produced a thirty-

age 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 Vice-

Monarchy 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.’

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’).

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-

uilding 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 fo

the first Acts for reformatory and industrial schools, and the first Acts for taking care o

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?

Empire as the triumph of theory 114

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 o

Europe and America and the globalization of world trade patterns. Little history is the all-

important 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 no

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 mid-

nineteenth 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.

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 an

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,

the land of the industrial robber-

arons, the land where Thorstein Veblen would discove

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 o

ublic 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.

apoleon 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;

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 o

English industrialism and the twentieth-century era of collectivist values.

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.

That is where England was by 1900. Looking at the imperial role that their country had

lundered 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.

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.

Only about half of the founding members who were still alive

Empire as the triumph of theory 116

in 1884 remained in the Society at that date. Almost half of the resignations in just ove

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

een 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

e 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

apoleon. 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 othe

grand collectivity; he merely referred to his own ‘colonial remembrances’, in the plural.

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 English-

speaking 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.

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.

Federation would have mean

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 o

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.

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.

Conclusion 117

Lord Bury also disapproved of the Imperial Federation League when it came, although he

did not resign his position as vice-

resident 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’.

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 neve

e American. In some of these assurances there was more than a hint of British Empire

federalism.

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’.

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.

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,

lus 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 globe-

spanning 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

egan with the Indian Mutiny in 1857, that continued through the American Civil Wa

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 self-

governing emigration and settlement empire of the 1850s would always be with the

Empire as the triumph of theory 118

founders as part of their general vision.

nd yet pace C.C.Eldridge

and many other scholars, the founders did not have to

wait until some special time—1868 and the Abyssinian affair, the Disraeli government o

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 thei

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

etween 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 o

duty, destiny, self-reliance, and self-government, and not so much by ideas of race o

status. Pace David Cannadine,

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-of-

march: the shift from the noisy specifics of the world to ever quieter, ever grande

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,

the Colonial Society stayed out of politics until the mid-1870s, the fac

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,

roud, worldwide empire does seem to have made the difference. That is, the smalle

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 large

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 o

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.

Conclusion 119

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 thei

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 ove

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 bette

to look at them as writers and thinkers on that intellectual journey—constructing a set o

empire-scaled categories and generalizations that helped them to manage the flow o

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 mid-

Victorians—the majority who did not choose to follow imperial affairs, and who did not

want to join a club for those who did.

Empire as the triumph of theory 120

Appendix 1

Members of the Colonial Society

B: 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

Bowyer

Albemarle, George

Thomas Keppel, 6th Earl

Allen, Charles H.

Allen, Lewis Philip

Argyll, George Douglas

Campbell, 8th Duke of

Arnold, H.J.

Baring, Thomas

Barr, E.G.

Bate, John

Beale, Montague

Beer, Julius

Bell, Sir George, KCB

Bennett, Charles Fox

Bergtheil, Jonas

Bevan, G.P.

Birch, Arthur Nonus

Black, James

Blaine, D.P.

Blaine, Henry

Blane, Capt.

Blyth, Arthur

Boutcher, Emanuel

Brand, William

Briggs, Thomas

Broad, Charles Henry

Broadwater, Robert

Buckingham and Chandos, Richard Plantagenet

Campbell Temple Nugent Brydges-Chandos

Grenville, 3rd Duke of

Bulwer, Henry

Bury, William Coutts Keppel, Lord

Cardwell, Edward

Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, 4th

Earl of

Cave, Stephen

Challis, John Henry

Childers, Hugh Culling Eardley

Churchill, Lord Alfred Spencer

Clarke, Col. Andrew

Clifford, Sir Charles

Coates, James

Cochrane, Alexander Dundas Ross William Baillie

Coghlan, Maj.-Gen. Sir William Marcus

Coghlan, William Mant

Crease, Henry Pering Pellew

Croll, Alexander

Croll, Col. Alexander Angus

Crooks, Adam

Franklin, Selim

Freshfield, William D.

Frome, Maj.-Gen. Edward Charles

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 Reynolds-

Moreton, 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

Wentworth-

Fleming, 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 Leveson-

Gower, 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

Appendix 122