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.
Levey, Charles E.
Lindsay, Lt-Col. Robert James Lloyd
Linnington, A.H.
Louis, Alfred Hyman
Lynn, W.Frank
Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton
Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron
MacArthur, Alexander
McDonald, H.C.
MacDougall, Col. Sir Patrick Leonard
MacGarel, Charles
Mackenzie, J.H.C.
Mackinnon, Lauchlan
Mackinnon, William
Macleay, Sir George
MacNab, Revd Dr Alexander
McPherson, Allan
Maitland, William
Manby, Lt Col. Charles
Manchester, William Drogo Montagu,
7th Duke of
Mann, Dr Robert James
Marsh, Matthew Henry
Marshman, John Clark
Maude, Col. Francis Cornwallis
Merivale, Herman
Mills, Arthur
Milton, Viscount William
Molineux, Gisborne
Monck, Charles Stanley Monck, 4th
Viscount
Monsell, William
Montefiore, Jacob
Montgomerie, Hugh E.
Moor, Henry
Morgan, Octavius Vaughan
Morgan, Septimus Vaughan
Morrison, J.R.
Morrison, John
Constantine Phipps, 2nd Marquess of
Northcote, Sir Stafford Henry, Bart.
Paterson, John
Pauw, Klaas
Porter, Richard, Jnr
Pratt, J.J.
Rae, James
Rawlinson, Maj.-Gen. Sir Henry
Creswicke, Bart.
Reeve, John
Rennie, J.T.
Ridgway, Lt-Col. A.
Robinson, Sir John
Roche, Alfred R.
Roche, E.S.
Roche, Henry Philip
Rogers, Alexander
Rogers, Sir Frederic
Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot
Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of
Salomans, Ald. Sir David, Bart.
Sargeaunt, William Charles
Sargood, Frederick
Schwartze, Helmuth
Scott, G.A.G.
Scott, Sir John
Searight, James
Shepstone, Theophilus
Shepstone, Theophilus, Jnr
Silver, Stephen William
Soloman, N.
Spowers, Allan
Stephens, William
Stevens, James
Swale, Revd Hogarth John
Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood
Verdon, George Frederick
Waddington, Alfred
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 123
Appendix 1B
The members as of the first meeting on 26 June 1868
Appendix 1C
New members, 27 July to 12 August 1868 (second general
meeting)
Wiggins, Frederick A.
Williamson, George
Young, Sir John, Bart.
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
Adderley, Charles Bowyer
Arnold, H.J.
Baring, Thomas
Barr, E.G.
Hamilton, Archibald
Harrington, Thomas
Moore
Hay, Lord William
Appendix 124
Appendix 1D
New members, 15 August to 3 November 1868 (
Greater
Britain
still unfinished)
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 Wentworth-
Ghinn, 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.
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.
Denison, Maj.-Gen. Sir William
Thomas
Duddell, George
Freshfield, William D.
Inman, William
King, Henry Samuel
Kinnaird, Hon. Arthur
Fitzgerald
Manby, Lt-Col. Charles
Moor, Henry Silver, Stephen William
Appendix 125
Appendix 1E
New members, 11 November to 30 December 1868
Appendix 1F
New members, 20 January to 25 February 1869
Appendix 1G
New members, 10 March (the Inaugural Dinner) to 13 April
1869 (the day Dilke joined)
Morgan, Septimus Vaughan
Mort, William
Scott, Sir John
Spowers, Allan
Weld, Frederick Aloysius
Wood, Frederick A.
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.
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
Albemarle, George Thomas Keppel, 6th Earl of
Allen, Charles H.
Allen, Lewis Philip
Black, James
Brand, William
Appendix 126
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
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
Appendix 127
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,
I
mperialism: 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 Anti-
imperialism’) 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.
Notes 129
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 pre-
eminence 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,
Notes 130
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’,
H
istory 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’,
Notes 131
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,
Notes 132
‘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,
M
ammon 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
p
articularly 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
Notes 133