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

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Illustrations

Figure

Tables

Figure 1

Major extra-European territories of the British Empire, 1868

xvi

2.1

ew members by period and by status on joining

2.2

Members who wrote

3.1

Aristocrats joining the Society

3.2

ew members by parliamentary membership

3.3

Members governing the colonies

3.4

Regular officers and engineers

4.1

Bankers and businessmen

5.1

Areas visited

5.2

Subjects of books and articles published by the founders by April 1869

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 o

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

road 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

ourneys 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 o

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 o

how they came to think of empire as an abstraction, is thus an important part o

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 self-

appointed 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,

orthumberland Avenue. My thanks go to the Society and the Commonwealth Trust fo

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

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

drawn by Jason Clark).

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

Key

A The

Bahamas

E Trinidad H Sierra Leone J Lagos

B Bermuda F Windward and

Leeward Islands

I Gold Coast forts

and Fante area

K Niger delta forts and

Lakoja Consulate

C British

Honduras

D Jamaica G The Gambia

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 i

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 powe

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

ower 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.

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.

Various pro-colonial sentiments appeared with some regularity in the press,

albeit with little in the way of systematic development.

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.

And as might be expected in a big, bustling culture, there were some people who began to

ay 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 fo

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.

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.

Indeed, ‘imperialism’ was a term of obloquy; it referred only to the domestic policies o

apoleon 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’.

But

Empire as the triumph of theory 2