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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while ‘imperialism’ as a term could be rehabilitated only after Napoleon III had lost his

throne in 1870, the enthusiasm of a number of Britons for their empire may be traced a

few years before the word was applied to England.

The business of this study is to look for the growth of the imperial sentiment in Great

Britain before 1870, and to look for it among a particular group of people. The Colonial

Society was among the earliest signs of a movement of opinion in the direction o

supporting the empire, and of thinking about the empire as a single large unit. Thus,

instead of following older scholarship and attempting to characterize mid-Victorian

imperialism by skipping among isolated quotations from what would seem to be a

randomly chosen set of contemporary writers,

we will use the founders of the Colonial

Society as a pre-made sample. By looking at the founders we can see how particula

individuals became interested in the empire as a general category, and how their ideas

about the empire changed and grew. We can see how imperialism originated in individual

minds, and what it derived from. The founders of the Colonial Society were indeed

individuals who became imperialistic sometime before 1868, their imperialism having

grown out of their other interests, and the position they reached is unmistakably

imperialistic. The imperial enthusiasts of the Colonial Society included in their plans not

only the settlement colonies but also many of the tropical areas that would be unclaimed

by Europeans until the 1880s—showing the creation of imperialism as a general,

geographically wide-ranging category.

And yet, while the Colonial Society is a key place to look at how and why people

moved away from their other concerns and became imperialists, it is not the only place.

As long ago as 1938, one scholar suggested that the federal issues implicit in the US Civil

War and in the Confederation of Canada soon after might have fed into the growth o

imperialism in the late 1860s. That does not seem to have been the case, for the main

founders of the Colonial Society had become interested in the empire and in how to

govern it—whether federally or otherwise—well before the American Civil War; some

paid close attention to the war in America, while others ignored it completely.

Anothe

lace to look for the origin of late 1860s imperialism is in connection with the Abyssinian

expedition of 1867, as Freda Harcourt has shown. She argues that Prime Ministe

Benjamin Disraeli embarked on an African adventure to pander to the voters who had

been enfranchised by the 1867 reform bill.

Yet other scholars disagree. The Abyssinian

War itself seems to have stemmed more from a set of bureaucratic and diplomatic

blunders than from anyone’s demagogic tendencies, even Disraeli’s.

Among the

members of the Colonial Society, moreover, a much wider and much older set o

imperialistic attitudes were visible than among the people connected to the Abyssinian

affair.

All in all, the founders of the Colonial Society are the best group among which to

examine who became an imperialist and why. Viewed up close, the imperialistic

eitgeis

disappears, revealing instead the individuals who founded the Society, and the specific

intellectual and social backgrounds out of which their imperialism grew.

At bottom, the concern is this: How does a society like Victorian England—so alive

with controversies and debates, so alive with different doubts and different faiths, so full

of ambitions and contradictions—how does so diverse a society

resolve itself to impose

a grand, ill-conceived dream on that world—and an imperial dream—which is a denial o

Introduction 3

that diversity, and a desire to smooth it away? Where did the bandwagon of imperialism

come from? Do a few opinion-makers invent huge movements, or do movements appea

with apparent suddenness when some common element (as I believe) happens to bubble

up in the lives of tens of thousands of people thinking in parallel about the economic,

political, and intellectual substructures of their age?

Throughout the lives of the founders of the Colonial Society, evidence of European

domination was everywhere for those who chose to see it.

And the founders did choose

to see it. That is, they chose to look at the big trends in the history of European contacts

with non-European peoples; they were using bigger and bigger categories and drawing

igger and bigger conclusions about the whole history of the world. Their thinking

became imperial in scope, and this often took place well before 1868.

The main founders of the Colonial Society were devotees of Alexis de Tocqueville,

whose writing burst upon the scene in the early 1830s. For the Tocquevilleans, the central

theme of world history was the rise of democracy; lessons came pouring in from the

many newly self-governing English-speaking societies abroad—thus the British Empire

was the vanguard of civilization. Alongside the Tocquevilleans in the Colonial Society

there were archaeologists and anthropologists. These men were attempting to understand

how the British Empire fitted into a world history that went back to the empires of Egypt

and Sumeria. But the temptation to think about lofty abstractions on the order of ‘world

democracy’ (for the Tocquevilleans) and the English ‘race’ (for the anthropologists) is a

owerful one, and hard to break away from. It draws you in. You begin to forget about

individual cases. As the years went by, the founders’ thinking tended more and more to

the collective and the imperial. This is what drew them together by 1868.

Perhaps in trying to come up with a grand imperial ideal, they were trying to answer a

asic question: What did England stand for? As Linda Colley has pointed out, the

emancipation of the Catholics had meant that English nationalism could no longer be

congruent with Protestant zeal; meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire

soon after 1833 left the English with less to campaign against.

So what did England

stand for? Railways and industry? England as the land of liberty was a great success

—

except that what seemed most successful was the world of Gradgrind rather than the

English constitution. Thus some Englishmen searched for a place for their country within

a meaningful scheme of worldwide cultural and social progress, a scheme that would

stand above the triumphs of what many of them saw as grubby British manufacturers.

To come up with such a scheme means indulging in at least a few grand generalizations.

For thirty years, and with ever greater intensity, the founders-to-

e of the Colonial

Society had been extending their ideas about the mission of England and its democratic

settlements overseas, and about archaeology, anthropology, and race. They had been

extending their ideas about these things to cover ever larger units of culture, government,

or population, units that grew imperial in scale. What was the mission of Anglo-Saxon

civilization? And what was the mission of the men in London who led it?

This study builds on a rich trove of scholarship about British imperialism in the

nineteenth century, part of the national histories of more than 1,000,000,000 people in

countries and universities around the globe. Many scholars have focused on British

initiatives from Whitehall (the ‘centre’), others on the interaction of Europeans and non-

Europeans in the different places where they met (the so-called ‘periphery’).

Empire as the triumph of theory 4

London had its own peripheries—its own uncoordinated points of contact between

Europeans and the wider world. That is, it had unofficial men who at the privacy of thei

desks were trying to figure out the world they lived in, and how they ought to act in it.

It should also be said that this book addresses questions of imperialism rather than o

imperial expansion.

Although it would be hard to imagine either imperialism or the

empire developing in the utter absence of the other, none the less the attitudes and the

territorial additions did not have to jog along together in any coordinated way. This is

something that scholars have learned in attempting the devilish task of periodizing

imperial history. The imperialism that came together in 1868 would have something to do

with preparing the way for the imperial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, but the latte

subject is beyond the scope of this work.

Yet even the subfield of the history of Victorian imperialism per se is very large

indeed, and I would be remiss if I did not survey my corner of it for historiographical

land mines that might destroy my thesis—a thesis, once again, about people who came to

think in huge categories about the place of English-speaking democracy or the English

race in world history, and who then came together in the Colonial Society. They came

together because of the way they thought, not because of money.

But weren’t the British always looking for ways to take over the world and make

money? Isn’t that where imperialism came from? A few purported facts—that the British

have always been imperialists, that they have always been ‘in it’ for the money, and that

they got rich through imperial rapine—have ascended almost to the level of folk wisdom.

Yet only a few scholars who study the subject believe that the desire for money explains

much about the growth of the ideology of imperialism that took place in the 1870s o

thereabouts.

Besides, even as an explanation for imperial expansion instead of imperial ideology, i

is not obvious at first blush what the economic explanations are really saying. Did the

British get rich off colonies, or did they waste a lot of money on colonies that they might

etter have spent on social programmes at home? Which was it? This uncertainty makes

the history of the economic explanation of imperialism a strange one.

The first majo

thinker along these lines was J.A.Hobson. Working at the turn of the century, and basing

his ideas upon the arguments of a small number of American theoreticians and a large

number of Cobdenite anti-imperialists, Hobson wrote that a class of ‘parasitic’ financiers

was profiteering from the empire at the expense of everyone else, including most English

capitalists; the empire was making England poorer.

Following Hobson, and for much o

the rest of the twentieth century, good Marxists would agree that England had exported

excess capital, since the iron laws of worker exploitation ruled out using excess goods

and excess finance to improve the lot of the common people at home.

Some years after Hobson, in the socialist era after the Boer War and the First World

War, people who no longer had much reason to trust the ruling classes created the

opposite myth. It might be called the demotic theory of economic imperialism. This myth

held that most of Britain’s prosperity (a prosperity which seemed in those lean years to be

confined to the rulers) was based on the exploitation of colonies. In this period, Hobson’s

fame grew, but his theory that a parasitic imperialism drained resources from England

does not seem to have been widely studied.

Believers in the demotic theory were

convinced that the prosperity of England came from exploiting the empire, importing

Introduction 5

surpluses from it and not from exporting surpluses to it. These sub-Hobsonians assumed a

‘zero-sum game’, with every part of a country’s riches being won at the expense of othe

countries. Thus their conclusion that England had simply stolen all of its wealth; was not

England wealthier than many parts of the world? George Orwell showed that he belonged

to this school when he wrote that a Britain stripped of its empire would be reduced to a

life that centred on herrings and potatoes.

Early scholarly refutations of this idea o

economic imperialism do not seem to have made as much of an impression; the demotic

theory of exploitation took off from the ideas of Orwell and other self-styled disciples o

Hobson.

Within the field of imperial history, scholars are still refuting the idea that the empire

was central to British economic growth. It now seems that British industrialization in its

eighteenth-century phase may indeed have been helped along by the existence of the

orth American market. Patrick K.O’Brien argues that no more than 15 per cent of the

investment behind the first industrial revolution came from Britain’s extra-European

trade.

Even if that extra margin of investment helped to spark the British economy, the

spark had already started a wildfire in England by 1815. Industry had taken off, wealth

was being created at home, and empire was not economically fundamental in the age o

coal and railways—although the empire did continue to grow.

To the extent that reconstructed statistics can tell us anything about the economic effect

of the empire in the mid- to late nineteenth century, well after industrial take-off, the

conclusion seems to be that empire cost the British people a great deal of money.

Defending the empire meant that the taxpayer (including low-income groups whose food

was subject to non-

rogressive excise taxes) had to pay for an extra navy, one capable o

defending Australians, New Zealanders, and for a time Canadians. The people of these

countries could therefore build an infrastructure for themselves while keeping their own

taxes low.

These settlement colonists were indeed the chief financial beneficiaries o

the empire. The British themselves could have maintained superpower military levels, as

well as their dominance over the world trading system, without the expense of eithe

running old colonies or acquiring new ones.

Thus it remains hard to explain why the

British took that extra step as the century drew to its close.

If the general public was not making money out of the empire, then maybe Hobson’s

finance capitalists were doing so, and perhaps it was they who gave the lead. But the facts

indicate that most investors lost their money when they so much as looked towards the

empire. Only a minority received the rate of return that they would have enjoyed in the

igger investment markets of Europe and the United States, even though there may have

been a brief, shallow, and hard-to-pinpoint interlude of imperial

rofitability in the 1860s

or 1870s. (Imperial profitability in that period was so diffuse that it would not have been

noticeable to contemporary investors—to find out about it they would have neede

masses of proprietary data, then secret.) As Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback have

shown, few sectors of the economy showed much in the way of imperial profits. Two

areas of economic activity where the empire did make money for people were consume

goods and infrastructure, chiefly railways. Even then, most of the profits were made in

the settlement empire that had become largely self-governing in the 1850s, and not in

those areas of the world which were to figure so prominently in the New Imperialism o

the 1880s and after.

That is, the British sold far more consumer goods in Canada than

Empire as the triumph of theory 6

up the Zambezi. While there was some contemporary opinion that the possession of one

very special non-settlement colony, India, brought economic profits to the empire, most

people did not think so.

Nor did businessmen behave as if it did. Even in India British

enterprise refused to risk any money building railways. Only in 1849, when the East India

Company agreed to guarantee firms a profit of 5 per cent (out of Indian government

revenue) did railway construction start. It grew apace, but profits and labour conditions

did not satisfy the British construction enterprises. Construction slowed by the late 1860s,

and from 1869 until the 1880s the post-1849 system of subsidized capitalism was

abandoned for outright public-private partnerships with a profit guarantee of 4 per cent.

Most of the profitable railway investment in the empire was, once again, in the self-

governing settlement colonies.

All in all, it is hard to claim that British imperial profits were higher than British profits

elsewhere in the mid-Victorian decades, or that imperial profits were thought to be very

ig at all during the New Imperial push into the tropics. That does not mean that the new

British colonies in Africa or Asia would not suffer financial exploitation. In addition, as

T.O. Lloyd has pointed out, the rates of return on different investments will tend to

equalize across industries under free competition. New investment will be attracted into

sectors of high profitability until that extra profitability is gone—diluted, removed by the

law of diminishing returns.

Imperial exploitation happened none the less, whether o

not profits on imperial investments were especially large. What matters here, however, is

that there does not seem to have been anything particularly attractive about imperial

investment—either an extra margin of profitability that had yet to equalize or an extra

measure of financial safety. There was little that would serve as an incentive to an across-

the-

oard expansion of imperial control, formal or informal. Some people made money in

far-off places that might come under imperial control, while others did not.

The more exotic parts of the world—the areas where the empire might grow—were the

laces where crises came from, not where safe money went. During the Parliamentary

session of 1868/69, when the Colonial Society was young, MPs were regaled with two

more or less imperial issues: the terrible £8,000,000 cost of the diplomatic catastrophe

and military adventure in Abyssinia, and the idea of removing the anti-slave-trade

squadrons from the coast of West Africa—and removing them for the sole purpose o

saving the government’s money.

The places where the British did make money were not the places that they seized.

Where a large amount of British money was invested, the British government usually

refrained from seizing territory,

or they were in no position to seize it anyway. Latin

America, site of much investment and full of independent countries, is the classic case.

But the history of another target area for British investment, an area where there were no

Latin American-style governments to get in the way of British territorial acquisition, will

make clear the tenuous connection between the spread of trade and the spread of the flag.

For about a half-century prior to 1852, Britain had been taking the odd piece of territory

now and then in maritime Southeast Asia. These places were taken largely in order to

guard the Indian and China trades rather than for the value of the new possessions

themselves, which lost money. Yet it must be underlined that for the most part these

actual acquisitions, unprofitable as they were, became formal colonies directly ruled by

the British.

Introduction 7

After 1873, Britain’s territorial acquisitions in that area resumed and they resumed in

force, this time for the profits actually available in the places seized; but the irony is that

these new, now-

rofitable areas were taken in the form of suzerainties rather than formal

acquisitions (excepting the central part of Burma, formally annexed for non-economic

reasons in February 1886). Thus, expansion of control without real sovereignty took place

while the scramble for formal colonial control over Africa was raging at full force.

Where trade went, therefore, whether in Latin America or in the indirectly ruled British

hegemonies erected in Southeast Asia after 1873, the British flag did not go.

Around the world, meanwhile, there was very little interest—at least before the

1880s—in the economic development of those tropical colonies that were under formal

British rule. Almost any attempt at development that did take place in the Tropics was

focused merely on enabling the colony in question to pay a higher percentage of the cost

of its own governance.

In sum, whatever the influence of investors on any one decision

about the expansion of British power, investors as a group did not succeed in putting

together any coherent programme of British territorial expansion, even as late as the

1870s.

There were pressure groups pushing for different particular extensions of British

power. In the mid-Victorian decades, as John Darwin has argued, the existence of these

ad hoc pressure groups—sometimes economic but more often not—could lead to the

expansion of British control over local areas, for local reasons, using local resources, and

often employing local troops, even in an era when expansion of annexation was as often

rejected by Whitehall as it was allowed. Darwin, building it would seem on the

observations of C.C.Eldridge, has identified a pattern of imperial expansion from these

local ‘bridgeheads’,

ut only when there was some British constituency for annexation

around the bridgehead, such as the anti-slavery movement, Free Traders, o

missionaries.

Hobson’s main concern—the hunt for some overall economic rationale for the seizure

of Africa

—inspired V.I.Lenin to embark upon the same search. The result was his

famous 1917 essay, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. And yet Lenin was

not primarily interested in imperial expansion. ‘Imperialism’ was simply his name for the

monopoly capitalism that he saw as dominant in the period after 1900. In looking for the

economic origins of imperialism in his sense of the term, he was more interested in where

monopolies came from than the origin of imperialism.

Indeed, he had some choice

words for those who then (as now) find imperialism looming behind all cultural

phenomena, seemingly without distinctions:

Colonial policy and imperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism,

and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial

policy and achieved imperialism. But ‘general’ arguments about imperialism,

which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of social-

economic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities.

Still, Lenin’s flawed and incidental treatment of imperial expansion deserves some

attention, since it is so famous that it might be taken as a challenge to any non-economic

theory of imperialism.

Lenin began by following Hobson in using overly broad and

Empire as the triumph of theory 8

never disaggregated statistics. The statistics seemed to show Great Britain controlling

massive overseas investments in different parts of the world, investments that must have

been the cause of imperial expansion.

When disaggregated, however, Lenin’s figures

show that British overseas investment was largely outside the empire, making hay of the

capital-export aspect of the cobbled-together popular idea of the Hobson-Lenin theory o

imperial expansion. Moreover, even the imperial portion of British investment was

largely in Australia and Canada, and to a much lesser extent in the railways of India,

rather than in places seized in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, Lenin explained the scramble for Africa of the mid-1880s as a

consequence of the transition to monopoly capitalism, which he had taken pains some

ages earlier to locate in the late 1890s, after its supposed effects in prompting the

Scramble for Africa.

Again, his statistics were insufficiently disaggregated, so that

imperial developments from the whole period from 1876 to 1914 were lumped together.

In sum, Lenin is no serious threat to any social and cultural explanation of the growth in

imperial enthusiasm among British people in the 1860s. Ideas about how the behaviour o

individuals might add up into social trends are more interesting and in the long run more

valuable than an economic conspiracy theory that Lenin himself merely glanced at in a

work on another subject.

Finally, a much more promising avenue of research into the economic motivations

ehind the British Empire has been opened up by P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins. Cain and

Hopkins have tried to remove from the economic story of imperialism the antiquated

Marxian idea of what British capitalism was—a more or less centrally organize

industrial movement—and to look at a more important area of the economy. Their wor

reflects the new focus on the finance and service sector in southeast England, a focus

developed by historians who debate the economic rise or fall of England in recent

times.

For Cain and Hopkins, the men of the financial and service sectors shared with

government officials a common set of expectations about Britain’s role in the world

economy, as well as the habit of exercising power to safeguard or extend that role. The

authors define this set of economic expectations and imperialistic behaviours as

‘gentlemanly capitalism’.

This model works quite well as an explanation for the fits-and-starts expansion of the

British Empire down through the whole of the nineteenth century. Sometimes there were

opportunities to make money without the expansion of British power; sometimes powe

had to be exercised in order to defend investments. Much will flow from the work o

Cain and Hopkins.

Still, it is not clear in their work where the threshold of scale lies

etween the local or parochial economic activities that would have happened anyway

and, at the other end of the scale, the investments and endeavours that were prompted by

the gentlemanly capitalists of London. How much of the economic activity was due to

imperialism? After all, the people out in the empire would naturally have to work and

support themselves in some way; that they worked and made money—and expande

British control in their local areas—does not by itself show what portion of their activities

may be put down to the operation of an imperial economic network under the control o

the gentlemanly capitalists of London. Building on his earlier work on the economic

history of West Africa, Hopkins has pointed out that local economic activity, whethe

European or African, may well have been the stimulus for the Scramble.

Introduction 9

In any case, the economic interests that Cain and Hopkins have uncovered do not seem

to impinge upon a study of imperialism as an idea in Great Britain, and of how that idea

changed at specific times during the second half of the nineteenth century. Again,

studying the empire as an economic phenomenon is not the same as studying the growth

of the ideology of imperialism. Both approaches are necessary. As has been suggested o

the American case since the Second World War, an imperial impulse may stem from the

whole Weltanshauung of a great power’s self-identity, its nationalism, and aspects of its

capitalism, rather than from any imperial profit-seeking on the part of particula

individuals or groups.

Scholars who have steered clear of economic explanations have

traced imperialism back to Disraeli’s Crystal Palace Speech (1872). Here, then, is the

second land mine that might explode my thesis. Someone might ask whether Disraeli

himself didn’t invent imperialism in order to appeal to the newly enlarged electorate afte

1867. Isn’t that where imperialism came from on the British political scene? Well, no.

Tracing imperialism back to 1872 isn’t going back far enough, if we are looking only at

political events. And it is not nearly far enough back if we are looking at Disraeli’s own

thinking. For decades, Disraeli had held true to a vision of the glorious British Empire as

a power in the East, and he had proposed adding MPs from the settlement colonies to

Parliament at Westminster.

He may not have known much about particular colonies,

ut he was quite fond of the empire as a grand, indistinct vision. Indeed, Disraeli had

spent decades working himself into just the sort of imperial generalizations and world

categorizations that this study will find among members of the Colonial Society—except

that this was only one of his interests, his foremost interest being appealing to the

electorate. Most members of the Colonial Society, on the other hand, were not at the top

of the political game, and they could afford to give freer reign to their imperial fantasies.

Another possibility is for the broader political turn to imperialism in 1869, and some

scholars have championed that year as the origin of imperialism. By summer, it was

apparent that the Gladstone government planned to save money by withdrawing British

troops from New Zealand. British forces were in the colony to fight the Maori, but they

also kept the settler and Maori armies apart. In non-official London, news of the

impending withdrawal caused an uproar. Some were sceptical about leaving white people

to defend themselves alone—or to learn how to get along with their neighbours at no cost

to the British taxpayer. This uproar was organized in large part by members of the

Colonial Society, using the good offices of the supposedly non-

artisan group (a political

intrusion that did not please the Society’s Gladstonian members).

Yet the Society

already existed; and however important this episode was in provoking imperial

sentiments on the part of some people, the Society and the broader interest in empire that

it represented had already come into being.

On occasion that interest has been traced one year further back—to two events in 1868:

the Society’s foundation itself, and the somewhat later publication of the book Greate

ritain. Yet the Society has not been given proper credit. Sometimes it is mentioned

riefly on the way to Dilke; sometimes, indeed, its foundation is dated from the gala

dinner held in March 1869, after months of great activity—and some months afte

Greater Britain was published.

Or we might go the other way, and reason forward towards the New Imperialism. How

much really changed across the nineteenth century? Starting in the 1880s, British

Empire as the triumph of theory 10

governments may simply have become more willing to react to crises on the European

periphery by seizing territory—

ut those crises, and the occasional seizure of territory,

had been happening for a long time. One could point to the annexation of New Zealand

itself in 1840, or of Lagos in 1861—and many others throughout the nineteenth

century.

And besides the British government’s stronger but hardly unprecedented

interest in seizing territory in the latter parts of the century, there was also newly

strengthened but again hardly unprecedented interest in empire on the part of families. By

the 1870s or 1880s, the new professionals of the mid-century would have noticed the jobs

available to their children in the then-reformed imperial bureaucracy; there would be

support for the empire qua employment agency. But the empire had played that role to

some degree for a century.

Yet clearly there was some change. Imperialism as a general category became all the

rage a few years after 1868. The key point about most of the founders of the Colonial

Society was that they developed an imperialism of a new and more general kind, and they

did this on their own as individuals sometime before 1868, only then going public with i

y founding the Colonial Society in that year. But they had begun on their own, as

individuals looking at the world; they did not have to rely on the support or the ideas o

others to extend their idea of the British Empire to all of the settlement colonies and the

tropical world besides. People could think of this more extensive kind of empire by

themselves, and without the benefit of some social movement or political fracas to guide

them—although they founded their own movement in 1868 to guide others. The

intellectual development of the founders took years. Theirs is a story of continuity and

development in imperial thinking in the face of the flow of events and information. And,

as writers and thinkers, they developed their imperial ideas for intellectual rather than

economic reasons.

Introduction 11

The founding of the Colonial Society

In 1801, London had a population of 1,000,000 people, approximately the size of the

opulation of Merseyside or the Providence, Rhode Island, of today. By the 1871 census,

the population had grown to nearly 4,000,000—London was as big as today’s Mancheste

or Washington, DC. Many of the new arrivals lived in the suburbs, but of course they did

not stay there by day, when central London had to accommodate them.

In the 1860s,

inner London had more dust, noise, and reconstruction than at any other time in the

nineteenth century; stations, rail lines, business premises, and central places of all sorts

were built on the ruins of Georgian London, which had been a city of narrow private

houses with small floors, unsuited to large organizations.

Until 1876, even the Colonial

Office occupied two thin and quite inadequate old houses in Downing Street. Indeed, the

building had been condemned years before.

It leaked, and the accounts office could no

house a safe—which people were afraid would bring the building down.

Yet there was

nowhere in London for the Colonial Office to move to.

By the 1870s, new and more specialized kinds of buildings with larger floor plans were

required, not only by government departments. These new types of buildings included

hotel-like clubs for professional men, and more business-oriented headquarters buildings

for professional institutes; more and more of these headquarters would be erected as the

century progressed and the number of professional organizations exploded.

Professionalization increased in many areas, it is true, even away from London. Indeed,

London-style club buildings and professional headquarters were also built in other parts

of the country, especially when scientists and industrialists sought a common forum. Yet

events in the provinces were literally isolated phenomena in comparison to club- and

headquarters-

uilding in the capital, where there was such a strong combination o

ambition, crowding, sheer activity, and even the joy of being at the centre of professions,

the centre of interest groups, the centre of civilization.

London was indeed the world’s largest city; full of great poverty, it is true, but also full

of people who were ever better educated, and ever more likely to travel to a meeting in

town by way of the new rail lines near their homes.

They needed places to get together.

By the late 1860s, London was too big to walk across routinely. People who shared an

interest might not run into each other as easily as they could have done in the smalle

London of the eighteenth century. The general coffee house, the gentleman’s club

(however politically focused), and the reception room, all so prominent in the social and

intellectual life of the late eighteenth century, had to be supplemented as gathering places

by the more specialized institutions and clubs that the Victorians have left to us.

In 1872, the antiquarian John Timbs published an inventory of London clubs of the

older kind; they centred on eating and drinking, most had jocular names, and many could

e traced to a particular tavern. By the late 1860s, when Timbs was working, most o