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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missionaries, but he did not.

Waterhouse’s only major public involvement in religious

questions came in the late 1840s. Because he was both a Wesleyan and a leading citizen,

he was expected on that occasion to take a position on whether the Wesleyans of South

Australia ought to accept state aid, but all that he could do as a politician was go back and

forth on the issue, with some measure of obfuscation each time.

There are still a few more founders connected to the missionary movement through

their families. Two were father and son. Sir Theophilus Shepstone was a key figure in

South Africa. He was the son of a Wesleyan missionary who had worked among the

natives.

Sir Theophilus and his own son, Theophilus Junior, were both founders of the

Colonial Society. Theophilus Senior’s missionary background led to his becoming an

interpreter in the 1830s and 1840s, when different African tribes were required to sign

over their independence.

Later he rose to dominate British native policy in Southern

Africa. His experiences there were hardly typical of those of most Colonial Society

members. Few were in the position to report, as Shepstone did in 1848, on how ‘tribal

distinctions’ could be useful in controlling the population. His was an unattractive

imperialism worked out by a hard man in the field. He was ahead of his time.

A final example is Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, son of the Revd Mr Joseph Wolff.

Joseph Wolff, the father, was perhaps better described as ‘the missionary, the converted

Jew Dr Wolff, whose eccentric and conceited autobiography set all London laughing’.

Indeed, the Revd Mr Wolff merits a few words. He was an Asian expert, a traveller, a

convert from Judaism (yes), and a German by birth. He was also the survivor of a 600-

mile march in the nude across Central Asia after he was captured by robbers during his

search for one or more of the lost tribes of Israel; and he was the self-described ‘Apostle

of Our Lord Jesus Christ for Palestine, Persia, Bokhara, and Balkh’.

The Revd M

Wolff, although a key founder of the Irvingite Church, was not much interested in

missionary work per se outside of Europe and the Near East. His socially upward-moving

son Henry, a diplomat, a Conservative MP, a founder of the pro imperial and very

aristocratic ‘Primrose League’ (in 1883), and of course one of the founding members o

the Colonial Society, was not someone eager to march 600 miles in the nude and become

the laughing-stock of ‘all London’. Instead, he would develop an interest in banking and

Egyptian finance, but after our period.

In sum, those members of the Society connected to the missionary world were few in

number. Those few who themselves served as missionaries tended to the spiritual needs

of well-off white people in Ontario and Cape Town—so they were somewhat out of the

missionary mainstream. Nor could the Colonial Society boast even one member who had

been prominent in the anti-slavery societies, societies allied to the missionary movement

both in practice and in sentiment.

The desire to save the world, whether by converting it or by using military force to stop

the trade in slaves, did not feed into the Colonial Society of 1868. Indeed, the missionary

urge, far from contributing to the coalescence of imperialism in 1868, seemed in the

1860s to be dying out in Britain as a whole. We have seen missionaries’ sons who were

quite uninterested in continuing their fathers’ work. The dearth in missionaries was felt at

the time. The London Missionary Society blamed the rising cost of living in many parts

of the world, and began sending out women in greater numbers. The Church Missionary

Society was well aware that it had absorbed only fourteen university-educated recruits

The usual suspects 43

from 1862 through 1868, four of those in the latter year. There had been none in 1863

and 1865, although some recruits were coming in from outside the universities. By the

early 1870s, The Times could ask whether anyone at home or abroad had ever met eithe

a missionary or anyone who had been converted by a missionary.

Of course the missionaries still had their own world, their own newspapers and

organizations, but these remained distant from the secular imperialism that fed into the

Colonial Society, and distant from the secular world generally. Apparently enthusiasm

for missions was by its nature multicentred and not necessarily coordinated through

central authorities in the imperial metropolis. Already in the mid-nineteenth century the

Christians of Jamaica were sending Scottish missionaries to found stations in West

Africa. But what of England? Were its missionary organizations doomed? The Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society put together a

national Day of Intercession for Missionaries, held in churches up and down the land, on

Sunday, 20 December 1872. Recruitment did pick up after that, but so of course did

secular interest in the empire.

But that was later; the colonial connections that we have

seen in the missionary group may indicate little more than this: a few people were likely

to become involved in overseas affairs no matter what. Their involvement gave to them

and to their children a more global horizon than other people had. Some few were

missionaries. Some, as we have seen, were colonial governors or colonial engineers.

Most were not.

Empire as the triumph of theory 44

Businessmen

To what degree did business concerns per se set the founders down the road to

imperialism? And to what degree, by contrast, did life bombard Englishmen with so

many stimuli that some men were bound to become associated with the empire, as others

ecame associated with coin collecting or cushion making? In other words, do we find an

economic imperialism, or simply a bustling economic life?

This question can only be approached through numerous examples. To begin only one

great aristocratic name, the 7th Duke of Manchester, future President of the Colonial

Society, had investments in the empire that later Victorians found notable for someone o

his station and era. He became quite rabid in his imperialism as the second President o

the Colonial Society (or the Royal Colonial Institute, as it then was) in the mid-1870s,

when he supported pressure groups to scuttle the transfer of the Gambia to France and

other groups that supported colonizing New Guinea. He began investing in the Straits

Settlements (now Malaya) in 1875.

But most of his large and numerous business

interests in the empire were confined to the settlement and development of Australia, and

did not come about until the 1880s (see Table 4.1).

Perhaps his interest in this part of the

world had grown out of his travels. He had been an aide-decamp in the Cape of Good

Hope in 1843–44. (Later a Conservative MP, he succeeded to the dukedom in 1855.)

Manchester may also have heard something about the empire without ever leaving home.

His Duchess, Louisa, was a key political hostess. The Duchess herself, although an

eccentric and a German, is said to have been the most powerful woman in England; both

Queen Victoria and Sir Charles Dilke thought that her wide influence and less than

impeccable morals had done tremendous harm to society. Still, she had connections o

many kinds. One night in 1857, at one of her parties, Disraeli had an animated and

informative conversation about the Indian Mutiny with the wife of one of the generals

who was busy suppressing it.

The Duke himself seems to have been controlled by this beautiful Duchess and by he

lover of thirty years (and future husband), the Marquess of Hartington (later Duke o

Devonshire and leader of the Liberal Party). Manchester took his mind off his marital

situation—or did he dwell on it?—

y working away among his family papers, writing a

sizeable book on the manners and morals of the Stuart monarchs, and helping to build the

empire in ways that no other peer seems to have done.

There were two other high-ranking peers who were active in business. As peers they

were even less typical, since they had financial difficulties and thus had to hold a job.

They were the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and the Marquess of Salisbury—the

same Lord Robert Cecil who visited the Australian gold-fields. Each ran a railway. Note

that neither had business interests in the colonies, save for a small estate in Jamaica tha

Buckingham sold off to meet his father’s debts,

and neither man was a businessman pe

se. Their railway jobs found them and not the other way around. A railway might need

special legislation to establish its lines. There was no harm in having a great name on the

letterhead, especially if that name was Buckingham. Indeed, the railways o

Buckinghamshire (and of Hampshire) came knocking because they needed to secure lines

across the family’s huge estates; the London and Northwestern Railway was even forced

to negotiate with him for new rights of way when he was serving as chairman of the

company.

As railway chairmen go, Buckingham had wonderful entrée. It was he who

arranged to present Gladstone with 500 guineas of silver plate ‘or whatever else Mrs

Gladstone and you may select’, to be paid for by the directors of the London and North-

western. Several months went by and neither Gladstone nor Mrs Gladstone had selected a

thing. Buckingham and Chandos sent them a cheque. Soon came an invitation to

Gladstone’s country house.

The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos had worked fo

years to rebuild part of the fortune squandered by his bankrupt father, but he did it

through domestic economies, investments, and railway ventures. He brought little

knowledge of the empire or its governance when he became Colonial Secretary.

He had

turned down the Governorship of Victoria, Australia, in 1856, soon after he had

completed his land sales, and he pleaded poverty and the need to keep his railway

chairmanship when he turned down the position of Home Secretary in 1859.

As Keepe

of the Privy Seal of the Prince of Wales (1852–59), he accompanied the Prince on a tou

of American and Canadian railways in 1860, but he does not seem to have invested in

America or in the empire as we usually understand it (although by 1885 he did acquire

some Victoria government stock).

Table 4.1 Bankers and businessmen

New members

Bankers

Businessmen (clear

colonial interests)

†

Other

businessmen

††

Total

26 June 1868 4 10 0 14

27 June to 12

August 1868

65011

15 August to 3

November 1868

3519

11 November to

30 December

1868

1102

20 January to 25

February 1869

2428

10 March to 13

April 1869

45110

Total 20 30 4 54

Notes

Includes men who were also in other businesses. No distinction is made

between bankers with some interests abroad and those who do not seem to

have had such interests; there is no proof that they did not. It should be noted

Empire as the triumph of theory 46

Although largely unfamiliar with the empire, on becoming Secretary of State in the late

1860s the Duke immersed himself in the detail of the Colonial Office—so much so that

the Permanent Secretary, Frederic Rogers, thought that Buckingham’s business caree

had taught him to care so much for detail that it had ruined him for the main work o

setting policy—the work of generalization. As Colonial Secretary, Buckingham had a

hand in everything, but he spent an inordinate amount of his time on the affairs of the

Ionian Islands. And it was perhaps symptomatic of his priorities that he made the

highlight of his Colonial Secretaryship a visit to rebellious Heligoland, an impoverished

island of 4,000 non-English-speakers off northern Germany—clearly outside the

mainstream of imperial developments in the mid-nineteenth century.

Thus Buckingham

and Chandos seem to have shared Salisbury’s attitude to imperial investment. That is to

say, they shared an almost total non-interest in it until the subject came to the fore more

generally, well after 1868.

Among businessmen more properly so called—as opposed to the peers whom we have

been looking at—

ankers would certainly figure as key suspects in any search for the

latent supporters of economic imperialism. British bankers would have been on the

lookout for investment opportunities almost anywhere, and they had fine research

facilities. Bankers would have had every opportunity to notice and make mental claims

upon the wider world. Sixteen members of the Colonial Society were bankers at one level

or another.

The Colonial Society’s very greatest éminences grises from the banking world were

Thomas Baring, Director of Baring Brothers and of the Bank of England, and George

Grenfell Glyn of Glyn, Mills & Co; both men were Trustees of the Society.

We will first examine Glyn’s connection to banking and imperialism. He had spent a

number of years working enthusiastically in the family bank to help build up

communications in Canada (although he was not a key decision-maker in the bank, which

was led by his seniors). In the late 1850s, Glyn was associated with Lord Bury himsel

and another original member of the Colonial Society, the Hon. Charles William

Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Liberal-Conservative MP for Malton (plus another half a dozen

men of no interest to us), in the Halifax and Quebec Railway Company, which soon died

for lack of British government money. Bury, who was in Canada during this period,

seemed to be the most enthusiastic of the group about the future of Canadian railways. He

parlayed his association with the ill-fated Halifax and Quebec into a seat on the board o

the North West Transportation Company.

Glyn did not do so. The only result of the

that some of the bankers or bank directors in this column had colonial rather

than London banks.

†

Includes colonial pastoralists, colonial businessmen, and British-based

businessmen with interests in the colonies or the underdeveloped world,

including a few MPs with colonial railway interests. These different kinds of

businessmen are classed together because many founders changed businesses

and even countries at some point.

††

Does not include Lord Salisbury, who was drafted as head of the Great

Eastern Railroad in January, 1868, so as to bring it respectability after a

collapse—see Barker, ‘Lord Salisbury: Chairman of the Great Eastern’.

Businessmen 47

roject would be to bring together a small knot of investors (some outside banking) that

overlapped with the future membership of the Colonial Society. No one made any

money, nor did most people (apart from the investors themselves) think they were eve

likely to. Thus, when in 1862 Glyn floated an idea for a transcontinental road and

telegraph line across Canada, he was not willing to raise much of the money himself, and

the Barings were even less enthusiastic.

In December 1866 Glyn gave up all banking

activity to become the Whig-Liberal Party’s Chief Whip in the House of Commons. His

osition as Chief Whip meant that he would become one of the Lords of the Treasury

when his party came into office, since the sinecure for the Government Chief Whip was

at the Treasury. Therefore, even some members of Glyn’s own party thought that a

anker should never become a whip in the first place, even when the party was out o

office, and they insisted on the strictest conditions when Glyn took the job. Accordingly,

the rest of Glyn’s life was consumed by parliamentary business. He proved himself to be

one of Gladstone’s most avid lieutenants, and he never went back to the bank. Bu

resumably the idea of investing in Canada was still with him, even if the investments

would have to be made by others.

Barings

We cannot go further in looking for economically motivated men without looking at the

Colonial Society founder-member who bore the most eminent name in English banking.

He was Thomas Baring Esq., a founding Trustee of the Society. Thomas Baring was also

the most powerful financier in the land. He refused the Chancellorship of the Excheque

in more than one Conservative government; he even turned down the leadership of the

Conservative Party when Disraeli offered it to him in 1851.

But was he an economic

imperialist? Where did his imperial interests come from, and what kind were they?

Thomas Baring did have a family connection to the attempt to reform the empire into

self-governing, self-supporting settlements for England’s poor—Edward Gibbon

Wakefield’s Colonial Reform Movement of the 1830s to early 1850s. Thomas Baring’s

cousin, the Hon. Francis Baring, Liberal-Conservative MP for Thetford (3rd Lord

Ashburton 1864)—who died one month before the Colonial Society enrolled its first

members—was the first Chairman of the Colonial Reform Society, although he soon lef

politics and banking to live out a life of pleasure in Paris.

Thomas Baring would also have known all about the imperial connections of his

nephew, another Thomas Baring (2nd Lord Northbrook, 1866, and 1st Earl, 1876). Born

in Calcutta (where his father was an official), this Thomas Baring was a Liberal MP from

1857 until he inherited his peerage. He was also Under-Secretary of State for India fo

most of the period from 1859 to 1864; in that position, he showed the typical Victorian

arsimony about the cost of moving soldiers, and of governing an empire generally (he

once looked into the vital subject of how to save money on stationery contracts). His

closest brush with economic imperialism at the India Office was when he enquired

whether the cotton trade between Great Britain and India would pick up because of the

American Civil War.

But this was no more than an idle suggestion during the course o

routine business.

Empire as the triumph of theory 48

Still other but much more distant relatives had helped to rule India; one became a vice-

resident of the Church Missionary Society in 1812; and Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer)

would rule Egypt for almost thirty years after the Scramble for Africa.

Yet in 1868 the

missionary heyday was in the past, and both the missionary renaissance of the late

nineteenth century and the Scramble for Africa were hardly developments that could have

een predicted in 1868. North America and Australasia were the foci for the banking

Barings at mid-century. The Thomas Baring of the Colonial Society, Chairman of the

ank and sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer, worked out his own interest in

empire.

Thomas Baring, Conservative MP, sat for Yarmouth from 1835 to 1837, stood for that

seat unsuccessfully in 1837, 1838, and 1841, stood unsuccessfully for London in 1843,

and sat for Huntingdon from 1844 until his death in 1873. That he sat as a Tory was odd,

since most of the Barings were Liberals. He was an early supporter of Disraeli as the

party’s leader in the Commons, but he declined serious offers of the Chancellorship o

the Exchequer in both 1852 and 1858, as well as having declined Disraeli’s peculiar offe

of the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1851. Nor was that the first time he refused

office. In 1845 he turned down an offer from Peel in part to preserve his quiet life at

home—he did not want to offend the Liberal ex-Cabinet ministers to whom he was

closely related—

ut more particularly because he wanted to preserve his quiet life in the

bank, an ‘honourable as well as profitable…independent station’, he thought.

He did

take time away to chair the very industrious India Committee of 1852–53, which had to

renew and to some degree modify the Act under which the subcontinent was governed,

but his questions to witnesses were businesslike and unrevealing.

Having chaired the

Committee, he opposed Disraeli in 1857 by (unsuccessfully) trying to save the East India

Company from abolition after the Mutiny; the Company had ceased trading or investing

in India in 1834, but it had remained the agency of governance.

Yet India was not his

prime focus—it was no more than one of many foci. By 1857 he was the head of Baring

Brothers. He was Chairman of Lloyds from 1830 to March 1868, a director of the Bank

of England from 1848 to 1867, and a Commissioner of the Great Exhibition. By the time

the Colonial Society was founded, he was also President of the London Institution, an

1805 body that was an uncomfortable cross between a history library and a scientific

lecture series;

the Colonial Society catered to a similar mix of interests, but due to its

imperial focus it was more successful.

Thomas Baring’s own imperial focus was on North American affairs and not on the

affairs of India or of anywhere else. In 1866 he did lead a group of Britons who held

Venezuelan bonds, but this group had no coherent policy towards Venezuela—not

coercion, not conciliation, not imperialism.

It is true that on occasion he would dash of

a letter seeking information about Latin American or Near Eastern affairs, information

that someone else at Barings needed from one of Thomas Baring’s particular friends in

government,

but Thomas himself had seldom studied the matter at hand in any detail.

He would ask the most perfunctory of questions. Nor was he very interested in the

monetary arrangements of even the Australasian colonies, although one would think that

he should have been, for he was of course an expert in currency and banking. He did

serve on the committee that investigated putting a branch of the Royal Mint in Sydney,

Australia, but he attended only one of the six hearings, and when he did appear he asked

Businessmen 49

not one question.

Yet he had travelled in North America in the late 1820s. He met former President

Madison—‘Father of the Constitution’, author of a third of the Federalist Papers, and

most of the American Bill of Rights. Baring visited America at least once more in the

early 1850s.

His connections in North America continued after his return to England;

these connections were personal and myriad.

It was Baring Brothers’ London-

ased

American partner, Joshua Bates—and Thomas Baring himself—who, on the part of the

bank, catered to the hundred or more well-

laced Americans who were in London at any

one time in the 1840s and early 1850s.

These two men admitted that in serving the

Americans they had to take special care not to offend the aristocratic sympathies which

infected American democrats when abroad—the same prickliness that Tocqueville had

identified.

Thomas Baring also dealt with more exalted North American banking matters. He

personally oversaw much of the English investment in America’s public debt, debt that

uilt the United States physically in the period when the Canadian and Australasian

colonies were being built constitutionally by the colonial reformers and others. This

banking business was certainly a royal road towards the interest in empire that he showed

in 1868; yet it was not a very profitable road even for him. Thomas Baring was not the

vanguard of some capitalist imperialism in 1868. Most people in the late 1860s would not

have thought Thomas Baring’s North American railway investments worth the paper they

were printed on.

The railways in North America on which Baring spent so much time and money

roceeded from the dream of going transcontinental, an expansionist dream that Baring

would seem to have shared. He suspended judgement in order to pour money into the

Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada (organized in 1852) and to serve on its board. Initially

reluctant to join the board, he was persuaded to do so by his transatlantic acquaintances,

and he joined in 1853 as the representative of the Canadian government. Soon he was the

director, which showed some enthusiasm on his part. So too did the fact that he stayed on

the board when the project began to unravel.

He did see the financial warning signs, but he did not act on them. As director, Baring

reproached his colleagues in Canada for their hints of colonial baksheesh, thei

extravagant spending, and their partisan struggles with each other, but he kept his money

in. The subsequent weakness of the railway was due to there being far less economic than

political demand for long-distance trade within Canada. The whole project discouraged

Baring Brothers from further Canadian investment until about the time that the Colonial

Society was founded. Thomas Baring’s backing of it had been too enthusiastic, the

olitical rather than the economic decision of a banker who had travelled in North

America and who had made American affairs the centre of his career.

He accepted fa

too much low-grade debt, debt secured by almost nothing save the goodwill of a

Canadian government in love with trains—and yet the same Canadian government had

the sense to keep to itself the control of the higher grades of Grand Trunk debt (the debt

that was backed by the rolling-stock).

Thomas Baring, MP, had lost much of his own

money along with the bank’s, but he held on to his Grand Trunk stock; it eventually

appreciated, so that by his death in 1873 it anchored his personal fortune. But as late as

1868, the American investments still did not look like they would come right for Barings.

Empire as the triumph of theory 50

In 1867, in the scare after the failure of the leading discounters, Overend Gurney,

Thomas Baring had to merge his over-extended bank with the firm of Finlay Hodgson,

whose director had been his colleague on the board of the railway.

The railway was not the firm’s only North American investment. Barings, once burned,

took rather less of America’s railway debt than it might have done, but the house invested

heavily in the North during and after the Civil War, when it also stepped up the level o

its investment in Canada.

In the 1860s the firm, burned or otherwise, was still over-

committed in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The firm’s clients in the first

half of the century had helped push the bank in this direction, since when they are

compared to the clients of the other banks, Baring clients seem to have been particularly

interested in British Empire investment. All in all, the family bank was known for its

orth American business throughout Thomas Baring’s lifetime, especially during his

career as its head.

In 1862, Thomas Baring was still willing to lend his name, albeit

with great reluctance, to a doomed project to build a road and telegraph line across

Canada; even he was highly dubious of the success of this project, but lend his name he

did. At least one contemporary observer was shocked by the participation of Thomas

Baring in so ill-starred a scheme.

In sum, Thomas Baring, MP, inherited certain family connections to the English-

speaking world overseas, and plunged into them with alacrity, whether as traveller, as

investor, or as a founder of the Colonial Society. He seems to have been the powe

ehind much of what some would conceive of as the empire, but the way he conceived o

it remains mysterious. He did not publish, an odd omission for a pillar of affairs in the

mid-nineteenth century. What is clear, however, is that he was so keen to invest in North

American schemes that he ignored their weaknesses.

On other occasions, too, he put his ideas about the proper development of the world

above his business sense. He was one of the few great figures among those whom Peel

called the representatives of the ‘Commercial Interests of the Country’

to reject the

abolition of the Corn Laws and to take up instead the protectionist cause of the landed

classes. Baring explained that the idea of suddenly dropping tariffs was in his view ‘a

great departure from a system of cautious and gradual application of relaxation in ou

existing duties which has always appeared to me the only safe policy for this country’.

Thomas Baring was no automaton-like businessman; his business interests seem to have

come second to his ideas about the ‘cautious and gradual’ development of the English-

speaking world, whether in North America or in Britain itself.

Men of wealth other than Glyn and Baring

Despite the presence of Baring and Glyn, both fabulously wealthy, the Colonial Society

was no club for the rich. Great amounts of liquid money were not especially noticeable in

the Colonial Society. Measured by unsettled liquid assets that might have been investe

in the empire (or anywhere else), the total number of British millionaires to die between

1869 and 1916, inclusive was 193.

Out of those 193, Baring and Glyn were indeed the

only two millionaires in the Colonial Society, despite all the great names on its roll.

There were other millionaires in the Society—if we include the aristocrats qualifying

Businessmen 51

as rich only because of settled landed estates. The owners of settled estates enjoyed only

a guaranteed income and a life interest in the family lands (the ‘strict settlement’). In

exchange for an income during his father’s lifetime, the eldest son of each generation was

forced to agree to these restrictions, and to agree to impose them on his own heir in

turn.

Here then is much of the basis for the traditional British distinction between

aristocracy and money—the aristocrats did not always have very much of the latter to

spend, and they tended to look down on those who did. Estate owners could not sell much

of anything or obtain a mortgage without the approval of the trustees, and the trustees

cared more about the family than they did about the individual.

Still, a settlement usually meant some level of comfort and financial independence. I

(as we saw before) the aristocrats of the Colonial Society were not looking for imperial

employment, were they looking to the empire as a place to invest surplus capital? In fact,

only twenty-four members counted among Great Britain and Ireland’s top 2,500

landowners, those 2,500 holding at least 3,000 acres worth at least £3,000 in rents pe

annum; and, even then, the total reaches twenty-four members only if we credit fou

eldest sons, among them Lord Bury, with what they had yet to inherit in 1868. Out of ou

twenty-four, only the Duke of Argyll counted among the top 115 landowners, those who

had more than 50,000 acres.

Much of the land belonging even to parvenus would have

een subject to a legal settlement and included in these figures, for the wealthy copied the

ractices of the landed elite; even in the 1860s the strict settlement was spreading and

growing. Therefore the landed aristocrats (old or new) joining the Colonial Society would

for the most part have enjoyed only life interests in their estates, rather than investment

income that needed to find a home overseas.

But one more man who was in the top 115, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam (not himself a

member of the Colonial Society, but closely related to two people who were), may well

have had an economic interest in empire that bears looking into. The 6th Earl was an

unusually wealthy aristocrat, and he was unusually close to business concerns, just as his

father had been. But his father, the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, was no imperialist. He publicly

campaigned for an industrial future to be marked, in his view, by stability and prosperity

for the workers. He campaigned against the foreign policy of Palmerston, and for years

he was a parliamentary gadfly working to humanize or limit the British presence in

Ireland.

The 6th earl, who did not continue his father’s anti-imperial campaigning, was in part

represented in the Colonial Society by his brother, the Hon. Charles William Wentworth-

Fitzwilliam, who had visited Oregon and Vancouver Island in the winter of 1852 and

1853. Back in London, the Hon. Charles would take up the case of the small businessmen

of Vancouver Island who were complaining about the power of the Hudson’s Bay

Company.

Here perhaps there was some economic imperialism. Indeed, the Hon. Charles

developed connections with coal-mining on Vancouver Island and with railway building

and settlement on the lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the mainland.

But the

Hon. Charles was not the only Fitzwilliam to forge a connection to British North America

and the empire. The 6th Earl was also represented in the Colonial Society by his son and

heir, Lord Milton (one of the four eldest sons counted above). Lord Milton not only

visited the western Canadian frontier in winter, as his uncle Charles had done, but he also

Empire as the triumph of theory 52