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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formation of the British Empire.

But any sort of travel was grand enough. This was an era when simply travelling 500

miles from London qualified a gentleman for membership in an exclusive club.

And

some of the founders had criss-crossed the world a dozen times.

It should be noted that they chose many different parts of the world to be interested in.

Thus they were no bloc of ‘orientalists’ in the modern sense.

Most British people had

other things to think about besides the Orient.

In the nineteenth century, indeed, the

word ‘orientalist’ referred to those Westerners who were arguing against the

Westernization of Indian schools, and for the teaching of Hindu classics in India.

Could

the more modern term ‘orientalist’ really be applied to them? Further afield, could it

really be applied to mid-Victorian factory owners who were interested in markets in

Australia or Germany? Could it be applied to London barristers interested in legal reform

and the growth of probationary system in different settlement colonies? Orientalism did

not pervade British society.

It is better to look for imperialism in English social history,

and even in the findings of the archival historians of places like the Bengal of the early

nineteenth century, than to look for orientalism.

And it is better to group the founders o

the Colonial Society according to the places they actually visited, and in which the largest

number of them seemed to be interested.

The founders in the settlement colonies

The most popular area of the world for the founders was Australasia. Almost all those

who had travelled to or who had lived in Australasia were old enough on their journey

out to remember it for the rest of their lives. Even those who never repeated the journey

y going back and forth to England would count as world travellers. Yet quite a few had

made the journey more than once, seeing a great deal of the empire and continually

thinking about their place in it as they crossed and recrossed the globe. Thirty-fou

members had seen Australia. Eight had been to New Zealand.

At least twelve out of the twenty-eight who had resided in Australia were from

Melbourne (some were officials posted there, some settled there on their own). The fact

that they lived in the city may have had something to do with what they expected in

oining an organization such as the Colonial Society. Melbourne’s population had

exceeded 140,000 by the 1860, less than a decade after the Victoria Gold Rush. By then,

the city had its own traditions of Georgian and Victorian architecture, its own cultural

pretensions, and its own clubs for well-

laced colonials. Members of the Melbourne Club

(1838) would certainly have expected a similar organization to repair to in London, even

if they could not expect an immediate welcome in the exclusive old clubs of the English

aristocracy.

According to one English visitor in 1867, the members of the Melbourne

Club were old squatters who had metamorphosed themselves into the ‘Tory of the Tory’.

Tory as they might be, the old squatters could hardly go to England and barge into the

Carlton.

art from the Melbourne contingent, members of the various Royal, Philosophical, o

Improvement Societies set up across Australia after 1838 also needed a place in London,

since the Royal Society itself would not have had them.

A man who illustrated the

Travels and ideas 63

texture of the Australian information network outside Melbourne, and the many

continuing connections between Australia and England, was George Macleay. He was the

son of a man who was a member of the Royal Society—Alexander Macleay, the humbly

born but hard-working Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. The elder Macleay had

held the Colonial Secretaryship from 1826 to 1837. This was his second career, since he

had retired from the Transport Board in London in 1815 at age 48. He went to Australia

because he needed the money. He died in 1848, having married his daugh-ters into the

colonial gentry. This Alexander Macleay was a self-made man, a man of parts—a man o

insects. His achievements in entomology had been his entrée into the Royal Society. And

he was a man of taste. He built for his family a Regency manor near Sydney, Elizabeth

Bay House (1832), and he was a founder of the (London) Linnean Society, and o

Australia’s first subscription library and the Australian Museum.

Our man, Alexander’s son George, could not compete with all of that. Nor could he

compete with the scientific achievements of his cousin William, FRS, who would one

day explore New Guinea (William had studied under Cuvier and knew Lamarck).

George himself did go on more than one expedition with William, including the most

important of Charles Sturt’s journeys. But when in 1859 George Macleay left his father’s

house for good, rather than going off into the bush or out into the jungle he moved to

London.

London had more Regency architecture than even his father could provide. He

oined the Colonial Society as a UK resident on 16 December 1868. The Society fit the

bill for men like George Macleay, men who were the ‘actual and potential allies of the

gentry’ of Australia (in the words of one historian), and members of the urban uppe

classes of Melbourne and Sydney.

When they retired to London, they wanted to do

Table 5.1 Areas visited

New members Australia NZ Canada India South

Africa

West

Indies

Other

26 June 1868 11 0 10 5 4 2 7

27 June to 12

August 1868

72 9 3 1 0 4

15 August to 3

November 1868

41 3 3 0 0 2

11 November to

30 December 1868

30 3 0 5 1 1

20 January to 25

February 1869

42 3 2 2 0 3

10 March to 13

April 1869

82 4 7 1 1 4

Total 37 7 32 20 13 4 21

Note

Members can be counted in more than one column.

Empire as the triumph of theory 64

more than associate with other former Australians.

They looked for the club

memberships that had marked their urban gentry status in Australia, but most had no real

rofession save that of being a colonist. Thus, the Colonial Society seemed a good

professional body to join.

It should be noted that the Australasians did not form a united front. Some men who

had been in Australasia were appalled at how other men were mistreating the Aborigines

or the Maori. What John Eldon Gorst saw of this matter in New Zealand led him to write

an impassioned book, tour Great Britain campaigning for civil rights, and vow to crush

popular democracy—for in his view it was the common people and their leaders who

attacked the Maori. To keep the common people and their murderous tendencies in

check, he spent his life inventing and organizing the central institutions of the

Conservative Party, under the auspices of Disraeli and Salisbury. In the 1880s he helped

to found the so-called ‘Fourth Party’ (with fellow Colonial Society founder Henry

Drummond Wolff and two men who were too young to have joined the Colonial Society

in its first months, Lord Randolph Churchill and Arthur Balfour); this was a Tory

ressure group that wanted a more direct attack on the Liberal government than their own

front bench seemed willing to provide.

The second most common area of travel after Australia was Canada, which thirty-two

members had visited. At least four, including the banker, Thomas Baring, had on one o

more occasions joined the three dozen or so men at the Canada Club at one of their four-

times yearly dinners in London; founded in 1810, the Canada Club never had a building

or an office of its own, just the regular dinner in some public establishment.

Canada had

its own learned societies and metropolitan clubs, clubs that—uniting learned men,

prominent social figures, and urban businessmen—were being organized at the same time

as their British and Australian equivalents.

The thirty-two former Canadians or visitors

to Canada did look to Canada rather than to Australasia, and not in addition to

Australasia, for there was little overlap between these men and those associated with the

Antipodes. The general category of imperialism had not yet been invented.

And yet some people invented it for themselves. A.R.Roche is worth pausing over,

since he was the Colonial Society’s secretary. Roche was a workaday Anglo-Canadian

—

outwardly an unremarkable type. He laboured as a government clerk at various places in

Canada for the better part of fifteen years, then went home to England. But he dreamed o

tropical empire. He was a traveller in Canada and an armchair traveller in places fa

beyond.

Apparently Roche’s duties in Canada were stultifying and his mind overactive. While

he sat in his office in the frozen north he had New Hebrides on the brain. In 1844, his

rother wrote a book about the New Hebrides; this was Henry Philip Roche, a London

arrister who would eventually become Registrar of the Court of Bankruptcy. He too was

to be a founder of the Colonial Society, as was a third brother, E.S.Roche.

Henry Philip’s book was an anonymously written sixty-six-

age disquisition, very

helpfully called (in full) Description of the New Hebrides Group of Islands in the South

acific Ocean: Showing the Advantages to be Derived from the Formation of a

Settlement on One of the Islands for the Purpose of Cultivating the Spices and the Many

Other Articles of Commerce Indigenous to the Group; with a Brief Notice of the Objects,

&c. of THE NEW HEBRIDES COMPANY, and some General Suggestions for Organizin

Travels and ideas 65

an Extensive and Lucrative Trade, by means of British Capital and Enterprise, amongs

the Numerous Islands and Countries Lying between our Australian and Indian

ossessions, and throughout the Indian Seas Generally; thus opening a new and Almos

unlimited Market for the Consumption of British Manufactures.

The word

‘imperialism’, had it been available, would have been so much more concise, but Henry

Philip got his point across without it: profit-making tropical empire. He added one more

thought, an attempt to connect his mercenary ideas to some higher moral purpose:

Enough has now been said to show the importance of this trade—a trade which,

if conducted on judicious and liberal principles, admits almost of an unlimited

extension. At present it would be premature to enter more fully into detail, as

the course of action which the Company will pursue must depend, in a great

measure, upon the coun-tenance which the Government may give it. To throw

open the existing Dutch monopoly in spices, and to extend the field of our

commerce, cannot be objects of indifference to British statesmen.

Those who wish to elevate the character of a large portion of the human race,

and to convey to them a knowledge of religion, cannot but view in a favourable

light the substitution of a just, equitable, and regular system of trade for one

which too often has been the pretext for nothing but violence and oppression.

So, breaking the Dutch monopoly meant making a tremendous profit, and at the same

time saving souls. Now if this sort of tropical adventuring had occurred on any scale prio

to 1868, and if imperialists involved in it had bucked large in the membership of the

Colonial Society, then our story of the interests and writings of the founders of the

Society would be very different indeed. But the Roche family was not representative of a

wide-spread enthusiasm for tropical empire; there wasn’t one. Nor were the Roches’

plans for bothering the peoples of the New Hebrides actually carried out.

Again, the fate of Henry Philip, dreamer of the New Hebridean dream, was to work

among bankrupts—high poetic justice.

Alfred is more important to us, since he was to

be the Colonial Society’s secretary. His hubris about the plans that he and his brothe

made kept him in Canada and kept him poor.

Divine retribution came about in the following way. Nine years into his Canadian

career, and a few years after his brother’s book came out, an old Canada hand and friend

of his became Governor of Labuan in the East Indies. Roche’s imagination was fired. He

tried to persuade his sisters in England to get him a job under his friend in Labuan, o

otherwise under Rajah Brooke in Sarawak. The ‘12,000 islands of the Eastern seas’

seemed far more exciting than where he was, and Roche claimed that he would accept

less money in the Far East if only he could put an end to his long years in Toronto.

Roche could hardly make himself go on with his work, his official work. He sat in his

Toronto office every day, but he was spending the time reading up on the Spanish

language, hoping that it would come in handy in the New Hebrides.

This fanciful

notion of learning Spanish came from how he misread the book. The first quarter of it

was a long description of how the New Hebrides had seemed to the Spanish explorer,

Quiros, from 1606 to 1614. Yet Spain never administered the islands—and Quiros, pace

Henry Philip Roche, was in any case Portuguese.

So, while Henry Philip’s book was

Empire as the triumph of theory 66

silent on matters of language, Alfred assumed that Spanish was spoken, rather than the

indigenous languages, or English and French.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Alfred, his sisters did not get to see the

Rajah while he was in England, so the official appointments did not come off.

No more

successful were the large-scale missionary enterprises that Alfred next planned for the

ew Hebrides. In a letter to a friend, he promised not only a missionary station, but also a

large trading and industrial concern in the East Indies along the lines of what his brothe

had planned. He would have all kinds of success in the South Seas. He was sure that he

would also enjoy a large measure of political power-

ower over, in his words, the

‘seventy thousand of the heathen savages who inhabit the islands of the New Hebrides’.

Apparently, Roche the secretary daydreamed not so much about a British Empire as a

ersonal one; he would be the next Rajah Brooke. And then he took a rash step. He

refused a promotion to a higher secretarial grade because he was planning to leave the

country and do great things. Indeed, his ‘Asia Company’ (for he had already selected the

name) would go on ‘to create, to establish, and to build up, to carry the flag, the religion,

and the civilization of England over a fifth portion of the globe’—even to some very rich

areas of the Canadian northwest.

Poor Roche. During the Crimean War he wrote a seventy-

age work on how Grea

Britain ought to take Alaska from the Russians, describing his proposal further in the

ontreal Gazette; no one paid attention and peace was made.

Then, after several more

years as a secretary at the lower grade where he had stranded himself, and after lord

knows how much more daydreaming, he was sent home to England to testify before a

parliamentary inquiry into the status of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Roche could finally

tell Parliament about the great imperial destiny of the vast lands under the control of the

Company. This was the zenith of his career. A moment later it became the nadir. He had

testified to the riches of the northwest of his dreams. Then, under close questioning he

had to admit that he had never been to the northwest. He had not even set foot in the

nearer parts of the Hudson’s Bay Company territory. The members of the committee

were less than impressed by his quality as a witness.

He dreamed about places of which

he knew little.

The founders in Asia and Africa

Of course, some Britons had better information about the world beyond the pale o

British settlement. At least twenty had lived in India. All but two of this group

maintained addresses and personal interests in the United Kingdom. (Very few

Englishmen would acquire homes or estates in the subcontinent or cut their ties to

England, even in those brief periods, such as just after the Mutiny, when the Governor-

General encouraged them to do so.

)

In any case, well over half of the Colonial Society founders who were in India were

well-

laced officials of the Raj. They had rather nice English homes to go back to. Very

few of them ever belonged to the Indian civil service, whose membership in the mid-

nineteenth century came largely from outside the upper classes.

Travels and ideas 67

One member of the Colonial Society who had been in the civil service in India was

hardly lacking in privilege. He was Lord William Hay, later 10th Marquess of Tweedale.

Although a Liberal MP by the time the Colonial Society was founded, he was still

travelling from time to time in the Himalayas. On his return he would report his findings

to Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society. India ran in

Hay’s blood. His father and brother (the 8th and 9th Marquesses) had been there, and the

9th Marquess (then Lord Arthur Hay) fought in the Mutiny.

Humble civil servant or no,

Hay was no exception to the rule that the Colonial Society founders who were in India

were prominent men.

The thirteen founders who were in Southern Africa are harder to get to know. Six were

hantoms, while seven others left some evidence about themselves. Not very many books

would come from these men. Those who wrote anything tended to produce fairly basic,

mostly descriptive articles. When the Society was born, for example, a young Natal

newspaperman and member of the Legislative Council, John Robinson, had just

published the first of his picture portraits of Natal life in Cornhill, one of them running in

ovember 1867 and the other in October 1868. These brief pieces of journalism were

competent in their discussions of the landscape, but they did not reach questions o

imperial policy, political controversy, or relations with the natives of the country.

Robinson, who grew up in the bush with little formal schooling, would go on to write a

novel and to become, in the 1890s, the first Prime Minister of Natal under responsible

government.

Such casual writers often revealed a more emotional and less economic variety o

imperialism. Such is the case with the medical doctor who went to Natal, Dr Robert

James Mann. A physician practising first in Norwich and then in Buxton, Derbyshire, he

egan by giving talks to local audiences, but these soon turned into numerous books on

astronomy and medicine. Indeed, he became the key British popularizer of science of his

era. A friend of Tennyson, Dr Mann also wrote—with the Poet-Laureate’s help—a short

book defending the poem ‘Maud’; the book, Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ Vindicated, was

ublished in 1856. What needed vindicating against the general outrage of the critics was

the mad narrator’s glorification of warfare (the unpopular Crimean War, in this case) as a

cure for one man’s troubled inner life.

Action and warfare are vitalizing forces, Mann

believed, because ‘rational creatures do, every now and then, cut each other’s throats, and

low each other to atoms by hundreds of thousands; since the Omniscient has accorded to

warfare an appointed function in human affairs’.

Whether to pursue the Tennysonian life of action, or simply to live in a bette

climate—for his health was failing—Mann prepared to leave the country at the very time

that he was completing his book on Tennyson. The following year, 1857, Mann accepted

an invitation from Bishop Colenso to come to Natal. He lived there from 1857 to 1866,

ecoming superintendent of education in 1859. When he returned to England he settled in

London, working as the Natal emigration agent. In that role, he went on to publish a

number of guidebooks and other pamphlets for potential emigrants.

Mann stressed that the main reason for anyone to go to Natal was this: It was a pleasant

place 6,000 miles closer than Australia.

One may pick up an echo here of his own

thinking before he left England, namely that Mann seems to have had in mind not so

much the call of a particular imperial destination, but a menu of likely places o

Empire as the triumph of theory 68

settlement in the temperate empire, places that one could visit for one’s own adventure o

to find solace for one’s Tennysonian heart. Mann joined the Colonial Society at the

inaugural meeting.

In contrast to the southern tip of Africa, the rest of the continent attracted almost no

attention from the early members of the Colonial Society—except for three of them, plus

the odd Member of Parliament who had to deal with African issues. As Dorothy Helly

has shown, British interest in tropical Africa blossomed only after the mid-1870s. Until

then, only about 150 Englishmen, many of them officials, showed any sustained interest.

The 150 men—men who were members of the Royal Geographical Society, the early

ethnographic societies, and various evangelical or anti-slavery groups—constituted, in

Helly’s words, ‘[a] web of communication by which a small, dedicated, group o

Englishmen interested in keeping themselves “informed”, exchanged their views and in

so doing reinforced their own assumptions’.

The Colonial Society was another such web, rather larger, and more interested in the

settlement colonies. Some of its members, such as Sir William Mackinnon, would late

develop an interest in Africa, but it would have been quite another thing to do so in the

1850s or 1860s.

The three men of the Colonial Society whose association with tropical Africa had

begun before 1868—so that their interests fed into the Colonial Society, rather than

feeding on it—included Colonel Sir Andrew Clarke, who had been posted off Wes

Africa briefly in 1864 and 1865. William Edmondstone, RN, was unique having spent

some years in tropical Africa; he was stationed at Zante in 1859 with the rank o

Commodore. Both of these officers had been called to defend African entrepôts, and yet

neither man had chosen an African career, and neither showed any wide-ranging interest

in the continent.

By contrast, our third man showed a great deal. He was Lord Alfred Churchill,

Conservative MP for Woodstock, and a younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. He

does not seem to have visited the continent himself, but as Chairman of the Liverpool-

based ‘African Aid Society’ he pushed for the expansion of British control and trade in

West Africa. His larger purpose was, in his mind, to help black people. In 1859, as an

official of the Aborigines Protection Society, he had been part of an unsuccessful

movement to annex Fiji and keep it out of the hands of Americans or other insensitive

owers. Then, in 1860, he and his African Aid Society came up with a bigger plan.

Churchill (again unsuccessfully) pressed the government to redeploy its West African

stores and ships to a central place on the coast near the Cameroon Mountains; then to

found a sanatorium there to save the lives of European soldiers and traders who were too

weak to reach a place of rest in Europe; and finally to found a colony of free blacks from

Canada, which was the main goal behind all of Churchill’s plans for the shifting about o

troops.

At one point in 1864, Churchill came into conflict with other founders-to-

e of the

Colonial Society by advocating just this sort of ambitious and intricate tropical

expansion.

They wanted nothing of the kind. Nor did the British traders who already

had interests in Africa. They strongly protested Churchill’s plans for steam navigation on

the Gambia, subsidized by the imperial government. The established traders did not want

the competition.

Travels and ideas 69

Churchill was indeed a humanitarian by intention, but he had convinced himself that a

European presence was really the best for everyone. In 1864, he wrote that a ‘

ermanen

British occupation’ would serve to advance ‘civilization’.

By this time, he was also

favourably disposed towards the settlers in New Zealand, a country that he had visited; he

did not think that the New Zealand settlers meant any harm to the Maori.

He did not

examine the specifics of the case; he had let his general ideas about colonization run

away with him.

In sum, most of the travellers in the Colonial Society went to Australasia, North

America, India, or Southern Africa. Few had any connection to tropical Africa or East

Asia.

More strikingly, only fifteen had any demonstrable connection with Ireland,

despite that island’s role in providing the empire with administrators. The Irish

imperialists were mostly Anglo-Irish, men who were accustomed to running hegemonic

governments at home as well as abroad.

Where has all this got us? It seems that the top one-third of the members, the people

who keep showing up as aristocrats, as ministers, as MPs, and some of them even as

businessmen, may very well be described as ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, a species identifie

by Cain and Hopkins.

The one-third below them (namely the chamber-of-commerce

types and the bureaucrats) might not be capitalists, but merely gentlemen of more modest

station—men who worked, not men who invested. Yet both groups were dominated by

men who wrote.

While ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ is therefore a good label for distinguishing the more

prominent part of the membership, ‘gentlemanly imperialist’ is more inclusive. By and

large the men in the top one-third were more gentlemanly than capitalistic, and the men

of the middle one-third of the membership were incapable of the kind of liquid

investment that would make them capitalists. Both the top gentlemen and the middling

gentlemen had mixtures of economic and non-economic motivations for their imperial

interests, as it would seem for everything else. Yet they were imperialists to a man, o

they would not have joined the Colonial Society and written on imperial subjects.

The vital point is the uncertainty about how heavily economic concerns weighed on

people’s minds. This uncertainty comes from the overlapping of social identities,

occupational identities, and personal interests. But whatever the members’ reasons fo

going on their travels or writing their books, the simple fact that they did so demonstrates

one thing: they had brushed up against some part of the cultural border at which England

at its apogee was bound to meet the underdeveloped world. They had to categorize the

information that poured in from elsewhere. And they wrote about all of this.

The pattern of their writings

Yet they did not follow the headlines very closely, or not in the way one might expect.

Some of the men who were interested in overseas democracy looked at the American

Civil War (1861–65)—

ut for most of the founders this great event was not very

significant. They paid little more attention to it than they did to the Indian Mutiny o

1857–58, and little more attention than they would pay to the Governor Eyre controversy

of 1865–66. They did not need to pay attention to these new events. Most of the founders

Empire as the triumph of theory 70

had long before developed their own general theories of what the empire was and what it

ought to be. The concentrated bloodshed in the American republic did not matter very

much when it was seen against the background—the general destiny of the settlemen

empire—that the Colonial Society founders had been developing over a considerable

eriod of time. Their British Empire did not have slavery or mob rule, which were

American peculiarities that could only be distractions from the larger, normative trends o

the British world.

The founders were almost as good at ignoring the native rebellions within the British

Empire. While the Indian Mutiny had to be put down, it did not have to be pondered, fo

the grand future would come despite the random eruptions of native resistance. As we

will see, even the founder of the Colonial Society himself, who had been an officer in the

Indian Army and who wrote voluminously on imperial subjects, seems to have paid the

Mutiny no attention at all. He may have gazed at the Indian headlines in the newspaper,

but he didn’t write anything about them, any more than most of the other founders would

condescend to write anything about Governor Eyre’s imposition of martial law and

udicial murder after the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. English society was polarized

and much exercised over the Governor Eyre controversy—

ut the founders of the

Colonial Society were not.

Except for dissidents and doubters such as Lord Salisbury, neither American history

nor native rebellions within the empire signified very much, for they were unpleasant and

unrepresentative; what was really going on in this world were the great global trends o

British expansion, settlement, and self-government. Or perhaps the great trend—if you

cared more for the historical and archaeological study of the past than for the

development of overseas democracy—was the expansion of British control and

civilization in a way that contrasted favourably with what the Romans did, and for that

matter with what the Spanish did.

Either way, there were always short notices in The Times about the growth and

development of different parts of the British Empire. The Colonial Society founders had

made their own selections from these facts and from what they had seen on their own

travels. Then they had filtered this flow of information through their reading o

Tocqueville or archaeology. Finally they had developed their general ideas about the

course of human history. These ideas were secure against the assault of the majo

unrepresentative events that from time to time made a greater noise in the newspapers,

and that temporarily drew the attention of a wider group of people to imperial questions.

The founders may once have had their attention caught by headlines in a similar way, but

they had chosen to continue thinking and writing on the subject; they developed a steady

and long-term interest in it. Thinking and writing on this subject—and, if not publishing

articles and books on the empire, then writing official documents on it—led them into the

kind of imperial generalizations that they would share by 1868. They had become long-

term enthusiasts, and they did not react to events in the same way as those short-term

enthusiasts whose interest in the empire came and went, and which extended only to one

or more of the major controversies of each decade. Indeed, the fact that the founders had

imposed their own pattern, their own categories upon the flow of information that

reached them allowed them to filter it, to pay attention to what they wanted and ignore

the rest. Their world was quieter than the world of those people who bounce around from

Travels and ideas 71

subject to subject, following a large proportion of the major headlines hither and thither.

Table 5.2 shows the founders who published works about the empire and other subjects

efore April 1869; it does not include those who wrote unpublished official or private

apers, or works that were published later. Again, writers were especially prominent

among the members who had joined the Society by the end of the summer of 1868. What

Table 5.2 cannot show (although subsequent chapters can) is the movement towards

worldwide generalizations within individual books. It is not so much that the founders

began by writing books in one category (the miscellaneous category in the right-hand

column, for example), and later began writing books of another kind, but that in all thei

writings the founders tended to move towards generalization and imperial themes, and to

filter away the noisy specifics. One has to look within the books. The fact that a numbe

of the founders moved to a new category of writing in 1857 or 1858 may seem to indicate

the influence of the Indian Mutiny of those years—

ut only a few of those who change

subjects at this time wrote about India. The founders had abandoned the specifics well

efore those wars and crises of the 1860s that might have seemed to be the background o

the founding of the Colonial Society.

Table 5.2 Subjects of books and articles published by the founders by April 1869;

founders listed by birth year

New members Settlement

colonies, the

USA,

emigration

Non-

settlement

colonies and

the Tropics

Archaeology,

ethnology

Other

26 June 1868

? H.Montgomerie x

? L.H.Wray x x

1794 G.Bell x x

1801 A.Waddington x

1803 W.M.Coghlan x

1803 Bulwer Lytton x x x

1807? D.P.Blaine x

1808 W.Henty x

1808 C.Nicholson x x

1814 E.Wilson x

1816 A.Cochrane x

1817 R.J.Mann x x

1817 H.P.Roche x x

1819 A.R.Roche x

1823 C.Fortescue x

1823 D. of

Manchester

1828 C.F.Varley x

Empire as the triumph of theory 72