Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

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Such panegyrics, which might seem exaggerated, even slavish, in reality

posed a challenge to the triumphant Briton, setting forth a high standard

of Indian expectation that they too must be mad e the beneﬁciaries of

this vaunted English liberty. Thus, when censorship of the Calcutta

press was imposed, Roy (now the proprietor of several papers, in multiple

languages) penned the solemn and eloquent protest from which the

above-quoted passage is drawn.

The second great duty that Roy enjoins on the British imperial masters

is the obligation to provide their subjects with a western education so

that they would in future be empowered to modernize themselves. In a

letter to the Governor-General, Roy registered his opposition to govern-

ment endowment of ancient Sanskrit learning, which he seemed to

disparage in almost Millite tones. His objection was not to the Sanskrit

learning, however, but to the state endowment of religious curricula, at

the expense of the practical, scientiﬁc, and technological education

that Indians would need to acquire if their descendants were to stand

on their own. Sharing Elphinstone’s prophesy of a future independent

India, Roy saw no reason why “the connection between Great Britain

and India” should not remain “on a solid and permanent footing,” even

after Indians gained self-government. Within the framework of some

voluntary federal constitutional structure, “India may then for an

unlimited period enjoy union with England, and the advantage of her

enlightened Government; and in return contribute to support the great-

ness of this country.” But even if “events should occur to effect a

separation between the two countries,” then a fully modernized, self-

reliant nation of Muslims, Hindus, and Christian European settlers

could follow the American example of independence, creating a distinc-

tively Asian descendan t of the British patrimony.

For the moment, Roy was not inclined to press Indian claims to

enfranchisement (which he doubtless regarded as inopportune).

Instead he cast his voice with the English reform movement, which

was gathering steam in the mother country. When the House of Lords

threatened to throw out the Reform Bill, Roy angrily exclaimed, “In

the event of the Reform Bill being defeated I would renounce my

connection with this country,” and declared that he would shift his

moral allegiance to the United States. But after the great measure

ﬁnally passed, he jubilantly exclaimed, “Thank Heaven, I can now feel

proud of being one of your fellow subjects.” These comments – which

might on one level be read as a subordination of Indian liberty to

Roy, “A Letter on English Education,” in English Works, III: 471–7; “Remarks on the

Settlement in India by Europeans,” in English Works, II: 315–20.

Rammohun Roy’s Union of Anglo-Indian history 95

English liberalism – can also be read as a bold insistence that Indians had

a voice in the English polity. It was a measure of Roy’s self-conﬁdence

(not to mention his elevated class privilege) that he was able to assert –

against the denials of the racists – that he too was a Greater British

citizen. Even more tellingly, it was a measure of his self-possession that

he could deﬂ ect Mill’s fears of the effe minate Brahman with a proud

assertion of his own patrimonial legacy.

This was not an easy maneuver, and it required much sureness of foot.

From the very outset, Roy had announced his principled opposition to the

caste system. Yet in practice he never fully broke with his Brahmanical

entitlements, and always took care that his multiple transgressions –

socializing with foreigners, traveling across the ocean, and patronizing

social inferiors – never went so far as to enable his high-caste brethren to

repudiate him entirely. To European friends he represented this as a

pragmatic compromise that was necessary to preserve his effectiveness in

Indian society. On a deeper level, it seems to have been a psychologically

necessary device to prevent him from losing touch with his own identity.

So far from abandoning Hindu tradition, Roy put a g reat deal of thought

into envisioning how it might be reconciled with modern progress. At the

height of the Education Controversy, when he was publicly attacking the

propriety of government support for Sanskrit learning, he also privately

endowed a Vedantic Academy , in which just such a curriculum was

explicitly retained. Not surprisingly, these tensions emerged most sharply

on the inﬂammatory question of sati. Having witnessed this horror within

his own family, Roy developed a lifelong aversion to this and other lesser

expressions of gender oppression and inequality. However, he was ambiv-

alent abo ut Bentinck’s decision to proscribe sati, believing that it would be

better for Hindus to come to this decision on their own.

How long Rammohun Roy would have been able to maintain this bal-

ancing act if he had not died prematurely is difﬁcult to tell. It is clear however

that he could not have regenerated the cause of liberal imperialism all alone.

Ultimately, success or failure in Indianizing the progress narrative could

not depend on one man, howsoever brilliant. Rather (pace Elphinstone) it

would require the energies of an entire class of western-educated Indians.

Here too, Roy paved the way, with the formation of Brahmo Samaj, an

CLR, 308–9, 330–6, quote on 334.

CLR, 98, 189–92, 251–301; Ashis Nandy, “Sati, a Nineteenth Century Tale of Women,

Violence and Protest,” in Joshi (ed.), Rammohun Roy and Modernization, 168–94. See also

Roy, “Conference between and Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning

Widows Alive,”“A Second Conference,” and “Abstract of the Arguments Regarding the

Burning of Widows,” in English Works, II: 321–72; and Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions:

The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998).

96 Imagining a British India

organization dedicated to advancing his universalistic ideals. It is character-

istic that this organization should have emerged from the failure of the

Calcutta Unitarian Committee during the 1820s. So long as Unitarianism

retained its vestigial Christian and anglocentric overtones, it elicited only

lukewarm Indian support. Yet in 1828, when Roy took leadership of the

committee, the interest of western-educated Brahmans was awakened as he

translated it into a more authentically Indian cultural idiom, and recast its

ecumenicism in Vedic terms. Over the next two generations, nearly all the

leading Bengali bhadralok (i.e. respectable, middle-class) families would

contribute one or more members to Brahmo Samaj.

Nevertheless, the success of this voluntary association in incubating

an organically indigenous Indian bourgeois ideology would depend on

two things. First, these rising families of merchants, ﬁnanciers, landlords,

and lawyers would have to succeed far more effectively than their zamin-

dari predecessors in integrating themselves into Greater Britain’s bur-

geoning world economy, carving out an autonomous space of

economic empowerment, which would be free of the EIC’s imperial and

political control. Second, such an urbanized Indian bourgeoisie would

have to meet with a new breed of m etropolitan interlocutors who would

follow Roy in recognizing the integrity of Indian culture: a new cohort

of British administrators and intelle ctuals, receptive to experiments in

syncretism, through which a more inclusive Greater British citizenship

might someday emerge. These two requirements were tall orders. On

their fulﬁllment, however, the future of nineteenth-century liberal impe-

rialism would depend.

7 Conclusion

With Rammohun Roy and Brahmo Samaj, we come full circle to the

original orientalist vision that sought to mediate the British–Indian Union

This included the Banerjis, Boses, Chakrabartys, Chatterjees, Dasses, Dattas, Debs,

Dutts, Mitras, Sens, Roys, and Tagores, to name only the most important. CLR, 209–

50, 275–9; David Kopf, Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind

(Princeton, 1979). The organization was originally named Brahmo Sabha. It was ofﬁcially

changed to Brahmo Samaj in 1843. Kopf, Brahmo Samaj,1–153; Nemai Sadhan Bose,

Indian Awakening and Bengal (Calcutta, 1976), 31–133; and Partha Chatterjee, The

Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993), 35–75.

CLR, 130–3, 164–5, 209–30. For studies of Brahmo Samaj and other

“westernized” Bengali intellectuals of the pre-Congress era, see Kopf, Brahmo Samaj;

J. K. Majumdar (ed.), Rammohun Roy and Progressive Movements in India: A Selection from

Records, 1775–1845 (Calcutta, 1941); McCully, English Education; F. Max Muller,

Biographical Essays (New York, 1884); and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered:

Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Oxford, 1988).

Conclusion 97

through interpretations of history. That eighteenth-century neo-classical

version had proven too narrow, and too dependent on aristocratic

elites. B y contrast, the romantic, Scottish orientalism of the 1800–20

period succeeded so well in taming the frontier lands of British India

that it put itself out of a job. Mill ’s counter-orientalist utilitarian recipe

for British–Indian progress was more consistent with capitalist modern-

ization, but it could never underwrite any gen uine vision of imperial

Union because it mandated the obliteration of Indian culture and

history. Rammohun Roy tried to synthesize what was best in all these

approaches, but history placed limits on what he could do. Unlike

Walter Scott, he could not roma nticize the old imperial history of

violence and oppression, because that history was not yet a closed book.

The new Empire that the British unleashed during the early nineteenth

century in India showed that the violence of conquest and oppression

had not yet run its course. So the great syncretist looked to a brighter

political future and a deeper spiritual past. Britain and India had to

come together, he portentously warned a fr iend, because India – like

Ireland – would have a say in Britain’s fate. “From her remote situation,

her riches and her vast population, [she would prove] either useful and

proﬁtable as a willing province of the British Empire, or troublesome

and annoying as a determined enemy.”

The words today sound impressively prophetic, but at the time they

were something of an audacious bluff. Unlike India’s defeated warlords,

her indebted zamindars, and her salaried pandits (not to mention her

millions of overtaxed peasants and degraded artisans), Roy could afford

to issue this challenge because he had become ﬁnancially independent

of the Raj. Liberal capitalism and the progress narrative, he hoped,

would create many others like himself. No less fervently, he hoped

that it would create a more cosmopolitan class of Britons who might

view their Empire more ecumenically, transcending its inherited

anglocentric frame. In the next chapter we will see how metropolitan

liberal imperialists rose to this challenge, by examining the contributions

of the Evangelical Zachary Macaulay and those of T. B. Macaulay, his

historian son.

CLR, quote on 385–6.

98 Imagining a British India

3 Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays

and the liberal romance of Empire

In England we can have no other feeling than that of respect for men who

stood up in bad times to maintain the independence of their country

against unjust aggression ... No greater calamity could have befallen

England than if, for want of such men [William Wallace and Robert

Bruce] she had been able to place on Scotland the yoke she abhorred,

and to have her, even down to this time perhaps, a conquered nation ...

I say it would have been a happy thing for the British Empire if Ireland

had her Wallace and her Bruce, if it had not in those dark ages come by

conquest under the arbitrary yoke of England, but had like Scotland

gradually amalgamated with England by paciﬁc measures.

T. B. Macaulay, toast to Calcutta Scottish Society, Dec. 1, 1834, quoted in

S. C. Sanial, “Macaulay in Lower Bengal,” Calcutta Review, 244 (1906), 306

We are trying ... to give a good government to a people to whom we

cannot give a free government ...We have to engraft on despotism those

blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty ... It may be that the

public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown

that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a

capacity for better government: that having been instructed in European

knowledge, they may in some future age, demand European institutions.

Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to

avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in

English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths

of slavery and superstition, to have ruled them as to have made them

desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a

title to glory all our own.

T. B. Macaulay, speech to House of Commons,

July 10, 1833, in MMW, 557, 572

In 1784, while Walter Scott and John Malcolm were contemplating

their futures, another young Scotsman, three years their senior, struck

outfortheempireofthewest.LikeScott,ZacharyMacaulayhad

dreamed of a life in li teratu re. However, as one among thirteen children

of an impecunious Presbyterian minister, he knew that this was not to be.

Apprenticed to a Glasgow merchant at the age of fourteen, Zachary

decided, two years later, that he had no future in S cotland. Lacking the

patronage that might have drawn him to India, he felt no choice but to

book a passage to Jamaica on his own. Forc ed by circumstances to take

work as a plantation under-man ager, he confessed to a friend, “you

would hardly know [me] were you to view me in a ﬁeld of canes, amidst

perhaps a hundred of the sable race, cursing and bawling, while the noise

of the whip resounding on their shoulders, and the cries of the poor

wretches, would make you imagine that some unlucky accident had

carried you to the doleful shades.” Determined to work his way out of

this perd ition, after ﬁ v e long years Zachary was able t o return home. To

his pleasant surprise, upon arrival in England, he discovered that a

family connection with Thomas Babington had brought him into the

orbit of the leading coterie of Anglican evangelical elites. Seeing the

chance to make something good out of his time in J amaica, he eagerly

joined their burgeoning anti-slavery campaign.

Zachary’s move from the coercive extreme of the ﬁrst British Empire

to the metropolitan center of its prospecti ve liberal successor set in

motion a two-generational saga that this chapter will trace. Th e romance

of freedom that Zachary forged as an anti-slavery activist was ﬁttingly

completed (and rhetorically trumped) by the grand progress narrative

penned decades later by his son. Yet if the Macaulays were prime

makers of the romance of liberal imperialism, in no small part this was

because the experience of liberalizing the Empire provided both of them

with the upward mobility by which they mad e themselves. This personal

stake in the liberalization of the entire Empire gave both men a unique

vantage that had been unavailable to those pr edecessors who had con-

ceptualized union in a more limited bi-national frame: Anglo-Scottish,

Anglo-Irish, or British-Indian. Linking British expansion to the univer-

sal van of human progres s, and identifying empire as the agent for

transmitting improvement to every distant clime, the Macaulays forged

a comprehensive ideological framework that equated the liberalization

of the Empire with the ascendancy of Britain and saw the ascent of

Britain (also their own personal ascent) as inextricably connected to the

creation of a liberal Empire. In both cases, however, as this chapter will

demonstrate, these rhetorical achievements were obtained at a price –

equating progress (both personal and global) with anglocentric assim-

ilation, and obliging colonial others to abandon those national identities

of cultural difference that both Walter Scott and the orientalists had

regarded as necessary to ease the passage from backw ardness into

modernity.

Viscountess Knutsford, The Life and Letters of Za chary Macaulay (London, 1900), 1–12,

quote on 8. For the origins of Anglican anti-slavery see Christopher Brown, Moral Capit al:

Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006).

100 Imagining a Greater Britain

1 The ﬁrst Macaulay and the second British Empire

If Zachary Macaulay believed that evangelical Christianity was his salva-

tion, he also knew that the deliverance was not merely spiritual.

Conversion to Christianity meant upward mobility, the embrace of

political centrism, and a more reﬁned version of masculinity. The oath-

swearing, slave-driving Jamaican gambler became a hard-working evan-

gelical reformer, equally at home in the Negro village or fashionable

drawing room. Surrounded, for the ﬁrst time, by a domestic circle of

pious, intelligent women, Zachary learned to be a respectable, virtuous

man. With enthusiasm, he internalized his mentors’ strategy of working

within the existing system – advancing moderate reform as the expedient

alternative to the dangers of radicalism and reaction at the political

extremes.

Of necessity, this commitment to respectability and modera-

tion enjoined patience and forbearance, since reform had to ﬁnd its own

pace. When the campaign against the slave trade was consumed in the

ﬁres of revolution during the 1790s, the Evangelicals turned their atten-

tion away from the House of Commons and looked for modest, provi-

sional solutions on the ground. During the American wars, a group of

Negroes had already gained their freedom by ﬁghting on the loyalist side.

Settled unsatisfactorily in London or Nova Scotia, they were now to be

sent to Africa, where they could obtain the land that they had once been

promised. Here, in the slavers’ heart of darkness, they could form a model

community of freedmen-farmers that would demonstrate the superiority

of free labor, and gradually obtain increments of self-government as they

demonstrated rising levels of industriousness and self-control.

Offered a position as Governor of this Sierra Leone colony, Zachary

eagerly accepted, regarding himself as tailor-made for this sort of challeng-

ing but redemptive work. Situated about midway between the freedmen

who were being sponsored and the evangelical elites who were sponsoring

them, he seemed a logical choice to mediate between the two. In some

respects, Zachary proved to be a successful leader, since he was able to

Knutsford, Zachary Macaulay,13–25; CM, 3–20. For Evangelicals see Ford K. Brown,

Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961); D. W. Bebbington,

Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989);

Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford, 1923). For anti-slavery see David

Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975). See also

Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative

Perspective (Oxford, 1987); and Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,

1776–1848 (London, 1988).

Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery,67–88; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone

(Oxford, 1962), 1–37; Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists after

the American Revolution (Jefferson, 1999).

The ﬁrst Macaulay and the second British Empire 101

identify with the predicament of his charges, and he was remarkably free of

racial prejudice. Yet he was also rigid and dictatorial and had been placed

by his employers in what turned out to be an impossible situation. While it

appeared to be an attractive proposition on paper, the colony was, in reality,

a money-losing proposition from the start. It was simply impossible to keep

faith with the settlers when the shareholders expected that dividends would

be paid. Subjected to demands for rent, the colonists complained about the

betrayal of pledges that they would be given their own land. Denied the

representative government that they had been promised, they were driven

to the edge of revolt. In the end, it was the very piety and spiritual fervor of

the black settlers that made life miserable for Macaulay. He had gone to

Africa inspired by the most noble philanthropic motives. Now he had to

endure the ingratitude of his charges, who accused him of tyranny and

hypocrisy for his pains.

By 1799, Macaulay had become fed up with the Sierra Leone experi-

ment and – partly chastened – returned home. Setting himself up in

London as a merchant with Africa, he continued to devote the bulk of

his time and energy to evan gelical causes. In particular, he remained

passionately committed to the campaign against the slave trade, doing

a good deal of the organizational and agitational legwork that enabled

the more elite movement leaders, such as Babington and William

Wilberforce, to become household names. In 1807, when the British

slave trade was abolished, Macaulay and his “Saints” shifted their atten-

tion to the evils of the institution of bondage itself. New committees were

formed, new petition campaigns were organized, and new politicians were

cultivated to introduce new bills. By 1833, when slavery was ﬁnally

proscribed throughout the British Empire, Macaulay was old, inﬁrm,

and nearly bankrupt. Preoccupied with the work of emancipation,

he had neglected his own business. In 1826, his ﬁnancial affairs were

thrown into disarray in the same credit crisis which had felled Sir Walter

Scott.

How are we to explain Macaulay’s lifelong preoccupation with slavery,

especially as his own youthful encounter with the Jamaican plantation

had begun to fade? One answer was offered on the epitaph of his

Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone,1–87; Knutsford, Zac hary Macaulay,26–57, 86– 115,

121, 127–8, 164–6, 174, 196–215; Clifford, Slavery to Freetown,105–215; John

Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (Evanston,

1969), 13–31. Zachary’s e xperience in Sierra Leone is examined more thoroughly

in the supplementary notes to this volume, and in Catherine Hall’sforthcomingwork

on the Macaulays.

Knutsford, Zachary Macaulay, 216–489, especially 241–2; Brown, Fathers of the Victorians,

372–82; Coupland, Wilberforce, 228–494.

102 Imagining a Greater Britain

gravestone, which praises a life devoted “to the diffusion of Christianity,

and the relief of human wretchedness,” which “during forty successive

years ... rescued Africa from the woes, and the British Empire from the

guilt of slavery and the slave trade.” If we take this memorial seriously,

then we must place this desire to save and reconstruct the British Empire

at the center of our attention. The original mercantilist Empire, the

epitaph seems to say, was built on a foundation that is no longer tenable.

Grounded in plantation slavery, it now produces only misery and guilt. To

save Africa from woe, and Britain from perdition, it is necessary to

reconstruct the Empire on a new foundation. For Macaulay and his

evangelical friends, it was the transforming power of Christian faith that

provided the animating principle on which a new understanding of

Empire could arise.

In the old Empire , choices had been relatively limited, and roles

comparatively ﬁxed. The dissenter was a second-class citizen. The con-

quered Catholic and Indian were third-class. The black man (with a few

exceptions) was predestined to slavery. The man with a Scottish brogue

had the chance to become a slave-driver. If (like Malcolm and

Elphinstone) he had friends and family in high places, he might ﬁnd a

more elevated and genteel positio n involving less brutal forms of rule. In

the new British Empire, these outward badges of hie rarchy remained

signiﬁcant, but their meaning had been destabil ized by enhanced pros-

pects for individual freedom and mobility. Black people were no longer to

be treated only as beasts of burden. White men like Zachary now had the

chance of a career that would reform them, rather than beat them, in

hopes that their descendants might rise to positions like their own. This

modicum of mobility opened the way to new freedoms and aspirations,

but it also created new anxieties, ambiguities, and problems of recogni-

tion. In a world where impecunious Scotsmen could go out to become

colonial governors and then send the sons of African chiefs to be educated

in London schools, the old system of inherited ranks and ﬁxed statuses

was breaking down. If outward marks no longer made the man, then inner

qualities became more important. Evangelical Christianity provided a

language in which the aspiring individual could monitor his own con-

science, and ﬁnd a standard for judging others around him.

Above and beyond these personal considerations, Christianity’s great-

est merit, in Maca ulay’s eyes, lay in its universality. Daunted by the

Quoted in Knutsford, Zachary Macaulay, 489.

Zachary Macaulay was enough of a parvenu that he deeply felt this individualist religion of

discipline and conscience. But he was enough of an elitist to seek its incorporation within

the established institutions of Church and State. Knutsford, Zachary Macaulay, 250–68.

The ﬁrst Macaulay and the second British Empire 103

bewildering variety of circumstances and conditions that confronted

British rulers in places as diverse as Africa, India, the West Indies,

Ireland, and the white settler colonies, evangelical Christianity presented

itself as a potentially powerful common denominator. It offered a univer-

sal standard of recognition that seemed to solve the problem of imperial

union without any laborious efforts at translation. In place of a multitude

of diffe rent ethnic, class, and gender self-understandings which had to be

translated from one cultural idiom into the next, Christianity offered a

simple act of conversion that promised to bind colonized and colonizers

together in a single moral community.

This hope can be seen in the pages of The Christian Observer, one of

Macaulay’s many projects, which he edited and published (and subs tan-

tially wrote) himself. In a single year (1809), there was a long review of

conditions in Haiti, a retrospect on the American Revoluti on, and an

essay on the prospects for British India.

Given Haiti’s dark history of

enslavement and rebellion, it was here that Macaulay paradoxically

placed his highest Christian hopes. In spite of the brutality to which they

had been subjected, the black freedmen were acquiring bot h religion

and education. In twenty years, he prophesied, they “would be the most

literate peasantry in the world.” By contrast, the Anglo-Saxons of the

northern ex-colonies were not always wise in exercising the freedom to

which they had been born. Still, the British editor strove to understand

their point of view. “As a colony grows in strength it will gradually become

more disposed to contend for its interests,” but unless these interests were

cavalierly disregarded, the “thousand ties of sentiment and affection”

which attached it to the mother country ought to prevent it from breakin g

away.

I suspect that there is in all communities, more particularly in growing colonies, a

certain period, during which, as in domestic life, and for nearly the same reasons,

government is an affair of great delicacy. The period is that when the conscious-

ness of newly acquired strength ﬁrst produces a tendency to insubordination;

when the awe of long-established authority begins to wear away; and knowledge

has generated presumption, but has not yet softened into wisdom ... This period

immediately precedes real maturity ... After the crisis has passed, I apprehend

authority is easily preserved, though it will naturally have assumed a less arbitrary

character.

There was nothing original in Zacharay’s use of the family metaphor

to characterize the relationship of these white, North American

The Christian Observer, 8 (1809), 781–92.

The Christian Observer, 8 (1809), 21–2 and 25–6.

104 Imagining a Greater Britain