Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
corresponding changes in Britons’ approach to history. His contribution
here was to insist that history was not always and entirely a history of
progress. Liberal individualism was not always a benefit. Authority was
often needed, and freedom was frequently abused. Nations and peoples
did no t always advance, but sometimes deteriorated, falling short of the
standard that their ancestors had set. Strong measures of self-defense
were sometimes necessary, and sentimental devotion to the improvement
of bac kward races was a luxury that the powerful could not always afford.
Froude did not convince his readers to make these adjustments in their
thinking so much as he resonated with the changes in the zeitgeist that
they had made on their own. Here, paradoxically, we can perhaps see the
limits of his influence. For if Froude helped his readers to think differently
about history, race, and empire, his specific history of race and empire
was not one that most of them could embrace wholeheartedly. His ven-
eration of the Tudors, his glorification of authority, his celebration of
preindustrial values, and his strange attraction to the moral climate of
the sixteenth century were all deeply rooted in his own life-story. They
were, however, quite idiosyncratic and of limited relevance to other
members of his class and generation, especially those who were loath to
make a clean break with the liberal allegiances into which they had been
born. Such people were persuaded that the problems of race and of empire
were indeed two of the most critical (and critically interconnected) dilem-
mas of the age. To resolve them, however, required a different kind of
history – one far more radical and intellectually innovative – than the
conventional narrative history that Froude offered up.
Conclusion 205
5 Greater Britain and the “lesser
breeds”: liberalism, race, and
evolutionary history
The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method
applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than
the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions.
F. Pollock, Oxford Lectures (Oxford, 1890), 41
We are now in a position to trace out all that the Comparative method of
inquiry has to tell us of the earliest political state of that branch of
mankind to which we ourselves belong. We are now ready to stand face
to face with our kinsmen ... In this mighty drama of European and Aryan
history, three lands, three races, stand before all others, as those to
whom, each in its own day, the mission has been given to be the rulers
and teachers of the world ... The Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton,
each in his own turn stands above the other nations of the Aryan family.
Each in his turn has reached the highest stage alike of power and civi-
lization that was to be had in his own age, and each has handed on his
own store to be further enriched by successors who were at once con-
querors and disciples.
E. A. Freeman, Comparative Politics [1873] (London, 1896), 24–5
This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and
be hanged for it.
E. A. Freeman to F. H. Dickinson, New Haven, Connecticut,
December 4, 1881, in W. R. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward
A. Freeman (London, 1895), II: 242
In 1866–8, Charles Dilke, a young Londoner of independent means, took
a tour of the English-speaking world. After returning home, he published
his impressions in a book, which he entitled Greater Britain. Partly because
of its catchy title, the book went quickly through four editions. In its pages,
readers found a sober assessment of that progressive imperialism, which
seemed no longer quite as simple and inexorable as it had in Macaulay’s
day. Elected to Parliament on the new reformed franchis e, Dilke quickly
rose to a leadership position on the Liberal left. In the House of Commons
he articulated a radical version of Gladstonian Liberalism, and was men-
tioned as a possible successor to the Grand Old Man himself. With regard
206
to the Empire, Dilke let his book do the speaking. Neo-conservatives like
Froude accused Lib erals of abandoning the Empire, but Greater Brit ain
demonstrated that this need not be so. The triumph of federal government
in post-bellum America showed that democracy and territorial expansion
could be reconciled. “In America,” Dilke avowed, “the peoples of the
world are being fused tog ether, but they are run into an English mold:
Alfred’s laws and Chaucer’s tongue are theirs whether they would or
no ... Through America, England is speaking to the world.” Yet if the
United States could ventriloquize in the voice of England, how much
more effectively could England speak for herself, if only she learned how
to devolve her overseas possessions and reunite them in a genuinely
voluntary union that would radiate British liberalism through every con-
tinent on earth.
1
Dilke’s impact can be measured by the number of successor volumes
that fleshed out his fragmentary argument: Fre derick Young’s Imperial
Federation, F. P. Labilliere’s Federal Britain, and H. M. Mortimer-
Franklyn’s The Unit of Imperial Federation , to name only a few. In 1884,
these men founded a bipartisan Imperial Federation League, which drew
in the leading Liberal politicians W. E. Forster, Lord Rosebery, James
Bryce, and Joseph Chamberlain.
2
With the rise of a German as well as a
North Ame rican federation, federalism was touted as the way of the
future. In a world where states were metamorphosing into super-states,
Britain’s greatness was now, more than ever, contingent on her ever-
increasing ability to become greater still. Surrounded to the east by
Greater Russia and Greater Germany, to the south by Greater France,
and to the west by the United States, Britain would have to break out of
this enclosure. Leap-frogging oceans, her empire might be re-forged into a
super-state that could encompass the globe. A century earlier, the thirteen
North American colonies had been lost because such a trans-oceanic
federation had been impossible under the conditions of that day. By
1884, however, all the white settler colonies – in Canada, Australasia,
and the Cape – had acquired their o wn v ersions of “responsible” self-
government. Moreover, with the advent of the railroad, telegraph,
1
Charles Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English Speaking Countries (New York,
1869), quote on ix. On Dilke, see Stephen M. Gwynn and Gertrude Tuckwell, Sir Charles
W. Dilke, 2 vols. (London, 1917); Roy Jenkins, Victorian Scandal (New York, 1965); Kali
Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (Oxford, 1999); David
Nicholls, The Lost Prime Minister: A Life of Sir Charles Dilke (London, 1995).
2
Frederick Young, Imperial Federation of Great Britain and her Colonies (London, 1876);
F. P. de Labilliere, Federal Britain; or, Unity and Federation of the Empire (London, 1894);
H. M. Mortimer-Franklyn, The Unit of Imperial Federation: A Solution of the Problem
(London, 1887).
Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds” 207
steamship, and global navy, it could be argued that distance had been
“annihilated” and no l onger posed a natural barrier to political unity.
Through federation, British capitalism would gain a wider sphere of
operation, British power would be configured for the c oming era, and
the world would be rendered safe for British democra cy.
3
Problems arose, however, when these general sentiments in favor of
imperial federation were translated into definite constitutional schemes.
Direct representation of the colonies in the existing Westminster Parli-
ament was clearly impractical, while the creation of a non-binding
executive advisory board giving advice to British ministers would hardly
satisfy colonial aspirations. Yet to create a fede ral super-pa rliament sui
generis wo uld b e tanta mount t o a cons titu tional rev olut ion on which no
consensus was possi ble. Given these practical impediments , i t is not
surprising that some of the greatest advocates of worldwide Anglo-
Saxon union – E. A. Freeman, A. V. Dicey, Goldwin Smith, and even
Dilke himself – concluded that formal federation o f the Empire might
never be achieved. As Freeman astutely pointed out, the two terms were
inherently contradictory. “What is ‘Imperial’ cannot be ‘Federal’” and
vice versa, since federations we re voluntary unions contracted between
free peoples, while empires were political despotisms imposed by force.
Those who imagined otherwise, Freeman indicated, “have forgotten the
existence of India and the existence of the United States.” In a true
Greater British federation, he privately noted, “we all s hall be o utvoted
by Hindus and Mahometans.”
4
Of course, the advocates of federation intended nothin g of the sort. All
the writers and politicians involved in this discussion – whether they
favored a formal federation or preferred to muddle through with existing
arrangements – agreed that democratic rights in the Greater Britain of the
3
John Kemble, Federal Britain: A History (London, 1997), 1–78; Michael Burgess, The
British Tradition of Federalism (Leicester, 1995), 1–79. These debates and discussions
have been masterfully examined by Duncan Bell in The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire
and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007). Bell, however, has limited
his focus to “the debate over the potential union of the United Kingdom with its so-
called settler colonies” (1). These were indeed the terms in which the idea of Greater
Britain was conceived by most late nineteenth-century British imperialists. But what
of the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon would-be federators and Britain’s vast
“coloured” colonial dependencies? This chapter takes up where Bell left off, exploring
the way in which history, race, and evolution were used, especially by liberals, to try to
regulate the relationship between imperial Anglo-Saxons and the colonized “lesser
breeds.”
4
W. R. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, 2 vols. (London, 1895), 356–7;
Burgess, British Tradition,50–60; Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 179–88; Ged Martin, “The
Idea of Imperial Federation,” in Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin (eds.), Reappraisals in
British Imperial History (London, 1975), 121–39.
208 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
foreseeable future should be restricted to Anglo-Saxon males (or at least
white males) alone. To be sure, Dilke had presented an attractive picture
of the United States as a melting-pot in which immigrants were being
anglicized, and even the freed Negro slaves were assimilating to the
dominant culture. In the United States, however, Negroes comprised
only about 13 percent of the population and white immigrants another
12 percent. In the British Empire, by contrast, only 12 percent of the
population lived in autonomous (white) territories that remained in the
Empire by choice. Even Dilke, who hoped for a more egalitarian future,
was convinced that Greater Britain’s 88 percent of colore d subjects had to
be governed by despotic means.
5
These awkward facts were embarrassing to most Victorian Liberals, and
it was only by ignoring them that they could persist in their quixotic
federation schemes. Yet the qu estion of how such dependencies should
be governed could not be wished away. A generation earlier, it had posed
no fundamental difficulty for James Mill or the Macaulays, since they were
able to rationalize the despotism as a temporary condition that would lead
to British acculturation and/or political independence in a matter of
decades. By the late nineteenth century, however, it had become apparent
that this was not happening, and that the road to postcoloniality would
take a very long time. While most liberals continued to believe that all men
should be protected in their property, active citizenship in governing the
Empire would have to be restricted on racial grounds. Yet to articulate
such racial restrictions too openly also caused discomfort because of
cognitive dissonance with abstract liberal views. After all, the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the fourteenth and fifteenth amend-
ments to the United States Constitution, not to mention the Queen’s
India Proclamati on within Greater Britain itself, all seemed to preclude
legally enforceable civic discrimination based on race, religion, color, or
creed. How then were such racial discriminations to be established and
practically defended in liberal terms?
6
In this chapter we will see how one part of the answer lay in the adoption
of a new kind of evolutionary history. The need to rank the Empire’s
manifold ethnic groups hierarchically, along polarities of enfranchisement
or dependence and inherently high or low wage capability, created
the need for a new kind of racial theory that would naturalize these
5
Population figures are from 1900. B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge, 1962), 12–13; J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor, 1965), 20; Bureau of
Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington, DC, 1949), 25.
6
S. V. Desika Char, Readings in the Constitutional History of India, 1757–1947 (Oxford,
1983), 299–300; C. A. and M. R. Beard, A Basic History of the United States (New York,
1944), 507–8.
Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds” 209
distinctions in professedly objective ways.
7
Simultaneously, the appear-
ance of new scientific theories of evolution enabled history to be re-written
in the framework of an incremental longue durée.InChapter 4, we saw
Froude and Buckle groping for a way to incorporate a longue durée per-
spective into a traditional historiography that remained essentially con-
junctural and narrative in form. The answers th ey came up with, vague
notions of “race” and “environment,” were becoming the coin of intel-
lectual exchange in their time. In this chapter we will examine how these
notions were elaborated between the 1860s and the 1880s, to forge a new
kind of evolutionary history that seemed consistent with both the discov-
eries of science and the requirements of Empire.
The result of this new evolutionary history, as we shall see, was the
bifurcation of historical writing along racialized lines. Those groups and
peoples deemed capable of individual agency and political independence
were to be chronicled through traditional methods of narrative exposition,
albeit with one eye always trained on the distinctive qual ities and features
that had enabled them to preserve their racial superiority. By contrast,
those groups and peoples deemed too backward to participate in politics
were to be consigned to the long evolutionary timescale. Incorporation into
the Empire had indeed brought such peoples within the ambit of recorded
history; however, they could not properly become historical actors in their
own right. Subordinated by their supposed civilizational deficiencies,
they found that their place was to accept the tutelage of the white imperial
masters, who deemed themselves to be more evolutionarily advanced.
The task of liberal colonial administrators was no longer to force-march
such backward peoples through the rapid paces of modernization,
Christianization, or Anglicization, as had been the case in the Macaulays’
day. On the contrary, by applying the new techniques of evolutionary and
ethnological study, the liberal imperialist could discern the racial character
of a given people, and thereby devise the precise regime of discipline and
dependency by which they could be most efficaciously controlled.
8
1 The advent of evolution and longue durée history
What did mid-Victorian liberals mean when they used the language
of “race” and “evolution”? For older generations of liberals, from
7
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London, 1982).
8
Theodore Koditschek, “Narrative Time and Racial/Evolutionary Time in Nineteenth-
Century British Liberal Imperial History,” in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland
(eds.), Race, Nation, and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester,
2010), 36–55.
210 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
J. F. Blumenbach to J. C. Prichard, race had been a patently visible but
highly mutable feature. While it was closely associated with culture,
morality, and intelligence, it was seen as alterable through racial mixing,
environment, or the inheritance of acquired characteristics, within a
relatively short period of time. For the defenders of slavery, by contrast,
race was an indelible and immutable attribute. Over many generations the
races had been preserved, virtuall y as separate species, and they were
incapable of interbreeding for any length of time. All too conveniently,
according to this view, some races (notably Anglo- Saxons) were destined
by nature to be masters, while others (most notably black Africans) were
preordained to be slaves. The abolition of slavery, first in the British
colonies and later in the United States, tended to discredit these “poly-
genist” views. Nevertheless during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s there was
no simple return to the Prichardian–Macaulayite position. On the con-
trary, the advent of evolution opened the way to a completely new
approach to race, which more effectively addressed the needs of the late
Victorian capitalist polity and society, and was neither strictly polygenist
nor monogenist in the old raciall y absolutist terms.
9
In the new framework, race was treated as neither immutable nor
incidental, but as a longue durée historical phenomenon that developed
(at least potentially) in progressive terms. While J. S. Mill, H. T. Buckle,
and a few other students of progress steered clear of both “race” and
“evolution,” most others came to embrac e the connection between them
as fou ndational to a chastened liberalism, appropriate for an increasingly
biologistic age. By making “race” progressive, evolution rendered it safe
for liberalism. Yet by limiting “progress” to race, evolution tempered its
velocity. There is a certain irony in the fact that, at the very moment when
“progress” was disappearing from grand historical narratives, such as those
of Froude, it was creeping into a new kind of bio-social evolutionary theory,
where it could endorse the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization in a more
formidable “scientific” manner and reaffirm the civilizing possibilities for
lesser peoples, albeit in gradual, imperially directed ways.
10
9
For early nineteenth-century liberal approaches, see J. C. Prichard, Researches in the
Physical History of Man, ed. and with introduction by George Stocking (Chicago, 1973);
John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames,
1959), 175–247; George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), 1–77. For
polygenism, see Robert Knox, The Races of Man [1850] (London, 1862); Stepan, The Idea
of Race in Science,20–82; Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971); and
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology,78–143.
10
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 144–273; Theodore Koditschek, “Capitalism, Race and
Evolution in Imperial Britain: 1850–1900,” in Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Cha-Jua,
and Helen Neville (eds.), Race Struggles (Champaign-Urbana, 2009), 48–79.
The advent of evolution and longue durée history 211
In his 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , Robert Chambers
had asserted “Development” as the universal law of everything organic, in
a manner that corresponded to the force of “gravitation” on inanimate
objects. These ideas were taken up and further extended during the 1850s
by Herbert Spencer, who claimed that “the evolution of the simple into
the complex, through a process of differentiation,” was “the law of all
progress,” in both biology and society. The most important contribution
to this evolutionary discourse was, of course, Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species, published in 1859. Just how far Darwin’s theory of natural selec-
tion could be seen as progressive was heatedly debated at the time.
Darwin’s initial reluctance to discuss the human implications of his theory
was not shared by many of his followers, who immediately began to
speculate on the implications of applying “natural selection” to the origin
and development of our species. The discovery of proto-human remains,
mixed with the bones of extinct animals in Brixham Cave, greatly rein-
forced the belief that the 6,000-year chronology of the Bible would have
to be abandoned as the timescale for human history, as it had been a
generation earlier for the history of the earth. Charles Lyell’s 1863 The
Antiquity of Man laid out what had finally become the consensus position
among scientists, that mankind was vastly older than Chri stian orthodoxy
had allowed. Darwin, Sir Frederick Pollock concluded, was simply a
historian who deployed the geological timescale to encompass organisms
of every kind. Historians, he implied, might become Darwinians if they
refigured human history on the timescale of race.
11
Just how profoundly this new racial and evolutionary thinking impacted
on Victorian intellectuals can be glimpsed by returning for a moment to
the case of Froude. His sixteenth-century History had been conceived in
the pre-Darwinian era, and displayed no inkling of evolutionary ideas.
Although he never identified as a Darwinian, by 1875, when he made his
trip to South Africa, a distinctively new layer in his thought had emerged.
Profoundly shocked by the situation that he found in Natal, he warned
Lord Carnarvon that a race war would soon be in the offing, and that
only a well -designed policy of imperial discipline could prevent the
11
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation [1844] (Chicago, 1994);
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret
Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000); Herbert Spencer,
“Progress: Its Law and Causes,” Westminster Review, 67 (April, 1857), 445–7; Charles
Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection [1859] (New York, 1963);
Donald K. Grayson, The Establishment of Human Antiquity (New York, 1963); Peter
Bowler, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944 (Baltimore,
1986), 25–35; Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past
(Oxford, 1989), 75–105; Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man
[1863] (London, 1914); Frederick Pollock, Oxford Lectures (Oxford, 1890), 41–2.
212 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
extermination of what he called the “Kaffir” race. The solution he pro-
posed involved a controlled mixture of natural and artificial selection.
Break up the tribes at arms. Let each Kaffir family have its own adequate freehold.
Some will keep this land and cultivate it. They will learn industry. They will cease
to be dangerous, and it would be neither necessary nor just to interfere with them
or their children. But the few good will be rapidly sorted out from the many
worthless – In two or three years the majority, living in idleness and drunkenness,
will have sold their portions. They must become vagrants. They must not be
allowed to squat on the waste lands. They must work for wages until they have
earned their independence. Or they must leave the country and their children
under such circumstances may be equitably taken hold of and apprenticed.
Froude’s proposal provides a good example of how “evolution” could
reconcile formal liberalism with de facto discriminatory policies. Allow
nature to run its course, and the optimal outcome will follow. “As it will
be with the Kaffirs, as with wild animals and with every infe rior race of
man with whom a stronger race has come in contact. ”“They will become
domesticated and must conform to the usages of civilized society, or they
will cease to be,” he portentously concluded. “This is a law of nature with
which it as idle to quarrel as with the law of gravity.”
12
Froude had most of his substantive historical writing behind him when
he issued these pronouncements, but a new cohort of historia ns was
emerging, steeped from the very beginning in evolutionary thought.
Their histories would be conceived in two complementary registers.
Old-style narratives of the Macaulayite or Froudian type would continue
to be published, but they would be underpinned with a multi-millennial
logic of bio-social development. Contests of groups and individuals would
be amplified into struggles between races, while episodic conjunctures
would blend into an evolutionary longue durée. Where the older four-
stage models of social development had been essentially static, with no
clear mechanism of progression from one stage to the next, the new
evolutionism would at least purport to become dynamic (i.e. by assigning
the propensity to improvement as an essential racial trait). “Savagery,”
which had previously been a determinate stage of social development,
would now become something of a floating signifier – a term of anathema-
tization, applied to any group that was deemed to be developing improp-
erly or to be resisting British “improvement.”
13
12
Froude to Carnarvon, January 12, 1875, British Library, London, Add. MSS, 60798.
13
Koditschek, “Narrative Time.” Since my concern here is with the uses of evolution in
historical writing, I will not examine the phenomenon of “Social Darwinism” per se. The
vast and often contentious literature on this subject is even-handedly reviewed by Mike
Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge,
1997).
The advent of evolution and longue durée history 213
As George Stocking and others have demonstrated, Darwinian descent,
and the transposition of mankind’s lifespan from a biblical onto a geo-
logical timeframe, had huge implications for the way in which race was
conceptualized. Yet if the end of polygenism came conveniently in phase
with the end of slavery, the “family of man” end orsed by evolution was
something far more extended and distant than that which the old
Prichardian monogenism had formerly proclaimed. Now that the com-
mon ancestor of the m odern races was no longer the familiar patriarch,
Adam, he had beco me a much more distant, brutish savage, who fell far
short of the bourgeois individualism, intelligence, and respectability that
modern liberalism valorized, and modern capitalism required.
14
The new orthodoxy therefore allowed for a considerable residue of belief
in the inequality of the races – not, to be sure, as absolutely permanent and
indelible, but deeply enough rooted, at sufficient genealogical distance, as
to make the progress and advancement of the “inferior” races no longer a
project that could be completed in one or two generations. Rather, it was
now reconceived as a protracted – even quasi-Darwinian – process that
would have to extend (as Froude suggested) over several centuries. It
was therefore extremely convenient that this new, incremental perspective
on racial development came to fruition at the very moment when the
colonial crises of 1857–86 were leading metropolitan liberals to doubt
whether Greater Britain’s racial others could easily be transformed into
darker versions of themselves.
15
Through the new evolutionary histories,
contemporary differences of culture and geography could be re-mapped as
chronological distance on the scale of time. History and presumptive con-
sanguinity were thereby turned into warrants for the way in which any
particular dependency or people should be integrated economically and
governed politically. National characters – fairly stable and predictable, but
never entirely fixed – could now be juxtaposed in historical terms. Cultures
and races differed, not in their essential humanity, but in the speed and
success with which they had passed through a universal transformation
from savagery to civilization. For those who were classified as savages, the
progress narrative had become so prolonged and extended that the present
generation ceased to experience it in narrative terms. No longer an arena in
which they were allowed to act, it had become a colonized space in which
they were properly managed and confined. The Empire had indeed
14
George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution (New York, 1968), 42–68; Stocking,
Victorian Anthropology,96–104, 146–52.
15
This new position on race was authoritatively articulated by Alfred Russel Wallace, “The
Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man,” in Michael M. Biddis (ed.), Images of
Race (New York, 1979), 37–54.
214 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”