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

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brought savagery and civilization face to face. But it was a mistake to think

that the former could be transformed in a few lifetimes.

2 John Lubbock and the evolution of “savagery”

The liberal historian whose work earliest and most directly drew on the

evolutionary revolution was John Lubbock. Scion of a wealthy London

banking family, Lubbock became deeply interested in science as a child.

Charles Darwin, who was a neighbor of the family, took the boy in hand

and gave him a ringside seat at the re-conceptualization of evolutionary

theory that was silently fructifying amid his Down House laboratories.

Contributing his own slight experiments to supporting Darwin’ s theory,

the twenty-ﬁve-year-old Lubbock had the privilege of helping to prepare

the manuscript of The Origin of Species for the press. However, Lubbock

understood (perhaps earlier than Darwin) the revolutionary implications

of evolution for the history of mankind. By putting Brixham Cave together

with The Origin of Species, he conﬁrmed what some geologists had already

suspected: Stone Age men had been walking the earth in the time of the

mammoths, many millennia before Adam’s day. In his own 1865 treatise,

Pre-Historic Times, we can still savor a taste of Lubbock’s excit ement at the

emergence of a new discipline, archaeology, that gave promise to throw an

evidentiary bridge between the historian’s era of written records and the

geologist’s mute fossil-attested eons of stone.

Henceforth, human hist ory and natural history would come together in

a single scholarly endeavor that would trace the conjunctures and con-

tingencies that buffeted human action, while simultaneously disclosing

the hidden bio-social forces that shaped human capabilities over the long

run. Lubbock’s own contribution to this new history of the longue durée

was his identiﬁcation of the “neolithic” as a distinctive stage between the

old stone age (paleolithic) and the bronze age fashioning of weapons and

tools.

Yet the evidence for this and other eras of prehistory was frag-

mentary and ambiguous. To make the past come alive for the general

reader, Lubbock drew on ethnological accounts of modern savages to

ﬂesh out the details of the European Stone Age that coul d not be dis-

cerned from excavations alon e. Using illustrations, he showed how the

implements of modern hunter-gatherers resembled the artifacts that

Horace G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, 2 vols. (London, 1914);

J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966),

228–34; Mark Patton, Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock

(Aldershot, 2007); Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented

Evolutionist (New York, 1992), 302–3, 361.

John Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times [1865] (London, 1869).

John Lubbock and the evolution of “savagery” 215

European archaeology had found. It seemed reasonable to infer that the

“low mental culture” exhibited by these modern sa vages corresponded to

an earlier stage of human evolution which white Europeans had left

behind. At the same time, it was now clear that not all savages were

equal. Some , like the Anglo-Saxo ns, passed quickly through the various

stages of bio-social and technological development and became self-

domesticated through their own efforts. Othe r peoples remained in a

savage, mentally fossilized state.

To address these more complex questions of development Lubbock

published a follow-up study in 1869, entitled The Origin of Civilization and

the Primitive Condition of Man. Probabl y inﬂuenced by E. B. T ylor’s much

more sophisticated Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865),

Lubbock now made a serious effort to examine not only the artifacts but

also the marriage customs and religious beliefs of a wide range of savage

and barbarian groups.

Like Tylor and Dilke, Lubbock acknowledged

that race played a certain role in determining the behavior, habits, and

civilizational aptitude of any given people. Yet he was struck by what he

perceived as the similarities between groups which were widely sep arated

by geography and ethnic origins, yet subsisted at the same civilizational

stage. For Lubbock, as for Dilke, racial difference manifested itself pri-

marily in the rate at which societies had passed through the same stadial

sequence. The advanced races were those that passed quickly and suc-

cessfully through an otherwise lengthy process that manifested itself in

rising standards of morality. Thus marriage everywhere seemed to origi-

nate in naked lust, passing through successive stages of marriage by

capture, by sale, and by treaty, before proceeding to increasingly complex

forms of polygamous kinship exchange. Correspondingly, all religions

had their roots in superstition. Those that were truly superior had

advanced more quickly through the same forms of fetishism, animism,

and idolatry before ascending to the heights of increasingly sophisticated

monotheistic creeds. Certain vestiges of primitivism could always be

found, even in the most advanced civilizations. The working classes

often regressed to a lower form of culture when not under the proper

guidance of elites. Conversely, primitive peoples usually exhibited some

signs of spontaneous evolutionary progression, albeit at a rate that was so

slow as to be almost undetectable.

Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times, 376–479.

John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man [1869]

(London, 1882); E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the

Development of Civilization [1865] (London, 1870).

Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, especially 72–387; Patton, Sir John Lubbock,2–4, 23–52,

79–90.

216 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”

Lubbock’s archaeological and ethnological interests had to be squeezed

into the odd hours whe n he could detach himself from his lucrative work

at the bank. Yet he saw no contradiction between his weekday enterprise

on the cutting edge of global capitalism and his weekend excavation of

prehistoric caves. From Darwin, he had learned that even the most

advanced forms of social organization and behavior had to be understood

in the context of the origins from which they came. A close friend of

Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and Joseph Hooker, Lubbock enjoyed

a regular schedule of convivial dinners at which these four men traded

ideas about an inevitable “law of progress” that each believed propelled

the evolution of society. Lubbock’s conviction that nineteenth-century

Britain stood at the pinnacle of an evolution still in progress also fueled his

decision to stand for Parliament. Here he focused his attention primarily

on questions of education and the improvement of the British working

and lower middle class. Between 1870 and 1874, he worked alongside

Dilke to promote legislation for shorter hours and bank holidays, in the

hopes that workingmen and clerks would use this leisure to take classes,

attend lectures, and read (no do ubt his) books.

Unlike the savages that Lubbock analyzed in his sc ientiﬁc writings,

these modern Anglo-Saxon artisans and clerks required only education

and leisure to ﬁt them for the world of capitalism and liberty. Since market

competition had now replaced the competition of the cudgels, Lubbock

looked forward to what was essentially a post-Darwinian future, in which

life could be prolonged, the interdependence of nations could be fostered,

and war would cease as a means of settling disputes. This visionary image

of a nearly utopian liberal future clearly presupposed a process of mental

and moral improvement that had rendered modern Britons biologically

different creatures from the ancient (and modern) savages against whom

they were juxtaposed. Where the former were adapted to a world of

political campaigns, intellectual debates, and scientiﬁc innovations, the

latter were relegated by Lubbock’s gaze to a glacially moving landscape of

primeval customs and irrational practices. Savage peoples never emerged

as individuals in his books. They were wholly determined by their pri-

mitive character and encased in their low evolutionary stage. Yet, unlike

Froude, who was inclined to “otherize” these delinquents, Lubbock (like

many liberals) was inclined to naturalize them in the language of the

family. Much like the European child, he observed, the adult savage

tended to be moody, undisciplined, attracted to baubles, and addicted

to dirty habits and superstitious beliefs.

Patton, Sir John Lubbock,91–122.

Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times, 121–4, 474–9, 502–4, 555–63.

John Lubbock and the evolution of “savagery” 217

Only in this context did the Empire enter Lubbock’s thinking. As a

young man he had felt no attraction to imperialism, associating it with the

legacy of slavery, mercantilism, and a host of associated errors. These

errors had led an earlier generation of (insufﬁciently liberal) Britons to

degrade both themselves and their victims while impeding the forward

march of progress. Lubbock ’s disposition was not improved by the

colonial revolts that broke out in India in 1857, in New Zealand in

1861–3, and in Jamaica in 1865. Although he refused to join the

Carlylean chorus of glee at their bloody suppression, his name was also

conspicuously absent from the memorials and petitions circulated by his

liberal friends (such as Darwin) in defense of native rights. By 1877,

however, when Lubbock’s ethnographic writin gs were largely complete,

he changed his mind about the Empire and became an ardent imperialist,

largely because he now saw British rule as just the right vehicle of super-

visory benevolence that modern savages and other backward peoples

required.

In an article which he published in The Nineteenth Century, Lubbock

depicted the British Empire of his day in a wholly positive light. The

Americans, whom Dilke had perceived as successful assimilators, were

now contrasted unfavorably with their British cousins, who recognized

that primitive peoples had to be segregated and protected before they

could function in the modern market world. Lubbock quoted with appro-

val the words of an American bishop who complained of the way in which

his supposedly liberty-loving republic “has spent ﬁve hundred million

pounds in exterminating Indians,” while

on the other side of the line are the same greedy, dominant Anglo-Saxon race, and

the same heathen. They have not spent one dollar in Indian wars, and have had no

Indian massacres. Why? In Canada the Indian treaties call these men “the Indian

subjects of Her Majesty.” When civilization approaches them they are placed on

ample reservations, receive aid in civilization, have personal rights in property, are

amenable to law, and protected by law, have schools, and Christian people send

them the best teachers.

3 Empire and the classiﬁcation of racial

and evoluti onary others

Lubbock’s conviction that savages had to be protected was widely shared

by other Liberals. His belief that reservations provided them with secure

Patton, Sir John Lubbock, 123–38; John Lubbock, “On the Imperial Policy of Great

Britain,” The Nineteenth Century, 1 (1877), 37–49.

Lubbock, “Imperial Policy of Britain,” 44.

218 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”

enclaves in which they could be exposed to carefully calibrated doses

of civilization, however, reﬂects his distance from the actual business of

empire. Ironically, Froude had more empirical experience on this point.

On the ground, in Asia, Afri ca, and America, the distinction between

savagery and civilization was never so dualistically neat. The colonial

dependencies, from Barbados to Assam, were not benevolent havens

for the protection of savages. These environments contained a multitude

of complexly interacting social groups: white planters, indentured

laborers, and a host of diverse and often divergent indigenes, all at

various stages in social development. Such environ ments were really

more like quasi-Darwinian habitats in which various groups competed

for resources and space. What rendered such conceptualizations com-

patible with eirenic Victorian notions of comity and progress was a neo-

Lamarckian belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was

shared by nearly all lay and scientiﬁc Darwinians, not least by Darwin

himself.

In this view, British imperialism could be conceived as a kind of artiﬁ-

cial selection that would guide development in the right direction and

speed the process up in a manner that was still calibrated and controlled.

Some indigenous groups, like the Native Americans, Tasmanians,

Australian aborigines, and (possibly) New Zealand Maori, seemed des-

tined for extinction, and metropolitans could bemoan but not alter their

fate.

Others, notably those of African or Asian origin, were reclaimable,

albeit only when they shed their debased indigenous folkways and allowed

metropolitan imperialists to guide their evolutionary path. How long

would this process of guided improvement last? “In the course of

two or three centuries,” Harry Johnston predicted, “the negroes of

British Africa will only differ from their white fellow-subjects in the

colour of their skins.” But for some time to come, the forefathers of

these ultimately civilized men of color “will require to submit themselves

to our guidance and control.” By contrast, Richard Burton, Edward

Blyden, and Winwood Reade all regarded Christianity as too advanced

for black Africans, who should be converted to Islam during this intermedi-

ate (imperial) phase. Even Samuel Baker, who regarded “African savages

[as] quite on a level of that of the brute,” reluctantly allowed that “perhaps

Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades

around 1900 (Baltimore, 1983), 58–106.

A few Victorian histories, such as G. W. Rusden’s Auretanga: Groans of the Maories

(Christchurch, 1975), did take a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to the suffer-

ing of indigenous peoples and British injustice. However, the circulation of these books

was restricted to small niche markets, and did not have much effect on the dominant

discourse.

Empire and the classiﬁ cation of racial and evolutionary others 219

after some centuries, we may expect a certain class of civilization from the

negroes.”

These assessments were a far cry from the blithe assumpt ions of David

Livingstone, who, as recently as the mid-1850s, had envisioned that

commerce and Christianity together might civilize Africa within a few

decades. Yet the more the new evolutionists contemplated the stasis of

“backward” peoples, the more they became convinced that the true

regulator of the velocity of evolution lay in the bio-social (i.e. more or

less Lamarckian) underpinnings of race. These conclusions were greatly

reinforced by the colonial resistance movements of the post-1857

period.

The Indian Mutiny, the Maori King Movement, Irish

Fenianism, and the Jamaica Revolt were all taken to indicate that even

semi-civilized groups which had been under imperial tutelage for several

generations could degenerate back to the savagery of their ancestors, if

metropolitan controls on their improvement were prematurely relaxed.

The West Indian freedman, warned Anthony Trollope, had become a

race dangerously betwixt and between “No country of their own” and yet

neither “any country of adoption.”“No memory of Africa, but no

approach to the civilization of his white fellow creature.” Such people

were “a servile race ﬁtted by nature for the hardest physical work, ” in

whom a little religion and a little education had become dangerous things.

In the years that followed the Jamaica revolt, observers like Charles

Kingsley and W. J. Gardner conﬁrmed the prescience of Trollope’s

views.

Not surprisingly, this changed orientation to colonial peoples was most

clearly manifested in India after the 1857 Re volt. As Heather Streets has

recently demonstrated, it became the basis for a complete reorganization

of the Indian Army, as the relatively high-caste Bengali Sepoys were

accused of being ringleaders of rebellion and were replaced by northern

Sikhs and Gurkhas (often referred to as martial castes), who became the

new Highlanders of the later nineteenth century. Here evolutionary back-

wardness was not necessarily deemed a disadvantage, if it was combined

Johnston and Baker, quoted in H. A. C. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to

Central African Society, 1840–1890 (London, 1965), 90, 204–5, 207–14. For Winwood

Reade, see Savage Africa, Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern and

Northwestern Africa (New York, 1864), 431–52.

David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in Africa [1857], 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, 2001);

Stocking, Victorian Anthropology,78–109; Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 110–32;

Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race,75–230.

Charles Kingsley, At Last: Christmas in the West Indies [1871] (London, 1905), 16–28,

36–9, 51, 285–302; William James Gardner, A History of Jamaica (London, 1873), 461–3,

472–96; James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conﬂict: The Maori, the British

and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal, 1986).

220 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”

with the simple virtues of courage and loyalty.

W. W. Hunter, the most

accomplished historian of the later Victorian Raj, was also fascinated by

the virtues of evolutionary simplicity. His Annals of Rural Bengal, pub-

lished in 1868, contained a penetrating ethnography of a cluster of hill

tribes, the Santals, whom he deemed to be at the evolutionary stage of the

Ancient Germans. They had “carried with them ... a certain degree of

civilization and agricultural habits which hundreds, perhaps thousands of

years of civilization have not been able to efface.” In 1855, the Santals had

rebelled, but Hunter saw that they had many legitimate grievances against

usurious m oneylenders and excessive taxation. Redressing these abuses

would turn them into loyal workers, especially in railway construction and

on tea plantations, where heavy labor was required. In later years Hunter

was put in charge of a massive 128-volume statistical gazetteer of India,

which combined geology, history, ethnology, anthropometry, philology,

and mythology to map ou t the subco ntinent’s myriad social groups. To

make sense of this mass of indigestible data, Hunter came to rely ever

more completely on reiﬁed notions of caste and race.

The most sweeping early practitioner of the new racial and evolutionary

thinking was the Liberal Indi an administrator and ethnologist Sir George

Campbell. Sir George was the scion of a minor branch of the great clan

Campbell, which had made so many contributions to the Scottish

Whig aristocracy. Campbell’s uncle had risen through the English bar to

the positions of Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor, while his father had

made a career in the EIC. Following in his father’s footsteps, young

George went to India in 1843 and steadily rose in the comp any hierarchy.

Playing a signiﬁcant role in the annexation of the Punjab, Campbell

published a book, Modern India, a decade later, which surveyed the vast

array of indigenous tribes and races in India while drawing heavily on

Elphinstone’s earlier account of the subconti nent’s history. The only

justiﬁcation for British conquest had been the enforcement of peace,

Campbell acknowledged, after centuries of internecine conﬂict between

Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military Race and Masculinity in British Imperial

Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004), especially 52–115.

W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal [1868] (London, 1883), 14–260; W. W. Hunter, A

Brief History of the Indian People (London, 1884). The application of a scientiﬁc culture to

late Victorian India is examined in Gayan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the

Imagination of Modern India (Oxford, 1999). On the application of racial classiﬁcations

see the following chapters in Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford,

1995): Susan Bayly, “Caste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography of India,” 165–218;

Crispin Bates, “Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian

Anthropometry,” 219–59; Lionel Caplin, “Martial Gurkhas: The Persistence of a British

Military Discourse on ‘Race,’” 260–81; and Indira Choudhury-Sengupta, “The

Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and Race in Colonial Bengal,” 282–303.

Empire and the classiﬁ cation of racial and evolutionary others 221

different ethnic, religious, and caste groups. The continuation of Britain’s

rule, however, could be justiﬁed only by her role as a catalyst for moderni-

zation: building bridges, roads, railroads, telegraphs, harbors , and irri-

gation networks that would enable India’s peoples to ﬁnd their most

advantageous niche in the burgeoning system of capitalist production

and exchange.

Campbell’s thinking was greatly affected by the revolt of 1857, which he

played a role in repressing. Henceforth, his primary goal for India would

be political stability and the preservation of British geo-political suprem-

acy. This change in his perspective man ifested itself in a new-found

emphasis on racial evolution and ethnology. Campbell believed that the

Mutiny had been caused by lax administration in the army, and that the

overwhelming bulk of India’s peasants remained amenable to British rule.

The fact that so few had risen up when British authority was in jeopardy

could be taken as an indication of their satisfaction with the status quo.

Nevertheless, he now worried that market forces were creating vulner-

abilities for the peasant, demonstrated most notably by the Orissa famine

of 1866, which he witnessed ﬁrsthand.

On the basis of his adm inistrative

experience, Campbell concluded that neither the zamindari nor the ryot-

wari land settlements had been entirely satisfactory, since the ﬁrst had

conjured up an artiﬁcial aristocracy, whi le the second had turned the

peasant into an economic free agent before he had learned to think in

utilitarian terms. Yet India was a very different place from Froude’s savage

Africa, since the vestiges of a once-vast civilization remained. Drawing on

the ideas of the Irish tenant right movement, Campbell argued that similar

notions of a traditional moral economy could be detected in India, where

the state was all-powerful and a more even balance between landlord and

peasant obtained. Through customary rents and partial peasant proprie-

torship, Campbell hoped, there could be a revival of traditional village

institutions. Local self-government would provid e an attractive alterna-

tive to anti-Bri tish sentiment on a national plane.

Campbell believed that the stabilization of Victorian India depended

on a proper understanding of race. To this end, in 1865 he published

an Ethnology of India, which combined evidence from physiognomy,

George Campbell, Modern India (London, 1852); George Campbell, Memoirs of my

Indian Career, 2 vols. (London, 1893), I: 1–209; DNB, supplement XXI (New York,

1909), 383–5.

Campbell, Indian Career, I: 210–305, II: 1–342.

George Campbell, India as it May Be: A Proposed Government and Policy (London, 1853),

224–36, 394–438; George Campbell, The Irish Land (London, 1869); George Campbell,

“The Tenure of Land in India,” in J. W. Probyn (ed.), Systems of Land Tenure in Various

Countries (London, 1881), 213–90.

222 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”

language, religion, customs, and “mental characteristics” to divide

Indians into three basic types. The people of the ﬁrst were described as

“ﬁne Caucasian” Aryans, mostly in the north; the second as “Negrito

types,” mostly in the south; and the third as various shades of mixtures

in between. According to Campbell, this pattern had been created by a

longue durée historical process, in which several waves of Aryan invaders

from central Asia had conquered the darker indigenous inhabitants of the

subcontinent, creating the caste system to preserve their racial supremacy.

A certain amount of interbreeding with their inferiors had occurred,

and this had spawned the vast system of intermediate castes that occupied

India by the Victorian epoch.

Campbell was not much interested in the higher, more Aryan, castes,

whose character was already well known. More in need of ethnological

study were the tribes “in the lowest stage of barbarism,” who were “mod-

ern representatives of one of the earliest phases in the history of mankind.”

Unlike Lubbock, who saw only their backwardness, Campbell hoped that

these simple people might play a constructive impe rial role. Such primi-

tive races, he opined, might prove extremely malleable. If inculcated with

“the art of agriculture and habits of ind ustry,” they might “make the best

laborers and colonists in the country.” Looking to the system of inden-

tured service as a means of transferring low-caste or tribal Indians from

the subcontinent, where they were superﬂuous, to the Caribbean , where

their labor was required, Campbell used one of his furloughs to travel

to the United States, where he conducted his own investigation of

American reconstruction. Like Dilke, Ca mpbell regarded the southern

Negro as a very backward but eminently civilizable specimen. This lesson

from across the Atlantic was deﬁnitely transferable to the British Empire.

Throughout the Afri can and South Asian world there were hardy, poten-

tially industrious peoples whose labor could be harnessed for productive

purposes, if only their true racial character could be understood.

George Campbell, The Ethnology of India [1865] (London, 1872), quote on 8–9. See also

Susan Bayly, “Caste and Race in Colonial Ethnography,” in Robb (ed.), Race in South

Asia, 165–218, as well as her Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century

to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999). Most recently, the Victorian construction of caste

has been revisited by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern

India (Princeton, 2001), and Shruti Kapila, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion,

India and Beyond, c.1770–1880,” Modern Asian Studies, 41.3 (2007), 471–513, who

examines the early history of race studies in Calcutta.

Campbell, Ethnology of India; George Campbell, White and Black: The Outcome of a Visit to

the United States (London, 1879), vi–xii, 111–99. See also his later The British Empire

(London, 1887) and “On the Races of India, as Traced in Existing Tribes and Castes,”

Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, NS, 1 (1868–9), 128–40; and Address to the

Anthropology Section of the British Association (London, 1886).

Empire and the classiﬁ cation of racial and evolutionary others 223

Toward the end of his life, Campbell surveyed the entire British Empire

to underscore its contribution to British wealth and power. In a world

where industrial capitalism was spreading to other western nations , and

where market relations were penetrating everywhere around the globe, the

Empire was no longer a luxury that liberals could dispense with. Like

Froude and Dilke, Campbell understood that if Britain wanted to com-

pete in this world of industrial giants, she would have to mobilize the

resources of her global periphery more effectively. At the same time, he

was highly skeptical of the plans for imperial federation that were being

bruited about. The white settler colonies, which he deemed proper can-

didates for inclusion, were too prone to independence. Let them become

autonomous, he argued, and they would remain culturally bound to their

Anglo-Saxon cousins, even as they pursued their own (sometimes con-

ﬂicting) geo-political and economic policies. Britain’s own future, accor-

ding to Campbell, lay in her relations with her tropical, racially mixed,

colonies. These were lands for which white laborers were not ﬁtted. As a

result, imperial administrators had to be sent out to harness the labor of

colored peoples, who would generate the raw materials that metropolitan

industry required. Since such colonies easily degenerated into chaos, it

was essential to understand how they should be administered and ruled.

As in his earlier writings, Campbell emphasized the enormous possibil-

ities for transferring colored labor from India, where it was superﬂuous, to

Mauritius, the Caribbean, Burma, and other plantation colonies, where

inexpensive worke rs were required. But now he was more attuned to the

problems in the indenture system, and saw the need for ﬁrm metropolitan

regulation and control. Rules were needed to protect these colored

migrants, and this, paradoxically, required placing them in a special

legal category that would not be deﬁned by the rights of the freeborn

Englishman, but by the disabilities and limitations of their race.

The

biggest problem, according to Campbell, lay in the Crown coloni es, such

as South Africa and the Caribbean, where the population was racially

mixed. Here the legacy of slavery had cast its long shadow far into the

nineteenth century. Beset with racially exclusionary franchises, these

colonies were dominated by white oligarchies of planters and adventurers

who oppressed the colored majority. Pressed too hard, these colored

laborers would become unproductive, or even revolt. Not surprisingly

perhaps, Campbell’s ideal model for the management of colored peoples

was the Indian Raj in which he worked. Here the management of lesser

peoples was entrusted to professional administrators, sent out from the

Campbell, British Empire,1–100.

Campbell, British Empire,31–9, 150–60.

224 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”