Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
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different side.
119
But how far did this ecumenicism extend beyond British
male elites, to those myriads among Greater Britain’s masses of a different
class, race, gender, religion, and creed? As a Christian, Stubbs believed
that “every soul has an equal value,” but as a historian, he was convinced
that “every national history does not contribute equally valuable results
towards the general progress of mankind.” English history was privileged
because it was “the history of [one of] those nations and institutions in
which the real growth of humanity is to be traced, in which we can follow
the developments, the retardations and perturbations, the ebb and flow of
human progress, the education of the world, the leading on by the divine
light.” But was this history the exclusive possession of a single race, or could
it be exported, to raise up the “lesser breeds”? In his academic lectures,
Stubbs seemed to follow the line of Freeman, simply assuming that the
legacy of English freedom and the English Constitution were inextricably
connected with the history of the Anglo-Saxons as a master race.
120
However, when he came to publish his grand synoptic Constitutional
History of England between 1874 and 1878, Stubbs adopted a different
tone. Here race consciousness was considerably muted. “The growth of
the English Constitution” was now attributed to “the reciprocal interaction
of national character, the external history and institutions of the people.”
Where race was virtually fixed, the “national character” developed in inter-
play with the nation’s history. It is the history of institutions, created and
slowly changed by a developing constitution, that stands at the center of
Stubbs’s account. If this is not the predestined rise of a chosen people, it is
also not – he warns the reader – a colorful narrative of deeds by great heroes.
It is rather a slow accretion of gradual changes, which have shaped constitu-
tional and institutional development in a particularly fortunate way.
121
Of all the historians we have so far considered, Stubbs was most con-
scious of working in an evolutionary framework, and yet this realization
also made him nervous, since he feared that any explicit theoretical
allegiance might compromise his commitment to empirical impartiality.
“I am no believer in the philosophy of hist ory,” he complained, after
reading Buckle. “I am opposed to the school of thinkers which exalts the
generalization of partially informed men into laws and attempts out of
those laws to create a science of history.”
122
At one point, he compared the
English Constitution to many old coun try houses which have a grand
history, having been “now castles, now abbeys, now manor houses.”
119
Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, 20.
120
William Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History (London, 1906); Stubbs, Seventeen
Lectures, 96.
121
SCH, I: 1–3; Burrow, Liberal Descent,97–151.
122
Stubbs, Early English History, 194.
William Stubbs and the evolution of the English Constitution 255
Having begun “with a little farmhold in the Teutonic clearing,” the
Constitution “grows up and becomes a feudal manor; it builds a national
church and a court of justice,” always retaining “much that it could do
without” and doing without “much that might well have been added, if it
were not that the addition would stop the working of some more impor-
tant part.” As this simile demonstrated, Stubbs’s method was essentially
adaptationist, since he sought to show how the Constitution changed
in response to its socio-political environment, while also stabilizing the
environment in which it thrived.
123
Like Freeman, Stubbs emphasized the freedom-loving and self-
governing character of the Anglo-Saxons, but he doubed whether that
made them unique. Like many semi-civilized peoples throughout Europe
and Asia, the early English were content to stagnate for centuries, and
advanced only under pressure from within and without. From the outside,
it was the exigencies of war and military organization that acted as the
primary impetus toward political growth and centralization. Exposed to
invasion and internecine strife, local chieftains consolidated under regional
kings, who eventually united under a national monarch. Continual war
enhanced the power of elective kings, who were culled by a “process of
natural selection.” As a national monarchy arose above the regional level, it
evolved into a hereditary institution, accumulating an apparatus of central
control and administration that enabled kings to transmute charismatic
leadership into structural sovereignty over people and land.
124
In the primitive German constitution the free man of pure blood is the fully
qualified political unit; the king is the king of the race, the host is the people in
arms ... In the next stage the possession of the land has become the badge of
freedom; the freeman is fully free because he possesses land, he does not possess
land because he is free; the host is the body of landowners in arms; the courts are
the courts of the landowners ... The king still calls himself the king of the nation, but
he has added to his old title new [powers and obligations] as supreme landowner,
the representative of all original, and the fountain of all derived, political right.
125
Against the hereditary rule of territorial monarchs, with their institu-
tions of central administration, Stubbs set the countervailing power of
hereditary feudal landholders with their own manorial courts, vassals,
retainers, and serfs. Replacing the old free warriors (and absorbing their
military functions ), these new aristocratic landholders (both Norman and
Saxon after 1066) turned out to be the fittest agents of freedom in a
complex society that had evolved both central government and landed
property. The greatest originality of Stubbs’s approach to English
123
Stubbs, Early English History, 332–3.
124
SCH, I: 74, 170.
125
SCH, I: 166–7.
256 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
constitutional history lay in his recognition that it consisted of two partly
related levels of development – the local and the national – that were evolving
at different rates. Local government, which could be traced back to the
Germanic Mark, was the slow-evolving organism, as it passed almost imper-
ceptibly through the vill, the township, the tithing, the manor, and the parish,
even into the modern era, with little fundamental change. By contrast, the
process of centralization, which began in the late Anglo-Saxon period,
picked up speed under the rule of the Norman and Plantagenet kings. The
freedom which arose spontaneously on the local level of the warrior com-
munity had now to be laboriously reconstructed on the national level by
institutions which formed around a sequence of negotiations and renegotia-
tions between feudal lords and centralizing kings. These negotiations
culminated in the Magna Carta, which “although drawn up in the form of
a royal grant was really a treaty between the king and his subjects.”
126
To put it in the language of Maine, the Anglo-Saxon freedman’s
(original, local) ascent from status to contract was confirmed at a higher
(feudal, national) level by a comprehensive written covenant that reca-
pitulated all the customary rights and liberties of the ancient constitution
while laying the foundation for their elaboration and extension in the
coming institutional age. Consciously or unconsciously the feudal nobility
was acting to construct a new kind of liberty that would eventually apply to
the nation as a whole. Representative institutions (i.e. the embryonic
Parliament) were providing new sites for th e exercise of male agency to
replace the primordial freedom of the forest. During the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, with the emergence of chartered towns, lesser land-
holders, and an embryonic House of Commons, government will be
delegated to representatives who would articulate the freedman’s interest
on an increasingly crowded national and international stage.
The great characteristic of the English constitutional system ... the principle of its
growth, the secret of its construction – is the continuous development of repre-
sentative institutions from the first elementary stage in which they are employed
for local purposes and in the simplest form, to that in which the national parlia-
ment appears as the concentration of all local and provincial machinery, the
depository of the collective powers of the three estates of the realm.
127
Yet it is only because freedom is preserved at the enduring local level
that “the administrative order is worked into the common law of the
people and the common institutions of the people are admitted to a
share in the administration of the state.” The centra l gove rnment limits
the tyranny of serfdom, while Parliament checks the tyranny of kings.
126
SCH, I: 530.
127
SCH, I: 544.
William Stubbs and the evolution of the English Constitution 257
Even during the civil wars of the fifteenth century the evolution of insti-
tutions proceeds. Constitutional adaptation and refinement continue “to
emerge from a confused mass of unconscious agencies, rather than from
the direct action of a great lawgiver, or from the victory of acknowledged
principles.” Yet amid all the “superficial refinement, heartless selfishness
and moral degradation” the late middle ages are an age of “great constitu-
tional results.”
128
By the Tudor period , when Stubbs closed his account,
it has already been reshaped to meet the requirements of the era to come.
Here as everywhere the dawn is approaching. Here as everywhere the evil is
destroying itself, and the remaining good, lying deep down and having yet to
wait long before it reaches the surface, is already striving toward the sunlight that
is to come. The good is to come out of the evil ... The thread of national life is not
to be broken, but the earlier strands are to be sought out and bound together with
threefold union for the new work. But it will be a work of time ... Much will be
destroyed that might well have been conserved, and some new growths will be
encouraged that ought to have been checked. In the destruction and in the growth
alike will be seen the great features of difference between the old and the new.
129
10 The English Constitution and Anglo-Indian history
The publication of the final volume of Stubbs’s Constitutional History
marked a signi ficant watershed. For the first time history had been written
by an English academic fully up to the highest standards of German
scholarship. Of course, the book would never be popular, and even
students might consult it primarily as a reference work.
130
Nevertheless
Stubbs had breathed new life into medieval constitutional history, and his
book was followed by the (sometimes revisionist) work of Maitland,
Pollock, and Vinogradoff, as well as others who further transformed
the historiography of medieval England. Stubbs himself resisted appeals
to shorten and simplify his study for the textbook market. His book
had stimulated others to take up this task, and he recommended
D. J. Medley’s AStudent’s Manual of English Constitutional History in partic-
ular.
131
Like Stubbs, Medley viewed the English Constitution as an
128
SCH, I: 545, II: 317.
129
SCH, III: 614–15.
130
Burrow, Liberal Descent, 119–25, 129–31. James Vernon notes the way in which the
professionalism of Stubbs was used to attack the amateur impressionism of Macaulay,
while the more rigorous professionalism of Maitland was used to sideline the profes-
sionalism of Stubbs. “Narrating the Constitution: The Discourse of the ‘Real’ and the
Fantasies of Nineteenth Century Constitutional History,” in James Vernon (ed.), Re-
Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 204–38.
131
D. J. Medley, A Student’s Manual of English Constitutional History (Oxford, 1894); Letters
of William Stubbs, ed. W. H. Hutton (London, 1904), 366.
258 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
evolutionary product, “the result of a practically unbroken development of
thirteen hundred years.” Yet, like Stubbs, he had little to say about how it was
adapting to an imperial polity that was global in scale. Could the democratic
installments of the nineteenth century – which were turning more and more
British men from subjects into citizens – be extended to the mixed and
“coloured” colonies? Conversely, could the British parliamentary electors
in the Home Island be regarded as trustees for the welfare and liberties of
colonial dependents, in much the same way as Stubbs and Medley made
medieval aristocrats into the agents of freedom for all Englishmen? As
Antoinette Burton has demonstrated, English feminists were staking their
own claims to the franchise, in part, on their role as protectors of even more
subjugated women in the colonies. Could the rights of women be traced back
to the Anglo-Saxon forests, or the Magna Carta? If so, was this to be taken as
amarkofEnglishwomen’s racial superiority?
132
Stubbs had nothing to say about this fast-moving modern constitution, but
his whole approach conduced to viewing it as a continuum, in which enfran-
chisement and subordination were interconnected categories. The Saxons
had not remained colonial subjects of their Norman masters. Rather, the two
groups had assimilated and their institutions had fused in a particularly
fruitful way. “Theancientsystemofthe[Saxon]Shirerisestothehighest
functions of government; the authority of royal justice permeates the lowest
regions of the popular organization.” But how far could this sleek Darwinian
organism of the English Constitution – the product of many centuries of
societal selection – be further adapted to incorporate the local institutions and
traditions of the many racially diverse subjects of Victoria’sCrown?The
Oxford historian E. S. Creasy was wary of over-rapid change. He noted that
there were “many great differences and variations” between different colonies
and dependencies “with regard to the amount of local self-government as to
legislation, as to taxation and other matters.” These differences were partly
the result of historical accident, but more broadly they were reflective of the
level of evolutionary development which any given colonial people had
achieved. While favorably disposed to the semi-civilized Negroes of the
West Indies, who were absorbing much of Anglo-Saxon culture, Creasy
regarded “a very large portion of the natives ... the Hottentots and Kaffirs
of the Cape, the Aborigines of Australia, the Eskimaux and Red Indians of the
Hudson Bay territories,” to be “unfit for the constitutional franchise.”
133
132
Medley, Constitutional History, 197–207, 227–30; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History:
British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994),
10–11, 171–205.
133
SCH, I: 551; E. S. Creasy, The Imperial and Colonial Constitutions of the Britannic Empire
(London, 1872), 3, 36–7.
The English Constitution and Anglo-Indian history 259
In the colonies of Anglo-Saxon settlement, by contrast, “men of
European race form a majority; men whose education and property are at
least on a level with the bulk of the electors in the home country.” Like their
predecessors who had settled American shores, these Anglo-Saxon colo-
nists were fit for self-government because they demonstrated an innate
“constitutional morality,” without which “no democratic community can
long exist.” Predisposed to independence under the rule of law, these heirs
of the Magna Carta exhibited a spontaneous order. They had succeeded in
taming the wilderness because they had carried their civilization with them
into the bush. Such a people could not be taxed by an Empire in which they
were not represented. Only responsible government and political
autonomy within a globe-spanning Anglo-Saxon federation could keep
their allegiance to Greater Britain alive.
134
Given his equation of colonial
autonomy with historical civilization, Creasy found the case of India
perplexing. Here it was not savagery but “over-civilization” that unfitted
Indians for self-government. “It was a country where (with some few local
exceptions) there was no idea of internal liberty, and there was in the mass
of the population no pride as to national independence.” India had been
repeatedly conquered, and these conquests produced “a false and cowardly
people” who were “abject, degraded, false to the very core.” The trouble
with the anglicized bhadralok was that their acquisition of an English
education had not been accompanied by the backbone, initiative, and
character exhibited by Anglo-Saxons everywhere around the globe.
135
Of course, not all metropolitan liberals agreed with Creasy. Charles
Dilke, in Greater Britain, argued that “India [under British rule] is being
made a country, is being created under the name where none has yet
existed.” He saw no reason why this incipient Indian nationalism should
be incompatible with his Greater British imperial allegiance. “Whether
the India which is being thus rapidly built up by our own hands will be
friendly to us, or the reverse, depends upon ourselves.” Offering an over-
ture to men like Dutt, he opposed racial restrictions in the ICS and
advocated the very gradual introduction of representative institutions.
Yet Dilke mused about whether some Anglo-Sa xon racial atavism might
not preclude this peaceful transfer of power. Interviewing officers in their
barracks about their experience during the Mutiny, he came to realize that
many had welcomed what they saw as a golden opportunity to run amuck.
It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation on the subject of looting
that we begin to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-robbers. Centuries
134
Creasy, Imperial and Colonial Constitutions, 37, 108, 154–6.
135
Creasy, Imperial and Colonial Constitutions, 174–89, 193–4, 211.
260 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
of education have not purified the blood; our men in India can hardly set eyes on a
native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, “What a place to break up!”
“What a fellow to loot!”
136
Duly appalled by such attitudes in the military, Dilke worried that these
martinets might bring their acquired taste for despotism back home.
Nevertheless, pr ide of race left him with some vestige of that adventuring
spirit that had enabled his ancestors to conquer an empire. “Love of race
among the English rests upon a firmer base than either love of mankind or
love of Britain, for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known.” These “race
distinctions will long continue,” for “miscegenation will go but little way
towards blending races.” Yet Dilke had not given up the traditional liberal
dicta “to act justly towards Ireland” and “to govern India aright,” nor even
had he given up the long-term “possibility of plantin g free institutions
among the dark-skinned races of the world.”
137
Nevertheless, by the 1890s, British politics was falling into the hands of
a new generation that now took evolutionism for granted, and was casually
familiar with the tomes of Maine, Freeman, Green, and Stubbs. In 1892,
a review of Indian administration called upon Parliament to consider
whether the traditions of repre sentative government that had been won
by their forebears had any relevance for the inhabitants of the Indian
subcontinent. Speaking on behalf of Lord Salisbury’s Tory government,
the young under-secretary G. N. Curzon was prepared to enlarge the
existing (appointive) legislative councils, to allow members to criticize
the budget, and to authorize the Viceroy to introduce a few elective seats,
at his discretion. When a few radical MPs proposed to incorporate the
elective element directly into the Bill, Curzon dem urred, complaining
about liberals “whose ideas of political progres s have been formed in
the breathless atmosphere of the West, and who are perhaps unable to
accommodate their pace to the slower movement of life in the East.”“The
idea of representation is alien to the Indian mind,” he continued, “we have
only arrived at it by slow degrees ourselves, through centuries of conflict
and storm ... How can you predicate political equality of a community
that is sundered into irreconcilable camps?”
138
From this point onward, the debate became a referendum on the
perceived ability of Indians to represent themselves on the imperial
stage. According to the Manchester radical Charles Schwann, “the
Indian people” had “now attained to a clear idea of nationality” through
exposure to the En glish language and the English institutions of
136
Dilke, Greater Britain, 428.
137
Dilke, Greater Britain, 428–546, quotes on 544 and 546.
138
Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., III (London, 1892), 53–68, March 28, 1892.
The English Constitution and Anglo-Indian history 261
commerce, free assembly, and a free press. This national voice was
embodied in the recently formed Congress movement, where “you will
find representatives of all the races of India acting together for political
ends.” By contrast, sneered James MacLean, “no amount of English
education could change the character [of the Indian people] or give
them that sobriety and robustness of disposition which is essential to the
smooth and even working of represent ative institutions.” Fre e institutions
were the birthright of English Teutons, “ a race that has love of freedom
instinctively in its life-blood.”“You are running a great risk,” he warned,
“in proposing to transfer a large portion of the administration of India to
men like the Bengalees, who have been slaves, nay, the bondsmen of
slaves, for fifty generations.”
139
Having survived the condes cension of Maine and the jests of Lytton,
anglicized bhadralok like Dutt were not inclined to lose sleep over such
crude reactionary jeers. More alarming was the indifference of Liberal
leaders who, like W. E. Gladstone, made it clear that he was satisfied with
Curzon’s moderate Tory measure, regarding it as suited to the condition
of the Indian people.
140
With both parties eager to move on to other
subjects, the bhadralok intellectuals saw that they were on their own.
The idea that Saxon freedoms might now evolve in an Indian context
was a conceit that they had to nurse secretly, among themselves. In the
metropolis, they now heard only a handful of sympatheti c voices, such as
that of Charles Dilke – now discredited by a divorce scandal, expunged
from the Liberal leadership, and representing no one but himself.
As has been well shown, men who speak better English than most Englishmen;
who conduct able newspapers in our tongue; who form the majority on town
councils which admirably supervise the affairs of great cities; who, as native judges,
have reached the highest judicial posts; who occupy seats on the Provincial, the
Presidency, and the Viceregal Councils, or, as powerful ministers, excellently rule
vast native states, – can no longer be treated as hopelessly inferior to ourselves in
governmental power.
141
139
Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., III: 68–78, 83–95.
140
Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., III: 78–84.
141
Charles Dilke, The Problems of Greater Britain (London, 1890), 433.
262 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”
6 Indian liberals and Greater Britain: the
search for union through history
The mutual intercourse of England and India, political as well as social,
is destined to promote the true interests and glory of both nations ... For
greater will be our rejoicing when all the chiefs and people of India shall
be united with the English nation in a vast International assemblage,
before the throne of the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords.
Keshub Chandra Sen, Delhi, 1877, quoted in MLS, 284
Rightly or wrongly, for good or evil, Englishmen and Indians have been
knit together, and it behooves both races so to mould themselves as to
leave a splendid legacy to generations yet to be born, and to show that
though Empires have gone and fallen this Empire may perhaps be an
exception and that this Empire is not founded on material but spiritual
foundations.
M. K. Gandhi, Cape Town, 1914, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
XII (New Delhi, 1964), 505
On the evening of February 13, 1866, the President of the London
Ethnological Society, John Crawfurd, addressed its assembled members,
arguing that European races were superior to those of Asia in almost every
respect. Exactly five weeks later, Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi merchant
from Bombay, stood before the same body to deliver a paper refuting
Crawfurd’s claims. Unintimidated by the glittering array of brilliant
scientific minds in front of him – probably including Thomas Huxley,
Francis Galton, Sir John Lubbock, Sir Roderick Murchison, and many
others – Naoroji ripped Crawfurd’s tendentious confection into hopeless
shreds. Crawfurd was guilty of “superficial observations and hasty con-
clusions,” Naoroji complained.
1
The notion that Europeans were more
intelligent than Asians was no more than a shallow prejudice. Asian
students performed at parity with their European counterparts whenever
1
John Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of European and A siatic
Races of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnol ogical Society of London , NS, 5 (1867), 58–81.
Dadabhai Naoroji, “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’sPaper,” Transactions of the
Ethnological Society of London, NS, 5 (1867), 127–49, quote on 133; names are taken from the
list of officers published therein.
263
open examinations were held. The masterpieces of Asian literature were
in no wise inferior to those of Europe, according to objective judges who
were equally familiar with both. Instances of perjury in Indian courts
were hardly the basis for impugning the integrity of an entire nation.
How would Englishmen like to be evaluated by rigged, defamatory stand-
ards of this kind? Naoroji related the story of an Indian acquaintance, who
had privately complained:
Look at the mass of untruths in the [London] daily advertisements; in the daily
language of the shopkeepers; how much swindling there is in the concoction of
companies for the benefit of the promoters only; see what the book on facts,
failures and frauds discloses; what extremely watchful care one is obliged to have
in his dealings in the city, when every kind of scoundrelism is so rife ... As long as
an Englishman wanted anything he was the model of politeness, but the object
gained, he was no more the same person.
On the basis of such observations, the Indian had concluded “that the
English were the most selfi sh and unprincipled people.” If this was a rash
and unjust conclusion, how was it any different from those that Crawfurd
had pseudo-scientifically made?
2
1 The Calcutta bhadralok and British racial ideology
In Chapter 5, we have seen how Crawfurd’s sloppy retreat into racist
assumptions was fueled by the new evolutionary approach to history.
Yet Naoroji’s bold invocation of a better cross-cultural science was also
the product of changes that had occurred during the previous thirty
years. By the 1860s, his native Bombay had become a thriving interna-
tional commercial center, while Calcutta could now boast a large English-
educated bhadralok. On one level, these facts reflected the triumph of
Macaulay’s program of anglicization. Yet on another level, they revealed
the complications and contradictions that Macaulay had failed to grasp.
Of the 1,300 English-educated students who were enrolled in Calcutta
University, very few would enjoy Rammohun Roy’s economic independ-
ence, and even fewer could aspire to the high-lev el governmental employ-
ment first achieved, in 1868, by R. C. Dutt. To be sure, these Bengalis
streamed into lower levels of the civil service, but the poor salaries and
limited promotions to which such positions confined them precluded the
role of patria potestas, which Maine had identified as the precondition for
autonomous masculinity. Even the fortunate few with economic resour-
ces tended to retreat from economically innovative entrepreneurship,
2
Naoroji, “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper,” 141–2.
264 Indian liberals and Greater Britain