Britain and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome

The Reception of Rome in Socio-Political Debate from the 1850s to the 1920s

Sarah J. Butler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472569530
• eBook ISBN: 9781441116086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Drawing on new primary source evidence, this volume evaluates ancient Rome's influence on an English intellectual tradition from the 1850s to the 1920s as politicians, scientists, economists and social reformers addressed three fundamental debates of the period – Empire, Nation and City. These debates emerged as a result of political, economic and social change both in the Empire and Britain, and coalesced around issues of degeneracy, morality and community. As ideas of political freedom were subsumed by ideas of civilization, best preserved by technocratic governance, the political and historical focus on Republican Rome was gradually displaced by interest in the Imperial period of the Roman emperors. Moreover, as the spectre of the British Empire and Nation in decline increased towards the turn of the nineteenth century, the reception of Imperial Rome itself was transformed. By the 1920s, following the end of World War I, Imperial Rome was conjured into a new framework echoing that of the British Empire and appealing to the surging nationalistic mood.

1

Ancient Rome and the debate
on the British Empire

The ‘civilizing’ mission

The nineteenth century was a century of territorial expansion for Britain. Adding to territories acquired during the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, Ceylon, Trinidad and Mauritius, in the 1820s, Britain seized control of areas in the North East of Burma.¹ During the 1840s, when as Edith Hall puts it, the ‘imperial acquisition of the planet shifted up a gear’, Britain annexed Hong Kong, Sind and the Punjab among others.² Lord Dalhousie, Governor General of India from 1848–56, acquired further Indian states for Britain during the 1850s, and Nigeria and the Gold Coast became British colonies in 1861 and 1874, respectively. Fiji was added to the Empire in 1874, the Transvaal in 1877, Egypt in 1882 and Kenya in 1886. By the 1920s, Britain had at least some control over close to 25 per cent of the world.³

The control of subject peoples provided a political and philosophical challenge to Britain’s elite who, with the passing of 1832 Reform Act, were prepared to countenance an extended (if limited) democracy at home and, yet, deny political rights to indigenous peoples in the dependencies. Justification for this lay with the belief that first, the dependencies were not capable of self-rule and, secondly, the civilizing mission that aimed to raise ‘dependent’ peoples from their lowly state. The concept of civilization had been a powerful influence on imperial ideology in the eighteenth century and Westerners were convinced of their suitability to take on the mantle of ‘civilizer’. As the historian and political philosopher Adam Ferguson put it in 1767, the ‘genius of political wisdom and civil arts appears to have chosen his seats in particular tracts of the earth, and to have selected his favourites in particular races of men’.⁴ In effect, Westerners had bifurcated the world into civilized and uncivilized and Englishmen placed themselves at the apex of Western civilization. Ferguson, himself a Scotsman, acknowledged that it was Englishmen who had ‘carried the authority of government of law to a point of perfection’.⁵

Ideas of the progressive nature of civilization gathered force in the nineteenth century. Politician, historian and author of the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and the hugely popular five-volume History of England (the first two volumes published in 1848), Thomas Babington Macaulay, believed England’s history was ‘emphatically the history of progress’. Proof of this lay with the transformation over a 700-year period of a ‘wretched and degraded race’ into ‘the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw’. During this time, Englishmen had ‘carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical’.⁶ Therefore, in Macaulay’s opinion as he famously expressed it in his Minute on Indian Education (1835), educating the indigenous population of India to be ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ would ensure their progression and ultimately fit India and presumably other dependencies for self-government.⁷ An additional benefit that arose out of British rule was the protection of ‘lesser’ races from exploitation by local rulers. The British naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, encapsulated the paternalistic attitude that pervaded the consciousness of those intent on controlling, and so the argument went bettering, the lives of subject peoples living under British ‘protection’. Following his expedition to Niger in 1799, Banks wrote to the President of the Board of Trade, Lord Liverpool, stating that:

in a very few years a trading company might be established under immediate control of the Government, who could take upon themselves the whole expense of the measure, would govern the Negroes far more mildly and make them far more happy than they are now under the tyranny of their arbitrary princes.⁸

Raising savages to manhood would then, in John Ruskin’s estimation, redeem them from ‘despairing into peace’.⁹ Hence, the civilizing mission that produced what J. A. Mangan terms a ‘mental myopia’, eased the conscience of those who acknowledged that British rule over others was at variance with a liberal philosophy at home.¹⁰

Bound up in the ‘civilizational argument’ was the reception of ancient civilizations. From an early age, future imperial administrators were imbued with knowledge of the Classics and the possession of an Empire was conducive to the study of ancient empires.¹¹ Archaeologist Edward Falkener pointed out in 1851 the value of the study of the ancient past to those in authority, or intending to become so:

The study of futurity is speculative, the present is wrapped up in that which is to come; and it is the past only which is complete. We are now in a state of progression, the future is shrouded in uncertainty and we gain knowledge and experience only from the past.¹²

In line with Britain’s liberal philosophy, it was Classical Greece and the Roman Republic that appealed to intellectuals. While Greece attracted liberal thinkers, the Whig interpretation of Roman history romanticized the Senate and extolled the Republican virtues of liberty and patriotism.¹³ It was the ‘fittest men’, John Stuart Mill wrote in 1831, ‘the educated gentlemen of the country (for such the free citizens of Athens, and in its best times, of Rome, essentially were)’ who enabled these ancient civilizations to exercise world power.¹⁴ Proof of this was evidenced in Athens as ‘the affairs of that little commonwealth were successively managed’ to such an extent that Athens became ‘the source of light and civilization to the world’, while in Rome ‘the same fact’ was ‘certainly demonstrated, by the steady unintermitted progress of that community from the smallest beginnings to the highest prosperity and power’.¹⁵ In other words, for Mill, the fittest of Romans, the men who had gained and successfully administered an Empire, were Republicans. The eighteenth-century playwright George Lillo’s (1693–1739) Christian Hero, which was republished in 1810, shows the high esteem in which the Republic was held in the early nineteenth century.

Degenerate Rome! By godlike Brutus freed

From Caesar and his temporary chain

Your own ingratitude renew’d those bonds

Beneath whose galling weight you justly perished.¹⁶

Fascination with the Classics and ancient history ensured references to Roman history were not infrequent in contemporary debates and comparisons with the Roman Republic were especially common in discussion on the British Empire.¹⁷ Not only had the Republic built up an Empire but also, as a writer for London’s Monthly Review explained it, their mixed constitution resembled Britain’s.

It is certain, that a thorough acquaintance with the Roman government must afford the most useful information to the subjects of a free State, and more especially to our own: for there is undoubtedly a very strong resemblance between the general forms of each; both being of a mixed nature, compounded of royalty, aristocracy, and democracy. . . .¹⁸

In particular, it was during discussions on India that Rome most often figured. As a letter from ‘Vetus’ to The Times put it, ‘we have erected on the Ganges a mighty Empire, eminent above the sovereignties of the East, in the same degree as was the Roman empire in comparison with those of the ancient world’.¹⁹ Indeed, the Liberal statesman, Earl Granville, speaking in the House of Lords, equated the power of men employed as ‘collectors’ by the East India Company to that of ‘the pro-consula [sic] of ancient Rome’.²⁰ But India was not the exception. In 1850, Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, in defending Don Pacifico, a British subject living overseas and seeking recompense from the Greek authorities for damage to his property during a riot, famously compared the rights of British citizens to those of Roman citizens. As Roman citizens ‘could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject’, Palmerston declared in parliament, ‘in whatever land he may be shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong’.²¹ Extending the franchise to the middle class in the 1832 Reform Act had made little difference to this parliamentary tradition. The bourgeoisie, aiming for acceptance into the upper echelons of society and recognizing knowledge of Greek and Latin was essential to upward mobility, ensured the Classics not only retained their prestigious place on the curriculum but also in intellectual discourse on the Empire, an Empire in which the British elite took immense pride.²²

Part of this pride arose from the purportedly homogeneous nature of the Empire although, in reality, a hierarchy existed that was based on the level of civilization that each constituent member of the Empire was judged to have reached. Naturally Britain, in particular England, stood at its zenith, the largely white self-governing colonies lay below, while the dependencies inhabited by non-white peoples deemed uncivilized and barbaric were at its nadir. Nonetheless, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, optimism was high that so-called inferior subjects could with Britain’s guidance progress to a civilized state.²³ Along with British institutions, men of letters believed this mission to civilize had been inherited from the Romans during the Roman occupation of Britain and, largely, it was historians who promoted this idea. As James Eccleston wrote in An Introduction to English Antiquities (1847), it was the Romans who ‘substituted the regular forms of civilisation for [the] rude arrangements of barbarous life, and introduced personal security, arts, letters, and elegance into the wild retreats of the uncultivated Briton’.²⁴ Accordingly, Eccleston came to the conclusion that Britain ‘improved’ and it was as a consequence of this improvement that ‘we find . . . several glowing panegyrics pronounced upon its happy state by the orators of the Roman empire’.²⁵ Evidence would appear to have been derived from translations of Tacitus’ Agricola (such as the classical scholar Alfred J. Church’s) as it was Agricola who:

gave private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and dwelling-houses, praising the energetic, and reproving the indolent . . . He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. (Agr. 21)²⁶

As the Romans had civilized the ancient Britons, who at one time had lived in ‘miserable huts’ and supplemented their crude diet ‘by the practice of . . . cannibalism’, so Britons would provide a similar service for the indigenous populations of their overseas empire.²⁷ John Bright, co-founder of the Anti-Corn Law League and no imperialist himself, drew attention to Rome’s civilizing mission in 1853 in a Commons debate on India. ‘The nations [Rome] conquered’, Bright argued, ‘were impressed so indelibly with the intellectual characters of their masters, that, after fourteen centuries of decadence, the traces of civilization are still distinguishable. Why should we not act a similar part in India?’²⁸ Effectively, the Roman occupation of Britain gave weight to theories of cultural progression; Britons had progressed from savagery to civilization during the Roman occupation by learning, as Ovid was translated, ‘the noble arts [which] civilized one’s way of life, lifting it above savagery’ (Epistulae ex Ponto, 2.9.48).²⁹ Ideas that peace would follow conquest were also drawn from ancient Rome. As Romanization of the Empire’s provinces had secured the Pax Romana (a modern conception constructed out of various Roman ‘peaces’ notably the Augustan) equally, the spread of civilization under the auspices of the British government would secure the Pax Britannica.³⁰

However, although Rome provided an exemplar that made people think the imperial dream was possible and Britons (or more specifically Englishmen) assumed the role once played by the Romans during the years of occupation, Britons regarded themselves as morally superior to their ancient predecessors on the grounds that the Romans conquered for conquest’s sake whereas Britain’s motive was non-militaristic. As the historian Sir Edward Creasy argued it, ‘the heart of England’ had not ‘the old Roman thirst for military excitement and glory, or to learn to love conquest for the mere sake of conquering. . . . It is as civilizers, not as conquerors, that we spread the gains of our best glory throughout the world’.³¹ Equally intent on claiming a higher moral motive underlay Britain’s acquisition of foreign land was an editorial in The Times. India, it suggested, was the ‘obvious parallel’ to a Roman province but any comparison was ‘very much on the side of our own subjects. We assert with confidence that never was a conquered race more fair...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1 Ancient Rome and the Debate on the British Empire
• 2 Ancient Rome and the Debate on the Nation
• 3 Ancient Rome and the Debate on the City
• Summary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index