Colonial connections, 1815–45

Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government

Zoe Laidlaw

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719069192
• eBook ISBN: 9781784990008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government ruled a more diverse empire than ever before, and the Colonial Office responded by cultivating strong personal links with governors and colonial officials through which influence, patronage and information could flow. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government, as lobbyists, settlers and missionaries also developed personal connections to advance their causes. However, the successive crises in the 1830s exposed these complicated networks of connection to hostile metropolitan scrutiny. This book challenges traditional notions of a radical revolution in government, identifying a more profound and general transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

I may forget the railroads, I may forget the steam engines, but I shall not forget what I have seen tonight. I have seen a little company of men – not taller than I am here – touch the spring that moves the world.¹

Dyani Tshatshu, a minor Xhosa chief, reportedly made these comments while observing a House of Commons’ debate in 1836. Tshatshu was in London to give evidence to a parliamentary committee on the relationship between Britain and her indigenous colonial subjects, an inquiry particularly inspired by the conflict between Xhosa and Europeans in southern Africa. Tshatshu was brought to London by people who shared (and probably shaped) his conviction that imperial intervention could profoundly affect colonial governance, but his sense that London was the critical hub of imperial rule was not uncommon in the 1830s. Both those who hoped for imperial intervention and those who denied its validity continually returned to the question of how imperial power was exercised and how it might be influenced.

In its exploration of imperial power, Colonial connections has three aims. First, it examines the operation of colonial rule in the settler colonies before self-government, an examination which entails the close consideration of both metropolitan and colonial spheres, and a focus on the imperial networks which connected them. The study of networks draws attention to both individuals and structures within the empire; this is important for an era of small formal government when non-governmental lobbyists could play a critical part in decision-making. Considering the networks used to govern the colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century additionally alerts us to the patronage and information they conveyed, while highlighting the problems, as well as the benefits, of rule via close personal connection.

Second, while Colonial connections covers the thirty years after Waterloo, it is particularly concerned with changes to colonial governance in the 1830s: a decade of metropolitan upheaval and colonial crises which has prompted long-standing historiographical concern. Thus the book follows a generation of colonists, metropolitan officials and colonial administrators who remembered the consequences of the American Revolution, if not its course; who matured during the Napoleonic Wars; and whose lives were shaped by the upheavals in British politics and society during the ‘Age of Reform’. Apart from European and domestic concerns, this generation saw major challenges to imperial rule in the settler colonies and beyond, including the emancipation of slaves, Canadian rebellions, southern African wars, the expansion of British India and ‘systematic colonisation’. The response of the Colonial Office to these issues, and to its own role in the mid-1830s, provides another focus for the book. How was the imperial government to reconcile settlers’ increasing demands for greater self-government with metropolitan conceptions of their unreadiness and unsuitability for it? How could it counter domestic concerns about imperial control, expenditure and responsibility? For the metropolitan administration, the failure of personal networks – which had provided a means of exerting control over the colonies between 1815 and 1835 – would shape the solutions proposed.

Historians have questioned the conceptual centrality in imperial history of the metropole or nation, but the importance of Britain, and particularly London, to both nineteenth-century contemporaries like Tshatshu and subsequent historians determined its inclusion as a site of investigation.² The third aim of this book is to stress the perceived and actual importance of the metropole to colonial governance before 1845, and to examine changes in the influence of metropolitan and colonial impulses and concerns. When did the metropolitan approach to colonial government change, allowing settler colonies to gain a greater degree of self-government? How did colonial settlers shape and support their demands to have maximum effect on metropolitan government? The growth of colonial societies, metropolitan officials’ sense of vulnerability, and intellectual developments all played a part in transfers of power. But these questions also highlight the importance of control over information, in order to exercise or influence power, which is seen in every section of the imperial arena, metropolitan or colonial, and reflects similar patterns in domestic government.³

In pursuing these themes, Colonial connections engages with broad questions about British imperialism in the early nineteenth century, but also allows the existing historiography of empire to be integrated with late twentieth-century work on nineteenth-century Britain. It investigates imperial power, asking where such power lay, and how it was exercised, influenced and perceived, and suggests that the study of networks of personal communication adds new depth to the question of colonial governance.

Although this book draws on evidence from across the British Empire, three sites – Britain, the Cape Colony and New South Wales – are of particular importance. The centrality of Britain has already been asserted. New South Wales and the Cape Colony were chosen because they constituted sufficiently similar, yet distinctive, colonial sites.⁴ The two crown colonies shared a similar span of British settlement (although the Cape had a longer, Dutch, colonial history). Both relied in 1815 on bonded labour which was to be extinguished, or severely threatened, by 1845, and both faced an uncertain future, with questionable economic viability and fragmented social bodies. Although both colonies experienced considerable upheaval in the established imperial order between 1815 and 1845, neither received the same degree of metropolitan scrutiny as colonies in British North America or the West Indies. Yet the two colonies were also quite distinct: the experiences of slave society and penal settlement entailed different ways of considering race and indigenous peoples, for example. Dutch colonisation of the Cape had left an institutional and legal, as well as a social, legacy, while in Australia the questions of whether English law should be transplanted, and to what extent it applied to indigenous peoples, were key. In politics, New South Wales would move more quickly towards responsible colonial government than the Cape Colony.

Colonial connections provides the opportunity to bring together new imperial and British historiography, in order to examine the somewhat neglected area of colonial governance, where ‘governance’ implies a concern with processes of government and administration in the broadest sense. Since the late 1990s more colonial and imperial historians have taken seriously Cooper and Stoler’s exhortation to place colony and metropole ‘in one analytic field’, producing pan-colonial and comparative studies, as well as interrogating the relationship between Britain and the empire.⁵ This interest has been encouraged partly by historians’ interest in the transmission, appropriation and modification of indigenous culture and ideas by the British and vice versa.⁶ Other studies are inspired by a desire to understand complex phenomena such as slavery, migration, convict transportation, indigenous peoples’ experiences of imperialism and missionary activity – all of which operated across and beyond the British Empire. Others, including the publications of the ‘British World’ historians, the multi-volume Oxford history of the British Empire (OHBE) and its companion series, and the work of the ‘new imperial historians’, represent a concerted attempt to revivify imperial history, or to examine more critically the nature of ‘Britishness’ in an imperial setting.⁷

The focus on ‘Britishness’ has been underpinned by a number of excellent studies of nineteenth-century British polity and society published since the 1980s. New perspectives on patronage, government centralisation, ‘Old Corruption’, the political sphere, evangelicalism, statistics and the ‘classifying imagination’ are all amenable to incorporation into conceptions of nineteenth-century empire.⁸ Since 2000, several works have attempted to reconcile these understandings of British society with colonial activity, while bringing all under one umbrella of empire. This project has perhaps been pursued most diligently, although not always identified as such, for the empire before 1800 – when the opportunity to examine ‘the Atlantic World’ or the sphere of the East India Company encourages an integrated approach.⁹ For the nineteenth century, one successful approach to juggling a variety of locations and ideas has been the employment of ‘networks’ or ‘webs’ to illuminate both critical connections and structures of empire. Alan Lester’s work on the connections between the Cape Colony and Britain posits the existence of competing colonial discourses which were conveyed, explicated and strengthened by their transmission through imperial networks.¹⁰ The personnel of these networks overlapped, muddying the discourses as well as strengthening them, but their existence underlines the widespread contemporary recognition of imperial connections as key for any individuals interested in affecting colonial governance, whether missionaries, settlers, merchants, officials or metropolitan-based interest groups. Tony Ballantyne’s Orientalism and race is unusual both in its explicit discussion of material and intellectual webs, and in its examination of the connections between more than two imperial sites. Ballantyne has also attempted to overcome the frequent imbalance between discussions of metropole and colony, by taking ‘a mobile approach’, an analysis that is not firmly rooted in one space.¹¹ This book follows Lester and Ballantyne in working with the idea of imperial networks, although it attempts a more comprehensive articulation of the concept. Using networks does have some limitations: networks are difficult for the historian to trace, and must usually remain only partially revealed. The networks considered in this book heavily favour colonial and metropolitan elites over the less well-connected in the colonial world. Nevertheless, they provide a useful way of thinking about empire.

Despite this movement towards colonial and metropolitan integration, nineteenth-century colonial governance has received relatively little attention since the 1980s. Perhaps this has stemmed from the concern to reinstate the experience of ‘ordinary’ colonisers and colonised, and from an aversion to the metropolitan-centred and triumphalist imperial history written in the early decades of the twentieth century. Later work falls into two categories: that which takes a metropolitan perspective – usually focusing on the Colonial Office; or single colony studies, typically produced in those locations.¹² Studies of the Colonial Office routinely detect a profound change in 1836, when James Stephen assumed the permanent under-secretaryship of the department, bringing with him a ‘bureaucratic revolution’ which ended ‘Old Corruption’. These works, while containing much of interest, display a limited appreciation of the broader colonial sphere.¹³ The historians who focused on single colonies, on the other hand, were often quite parochial in outlook, more often falsely identifying colonial practices as exceptional than identifying what it was which made each colony different.¹⁴ Yet an understanding of colonial governance, considered in its broader imperial context, can provide a framework for studies of both particular colonial societies and cultures of imperial rule.

This book starts from the assumption that a critical transition did occur in the 1830s: the transition from a residual desire to exert autocratic imperial control (connected with Whiggish notions of elite superiority as much as with Tory paternalism) to a pragmatic acceptance that effective management of the move towards greater colonial self-government was necessary. Two markers of this change were the relocation of patronage from the metropole to the colonies, and an altered perception of information and its uses. Imperial administrators continued to assert metropolitan centrality, but their reliance on affective, nuanced, networks of personal connection and information critical to colonial rule up to the mid-1830s changed as more emphasis was placed on impersonal bureaucracy and system. Colonists, meanwhile, realised from the early 1840s that time spent pursuing their goals in the coloni...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Metropolitan concerns
• Part II Colonial struggles
• Part III Agendas for imperial reform
• Appendices
• Bibliography Primary Sources
• Index