Empire as the Triumph of Theory

Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868

Edward Beasley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135767709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Who were the first people to invent a world-historical mission for the British Empire? And what were the constituencies behind the development of the imperialistic thinking in mid-Victorian England? These questions are vital for understanding where the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century came from. Empire as the Triumph of Theory takes as its sample the more than two hundred earliest members of the first major pro-imperial pressure group: the Colonial Society (founded in 1868, it is now the Royal Commonwealth Society).
The book goes on to a careful and well-written tour of the different parts of the Victorian world, putting the founders of the Colonial society into their social contexts. Empire as the Triumph of Theory concludes that imperialism was developed less by investors and office holders than by people who, whatever their other activities, had written books or articles about the cultures of the world. Victorian activities around the globe were multitudinous and varied, and general ideas about England's imperial mission were, in fact, constructed by members of the Colonial Society, in order to make sense out of information flowing in from this teeming world.
This is the first work to explore the social and intellectual origins of the Colonial Society. It brings the mid-Victorians to life, and should become a standard work for specialists on imperialism.

1 Introduction

In the late nineteenth century, Great Britain acquired a new empire in Africa and elsewhere in the Tropics. And it acquired a new enthusiasm for empire as a whole. A vast swathe of ‘British Empire Red’ stretched across thousands of schoolroom maps, and it made millions of British hearts beat faster. Imperial questions became central in British politics. The Boer War of 1899–1902 was fought in service of the imperial mission, a mission that soared above the rather meagre economic benefits of almost all the territory in Africa. People died for the empire. Where did this late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for empire come from?

Little of this imperial enthusiasm had existed at mid-century. There had been little desire to keep the empire together, and little attempt to explore the idea of what the various pieces of the empire might add up to if they were looked at as a whole. The heart of the old empire had gone in the American Revolution, and the remaining North American possessions had been sent down the road to self-government after the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. No one in the mother country seemed to mind a bit. In the 1840s, a political movement called ‘colonial reform’ had supported an expansion of the settlement colonies in order to make new homes for Great Britain’s surplus population, but colonial reform died away in the better economic climate of the early 1850s. Most of the settlement colonies (in North America, Australia, and New Zealand) were given self-government by the middle of that decade. The colonies of the West Indies, economic embarrassments ever since the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, inspired little enthusiasm.

While some people were enthusiastic about retaining the Indian Empire (especially when it rebelled in 1857), they were not enthusiastic about the empire in general. The imperial enthusiasm that did exist was patchy and short-lived. Now and again there was the occasional imperial adventure, the occasional projection of British imperial power. Sometimes the idea was to abolish the slave-trade. Other projections of British power arose from instabilities in the remaining imperial possessions; usually this meant a need to secure dangerous frontiers, but it also meant the need to repress the Indian Mutiny. And now and then there would be other projections of power and enthusiasm, usually after some real or imagined affront to national pride, as in the Opium Wars.

None of these isolated exertions of British power belied the general lack of interest in extending or ruling the colonies, or in any idea of imperial mission—a lack of interest that was evident from the 1830s to the late 1860s. Liberal England (and Scotland) followed Adam Smith in recoiling from colonial expenditure. Mid-nineteenth-century governments did not like paying the defence costs of Canadians, of truculent South Africans, or of downright violent New Zealanders. As seen from London, the New Zealanders quite inhumanely and expensively insisted on picking fights with the Maori. If the troops could be recalled from New Zealand, the money to pay them could be used to lower taxes, to build sewers, or to defend against the Germans (a key point in 1870).Still, the imperial adventures continued, and the British Empire, or pieces of it, were always in the background in mid-Victorian England. Throughout the century, indeed, the idea of imperial political federation would sometimes pop into the minds of political reformers.¹ Various pro-colonial sentiments appeared with some regularity in the press, albeit with little in the way of systematic development.² Citizens of the country that had invented industrialism and defeated Napoleon could hardly fail to notice their advantages over the rest of the world, and the fact that they had come to control large pieces of it.³ And as might be expected in a big, bustling culture, there were some people who began to pay more sustained attention to the bewildering variety of imperial news in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. What was happening in their minds? How did they try to make sense of it all?

Such people bulked large among the founders of the Colonial Society of 1868, the first major organization promoting the empire as a whole. In what they wrote and what they did, the Colonial Society founders show where the different strands of support for imperialism came from, and how those strands were brought together. The founders helped to bring coherence to the diverse and contradictory strands of British imperial thinking at mid-century. They ushered in the revival of interest in the imperial question that was already notable by 1870.⁴ They also helped to illustrate the origins of the imperial enthusiasm that would sweep through the British people by the end of the nineteenth century.

For most of the 1860s, as in the several decades before, ideas about the empire were still uncoordinated. There was not even a word that could encompass British policy in all the areas of the empire, from New South Wales to the Punjab. The word ‘imperialism’ would not do, for it meant something different then. Indeed, as Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt have explained:

The fact that what came to mind whenever the word imperialism was used between 1852 and 1870 was always the French empire and never the British serves to indicate that the latter lacked the quality which made the former subject to criticism under that name—the quality of representing a challenge to the public mind by its very existence. Most critics of British imperial affairs did not seem to consider the name of the British Empire a provocation against which their moral or political conscience was bound to react. The name of the British Empire was not, as a rule, raised in boastful rhetoric. There were no statesmen or publicists prominent in English public life for whom, on the ground of attitude or public utterances concerning the imperial position of Great Britain, the term ‘imperialism’ or ‘imperialist’ would have been characteristic.⁵

Indeed, ‘imperialism’ was a term of obloquy; it referred only to the domestic policies of Napoleon III. For Goldwin Smith, writing just before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, ‘imperialism’ was nearly synonymous with ‘despotism’. He used both words to refer to the system of domestic government under the Ancient Romans and Louis Napoleon alike. In his view, the opposite of imperialism throughout history was ‘English freedom’.⁶ But while ‘imperialism’ as a term could be rehabilitated only after Napoleon III had lost his throne in 1870, the enthusiasm of a number of Britons for their empire may be traced a few years before the word was applied to England.

The business of this study is to look for the growth of the imperial sentiment in Great Britain before 1870, and to look for it among a particular group of people. The Colonial Society was among the earliest signs of a movement of opinion in the direction of supporting the empire, and of thinking about the empire as a single large unit. Thus, instead of following older scholarship and attempting to characterize mid-Victorian imperialism by skipping among isolated quotations from what would seem to be a randomly chosen set of contemporary writers,⁷ we will use the founders of the Colonial Society as a pre-made sample. By looking at the founders we can see how particular individuals became interested in the empire as a general category, and how their ideas about the empire changed and grew. We can see how imperialism originated in individual minds, and what it derived from. The founders of the Colonial Society were indeed individuals who became imperialistic sometime before 1868, their imperialism having grown out of their other interests, and the position they reached is unmistakably imperialistic. The imperial enthusiasts of the Colonial Society included in their plans not only the settlement colonies but also many of the tropical areas that would be unclaimed by Europeans until the 1880s—showing the creation of imperialism as a general, geographically wide-ranging category.⁸

And yet, while the Colonial Society is a key place to look at how and why people moved away from their other concerns and became imperialists, it is not the only place. As long ago as 1938, one scholar suggested that the federal issues implicit in the US Civil War and in the Confederation of Canada soon after might have fed into the growth of imperialism in the late 1860s. That does not seem to have been the case, for the main founders of the Colonial Society had become interested in the empire and in how to govern it—whether federally or otherwise—well before the American Civil War; some paid close attention to the war in America, while others ignored it completely.⁹ Another place to look for the origin of late 1860s imperialism is in connection with the Abyssinian expedition of 1867, as Freda Harcourt has shown. She argues that Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli embarked on an African adventure to pander to the voters who had been enfranchised by the 1867 reform bill.¹⁰ Yet other scholars disagree. The Abyssinian War itself seems to have stemmed more from a set of bureaucratic and diplomatic blunders than from anyone’s demagogic tendencies, even Disraeli’s.¹¹ Among the members of the Colonial Society, moreover, a much wider and much older set of imperialistic attitudes were visible than among the people connected to the Abyssinian affair.

All in all, the founders of the Colonial Society are the best group among which to examine who became an imperialist and why. Viewed up close, the imperialistic Zeitgeist disappears, revealing instead the individuals who founded the Society, and the specific intellectual and social backgrounds out of which their imperialism grew.

At bottom, the concern is this: How does a society like Victorian England—so alive with controversies and debates, so alive with different doubts and different faiths, so full of ambitions and contradictions—how does so diverse a society¹² resolve itself to impose a grand, ill-conceived dream on that world—and an imperial dream—which is a denial of that diversity, and a desire to smooth it away? Where did the bandwagon of imperialism come from? Do a few opinion-makers invent huge movements, or do movements appear with apparent suddenness when some common element (as I believe) happens to bubble up in the lives of tens of thousands of people thinking in parallel about the economic, political, and intellectual substructures of their age?

Throughout the lives of the founders of the Colonial Society, evidence of European domination was everywhere for those who chose to see it.¹³ And the founders did choose to see it. That is, they chose to look at the big trends in the history of European contacts with non-European peoples; they were using bigger and bigger categories and drawing bigger and bigger conclusions about the whole history of the world. Their thinking became imperial in scope, and this often took place well before 1868.

The main founders of the Colonial Society were devotees of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose writing burst upon the scene in the early 1830s. For the Tocquevilleans, the central theme of world history was the rise of democracy; lessons came pouring in from the many newly self-governing English-speaking societies abroad—thus the British Empire was the vanguard of civilization. Alongside the Tocquevilleans in the Colonial Society there were archaeologists and anthropologists. These men were attempting to understand how the British Empire fitted into a world history that went back to the empires of Egypt and Sumeria. But the temptation to think about lofty abstractions on the order of ‘world democracy’ (for the Tocquevilleans) and the English ‘race’ (for the anthropologists) is a powerful one, and hard to break away from. It draws you in. You begin to forget about individual cases. As the years went by, the founders’ thinking tended more and more to the collective and the imperial. This is what drew them together by 1868.

Perhaps in trying to come up with a grand imperial ideal, they were trying to answer a basic question: What did England stand for? As Linda Colley has pointed out, the emancipation of the Catholics had meant that English nationalism could no longer be congruent with Protestant zeal; meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire soon after 1833 left the English with less to campaign against.¹⁴ So what did England stand for? Railways and industry? England as the land of liberty was a great success— except that what seemed most successful was the world of Gradgrind rather than the English constitution. Thus some Englishmen searched for a place for their country within a meaningful scheme of worldwide cultural and social progress, a scheme that would stand above the triumphs of what many of them saw as grubby British manufacturers.¹⁵ To come up with such a scheme means indulging in at least a few grand generalizations. For thirty years, and with ever greater intensity, the founders-to-be of the Colonial Society had been extending their ideas about the mission of England and its democratic settlements overseas, and about archaeology, anthropology, and race. They had been extending their ideas about these things to cover ever larger units of culture, government, or population, units that grew imperial in scale. What was the mission of Anglo-Saxon civilization? And what was the mission of the men in London who led it?

This study builds on a rich trove of scholarship about British imperialism in the nineteenth century, part of the national histories of more than 1,000,000,000 people in countries and universities around the globe. Many scholars have focused on British initiatives from Whitehall (the ‘centre’), others on the interaction of Europeans and non- Europeans in the different places where they met (the so-called ‘periphery’).¹⁶ Yet London had its own peripheries—its own uncoordinated points of contact between Europeans and the wider world. That is, it had unofficial men who at the privacy of their desks were trying to figure out the world they lived in, and how they ought to act in it.It should also be said that this book addresses questions of imperialism rather than of imperial expansion.¹⁷ Although it would be hard to imagine either imperialism or the empire developing in the utter absence of the other, none the less the attitudes and the territorial additions did not have to jog along together in any coordinated way. This is something that scholars have learned in attempting the devilish task of periodizing imperial history. The imperialism that came together in 1868 would have something to do with preparing the way for the imperial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, but the latter subject is beyond the scope of this work.

Yet even the subfield of the history of Victorian imperialism per se is very large indeed, and I would be remiss if I did not survey my corner of it for historiographical land mines that might destroy my thesis—a thesis, once again, about people who came to think in huge categories about the place of English-speaking democracy or the English race in world history, and who then came together in the Colonial Society. They came together because of the way they thought, not because of money.

But weren’t the British always looking for ways to take over the world and make money? Isn’t that where imperialism came from? A few purported facts—that the British have always been imperialists, that they have always been ‘in it’ for the money, and that they got rich through imperial rapine—have ascended almost to the level of folk wisdom. Yet only a few scholars who study the subject believe that the desire for money explains much about the growth of the ideology of imperialism that took place in the 1870s or thereabouts.¹⁸

Besides, even as an explanation for imperial expansion instead of imperial ideology, it is not obvious at first blush what the economic explanations are really saying. Did the British get rich off colonies, or did they waste a lot of money on colonies that they might better have spent on social programmes at home? Which ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The founding of the Colonial Society
• 3 The usual suspects
• 4 Businessmen
• 5 Travels and ideas
• 6 Tocqueville and Lord Bury
• 7 Adderley discovers the pattern of the world
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Members of the Colonial Society
• Notes
• Bibliography