Mid-Victorian Imperialists

Edward Beasley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135765743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the nineteenth century the British Empire was the subject of much writing; floods of articles, books and government reports were produced about the areas under British control and the policy of imperialism. Mid-Victorian Imperialists investigates how the Victorians made sense of all the information regarding the empire by examining the writings of a collection of gentlemen who were amongst the first people to join the Colonial Society in 1868-69. These men included imperial officials, leading settlers, British politicians and writers, and Beasley looks at the common trends in their beliefs about the British Empire and how their thoughts changed during their lives to show how Mid-Victorian theories of racial, cultural and political classification arose.

1
Introduction

In reading the histories of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness; when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852¹

Victorian England was a teeming society. For its more fortunate men and women, life brimmed with industries and shops, popular entertainments and learned journals, the polished woods of the display cases in the new museums, the racks of news pouring in from foreign lands. Many of the 21 million people in Great Britain at mid-century— perhaps three million of mature years in the more comfortable classes²—had the time and the means to choose (if they wished) what they wanted to pay attention to, what strands to listen for in the rich cacophony of Victorian life. Should one learn Italian? Work for the poor? Take up marine biology? Follow Latin American business and politics? Or should one follow the history of the British Empire itself?

But despite all the teeming interests and opinions of Victorian England, a consensus emerged by the end of the century—the consensus to pay attention to a certain range of affairs that came under the term ‘the British Empire’. The British would attempt to make a large part of the world conform to British expectations and the British will. They imposed their own shared intellectual categories on the rest of the world. These shared categories—such as ‘England’s mission’, ‘the white race’, ‘the natives’, and such—were applied in place of that riot of individual perspectives that one might well expect to arise out of the ramifying interests of 21 million people living at the centre of the world system of trade and communication.

Recent scholarship, stemming from the work of P.J.Cain and A.G. Hopkins, has traced Victorian imperialism to its economic source. This was the unity of feeling between British investors and the men who ran the government. Because of this unity of feeling, which Cain and Hopkins call ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, men in the government would work to make British overseas investments more secure.³ Sometimes helping investors would mean exerting pressure on foreign governments; sometimes it meant exerting imperial control over what had been foreign territory.⁴

But I do not believe that the motivation behind everyone’s imperialism was economic. If there was a unity of feeling between investors and administrators over Great Britain’s economic activities on the world stage, there was also another unity of feeling—one regarding the role of the ‘British race’ in the sweep of world history—and this unity of feeling was shared by many gentlemen who had no obvious economic motivation.

And there may well have been other motivations for imperialism, too—political motivations, personal motivations, other kinds. How can they be judged? How can all the different motivations be reconciled with each other, and a balanced picture reached?

As I have shown in an earlier work, Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information, and the Colonial Society of 1868 (London: Routledge, 2004), one needs to look in depth at people’s lives and writings to see what the economic motivation or the racial motivation or any other motivation for imperialism really meant to each individual. If, for example, we have the idea that one motivation for imperial activity was the need to find employment for hereditary aristocrats, we might then note that the future prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had occupied the India Office early in his ministerial career. And so an hereditary aristocrat found imperial employment, apparently confirming our hypothesis about aristocrats and empire. But in fact a closer examination of Lord Salisbury himself revealed (as in my last book) that for much of his life what aristocracy meant to him was resisting democratization and modernization. And he believed that a key part of what must be resisted was the spread of British colonial settlement. Colonization, in his mind, was nothing more than the process by which the moneygrubbing and amoral elements of society—the democratic elements—spread more of their kind across the globe, destroying traditional societies and aristocracies and killing off native populations. He had taken over the Colonial Office because that is the cabinet post that his political superiors needed him to take. So Salisbury was no ordinary imperialist at all, no aristocrat looking out into the Empire for employment and deriving a pro-imperial point of view from that fact. And this lack of imperial careerism on his part was despite the fact that he was cash-poor from much of his early and mid-years, and had to work as a journalist.

Our general picture may well be true; that is, aristocrats may have looked at the Empire for employment, and this may have motivated their imperialism. Perhaps we could make a table of aristocrats with imperial jobs—and yet upon closer examination, as in the case of Salisbury, the inner workings of at least some aristocratic minds, and the different self-fashionings and self-understandings that they shared and that we do not, might make hay of the conclusions to be drawn from the fact that there was some association between aristocratic status and imperial employment. Association does not mean causation, much less any particular kind of causation—economic, psychological, or what have you—until that causation has been shown to have existed. In my last study, I looked at each of the members of the Colonial Society of 1868 individually—it was the first body designed to promote the overall empire as a single large category, and so it is a good place to look for the origins of a later and larger kind of imperialism. In looking at the aristocrats within the society, I did not find that Salisbury’s anti-imperialism was typical. But what ‘typical’ is can be elusive; different aristocrats, when one looks at them closely, had their different ideological, economic, political, and other kinds of motivations for being interested in different subjects and different parts of the world— factors above and beyond what we could learn simply by identifying them as ‘aristocrats’.

The question is whether any group of people that we might identify as being proimperial is really a coherent and valid group, when one looks closely at the lives and views of the people in it. In Empire as the Triumph of Theory, I looked at the validity of grouping the members of the 1868 Colonial Society into various possibly pro-imperial constituencies, not only aristocrats and officeholders, but also railway and telegraph engineers, bankers, businessmen, missionaries, travellers and writers. The least helpful, least internally coherent grouping turned out to be missionaries—there simply weren’t more than a handful in the Society—and businessmen, who although they were numerous enough did not make a very coherent group. The ‘businessmen’ included people who were simply colonists out in the Empire, supporting themselves by participating in the economy in some way, and sharing neither the outlook nor the social position of major economic imperialists back in London—who by themselves were far fewer in number.

The category that fits the largest number of members the best was not ‘businessman’ or ‘official’ or ‘traveller’, but ‘writer’, a fact that surprised me early in my research. Indeed, what does it mean? As writers, many of the members of the Colonial Society of 1868 shared in the task of trying to organize and simplify the information flowing at so rapid a rate into Victorian England. Their need to simplify and classify had led them towards grand categories of thought like ‘the British Empire’. And that helps to explain why they joined a pro-imperial society in 1868.

Lytton Strachey wrote that the history of Victorian England will never be written because we know too much about it.⁵ What he might have added is that the Victorians knew too much about themselves. Like us—like any modern people—they were drowning in books and biographies, reminiscences, dozens of monthly journals and reams of government reports. Then there was the mail—which by the 1850s came 12 times daily in central London, several times per day in most of urban England, and once on Sunday.⁶ One could have a whole correspondence in a day, as we can with e-mail. So there was plenty of incentive to cut down on all of this detail, to make sense of the world, to look for the underlying pattern and sweep of history so one could ignore most of the rest.

For many people, to categorize and generalize meant not only to make marginal annotations on the articles written by others but to write for oneself, to develop one’s own categories. Doing so—writing continually, year after year—meant that a writer’s fixed ideas might grow and deepen, while contrary evidence and messy details might not always be remembered so well down through the years as they had been early in one’s career. This is the process that brought some men, those who began to write about some aspect of imperial affairs at some point early in their lives, to see the British Empire as a single, shining (if increasingly indistinct) vision, as they came to a position of outright imperialism.

If we are to understand this Victorian world of thinking and writing we must look, as Strachey did, at the stories of individuals, looking at their lives in the round, looking at the growth and change in their thought. People cannot be left in quickly sorted categories according to something that they may have written in one year or another;⁷ they need to be looked at as living, changing personalities. Their thoughts developed, and often in a parallel direction. From an early concern with specifics there grew generalizations, and out of the habit of generalizing about the world came a set of imperialistic opinions about it.

The thinking of Alexis de Tocqueville about the world-historical future of the AngloSaxon peoples provided a set of intellectual categories that ran through the thinking of a great many of the writers who so dominated the Colonial Society of 1868. Tocqueville focused on the advance of equality and democracy in the modern world, and especially in the English-speaking world (at least in his earlier works). It was in the 1830s and 1840s that the founders of the 1868 Colonial Society were reading Tocqueville, and it was then that they first began to pay attention to English colonies and to the kind of equality and democracy that tended to characterize them. It was in those decades that the idea of expanding the colonies to which British emigrants might go loomed large as a way of coping with the problem of poverty in England itself.

The founders further developed their ideas about the settlement empire when times got better and the need for emigration faded in the 1850s; by that point, the spread of selfgovernment among the British settlement colonies seemed—to those British people who were paying attention—to augur a world of dozens of self-governing demo-cratic states, each speaking English, and each combining English stability with something of the democratic social character of the United States. Thus the founders of the Colonial Society of 1868 had moved away from some of their more specifically immigrationrelated imperial concerns, and they had moved towards even grander generalities related to the British Empire and its world-historical fate. But they generalized in other ways, too.

Their grander theories of world history and of the British role in it—theories developed by the 1850s and 1860s—were not much disturbed by mere events on the order of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8 or the American Civil War of 1861–5. The thinking of the founders had risen above mere specifics, and in any case a native rebellion in India and a civil war in the North American republic did not disturb their vision of the grand destiny of the new Englands of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa. Indeed, as I showed in Empire as the Triumph of Theory, the generality of the founders’ thinking in the 1850s and 1860s led at least some of them all the way to an idea of extending this grand empire into the tropics, long before the Scramble for Africa became a popular cause.

Empire as the Triumph of Theory surveyed the whole membership and looked in depth at the main founders of the Colonial Society—thus the book established the overall picture that I have outlined here.

Mid-Victorian Imperialists goes further. It is common enough to claim that imperial themes ran through nineteenth-century British culture in a variety of important ways. But perhaps it is not common enough to look at the evidence to see whether those imperial themes were really present among one or another group of thinkers within Victorian society. This study looks at certain key groups of Colonial Society founders in greater depth than Empire as the Triumph of Theory could do in surveying all the members. Just what were the issues, running through the wider swathes of the Victorian world represented by these key groups of men, that were feeding the generalization and the imperial thinking that Empire as the Triumph of Theory identifies as lying behind the Colonial Society of 1868?

For his part, Lytton Strachey looked at four Victorian individuals: Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon. This book looks at four groups of Victorian writers in the Colonial Society—some famous people and some who were not famous at all. They all developed their own forms of imperialism, their worldwide and imperialistic categories of thought, in time to join the Colonial Society of 1868 in its first several months. Thus they were pioneers and not late-joiners of the imperial movement.

Some—writers all—were imperial officials, others were Australians, still others were English politicians, and then there were the archaeologists and ethnologists. Members of all but the last group led themselves towards imperialism by making ever-grander generalizations about the nature of the democratic, English-speaking world, often borrowing their categories from Alexis de Tocqueville. Members of the fourth group, although not so interested in Tocquevillean ideas about the fate of democracy, were interested in other global issues. They wondered how the British Empire fitted into a sequence of empires going back to Egypt and Sumeria, and how what was being learned about some cultures could be generalized into a complete world-wide picture of the human race.

The ‘English-speaking world’, the ‘English race’—the temptation to think about collectivities rather than individuals is a powerful one, and once started it is hard to break away from. As each man went through life, his thinking tended more and more to the collective and the imperial, and this drew them together by 1868.

In sum, without a close examination of what these men wrote by that date about the empire in the settlement colonies and the tropics—and they wrote a great deal about both—one cannot get a good picture of how high the empire loomed in the minds of those mid-Victorian Englishmen who chose to think about it. Some were outright tropical imperialists. How prominent was the imperial theme in the different areas of Victorian culture that these men inhabited? And how did they take up the imperial theme and develop it further? This book examines these men in enough depth to help firm up our answers to these questions. These are questions that very recently have been given renewed prominence by the publication of Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), but they are also of permanent interest in the study of nineteenth-century England and its imperial activities.

Such questions about the prominence and fate of imperial thinking are also of interest when we step back to examine the categories that we use to think about the different societies of the world—when, that is, we examine how to do history and social science in a world where there is too much detail to master. We must generalize about other peoples, but how much generalization is too much, too imperial? As we will see by the end of the book, certain mid-Victorians wondered about exactly these issues. Is imperial thinking always a latent possibility, ready to spring up when we look at the rest of the globe and try to reduce it to some sensible pattern?

It is time to look at how the Victorians did it—how they examined and characterized their globalized world.

2
Arthur Mills, almanacs and despotism

The variety of the Empire

So what was the British Empire, what were the imperial concerns of the time, and where could the Victorians find out about all this?

The empire of the 1850s and 1860s included what was left of British North America after the peace with the United States in 1783; what was left of the British Caribbean after the sugar economy was ruined by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s; various bases like Gibraltar and Malta, left over from centuries of wars and struggles; the more recent anti-slave trade bases on the coast of West Africa; the southern tip of the same continent, taken as a base during the Napoleonic Wars but open to settlers and rapidly turning into a set of colonies; India, ruled until 1859 not by the British government but by the East India Company; and the very young colonies of Australia and New Zealand, with New Zealand coming under British rule only in 1840. Some of these places were governed by military commanders, some (such as Bermuda) by local governments hundreds of years old, and many were self-governing parliamentary democracies, nearly independent of Whitehall except in foreign policy, defence and native affairs. This state of near independence in many of the more developed colonies of settlement¹—granted in response to the burning of the local parliament in Newfoundland in the year of revolution, 1848—was called ‘responsible government’, because each ministry was responsible to the lower house of the local parliament. The cabinet stood or fell by its votes in parliament, not by the favour of the local governor. By 1859, the world was girded with 11 of these English-speaking colonial democracies, each with its own ‘responsible government’, its own parliament, mace and speaker, a vibrant and contentious local press, and as often as not its own agenda of expansion and development.

Already, at the outset of responsible government, the local political agenda in these colonies was rather different from the policies coming out of the twelfth English-speaking parliamentary system, the one in London. There was no well-established aristocracy in the colonies, no House of Lords dating from the Middle Ages; as Tocqueville understood, democratic and equalitarian principles had freer rein than in the mother country. This contrast played itself out in a bewildering variety of issues that would confront

the contemporary observer of the colonial scene. Not least of them was the equalitarian opposition to the ‘Wakefieldian’ or ‘Colonial Reform’ system that Whitehall had imposed upon many of the newer colonies of settlement in the 1830s and 1840s. Following the thinking of the writer Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the rural lands of the colonies were sold for a ‘sufficient price’ to keep all but the richest emigrants off them. The idea was to bottle up the poorer settlers in English-style towns rather than letting them homestead out on the land as equalitarian back-woodsmen. Confined to the colonial cities, they would make up a class of tradesmen and servants—earning low wages, so that higher-class emigrants could afford decent servants. Too often, in colonies with cheap land, the tradesmen and servants simply set out on their own, Wakefield believed. With expensive rural land, he thought, one could replicate the whole of the English class system: great rural landlords employing agricult...