The Enlightenment, Philanthropy and the Idea of Social Progress in Early Australia

Creating a Happier Race?

Ilya Lazarev

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429818080
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Weltgeschichte

This book seeks to highlight the influence of the Enlightenment idea of social progress on the character of the "civilising mission" in early Australia by tracing its presence in the various "civilising" attempts undertaken between 1788 and 1850. It also represents an attempt to marry the history of the British Enlightenment and the history of settler-Aboriginal interactions. The chronological structure of the book, as well as the breadth of its content, will facilitate the readers' understanding of the evolution of "civilising attempts" and their epistemological underpinnings, while throwing additional light on the influence of the Enlightenment on Australian history as a whole.

1
A Shortcut to Civilisation

The Idea of Social Progress and the Founders of Australia

The most remarkable races of men, it is true, have been rude before they were polished.

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 162

[S]avage people exactly answer the description given us by historians of the ancient state of mankind.

Antoine-Yves Goguet, The Origin of Law, Arts and Sciences, p. 5

I. The “Stadial Theory” and the Rise of the Conjectural History

The idea of the “civilising mission” in Australia was inextricably connected to and to a substantial extent inspired by the theory of social progress and its derivative—“the four-stages theory”, which assumed their coherent shape in the works of the Enlightenment thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century. By the time the First Fleet set sail for New South Wales the notion that “[t]he progress of civilisation may be divided into several stages; each of which … comprehends divers degrees of improvement”¹ having become widely accepted was deployed by the British in Australia, then New Holland, thus setting the tone for all subsequent attempts to assimilate Aboriginal people. The importance of the four-stages theory in the process of imperial expansion has been acknowledged but never sufficiently elucidated. Some regard it as little more than a clever ploy deployed to facilitate and expedite colonisation and dispossession. They maintain that the scientific assumptions of the theory itself were of passing relevance to British colonial officialdom, which used it merely as a camouflage for their real ignoble intentions of depriving the Aborigines of their ancestral lands. But was it really just a fancy façade for greed? I believe it was not, at least not to the extent some contemporary scholars would have us believe.

It has been suggested, somewhat dismissively, that the European founders of modern Australia were too indoctrinated in the ideas of the Enlightenment to be able “to see Aboriginal culture as instrumental in shaping action and reaction”. Grace Karskens, for instance, maintains that Arthur Phillip, Australia’s first Governor, and his officers were too convinced in their own superiority to even countenance the possibility that their “[c] ivilised manners, language … Christianity [and] the crowning gift of British justice” could be spurned by the Eora.² What Karskens calls the “‘colonisation by kindness’ plan” might have been the product of erroneous presuppositions but these presuppositions were by no means unimportant to the authors of early civilising schemes. In the absence of other equally cogent scientific explanations, the theory of incremental social progress was the only rational way to interpret human development. It was also the most elegantly formulated narrative of the rise of Britain from the fog of savagery to the lustre of civilisation. It seems inconceivable that both Phillip and Macquarie did not personally subscribe to the main tenets of this theory, while largely relying upon it as a conceptual model for their own civilising projects. It was an imperfect analytical prism through which educated Europeans looked at other peoples but it was the best one they had. But it was not a static empirical framework. It could be tweaked and improved in accordance with the exponentially increasing volume of scientific and geographical knowledge.

Knowledge itself was fluid and “[n]nothing was settled—things were being decided and that is what made is so exciting”. To its practitioners “science was exciting”, as “[i]t explored the world and … opened up hidden worlds”.³ Australia, as the “newest” world, provided fruitful ground for exploration, which itself was “closely tied up to the hope of economic advancement”. John Gascoigne observes that Europeans in early Australia were driven by “the ambition of taming the land for [personal] enrichment”, which was “the chief catalyst of scientific activity”. He, however, also adds the important qualifier that “there was an element of “disinterested fascination” in exploring the land and “even its original human population”.⁴

Karskens likewise concedes that the officers of the First Fleet were curious about the Eora and that their writings reveal the “genuine anthropological impulse, the quest to know these people”.⁵ This scientific inquisitiveness, in Karsken’s opinion, jars with their sense of cultural superiority. The two, I believe, are neither antithetical nor mutually exclusive. In fact, the eagerness to study the Other enabled the British to gradually develop a more nuanced understanding of the Aborigines as well as to see the drawbacks of their own society, which helped to dispel at least some of the preconceived notions they held about Native Australians.

Once again I must reiterate that there is little evidence to suggest that the eighteenth-century stadial theories provided the inspiration or justification for European colonisation, at least not until the second half of the nineteenth century. The assertion that the British and the French colonisations were driven by the lofty desire to propagate Enlightenment ideals and ideas associated with modernity is as naïve as it is erroneous. A careful examination of the eighteenth-century geopolitics, which I cannot attempt here, will soon reveal that the connection between the Enlightenment and European colonisation is very tenuous indeed. If anything, the new theories of social progress encouraged the European belief in the possibility of a speedy homogenisation of colonial societies, where the “native” component was to be gradually absorbed into the newly established socio-political structures. To an Enlightenment humanist, who would have baulked at the idea of purposeful extirpation of native peoples for the sake of European Lebensraum, the idea of assimilation was a much more palatable option than its awful alternative.⁶

The view that human societies progressed through four stages exemplified by a different mode of subsistence essentially outlines the rise of humankind from hunting-gathering through animal herding and agriculture before finally culminating in commerce. The latter, according to some versions of the theory, does not entirely displace agriculture but becomes a concomitant phenomenon resulting from the appearance of surplus produce.⁷ The theory, however, had broader implications. Apart from the emphasis on subsistence, the theory charted “the progression from the simple to the complex”, or from savagery, “which stood on the threshold of complex history”, towards civilisation—its “final phase”.⁸ Whereas proto-versions of the theory can be discovered dating as far back as classical antiquity, it was only during the eighteenth century that it was wrought into its final shape by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, John Millar and Adam Smith.

The fact that this theory came to fruition in Scotland is not a mere coincidence. Following the passing of the Acts of Union in 1706–1707 that united the kingdoms of Scotland and England, the former was undergoing a number of important economic and social changes. The merging of the states, despite being unpopular among those who regarded its outcome as a loss of sovereignty, did, nonetheless, produce a number of positive results, which noticeably outweighed the disadvantages of the new arrangement. By acquiring access to the English and imperial markets, Scotland was able not only to financially recover from its own disastrous attempt to establish an empire in the Americas, such as the Darien scheme, which substantially weakened the opposition to the Acts, but also ushered in a period of unprecedented economic, cultural and philosophical change. Scottish intellectuals like Dugald Stewart thought the union beneficial to Scotland’s development. “The happy but slow effects produced by the union of the kingdoms do not extend beyond the memory of some of some of our contemporaries”, observed Stewart in 1801, “and the traditions we have received concerning the condition of our immediate predecessors are apt to impress us with a belief that, at a still more early period, a proportionally less degree of civilisation prevailed”.⁹ Scotland of early nineteenth century had indeed become more “civilised” but the seeds of this intellectual fervour were already germinating a century before. The union simply nudged it down the foreseeable trajectory resulting in the establishment of the unique intellectual tradition. The Scottish Enlightenment, although mindful of the ideas flourishing to the south of the border and on the continent “had native roots in the country’s problems and in the analyses of solutions proposed to deal with them”.¹⁰ Scotland of the seventeenth century was a country, which “lagged some considerable way behind the other European states that fought for economic ascendency during this period”.¹¹ The change of economic fortunes after 1707, the transformation of Scotland’s cities and “the simultaneous emergence of an urban and commercial society in a country previously known only for its poverty and under-development”, were the main factors that prompted Ferguson and his other well-known contemporaries to construct their theories “of how and why progress has occurred”.¹² Ferguson stresses that all the essential clues can be found upon observation of the existing pre-civilised societies suggesting that

[i]t is in their condition, that we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our father were placed.¹³

If the developed European states, Britain in particular, represented to Ferguson humanity “in advanced years”, then other “primitive” societies were seen by the latter as existing in the state of infancy not dissimilar to the condition the Britons had been before the Roman invasion of the first century A.D. By observing such contemporary “primitive” societies, Europeans could obtain insights into their own ancient customs and “manners, that cannot, in any other way, be recalled”.¹⁴ The statement made perfect sense at the time when archaeology and anthropology as sciences were still in their infancy, and apart from the steadily increasing volume of travel accounts of varying veracity, there was little else to draw upon as far as the ability to reconstruct the past events was concerned. Decaying ruins left by the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, while providing some vague clues about the past, nonetheless represented an epistemic boundary beyond which the “real” history was indistinguishable and inextricable from the myth.

Legends, Biblical accounts and myths were, of course, closely examined for traces of humanity’s distant past but ever since the adoption of the Baconian methodology with experiment and observation as its principal modes of investigation, th...