Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868

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Empire as the Triumph of Theory

Who were the first people to invent a world-historical mission for the British Empire? And what were the constituencies behind the development of imperialism in mid-Victorian England? These questions are vital for understanding where the NewImperialism of the late nineteenth century came from. Empire as the Triumph of Theorytakes 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 RoyalCommonwealth Society).

The book goes on to a careful and well-written tour of the different parts of theVictorian 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, hadwritten books or articles about the cultures of the world. Victorian activities around theglobe were multitudinous and varied; and general ideas about Englands imperial mission were, in fact, constructed by members of the Colonial Society, in order to make sense outof information flowing in from this teeming world.

This is the first work to explore the social and intellectual origins of the Colonial Society, brings the mid-Victorians to life, and should become a standard work forspecialists on imperialism.

Edward Beasley is lecturer in history at San Diego State University, where he alsoteaches in the Liberal Studies Program. He studied the nineteenth-century British Empire under the late John S.Galbraith and nineteenth-century England under Judith Hughes.

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Empire as the Triumph of Theory Imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of 1868

Edward Beasley

Empire as the Triumph of Theory Imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of

1868

Edward Beasley

LONDON AND NEW YORK

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2005 Edward Beasley

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To my parents

Contents

List of illustrations x General editors preface xi Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xv

1 Introduction 12 The founding of the Colonial Society 123 The usual suspects 254 Businessmen 455 Travels and ideas 626 Tocqueville and Lord Bury: the empire of democracy 757 Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 958 Conclusion 115

Appendix: Members of the Colonial Society 121 Notes 128 Bibliography 186 Index 201

Illustrations

Figure

Tables

Figure 1 Major extra-European territories of the British Empire, 1868 xvi

2.1 New members by period and by status on joining 182.2 Members who wrote 223.1 Aristocrats joining the Society 253.2 New members by parliamentary membership 303.3 Members governing the colonies 333.4 Regular officers and engineers 364.1 Bankers and businessmen 465.1 Areas visited 645.2 Subjects of books and articles published by the founders by April 1869 72

General editors preface

At one point in this book Edward Beasley draws an interesting distinction between little,middling and big histories. His purpose is simple: to illustrate how his little history of a particular social group, the men who in 186869 founded Britains Colonial Society, informs the big history of long-run trends in attitudes towards abstractions such as empire and imperialism. The point is apt for, too often, these two types of history do notcoincide, not least in the field of imperial history. It is too easy to assume that eventsshape attitudes to these grand themes, without checking sufficiently the contemporaryevidence. And insofar as little history is considered, it is unfortunately on occasion inorder to shoehorn it into servicing the broad conclusions that big history suggests. So, for instance, it is sometimes assumed that the imperialist childrens literature of a G.A. Henty somehow shaped the empire reflected by his writings, even though those who readhis works between the 1880s and the First World War included not so much the alreadymature builders of empire, but instead the men who went on to close it down in the 1950sand 1960s. Or it is similarly assumed that the publication of Dilkes Greater Britainexplains subsequent changing attitudes to empire.

This book, which looks, among others, at an earlier group of Hentys, suggests a more complex relationship between the little and big histories of empire in nineteenth-century Britain. A change in the latter in the last decades of the century, exemplified by theScramble for Africa, has long been supposed. Empire seemingly shifts from theoccasional acquisition of either settler colonies or coaling and trading stations to a morethorough-going forward policy. But, Beasley argues, this was not the result of the happenstance reaction to major events, the usual suspects including the Indian Mutinyand the Jamaican Governor Eyre controversy of the 1850s and 1860s. Nor, he maintains,was it a reflection either of changes in what he terms middling history, the activities of government agencies and institutions, or the influence of Dilkes 1869 publication upon official minds. Instead, as Beasley shows, Great Britain was reflexive of broader trends already in train when it appeared, one of which was the infant Colonial Society.

Particular catalysts for changea book, an event, a new government directiveare therefore rejected here in favour of what might be termed, somewhat oxymoronically, abroad little history. Beasley does not look at the first expression of the views of a youngman, as Charles Dilke then was, so much as at the maturing ideas of a somewhatdisparate group whose one common point was their early membership of the ColonialSociety. That membership reflected the point to which their conceptualization of empirehad travelled by 186869, but it was not the prompt for it.

There are, of course, a number of groups of eminent Victorians who have already been subjected to collective scrutiny. For instance, the controversies among ethnographers andanthropologists of the 1850s and 1860s, not least their responses to imperial events suchas the brutal suppression of unrest in Jamaica by Governor Eyre, have been used bysubsequent historians to suggest a hardening of attitudes to race in mid-Victorian Britain.

What this does not demonstrate, however, is that such controversies can readily be readacross and inserted into the discourse of empire. A young man such as Dilke might havefound his consciousness of empire shaped by such developments. The intellectualjourneys of the vast majority of Beasleys subjects, maturing as they did over a much longer span, were much less susceptible to such influences. Instead, their views of empirewere largely formed over the preceding decades as travellers, businessmen, officials orlawyers within the increasingly self-governing colonies of settlement.

The result, Beasley suggests, was that by the 1860s they had arrived at a systematic view of empire. Their ideas may not have been entirely congruent, either among all thefounders or with how ideas of empire would subsequently develop over the next fewdecades. There were to be conflicts over proposals for imperial federation, or on howempire should behave relative to native peoples. But these controversies were about thearticulation of empire. Late Victorians could debate what empire should do and how itshould be organized, but first they needed to think through, by the 1860s and 1870s, whatit actually was. Beasleys little history of the founders of the Colonial Society, and ofhow they came to think of empire as an abstraction, is thus an important part ofexplaining why this development in the big history of the British Empire came about.

Peter Catterall London, 6 April 2004

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my parents, Virgil Roy Beasley and the late Ima Jean Beasley; my brother,Howard Russell Mendenhall; and my grandparents, Audrey and Lawrence Michael. Andthank you to my best friend, Rebecca Lea Hartmann Frey; my goddaughter, SarahCastille Frey; and our friend and roommate, Ronald Zavala.

At the University of California, San Diego, my thanks go to my dissertation advisers,namely the late John S.Galbraith, who showed me the British Empire, and JudithM.Hughes, who made me a European historian. I would also like to thank my self-appointed and much appreciated supporters, Stephen Cox, Thomas Dunseath, LauraGalbraith, and the late Christine Norris. Thanks also to Mary Lillis Allen, Pam Clark,Douglas Cremer, Stefan Fodor, Elizabeth Jordan, David S.Luft, John Marino, AllanMitchell, James Ralph Papp, Ann Ramirez, David Ringrose, Robert Ritchie, CynthiaTruant, Errol Seaton, Andrew Wright, and the UCSD History Department for its financialsupport.

At San Diego State University, thank you to William Ashbaugh, Laurence Baron,Bruce Castleman, Aimee Lee Cheek, William Cheek, Betty Fischer, Elizabeth CobbsHoffman, David Dufault, Ross Dunn, Barry Joyce, Harry McDean, Polly Mason, AdrianaPutko, Carole Putko, Phoebe Roeder, and my students, especially in Modern EuropeanHistory. I thank Jason Clark for drawing the map.

Thank you also to the libraries of the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Irvine, and San Diego State University. I owe a special dept tothe staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office of San Diego State University, including EdwardDibella, Kelley Martin, and Teri Roudenbush.

In London, I am deeply in debt to the British Library in its Bloomsbury incarnation, as well as the India Office Library and Records, a British Library Department located (whenI used it) in Blackfriars Road. Thank you also to the many people who helped me at theInstitute of Historical Research; the Historical Manuscripts Commission; the PublicRecord Office, Kew; the British Museum; and the London Goodenough Trust (theLondon House for Overseas Graduates), now Goodenough College. My thanks toProfessor A.G.Hopkins for his encouragement.

And thank you to Andrew Humphries, who was my editor at the firm of Frank Cass; tomy editor at Routledge, Terry Clague; to the Series Editor, Peter Catterall, of QueenMary and Westfield College; and to Gail Welsh and Wearset Ltd.

Finally, there is (or was) the Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Northumberland Avenue. My thanks go to the Society and the Commonwealth Trust formaintaining the library as long as they did, and for allowing me to see everything that Iwanted to see. I must give even deeper thanks, however, to the extremely helpful librarystaff. That staff is now dispersed, and the collection is in its new home at CambridgeUniversity. But thank you to Miss T.A.Barringer, the Librarian of the RoyalCommonwealth Society. She did so much to help me even in those uncertain years when

she was trying to keep the collection together and running. My thanks also to theLibrarian Emeritus of the Royal Commonwealth Society, the late Donald Simpson, OBE,who shared with me his own information on the early members of the Colonial Society.Without his kindness, I would have had a much harder row to hoe in collating themembership.

Abbreviations

ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography Add. MS/Add. MSS Additional Manuscript/Additional Manuscripts AHLP Austen Henry Layard Papers BL British Library CS Colonial Society CB Companion of the Order of the Bath CIE Companion of the Indian Empire Corresp. Correspondence Coun. Min. Council Minutes DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography DNB Dictionary of National Biography DP Dilke Papers edn edition EIC East India Company encl. enclosure fo, fos folio, folios FRS Fellow of the Royal Society GCB Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath GCMG Knight Grand Commander of the Order of Saint Michael

and Saint George GCSI Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India GP Gladstone Papers HMS His Majestys Ship/Her Majestys Ship IOLR India Office Library and Records KCB Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath KCMG Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and

Saint George KP Knight of Saint Patrick MICE Member of the Indian Corps of Engineers Min. Minutes n. note n.d. no date n.s. new series

Figure 1 Major extra-European territories of the British Empire, 1868 (source: drawn by Jason Clark).

NJ New Jersey NY New York o.s. old series PP Parliamentary Papers (Command Papers) PRCI Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute PRO Public Record Office RCS Royal Commonwealth Society RCSA Royal Commonwealth Society Archives RCSL Royal Commonwealth Society Library rev. revised ser. series SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel TLS Times Literary Supplement

Key A The Bahamas

E Trinidad H Sierra Leone J Lagos

B Bermuda F Windward and Leeward Islands

I Gold Coast forts and Fante area

K Niger delta forts and Lakoja Consulate C British

Honduras D Jamaica G The Gambia

1 Introduction

In the late nineteenth century, Great Britain acquired a new empire in Africa andelsewhere in the Tropics. And it acquired a new enthusiasm for empire as a whole. A vastswathe of British Empire Red stretched across thousands of schoolroom maps, and itmade millions of British hearts beat faster. Imperial questions became central in Britishpolitics. The Boer War of 18991902 was fought in service of the imperial mission, amission that soared above the rather meagre economic benefits of almost all the territoryin 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 thevarious pieces of the empire might add up to if they were looked at as a whole. The heartof the old empire had gone in the American Revolution, and the remaining NorthAmerican 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 tomind 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 Britains surplus population, but colonial reform died away in the better economic climate of theearly 1850s. Most of the settlement colonies (in North America, Australia, and NewZealand) were given self-government by the middle of that decade. The colonies of theWest Indies, economic embarrassments ever since the abolition of slavery in the BritishEmpire in the 1830s, inspired little enthusiasm.

While some people were enthusiastic about retaining the Indian Empire (especiallywhen it rebelled in 1857), they were not enthusiastic about the empire in general. Theimperial 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 powerarose from instabilities in the remaining imperial possessions; usually this meant a needto 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 inextending or ruling the colonies, or in any idea of imperial missiona 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 SouthAfricans, or of downright violent New Zealanders. As seen from London, the NewZealanders 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 usedto 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, theidea of imperial political federation would sometimes pop into the minds of politicalreformers.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 advantagesover the rest of the world, and the fact that they had come to control large pieces of it.3And as might be expected in a big, bustling culture, there were some people who began topay 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 senseof 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 theydid, the Colonial Society founders show where the different strands of support forimperialism came from, and how those strands were brought together. The foundershelped to bring coherence to the diverse and contradictory strands of British imperialthinking at mid-century. They ushered in the revival of interest in the imperial questionthat was already notable by 1870.4 They also helped to illustrate the origins of theimperial enthusiasm that would sweep through the British people by the end of thenineteenth 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 allthe 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 andHelmut 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 namethe 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

Empire as the triumph of theory 2

while imperialism as a term could be rehabilitated only after Napoleon III had lost histhrone in 1870, the enthusiasm of a number of Britons for their empire may be traced afew 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 ColonialSociety was among the earliest signs of a movement of opinion in the direction ofsupporting 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 arandomly chosen set of contemporary writers,7 we will use the founders of the ColonialSociety as a pre-made sample. By looking at the founders we can see how particularindividuals became interested in the empire as a general category, and how their ideasabout the empire changed and grew. We can see how imperialism originated in individualminds, and what it derived from. The founders of the Colonial Society were indeedindividuals who became imperialistic sometime before 1868, their imperialism having grown out of their other interests, and the position they reached is unmistakablyimperialistic. The imperial enthusiasts of the Colonial Society included in their plans notonly the settlement colonies but also many of the tropical areas that would be unclaimedby Europeans until the 1880sshowing 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 peoplemoved 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 CivilWar and in the Confederation of Canada soon after might have fed into the growth ofimperialism in the late 1860s. That does not seem to have been the case, for the mainfounders of the Colonial Society had become interested in the empire and in how togovern itwhether federally or otherwisewell 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 Abyssinianexpedition of 1867, as Freda Harcourt has shown. She argues that Prime MinisterBenjamin Disraeli embarked on an African adventure to pander to the voters who hadbeen enfranchised by the 1867 reform bill.10 Yet other scholars disagree. The AbyssinianWar itself seems to have stemmed more from a set of bureaucratic and diplomaticblunders than from anyones demagogic tendencies, even Disraelis.11 Among the members of the Colonial Society, moreover, a much wider and much older set ofimperialistic attitudes were visible than among the people connected to the Abyssinianaffair.

All in all, the founders of the Colonial Society are the best group among which toexamine who became an imperialist and why. Viewed up close, the imperialistic Zeitgeistdisappears, revealing instead the individuals who founded the Society, and the specificintellectual and social backgrounds out of which their imperialism grew.

At bottom, the concern is this: How does a society like Victorian Englandso alive with controversies and debates, so alive with different doubts and different faiths, so fullof ambitions and contradictionshow does so diverse a society12 resolve itself to impose a grand, ill-conceived dream on that worldand an imperial dreamwhich is a denial of

Introduction 3

that diversity, and a desire to smooth it away? Where did the bandwagon of imperialismcome from? Do a few opinion-makers invent huge movements, or do movements appearwith apparent suddenness when some common element (as I believe) happens to bubbleup 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 contactswith non-European peoples; they were using bigger and bigger categories and drawingbigger and bigger conclusions about the whole history of the world. Their thinkingbecame 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 centraltheme of world history was the rise of democracy; lessons came pouring in from themany newly self-governing English-speaking societies abroadthus 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 understandhow the British Empire fitted into a world history that went back to the empires of Egyptand 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 aboutindividual 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, theemancipation of the Catholics had meant that English nationalism could no longer becongruent with Protestant zeal; meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in the British Empiresoon 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 successexcept that what seemed most successful was the world of Gradgrind rather than theEnglish constitution. Thus some Englishmen searched for a place for their country withina meaningful scheme of worldwide cultural and social progress, a scheme that wouldstand above the triumphs of what many of them saw as grubby British manufacturers.15To 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 democraticsettlements overseas, and about archaeology, anthropology, and race. They had beenextending 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 incountries and universities around the globe. Many scholars have focused on Britishinitiatives 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 peripheriesits own uncoordinated points of contact between Europeans and the wider world. That is, it had unofficial men who at the privacy of theirdesks 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 theterritorial additions did not have to jog along together in any coordinated way. This issomething that scholars have learned in attempting the devilish task of periodizingimperial history. The imperialism that came together in 1868 would have something to dowith preparing the way for the imperial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, but the lattersubject 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 historiographicalland mines that might destroy my thesisa 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 cametogether because of the way they thought, not because of money.

But werent the British always looking for ways to take over the world and make money? Isnt that where imperialism came from? A few purported factsthat the British have always been imperialists, that they have always been in it for the money, and that they got rich through imperial rapinehave ascended almost to the level of folk wisdom. Yet only a few scholars who study the subject believe that the desire for money explainsmuch about the growth of the ideology of imperialism that took place in the 1870s orthereabouts.18

Besides, even as an explanation for imperial expansion instead of imperial ideology, itis not obvious at first blush what the economic explanations are really saying. Did theBritish get rich off colonies, or did they waste a lot of money on colonies that they mightbetter have spent on social programmes at home? Which was it? This uncertainty makesthe history of the economic explanation of imperialism a strange one.19 The first major thinker along these lines was J.A.Hobson. Working at the turn of the century, and basinghis ideas upon the arguments of a small number of American theoreticians and a largernumber of Cobdenite anti-imperialists, Hobson wrote that a class of parasitic financiers was profiteering from the empire at the expense of everyone else, including most Englishcapitalists; the empire was making England poorer.20 Following Hobson, and for much of the rest of the twentieth century, good Marxists would agree that England had exportedexcess capital, since the iron laws of worker exploitation ruled out using excess goodsand excess finance to improve the lot of the common people at home.21

Some years after Hobson, in the socialist era after the Boer War and the First World War, people who no longer had much reason to trust the ruling classes created theopposite myth. It might be called the demotic theory of economic imperialism. This mythheld that most of Britains prosperity (a prosperity which seemed in those lean years to be confined to the rulers) was based on the exploitation of colonies. In this period, Hobsons fame grew, but his theory that a parasitic imperialism drained resources from Englanddoes not seem to have been widely studied.22 Believers in the demotic theory were convinced that the prosperity of England came from exploiting the empire, importing

Introduction 5

surpluses from it and not from exporting surpluses to it. These sub-Hobsonians assumed a zero-sum game, with every part of a countrys riches being won at the expense of other countries. Thus their conclusion that England had simply stolen all of its wealth; was notEngland wealthier than many parts of the world? George Orwell showed that he belongedto this school when he wrote that a Britain stripped of its empire would be reduced to alife that centred on herrings and potatoes.23 Early scholarly refutations of this idea of economic imperialism do not seem to have made as much of an impression; the demotictheory of exploitation took off from the ideas of Orwell and other self-styled disciples of Hobson.24

Within the field of imperial history, scholars are still refuting the idea that the empirewas central to British economic growth. It now seems that British industrialization in itseighteenth-century phase may indeed have been helped along by the existence of theNorth American market. Patrick K.OBrien argues that no more than 15 per cent of theinvestment behind the first industrial revolution came from Britains extra-European trade.25 Even if that extra margin of investment helped to spark the British economy, thespark had already started a wildfire in England by 1815. Industry had taken off, wealthwas being created at home, and empire was not economically fundamental in the age ofcoal and railwaysalthough the empire did continue to grow.26

To the extent that reconstructed statistics can tell us anything about the economic effect of the empire in the mid- to late nineteenth century, well after industrial take-off, the conclusion seems to be that empire cost the British people a great deal of money.Defending the empire meant that the taxpayer (including low-income groups whose food was subject to non-progressive excise taxes) had to pay for an extra navy, one capable ofdefending Australians, New Zealanders, and for a time Canadians. The people of thesecountries could therefore build an infrastructure for themselves while keeping their owntaxes low.27 These settlement colonists were indeed the chief financial beneficiaries of the empire. The British themselves could have maintained superpower military levels, aswell as their dominance over the world trading system, without the expense of eitherrunning old colonies or acquiring new ones.28 Thus it remains hard to explain why the British took that extra step as the century drew to its close.

If the general public was not making money out of the empire, then maybe Hobsons finance capitalists were doing so, and perhaps it was they who gave the lead. But the factsindicate that most investors lost their money when they so much as looked towards theempire. Only a minority received the rate of return that they would have enjoyed in thebigger investment markets of Europe and the United States, even though there may havebeen a brief, shallow, and hard-to-pinpoint interlude of imperial profitability in the 1860s or 1870s. (Imperial profitability in that period was so diffuse that it would not have beennoticeable to contemporary investorsto find out about it they would have neededmasses of proprietary data, then secret.) As Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback haveshown, few sectors of the economy showed much in the way of imperial profits. Twoareas of economic activity where the empire did make money for people were consumergoods and infrastructure, chiefly railways. Even then, most of the profits were made inthe settlement empire that had become largely self-governing in the 1850s, and not in those areas of the world which were to figure so prominently in the New Imperialism ofthe 1880s and after.29 That is, the British sold far more consumer goods in Canada than


up the Zambezi. While there was some contemporary opinion that the possession of onevery special non-settlement colony, India, brought economic profits to the empire, most people did not think so.30 Nor did businessmen behave as if it did. Even in India British enterprise refused to risk any money building railways. Only in 1849, when the East IndiaCompany agreed to guarantee firms a profit of 5 per cent (out of Indian governmentrevenue) did railway construction start. It grew apace, but profits and labour conditionsdid not satisfy the British construction enterprises. Construction slowed by the late 1860s,and from 1869 until the 1880s the post-1849 system of subsidized capitalism was abandoned for outright public-private partnerships with a profit guarantee of 4 per cent.31Most of the profitable railway investment in the empire was, once again, in the self-governing settlement colonies.

All in all, it is hard to claim that British imperial profits were higher than British profitselsewhere in the mid-Victorian decades, or that imperial profits were thought to be verybig at all during the New Imperial push into the tropics. That does not mean that the newBritish colonies in Africa or Asia would not suffer financial exploitation. In addition, asT.O. Lloyd has pointed out, the rates of return on different investments will tend toequalize across industries under free competition. New investment will be attracted intosectors of high profitability until that extra profitability is gonediluted, removed by the law of diminishing returns.32 Imperial exploitation happened none the less, whether or not profits on imperial investments were especially large. What matters here, however, isthat there does not seem to have been anything particularly attractive about imperialinvestmenteither an extra margin of profitability that had yet to equalize or an extra measure of financial safety. There was little that would serve as an incentive to an across-the-board expansion of imperial control, formal or informal. Some people made money in far-off places that might come under imperial control, while others did not.

The more exotic parts of the worldthe areas where the empire might growwere the places where crises came from, not where safe money went. During the Parliamentarysession of 1868/69, when the Colonial Society was young, MPs were regaled with twomore or less imperial issues: the terrible 8,000,000 cost of the diplomatic catastropheand military adventure in Abyssinia, and the idea of removing the anti-slave-trade squadrons from the coast of West Africaand removing them for the sole purpose ofsaving the governments money.33

The places where the British did make money were not the places that they seized. Where a large amount of British money was invested, the British government usuallyrefrained from seizing territory,34 or they were in no position to seize it anyway. LatinAmerica, site of much investment and full of independent countries, is the classic case.35But the history of another target area for British investment, an area where there were noLatin American-style governments to get in the way of British territorial acquisition, will make clear the tenuous connection between the spread of trade and the spread of the flag.For about a half-century prior to 1852, Britain had been taking the odd piece of territorynow and then in maritime Southeast Asia. These places were taken largely in order toguard the Indian and China trades rather than for the value of the new possessionsthemselves, which lost money. Yet it must be underlined that for the most part theseactual acquisitions, unprofitable as they were, became formal colonies directly ruled bythe British.

Introduction 7

After 1873, Britains territorial acquisitions in that area resumed and they resumed in force, this time for the profits actually available in the places seized; but the irony is thatthese new, now-profitable areas were taken in the form of suzerainties rather than formalacquisitions (excepting the central part of Burma, formally annexed for non-economic reasons in February 1886). Thus, expansion of control without real sovereignty took place while the scramble for formal colonial control over Africa was raging at full force.36Where trade went, therefore, whether in Latin America or in the indirectly ruled Britishhegemonies erected in Southeast Asia after 1873, the British flag did not go.

Around the world, meanwhile, there was very little interestat least before the 1880sin the economic development of those tropical colonies that were under formalBritish rule. Almost any attempt at development that did take place in the Tropics wasfocused merely on enabling the colony in question to pay a higher percentage of the costof its own governance.37 In sum, whatever the influence of investors on any one decision about the expansion of British power, investors as a group did not succeed in puttingtogether any coherent programme of British territorial expansion, even as late as the1870s.

There were pressure groups pushing for different particular extensions of British power. In the mid-Victorian decades, as John Darwin has argued, the existence of these ad hoc pressure groupssometimes economic but more often notcould lead to the expansion of British control over local areas, for local reasons, using local resources, andoften employing local troops, even in an era when expansion of annexation was as oftenrejected by Whitehall as it was allowed. Darwin, building it would seem on the observations of C.C.Eldridge, has identified a pattern of imperial expansion from theselocal bridgeheads, but only when there was some British constituency for annexationaround the bridgehead, such as the anti-slavery movement, Free Traders, ormissionaries.38

Hobsons main concernthe hunt for some overall economic rationale for the seizure of Africa39inspired V.I.Lenin to embark upon the same search. The result was his famous 1917 essay, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. And yet Lenin was not primarily interested in imperial expansion. Imperialism was simply his name for the monopoly capitalism that he saw as dominant in the period after 1900. In looking for theeconomic origins of imperialism in his sense of the term, he was more interested in wheremonopolies came from than the origin of imperialism.40 Indeed, he had some choice words for those who then (as now) find imperialism looming behind all culturalphenomena, seemingly without distinctions:

Colonial policy and imperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and achieved imperialism. But general arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background the fundamental difference of social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities.41

Still, Lenins flawed and incidental treatment of imperial expansion deserves some attention, since it is so famous that it might be taken as a challenge to any non-economic theory of imperialism.42 Lenin began by following Hobson in using overly broad and


never disaggregated statistics. The statistics seemed to show Great Britain controllingmassive overseas investments in different parts of the world, investments that must havebeen the cause of imperial expansion.43 When disaggregated, however, Lenins figures show that British overseas investment was largely outside the empire, making hay of thecapital-export aspect of the cobbled-together popular idea of the Hobson-Lenin theory of imperial expansion. Moreover, even the imperial portion of British investment was largely in Australia and Canada, and to a much lesser extent in the railways of India,rather than in places seized in the second half of the nineteenth century.44

Furthermore, Lenin explained the scramble for Africa of the mid-1880s as a consequence of the transition to monopoly capitalism, which he had taken pains somepages earlier to locate in the late 1890s, after its supposed effects in prompting theScramble for Africa.45 Again, his statistics were insufficiently disaggregated, so that imperial developments from the whole period from 1876 to 1914 were lumped together.46In sum, Lenin is no serious threat to any social and cultural explanation of the growth inimperial enthusiasm among British people in the 1860s. Ideas about how the behaviour of individuals might add up into social trends are more interesting and in the long run morevaluable than an economic conspiracy theory that Lenin himself merely glanced at in awork on another subject.

Finally, a much more promising avenue of research into the economic motivations behind the British Empire has been opened up by P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins. Cain andHopkins have tried to remove from the economic story of imperialism the antiquatedMarxian idea of what British capitalism wasa more or less centrally organizedindustrial movementand to look at a more important area of the economy. Their workreflects the new focus on the finance and service sector in southeast England, a focusdeveloped by historians who debate the economic rise or fall of England in recenttimes.47 For Cain and Hopkins, the men of the financial and service sectors shared withgovernment officials a common set of expectations about Britains role in the world economy, as well as the habit of exercising power to safeguard or extend that role. Theauthors define this set of economic expectations and imperialistic behaviours asgentlemanly capitalism.48

This model works quite well as an explanation for the fits-and-starts expansion of the British Empire down through the whole of the nineteenth century. Sometimes there wereopportunities to make money without the expansion of British power; sometimes powerhad to be exercised in order to defend investments. Much will flow from the work ofCain and Hopkins.49 Still, it is not clear in their work where the threshold of scale lies between the local or parochial economic activities that would have happened anywayand, at the other end of the scale, the investments and endeavours that were prompted bythe gentlemanly capitalists of London. How much of the economic activity was due toimperialism? After all, the people out in the empire would naturally have to work andsupport themselves in some way; that they worked and made moneyand expanded British control in their local areasdoes not by itself show what portion of their activitiesmay be put down to the operation of an imperial economic network under the control ofthe gentlemanly capitalists of London. Building on his earlier work on the economichistory of West Africa, Hopkins has pointed out that local economic activity, whetherEuropean or African, may well have been the stimulus for the Scramble.50

Introduction 9

In any case, the economic interests that Cain and Hopkins have uncovered do not seem to impinge upon a study of imperialism as an idea in Great Britain, and of how that ideachanged at specific times during the second half of the nineteenth century. Again,studying the empire as an economic phenomenon is not the same as studying the growthof the ideology of imperialism. Both approaches are necessary. As has been suggested ofthe American case since the Second World War, an imperial impulse may stem from thewhole Weltanshauung of a great powers self-identity, its nationalism, and aspects of itscapitalism, rather than from any imperial profit-seeking on the part of particular individuals or groups.51 Scholars who have steered clear of economic explanations have traced imperialism back to Disraelis Crystal Palace Speech (1872). Here, then, is the second land mine that might explode my thesis. Someone might ask whether Disraelihimself didnt invent imperialism in order to appeal to the newly enlarged electorate after 1867. Isnt that where imperialism came from on the British political scene? Well, no. Tracing imperialism back to 1872 isnt going back far enough, if we are looking only at political events. And it is not nearly far enough back if we are looking at Disraelis own thinking. For decades, Disraeli had held true to a vision of the glorious British Empire asa power in the East, and he had proposed adding MPs from the settlement colonies toParliament at Westminster.52 He may not have known much about particular colonies, but he was quite fond of the empire as a grand, indistinct vision. Indeed, Disraeli hadspent decades working himself into just the sort of imperial generalizations and worldcategorizations that this study will find among members of the Colonial Societyexcept that this was only one of his interests, his foremost interest being appealing to theelectorate. Most members of the Colonial Society, on the other hand, were not at the topof the political game, and they could afford to give freer reign to their imperial fantasies.

Another possibility is for the broader political turn to imperialism in 1869, and somescholars have championed that year as the origin of imperialism. By summer, it wasapparent that the Gladstone government planned to save money by withdrawing Britishtroops from New Zealand. British forces were in the colony to fight the Maori, but theyalso kept the settler and Maori armies apart. In non-official London, news of the impending withdrawal caused an uproar. Some were sceptical about leaving white peopleto defend themselves aloneor to learn how to get along with their neighbours at no cost to the British taxpayer. This uproar was organized in large part by members of theColonial Society, using the good offices of the supposedly non-partisan group (a political intrusion that did not please the Societys Gladstonian members).53 Yet the Society already existed; and however important this episode was in provoking imperialsentiments on the part of some people, the Society and the broader interest in empire thatit represented had already come into being.54

On occasion that interest has been traced one year further backto two events in 1868: the Societys foundation itself, and the somewhat later publication of the book Greater Britain. Yet the Society has not been given proper credit. Sometimes it is mentioned briefly on the way to Dilke; sometimes, indeed, its foundation is dated from the galadinner held in March 1869, after months of great activityand some months after Greater Britain was published.55

Or we might go the other way, and reason forward towards the New Imperialism. Howmuch really changed across the nineteenth century? Starting in the 1880s, British


governments may simply have become more willing to react to crises on the Europeanperiphery by seizing territorybut those crises, and the occasional seizure of territory, had been happening for a long time. One could point to the annexation of New Zealanditself in 1840, or of Lagos in 1861and many others throughout the nineteenthcentury.56 And besides the British governments stronger but hardly unprecedented interest in seizing territory in the latter parts of the century, there was also newlystrengthened but again hardly unprecedented interest in empire on the part of families. Bythe 1870s or 1880s, the new professionals of the mid-century would have noticed the jobs available to their children in the then-reformed imperial bureaucracy; there would be support for the empire qua employment agency. But the empire had played that role tosome degree for a century.57

Yet clearly there was some change. Imperialism as a general category became all therage a few years after 1868. The key point about most of the founders of the ColonialSociety was that they developed an imperialism of a new and more general kind, and theydid this on their own as individuals sometime before 1868, only then going public with it by founding the Colonial Society in that year. But they had begun on their own, asindividuals looking at the world; they did not have to rely on the support or the ideas ofothers to extend their idea of the British Empire to all of the settlement colonies and thetropical world besides. People could think of this more extensive kind of empire bythemselves, and without the benefit of some social movement or political fracas to guidethemalthough they founded their own movement in 1868 to guide others. Theintellectual development of the founders took years. Theirs is a story of continuity anddevelopment in imperial thinking in the face of the flow of events and information. And,as writers and thinkers, they developed their imperial ideas for intellectual rather thaneconomic reasons.

Introduction 11

2 The founding of the Colonial Society

In 1801, London had a population of 1,000,000 people, approximately the size of thepopulation of Merseyside or the Providence, Rhode Island, of today. By the 1871 census,the population had grown to nearly 4,000,000London was as big as todays Manchester or Washington, DC. Many of the new arrivals lived in the suburbs, but of course they didnot stay there by day, when central London had to accommodate them.1 In the 1860s, inner London had more dust, noise, and reconstruction than at any other time in thenineteenth century; stations, rail lines, business premises, and central places of all sortswere built on the ruins of Georgian London, which had been a city of narrow privatehouses with small floors, unsuited to large organizations.2 Until 1876, even the Colonial Office occupied two thin and quite inadequate old houses in Downing Street. Indeed, thebuilding had been condemned years before.3 It leaked, and the accounts office could nothouse a safewhich people were afraid would bring the building down.4 Yet there was nowhere in London for the Colonial Office to move to.

By the 1870s, new and more specialized kinds of buildings with larger floor plans wererequired, not only by government departments. These new types of buildings includedhotel-like clubs for professional men, and more business-oriented headquarters buildings for professional institutes; more and more of these headquarters would be erected as thecentury progressed and the number of professional organizations exploded.5Professionalization increased in many areas, it is true, even away from London. Indeed,London-style club buildings and professional headquarters were also built in other parts of the country, especially when scientists and industrialists sought a common forum. Yetevents in the provinces were literally isolated phenomena in comparison to club- and headquarters-building in the capital, where there was such a strong combination of ambition, crowding, sheer activity, and even the joy of being at the centre of professions,the centre of interest groups, the centre of civilization.6

London was indeed the worlds largest city; full of great poverty, it is true, but also full of people who were ever better educated, and ever more likely to travel to a meeting intown by way of the new rail lines near their homes.7 They needed places to get together. By the late 1860s, London was too big to walk across routinely. People who shared aninterest might not run into each other as easily as they could have done in the smallerLondon of the eighteenth century. The general coffee house, the gentlemans club (however politically focused), and the reception room, all so prominent in the social andintellectual life of the late eighteenth century, had to be supplemented as gathering placesby the more specialized institutions and clubs that the Victorians have left to us.

In 1872, the antiquarian John Timbs published an inventory of London clubs of the older kind; they centred on eating and drinking, most had jocular names, and many couldbe traced to a particular tavern. By the late 1860s, when Timbs was working, most of

these associations were indeed in the purview of the antiquarian, and the surviving coffeehouses were too social and too informal to allow for them to serve as centres for newkinds of intellectual endeavour, much less for organized national associations.8 Indeed, many of the City coffee houses were disappearingtorn down to make room for the wider, purpose-built business premises.9 Very soon after Timbs published his chattycatalogue of the old clubs, Bernard H. Becker published Scientific London, in which he sought to write more substantial histories for a very different and newer kind of club. Henoted that the learned Societies whose meetings he had made a habit of attending had not as yet had their origins written up, except for the one book on the Royal Societyitself. Of the thirteen non-governmental bodies whose history he went on to write inScientific London, nine were founded after 1815, and six of these after 1830.10 With its ambitious but potted histories of sciencehe was looking only at scienceBeckers book was a characteristically mid-Victorian production, as were so many of theinstitutions he wrote about. Collectively, these institutions changed the tenor of society,first in scientific fields and then, in mid-century and after, outside of science. Lectures and journals proliferated.11 Interests that had been confined to shady, far-flung corners could now bloom and cross-pollinate in ways they never could before the concentrationof humanity that came with the foundation of the new clubs. Perhaps some of the newinstitutions were no more than hothouses for the arcane or the archaic; others soondeveloped a global reach.

One of the more global of the new institutions was in fact the Colonial Society. Itsname would change frequently,12 as would its size and influence, but its purpose wouldnot. The idea was to encourage all objects likely to create a better knowledge andunderstanding of the Colonies, to strengthen the connection and good feeling betweenthem and the mothercountry, and also to promote a closer intercourse between theColonies themselves.13 The Colonial Society, as an example of the new kind of interest-based, purposefully founded London institution, held many practical advantages as ameeting-place for people interested in the colonies as such. It was better than the last of the old, unspecialized meeting-places that were still frequented. These were the huge Cityof London coffee houses that served as centres for overseas and shipping news. Althoughin the 1860s a person could still find out a great deal about the colonies by taking hiscoffee in the right place, the main coffee houses were getting too big, too busy, and toounfocused to allow for any sustained contact between people with more specializedinterests. Witness the periodical subscriptions of the three most important City coffeehouses associated with overseas affairs: Peeles Coffee House, Fleet Street, had complete files of English newspapers going well back into the eighteenth century, as well ascurrent foreign and colonial papers; the very busy Jerusalem Coffee House, Cornhill,brought together people and publications touching on the whole of the world east of theBritish Isles, all the way to Australia; and the New England and North and SouthAmerican Coffee House, Threadneedle Street, had a daunting 400 newspapers on file,including titles from Germany and Russia. Such buzzing coffee houses, especially theJerusalem and the New England and North and South American, were frequented by merchants and ships captains interested in reviewing nearly the whole world, however cavalierly.

Each of these great coffee houses was less a social institution than a key information

The founding of the colonial society 13

centre for world trade. A few more focused coffee houses, such as the Jamaica in StMichaels Alley, Cornhill, which covered the West Indies, and the Baltic Coffee House,Threadneedle Street, which covered Northern Europe and those parts of South Americawhich produced tallow, were frequented by people interested only in one part of theworld (more or less), rather than that everywhere Britain was active colonially.14 As its circular says, the Colonial Society was founded expressly to give people who wereinterested in all the coloniesbut not the whole worlda place to exchange views about colonies (and not about trade) with colonists and with each other. Only one person in the Colonial Society gave a coffee house, the Jerusalem, as his London address.15 Members could go to the Society instead, whether to meet each other or to read colonialnewspapers in peace and quiet, undisturbed by people looking for a ship, seeking news ofthe tallow trade in Denmark (at the Baltic Coffee House), or looking up English politicalrags from the 1780s (at Peeles).

The Colonial Society would be frequented by people interested in the colonies per se,and it would be quieter and more refined than the buzzing coffee hives of the City.Indeed, the Society was also supposed to establish a library and a scholarly journalin short, it was to be everything for which the scientists had begun to look to their societies:

The intention is to establish in London a Colonial Society, consisting of Fellows and a Council, which shall occupy as regards the Colonies the position filled by the Royal Society with regard to science, or the Royal Geographical Society with regard to geography. In this Society each Colony may be represented. It is proposed eventually to open a lecture hall, a library and reading room, and a museum of science, industry and commerce, where the natural and other products of the several Colonies will be exhibited.

The library of the Society will be furnished with information on all commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, mining and other matters, coming statistical, useful, and interesting details, often urgently required by the statesman, the merchant, the colonist, the man or science, the intending emigrant, and other classed in the Mothercountry. This information will be carefully classified, registered, and made as much as possible accessible to all concerned.16

These assurances about the mission and the library show that the founders knew just thekind of formal and highly specialized institution they wanted, and they knew that theywere aiming high.17 The Colonial Society would be a Literary and Scientific Body in the words of the founder, Lord Bury, who repeated elsewhere that the RoyalGeographical Society was one of the chief models.18

The founders admitted in their circular that what they had in mind was the kind of headquarters that a few other rather prestigious but not quite so specialized groupsalready had:

The Society will also afford opportunities for the reading of papers and the holding of discussions upon Colonial subjects generally, and will undertake those investigations in connection with Colonies, which are carried out in a more general field by the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the


Society of Arts, and by similar bodies in Great Britain.19

All of those bodies held public lectures and discussions, and the Colonial Society wouldtoo. Besides, the Society would be easier to get into than the models that the founders hadin mind; the Fellows may have invented some varieties of imperialism, but they did nothave to invent the scientific theories or tangible objects expected from candidates for theRoyal Society, or to show interest in actually making or manipulating things that unitedthe Society of Arts.20

The early ambitions for the Society were not only fulfilled but soon transcended. In the1870s and 1880s, as the British people grew more enthusiastic about maintaining andexpanding their empire, the Society grew far beyond the plans of its founders. Somepeople even used the Society to organize a political pressure groupalthough anyorganization for political purposes [was] forbidden by the fundamental rules of theSociety.21 And the Society quickly grew beyond London. The founders were happilysurprised at the number of subscriptions (and the amount of money) that came pouring infrom Canada and Australia even before the end of 1868, and the Societys rules keptchanging to accommodate overseas members.22 Over the next few years, the popularity ofimperialism took off.

Indeed, it would not be long before even the simple fact of Londons size would leadsome people to a dream of worldwide empire. Henry James caught this aspect of Londonlife in 1888:

It is perfectly open to [the London-lover] to consider the remainder of the United Kingdom, or the British empire in general, or even, if he be an American, the total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, as the mere margin, the fitted girdle.

It is for this reasonbecause I like to think how great we all are together in the light of heaven and the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of our glorious tongue, in which we labour to write articles and books for each others candid perusal, how great we all are and how great is the great city which we may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of our raceit is for this reason that I have a singular kindness for the London railway stations.23

The founders were beginning to put together the general idea of empire that James in hisrailway reverie would rely upon twenty years later.

A misleading precedent

No such idea had been shared thirty years before the Colonial Society of 1868 wasfounded. And yet in 1837, a Colonial Society was founded in London to bring togethermen from different parts of the empire. The day-to-day aims of this society and the 1868version were remarkably similar.24 Much as the 1868 Society would be, the 1837 versionwas:

intended to afford a place of rendezvous to persons interested in the various


dependencies of the empire in every corner of the Globe, by which means information may be diffused respecting the valuable resources of the British Colonial possessions, hitherto comparatively unknown.

For the attainment of the above named objects, an extensive library will be formed, consisting of all important works relating to the colonies, together with a selection of the most approved Maps, Charts, and the latest Surveys. There will also be provided a regular supply of one or more newspapers from each colony.25

But the 1837 Colonial Society was not the model for the 1868 Colonial Society. Onlyfour members of the older club joined the newer one,26 and the full council of the newersociety went to the trouble of formally declining the offer of a certain Captain Whitty todonate a copy of the rules of the 1837 organization.27

Indeed, it was important to distance the new society from the old. Pointed controversiesover the morality of imperialism had torn the older Colonial Society apart. It would seemthat people were happy enough to go back to coffee housesor that they found it easierto do so than to come to a general agreement about Great Britains imperial control.

The disagreement had first broken out in Parliament. In 1840 the Tories came withinnine votes of defeating the Whig government over its alleged incompetence in starting awar with China.28 It was against this partisan background that the four-year-old ColonialSociety itself debated the use of British force in bombarding the Chineseas well as ininvading Afghanistan. In both places British forces had simply attacked with no formaldeclaration of war (until later). This fact bothered sensitive people, and the ColonialSociety formed a committee to examine the issue.

After months of work, the committee came back with two reports, one for China andone for Afghanistan. Each was full of complicated legal arguments about the Crownsunique prerogatives in declaring war, pre-rogatives that according to the committee hadbeen breached by the commanders in both theatres:

The departure from these forms constitutes that difference, among the parties engaged in warbetween the policeman who preserves order, and the housebreaker that infringes itbetween the guardian of public safety and the assassin.

A State dispensing with these formalities, recognises that it has set aside the essence of justice.

But that was not all. The men on the spot were not in fact out of control; their barbarityand cruelty had been directed from Whitehall:

It was the same men holding the same offices of power and trust in England, who sent British armies into Affghanistan [sic], and British squadrons into the coast of China. If we found, in the first of these transactions, certain defined characters, we may expect to find the same in the last. We found in the former a public crime, committed without a necessitycommitted without an object, concealed during the course of its committal, and misrepresented after its occurrence. We found documents, mutilated, perverted, and suppressed, with a


view, first to keep the nation in the dark, as to the acts of which it ought to have been informed, and which, if necessary, it might have prevented, and, then, to pervert its judgement respecting them, after they had taken place.29

The committee adopted its reports unanimously. Then, in the autumn of 1842, it proudlysubmitted them to a general meeting of the Societywhich rejected them unanimously,save for the votes of the committee members themselves. The only thing that the generalmembership of the Society found barbaric was the way their own committee calledBritish behaviour in China and Afghanistan barbarousto be murder and piracy, in thewords of the committee.30

The committee members stuck to their anti-Whig guns. That night in 1842 was the endof the Colonial Society of 1837; any record of the society stops cold, save for an abortivemeeting on colonization that fewer than twenty men attended.31 Meanwhile thecommittee went on to publish its reports, but under the name of the committee itself andnot of the society.32 There could be no clearer demonstration that the moment had not yetcome for the general imperialism reflected in the Colonial Society of 1868. It seems thatsome members of the 1837 society were afflicted with the morality of the evangelical era,which had barely passed. Not all of its members had the time to transform theirevangelical fervour into a more diffuse Anglo-Saxon boosterism, as so many peoplewould do by 1868. The members of the 1837 society were divided on questions ofinternational moralitythey were divided over the specifics of British conduct in twoparts of the world. The members of the 1868 society would be united in a grand vision ofempire that overrode specifics.

Counting the founders

The membership of the Colonial Society of 1868 is of interest chiefly in the period beforeimperialism made it into the headlines the following year. From then on, membershipfigures rose more steeply; we might be looking at the snowballing of imperialism ratherthan at the people who had been developing their own imperial ideas for their ownreasons for some considerable period of time. So, for how many months or years after theSociety was founded should we follow the Societys membership?

Fifty-eight men attended the first organizational meeting of the Colonial Society onFriday night, 26 June 1868, and another eleven had sent letters of interest. The membershad come together because of a circular written by the Viscount Bury, MP, and two othermenAlfred R.Roche, who had been a clerk in Canada and who would become theSocietys working secretary, and Hugh E.Montgomerie, who had played a minor part inCanadian politics.33 The three prime movers were thus a nobleman, a clerk who hadtravelled, and a Canadian. This mix of classes and origins was to be a pattern in the newSociety (see Table 2.1).

The circular announced that an organizational meeting was to be held in WillissRooms, a place that Londoners would associate with the RGS and with other groups thathad been organized there. And Londoners do seem to have been Burys target audience.The circular was dated 22 June, a Monday, only four days before the meeting. Who could


be in London so quickly in the summer besides Londoners and MPs? Parliament sat until

the end of July that year (to finish its business before a summer break and the expecteddissolution in the autumn),34 but for most people the summer had well and truly begun.Furthermore, the meeting was held on a Friday afternoon, when the well-off who had been engaged in London for the week might have been leaving town. Clearly, Bury wasnot considering the great and the good who had estates to leave town for. Indeed, onlythree peers took notice of the meeting.35

Apart from the peers, attendance was good despite the inauspiciousness of the time.Five of the six MPs joining that night were in attendance, although only one was aLondon member.36 Of the sixty-nine men who attended, or who sent a letter of supportthat was read out, fifty-two went on to join the Society (see Appendix 1B). Out of these fifty-two, a few would never appear in the Societys membership rolls, but none the lessthey attended one or more meeting of the steering committee in the early days. Othershad some other sustained contact with the fledgling Society over and above attending thefirst meeting, or writing letters to it. I have included such men in this study, while I haveexcluded eighteen not at all famous names whose only contact with the Society was asingle silent appearance at the organizational meeting.

The Colonial Society enrolled the rest of what its records call the original membership between the June meeting and that of 12 August 1868. On that day, a second largemeeting was held at one oclock in Williss Rooms; the attendance was still about fifty, even in high summer.37 In the interim, the Provisional Committee had met three times, each time approving new members.38 On these occasions, many aristocrats were added to the rolls of professional men and MPs who had attended the first meeting. Bury recruitedsome of the newer and more aristocratic members directly on to the provisionalcommittee; the committee in turn prepared a list of officers, all great names, to be elected

Table 2.1 New members by period and by status on joining

New members Peers MPs Others Total By first meeting, 26 June 1868 3 4 45 5227 June 1868 to 12 August 1868 (second general meeting)

2 12 38 52

15 August 1868 to 3 November 1868 (Greater Britain still unfinished)

1 2 19 22

11 November 1868 to 30 December 1868 0 0 16 1620 January 1869 to 25 February 1869 4 3 22 2910 March 1869 (Inaugural Dinner) to 13 April 1869 (Dilke joins)

1 1 50 52

Total 11 22 190 223Note Although the periods covered in this table are discontinuous, they match the intake of members; this table covers all members through to 13 April 1869.


at the meeting on 12 August. The few members who joined from 1 September through 3 November were not among

the original members simply because the Societys secretary, Roche, began noting on 12 August the date of joining next to the name of each new member, whereas theoriginal memberships had been undated (see Table 2.1; for their names, see Appendix 1D). This was merely a change in the paperwork. But perhaps the best reason to treatthese new members as part of the initial coming together of the Society is that theydribbled in very slowly and quietly over a period of more than two months, rather thanbeing carried into the Society on some new wave of popular enthusiasm.

Now that the Societys organization was in place, new memberships were approved afew at a time by the Council in its private meetings. There were only four newmemberships approved in the second half of August, none in September, and four inOctober; eight were approved on 3 November, among them the memberships of theofficers of the Society whom we surveyed above.39 Joining took some effort. The treasurer, W.A. Sargeaunt, could not be found at the Societys temporary offices in 80 Lombard Street, and the Society simply used that bare street address until 6 October1868, when the words Colonial Society were added at the top (as yet the Society had no letterhead).40

Joining also cost money. Initiation was 3, plus a 20 annual fee (1 for non-residents of the British Isles). Twenty pounds was fully one tenth of the annual income needed tokeep a small family in the middle-middle classthat stratum composed of low-ranking professionals and well-to-do tradesmen who usually sent their sons to public school anduniversity, and then back into a life of office work or trade.41 If for the most part the Colonial Society attracted very comfortable gentlemen of a higher station than this, the20 annual fee was one reason. Paying the Colonial Society one-tenth of ones income would be rather too much. Yet some of the earliest members did not pay at all, andalthough they were struck from the rolls after a year or two, they were there at thebeginning. Therefore the 126 members through 3 November 1868 hailed from a broaderwedge of the population than did the membership in later years. The poorest of these 126were sufficiently interested in the empire to help found the Society or to seek it out in itsearliest periodeven if, in the long run, some of them could not (or would not) pay their subscriptions.

Soon after 3 November, Charles Dilke finished Greater Britain, and it was published within the month. Before that November, no one could have read much of the book, evenin draft. Even then its effect was not immediate. About two months passed before it gotinto the bookshops, and over that Christmas season only a few people read it. The first person to record doing so was the ever-perspicacious William Ewart Gladstone, newlyPrime Minister, whose diary entry for 10 November 1868 says that he Read Dilkes Greater World [sic].42 Dilke himself first received comments on the book in December;the people who wrote to him so early received copies directly from the publisher, or fromDilke himself.43

Soon the book would go further afield. The Governor of New Zealand had received it in Wellington at the very end of March 1869, about three weeks after reviews began toappear in the British press.44 The Times ran seven pieces about Greater Britain between 10 March and 19 April 1869, beginning with their review itself, and continuing with a


sequence of factual criticisms from colonials that ran next to Dilkes responses.45 But the lag between the books going to press and the splash it made in the newspapers had been a matter of two or three months. Perhaps to a man, the members of the Colonial Societywho had joined by early November 1868 had never heard of the book. And those whojoined still later in Novemberor indeed at any time in the three months between the release of Greater Britain and when The Times reviewed itwere as yet unlikely to have been caught up in some Dilke-inspired frenzy. They too will be included in this study.46

The day on which The Times reviewed Greater Britain, 13 April 1869, is a convenient place to stop tracing the prehistory of the imperialism that produced the Society. Thosewho had joined the Society by then were doing so for their own reasons, not because theyhad been reading about Dilke in The Times. Forty-five people joined the new society between 11 November 1868 and 10 March 1869, when the inaugural dinner was held (seeAppendices 1E and 1F). Another fifty-two, mainly those who joined at the dinner, had their names approved by 13 April 1869, which was also the day when Dilkes own name appeared on the roster for the first time (see Appendix 1G). Thus, 223 members of the Colonial Society had their names approved on or before 13 April 1869 (see Appendix 1A). Within the 223, sixty-one cannot be positively identified, sometimes because ofnamesakes,47 but usually because they made no impression worth speaking of outside ofthe Societys own membership lists. However, over 70 per cent (162) left good evidence about themselves, since the members were a remarkably active bunch, active astravellers, professionals, politicians, and writers.

Who were the members?

There are intellectual links between the most distant parts of the earth, and men cannot remain strangers to each other for a single day or fail to know what happens in any corner of the world.

(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, Conclusion [1835])48

An exhaustive review of the Societys membership turns up a few interesting patterns.49One of the larger groups that can be identified among the 223 men who had joined theColonial Society by 13 April 1869 were the fifty-one with some kind of government job touching on the empire. These people ranged from Whitehall clerks to New South Waleslegislators. But too many of these men were the Cabinet Ministers who had takenBuggins turn at the Colonial Office or elsewhere; therefore, the fifty-one were not a united front of men who had long been interested in empire. Slightly more numerous, butno more cohesive, were the fifty-four founders who seem to have been businessmen, either at home or abroad. Especially in the colonies, these two groups, the men ingovernment and the businessmen, substantially overlapped.

Next in line come the forty-three founders who were members of the Athenaeum, yetthis number tells us little except that the establishment was well represented in theSocietybecause of all the Cabinet Officers drafted into the Colonial Society, this is no


surprise.50 Then come the Members of Parliament. Of the men who joined the Society by 13 April, thirty-three had served in Parliament by 1869; a few others would serve later. Next come the thirty peers, heirs to peerages, close relations of peers, and men latercreated peers whose political careers might very well have led them to expectennoblementa group that may be referred to as the aristocracy. The aristocrats overlapwith the MPs and the officials. Meanwhile the number of members who may be classifiedas military men or missionaries or members of other familiar categories is much smaller,but once again covers many of the same people.

This problem of overlap is severe. After going through all of the categories so far, we have looked at less than half of the membership. Thus, the ideas of the majority of themembers still remain in the dark. But while fifty-one members had imperial employment and an overlapping fifty-four can fit into the category of businessmen, at least seventy-three members published something that wound up in the British Museum or anothernational library or national bibliography; and sixty of these men had published somethingearly enough to show that their interest in the empire pre-dated the Colonial Society. Another twenty-two (on top of the seventy-three) left substantial manuscripts, often showing the same intellectual interests well before 1868. To look at it in another way, ifthe sixty-one unidentifiable members are set aside, 162 members are left. Of these,ninety-five left meaningful prose and sixty-seven did not (except for leaving a social letter or two in some cases)and many of the silent sixty-seven were highly placed people whose ideas we can approach in other ways.

The ninety-five members who did write something were a larger, more representative, and more socially diverse group than any other subset of members. Writers were almosttwice as numerous as businessmen, even when we include among the latter those whosimply gave the Colonial Society a business address. Moreover, the writers are especiallysignificant for figuring out the earliest origins of the Society. Writers joined in especiallyhigh numbers during the first summer of the Societys existence (see Table 2.2).

The number of published authors in the Society would be even higher if there were perfect knowledge of all 223 members, since some of the sixty-one who cannot be properly identified (because they shared their names with others) were indeed prolificwritersand could be counted as such if we could accept one namesake rather thananother. Excluding such men, the sixty positively identified members who had publishedsomething before April 1869 made up well over one-third of the positively identified membership of 162. In addition, the ninety-five members who wrote something at some period made up more than nine-sixteenths, or nearly 59 per cent, of the identifiable membership. This is double the approximate percentage of writers and other learnedgentlemen and noblemen that one scholar, R.C.Bridges, has found in the membership ofthe Royal Geographical Society from 1848 to 1855while the proportion of military officers in the Colonial Society was about half that of the RGS.51

What does it signify that there were so many writers in the Colonial Society? Thelogorrhoea of the mid-nineteenth century is astonishing; it affected a vast number ofupper- and middle-class Victorians. Statesmen, judges, medical men, bureaucrats, churchmenall manner of men and some women could take up their pens and ponder in print the stirring social or intellectual problems of the day. Human evolution, socialism,technical progress, democracy, decimal coinage, continental literature, newly active


volcanoes in South America, how to build conservatories

upon questions like these, and so many others, the rising masses of half-educated Englishmen wanted comfort or guidance.52 In a later age, men and women from a variety of walks of life might well talk about such issues at a party, but they would hardly holdforth on very many of them in print. Nor are there many generalists today who cancommand thirty pages at a time in The New Yorker.

In the 1860s, by contrast, practically anyone who wanted to and who could write could publish minor dissertations in major reviews. There were literally hundreds of upscaleperiodicals, dozens of which published long, serious pieces on the order of those in theEdinburgh or Westminster Reviews. Most of the articles shared not only the length butalso the didactic tone and anonymity pioneered by the Edinburgh Review, reinforcing the homogeneity of tone in the world of what Bagehot called the review-like essay and the essay-like review.53 The appetite for these pieces, with all their promise of recreation, information, and self-improvement, was huge. In the mid-Victorian years, the greatest journals (such as the Edinburgh itself) had circulations of 10 to 15,000, while Cornhillhad twice that and the even more popular Household Words topped 40,000. What is more, copies were passed from person to person, so a large number of the educatedreading public of about 3,000,000 people saw the more famous journals. With hundreds

Table 2.2 Members who wrote

New members

Published authors (books

or articles)

Members leaving only

MSS

Non-writers

Unidentified* Total

26 June 1868 19 3 19 11 5227 June to 12 August 1868

16 8 14 14 52

15 August to 3 November 1868

12 1 6 3 22

11 November to 30 December 1868

8 2 3 3 16

20 January to 25 February 1869

11 6 4 8 29

10 March to 13 April 1869

7 2 21 22 52

Total 73 22 67 61 223Note *Some may be authorsthese founders cannot be positively identified, sometimes because two or more people had the same name.


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Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868

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