Beasley E. Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (British and Foreign and Colonial Policy)
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had one unusual moment of profitability just as the Colonial Society was being
founded. Since the profitability of these imperial investments was a new concept,
any investors attracted to them would have been risk-takers, and their money would
have flowed back out of these investments after a few years. The relative
profitability of imperial investment did not last long enough to attract longer term
investment. And long-term ‘investment’ remained, in the 1860s, far more socially
acceptable than short-term ‘speculation’. See David C.Itzkowitz, ‘Fair Enterprise or
Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian
England’, Victorian Studies, 45 (autumn 2002), pp. 121–47.
30 S.Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India, Cambridge
South Asian Studies, 21 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 49–52.
31 Ian J.Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp. 17–20, 187, 210–12.
32 T.O.Lloyd, ‘Africa and Hobson’s Imperialism’, Past & Present, 55 (May 1972), pp.
130–53.
33 T.A.Jenkins (ed.), ‘The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1868–1873’,
Camden Miscellany, 5th ser., 3, 4 (1994), pp. 329–513—see the entries for 5 and 8
March 1869, pp. 348–9.
34 Nor did businessmen push for annexation in such places, at least until the mid-
1880s, after the New Imperialism had got its start—W.G.Hynes, ‘British Mercantile
Attitudes towards Imperial Expansion’, Historical Journal, 19, 4 (1976), pp. 969–
79.
35 For Latin America, see D.C.M.Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Latin America became a more crowded market
in the late nineteenth century, and British money tended to shift elsewhere (pp. 306–
8, 310–13). Some money shifted earlier; the huge guano trade with Peru of the
1840s and 1850s went into decline, and the firm of Anthony Gibbs & Sons lost its
monopoly contract in 1862. The firm’s profits in the 1850s had been large in
absolute terms but not in relation to the volume of the trade. W.M.Matthew, ‘Antony
Gibbs & Sons, the Guano Trade and the Peruvian Government, 1842–1861’, in
D.C.M.Platt (ed.), Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British
Experience in Latin America (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 337–70; see
esp. pp. 338, 339–50, 369.
36 D.R.SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1830–1914
(Columbus, MI: South Asia Books, 1977), pp. 144–52, 264–71, 274–80; idem.,
‘British Expansion in Southeast Asia: The Imperialism of Trade in the Nineteenth
Century’, in Roger D.Long (ed.), The Man on the Spot: Essays on British Empire
History, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, 31 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 7–20; Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, pp. 173–98,
384–93; McIntyre, Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, pp. 154–210.
37 Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and
its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.
24–69; see esp. pp. 45–6.
38 John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial
Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (June 1997), pp. 614–42; for further
Notes 134
cases, and a consideration of anthropological perspectives on clientelism, see Colin
Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous
Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, Journal of World History, 11, 2 (autumn 2000), pp.
227–63. At many bridgeheads, the amount of local collaboration decreased and the
amount of violence increased in the later second half of the nineteenth century, thus
feeding into the desire for formal European control: A.E.Atmore, ‘The Extra-
European Foundations of British Imperialism: Towards a Reassessment’, in
C.C.Eldridge (ed.), British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Problems in
Focus (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 106–25. As Darwin acknowledges, the
theoretical aspects of this process were first explored in Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-
European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of
Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of
Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 118–40—referring back to the Anglo-
Egyptian history powerfully set out in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with
Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1961). See
the extended and clear discussion of the missionary and humanitarian pressure
groups of the 1870s in Eldridge, England’s Mission, pp. 144–70.
39 There is a helpful synthesis of recent scholarship on what Hobson was trying to do,
plus a new exploration of the subject, in P.J.Cain, ‘J.A.Hobson, Financial
Capitalism, and Imperialism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 13 (May 1985), pp. 1–27. For some
interesting comments on the Afrocentric nature of Hobson or of his followers, see
SarDesai, British Trade and Expansion in Southeast Asia, pp. 4–5; and Lloyd,
‘Africa and Hobson’s Imperialism’.
40 V.I.Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline [1917]
(New York: Progress Publishers, 1939). The vital point that Lenin, the supposed
theorist of imperialism, was not really writing about the subject of countries taking
over territory in the less-developed world was only recognized in the literature in
1969, in Eric Stokes, ‘Late Nineteenth-century Colonial Expansion and the Attack
on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?’, Historical
Journal, 12, 2 (1969), pp. 285–301.
41 Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 81–2.
42 The questions of whether Hobson and Lenin agreed with each other, and whether
Lenin was concerned with territorial imperialism, are answered in the affirmative in
A.M.Eckstein, ‘Is There a “Hobson-Lenin Thesis” on Late Nineteenth-century
Colonial Expansion?’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 64, 2 (1991), pp. 297–
318. Eckstein also notes that some scholars continued to answer these questions one
way or the other without reading the scholarly debate; see esp. p. 298 and 298, n. 7.
43 Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 62–5, 79–80—these pages comprise parts of chs IV and VI.
44 This is the burden of Michael Edelstein’s study, although Edelstein does not want
to let go of the hold of economics on imperial history—Michael Edelstein, Overseas
Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850–1914
(London: Metheun & Co, 1982), pp. 288–314.
45 Lenin, Imperialism, p. 46.
46 Lenin’s sampling dates for the extent of European empires, dates figuring in the key
Notes 135
table of ch. VI (Table 3), were 1876 and 1914. When, as in the first table of that
chapter, he did mention the date 1900, he did so with no comment on its relevance
to his previous argument about monopolization. The period of monopolization as he
had identified it began at about 1900; thus judging by Table 3 of Chapter VI he
could find an effect from before that year (the expansion of empires) and give a
cause from afterward (monopolization)—Lenin, Imperialism, pp. 46, 76–83. For a
different, more detailed, and if possible even less friendly account of Hobson-
Hilferding-Kautsky-Leninist imperialism, see L.H.Gann and Peter Duignan, Burden
of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 1967), pp. 39–71. The economic theory of imperialism and its
weaknesses are also explored in Koebner, ‘Concept of Economic Imperialism’;
Mark Blaug, ‘Economic Imperialism Revisited’, Yale Review, ser. 2, 50 (1961), pp.
335–49; and D.K.Fieldhouse, ‘“Imperialism”: An Historiographical Revision’,
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25, 2 (1961), pp. 187–209.
47 The argument in favour of a dominant service sector is contained in W.D.
Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1900 (London:
Routledge, 1993). In the nineteenth century and ever since, British manufacturers
were reputed to possess wealth far in excess of what they actually had. They had a
reputation as a large group helping to guide British policy, when in fact
manufacturers made up only a tiny fraction of society, even in manufacturing
centres—Stana Nenadic, ‘Businessmen, The Urban Middle Class, and the
“Dominance” of Manufacturers in Nineteenth-century Britain’, Economic History
Review, 2nd ser., 44, 1 (1991), pp. 66–85.
48 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–
1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993).
49 It has appeared in a new edition: P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism,
1688–2000, 2nd edn (London and New York: Longman, 2002); and it has inspired
new work: see Raymond E.Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British
Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London and New York: Longman, 1999).
‘Gentlemanly capitalism’, first proposed by Cain and Hopkins in 1986, has proved
to be a fruitful idea for investigating British domestic history quite apart from
imperialism: see e.g. W.D.Rubinstein, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British
Industry, 1820–1914: Comment’, Past & Present, 132 (August 1991), pp. 150–70;
M.J Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry, 1820–1914: Reply’,
Past & Present, 132 (August 1991), pp. 170–87; and Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly
Capitalism” and British Industry, 1820–1914’, Past & Present, 122 (February
1989), pp. 119–58. For the fons et origo, see P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, ‘Gentleman
Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. I. The Old Colonial System’, Economic
History Review, 2nd ser., 39, 4 (November 1986), pp. 501–25; and ‘Gentlemanly
Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. II. New Imperialism’, Economic
History Review, 40, 1 (February 1987), pp. 1–26. See also Cain and Hopkins, ‘The
Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750–1914’, Economic History
Review, 2nd ser., 33, 4 (November 1980), pp. 463–90.
50 A.G.Hopkins, ‘The “New International Economic Order”, in the Nineteenth
Century: Britain’s First Development Plan for Africa’, in Robin Law (ed.), From
Notes 136
Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-
century West Africa, African Studies Series, 86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 240–64.
51 See comments in Jerome Slater, ‘Is United States Foreign Policy “Imperialist” or
“Imperial”?’, Political Science Quarterly, 91, 1 (spring 1976), pp. 63–87. Slater
cites William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland
and New York: World Publishing, 1959). See also idem., Empire as a Way of Life:
An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, Along
with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press,
1980), pp. 6–11 and passim. By 1980, Williams could draw a direct line from
Elizabethan plans for Virginia through the adoption of a strong federal government
in 1787–88, the seizure of half of Mexico in 1849, and the American intervention in
Vietnam. For Williams, Adam Smith rather than J.A Hobson best understood
imperialism: the metropolises (whether London and Manchester in 1851, Boston and
New York in 1865, or New York and Washington, DC in 1965) always control the
economy and thus the culture and political destiny of the whole countryside, even
the countryside overseas.
52 Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of the New Imperialism, pp. 13–25; Eldridge,
England’s Mission, pp. 180–1.
53 Trevor R.Reese, The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868–1968
(London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 33–5; Michael Burgess, ‘Imperial
Federation: Continuity and Change in British Ideas, 1869–1871’, New Zealand
Journal of History, 17 (April 1963), pp. 60–80 at pp. 70–1; Charles Stuart Blackton,
‘The Cannon Street Episode: An Aspect of Anglo-Australian Relations’, Historical
Studies, 13 (April 1969), pp. 520–32. Perhaps the earliest account by a professional
historian of the events of 1869–70 as a turning point in the history of imperialism—
turning England towards the New Imperialism of later in the century—is George
Burton Adams, ‘The Imperial Federation Movement in England’, Proceedings of the
Wisconsin Historical Society (1898), pp. 93–116.
54 After the autumn of 1869, Whitehall seemed more and more anxious to maintain
imperial control during frontier crises. See James Patterson Smith, ‘The Riel
Rebellion of 1869: New Light on British Liberals and the Use of Force on the
Canadian Frontier’, Revue d’études canadiennes (Journal of Canadian Studies), 30,
2 (summer 1995), pp. 58–73.
55 Even Koebner and Schmidt date the Society from March 1869. They focus on the
first advent of the word ‘imperialism’ rather than on the slightly older phenomenon
represented by that word—Koebner and Schmidt, Imperialism, pp. 87–91.
Unconcerned either with Dilke or with where the Society came from—save a few
lines on Lord Bury—and dating the Society’s organizational meeting five months
too early, while otherwise giving a good précis of its early days, is Daniel William
Younker, ‘The Practical Origins of the Colonial Conference of 1887’ (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Michigan, 1968), pp. 68–72.
56 On continuities between British imperial practice in mid-century and in later
periods, see J.S.Galbraith, ‘Myths of the “Little England” Era’, American Historical
Review, 67 (October 1961), pp. 34–48; Richard Pares, ‘The Economic Factors in the
Notes 137
History of the Empire’, p. 133; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, ‘The
Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 6, 1 (1953), pp. 1–
15; C.C.Eldridge, ‘The Myth of Mid-Victorian Separatism: The Cession of the Bay
Islands and the Ionian Islands in the Early 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 12, 3 (March
1969), pp. 331–46; and Sydney Kanya-Forstner, ‘A Final Comment on Robinson
and Gallagher’ (not a prescient title) in William Roger Louis (ed.),
I
mperialism: The
Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), p. 229.
See also Paul Kennedy, ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in British Imperialism’, pp.
25, 31; and James Sturgis, ‘Britain and the New Imperialism’, pp. 85, 97–100; both
in C.C.Eldridge (ed.), British Impe-rialism in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Macmillan, 1984), pp. 20–38, 85–105. Gann and Duignan reject any new creation of
imperialism at about 1870, but they accept that people wrote much more about the
subject after that date, and wrote friendlier things—Gann and Duignan, Burden of
Empire, pp. 18–19, 361–2.
On what may have changed in the 1880s, see Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire,
pp. 464–75; D.C.M.Platt, ‘Economic Factors in British Policy During the “New
Imperialism”’, Past & Present, 39 (April 1968), pp. 120–38. Governments had not
been completely unwilling to throw their weight about even before the 1880s, as
witnessed in India in 1857 and in China from the Opium Wars through the Tai-Ping
Rebellion; D.C.M.Platt goes too far in minimizing Britain’s role, especially in
China: D.C.M.Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’,
Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 21, 2 (August 1968), pp. 296–306; and idem.,
‘Further Objections to an “Imperialism of Free Trade”, 1830–60’, Economic History
Review, 2nd ser., 26, 1 (February 1973), pp. 77–91.
57 On the empire as employment agency, see W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The
Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic
Books, 1966), pp. 183–4; Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British
Policy, pp. 43–8, 53; and on the step-by-step institution in the 1850s and 1860s of
competitive examinations for positions in the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial
Office, see John W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 26–34. The literature
on the professionalization of the general culture is huge. Besides the works of
Harold Perkin, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional:
Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2
The founding of the Colonial Society
1 Figures are for metropolitan areas. B.R.Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of
British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 19.
On the building boom, see John Summerson, The London Building World of the
Notes 138
Eighteen-Sixties (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 7–8.
2 For example, the new universities were hard pressed to fit themselves into the
narrow buildings of British cities. University officials responded by building their
laboratories, museums, and lecture halls on new sites outside of town, or by
converting old gymnasia, court buildings, gaols, or—as in the case of Liverpool—
madhouses; see Sophie Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a
University’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 20 (1989), pp. 405–
34.
3 The Colonial Office was in No. 13 Downing Street until 1827, when it added No.
14—John W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-nineteenth Century
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 3–4.
4 Brian L.Blakely, The Colonial Office, 1868–1892 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1972), p. 18.
5 John Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1976), pp. 82, 94. The mid-century burgeoning of new
professional institutes for engineers, chiefly in London but also in some provincial
cities, is a notable example of the process; see Tables 1 and 2 in R.A. Buchanan, The
Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London:
Jessica Kingsley, 1989), pp. 232–5. For the opening of the older and less
professional institutions to a new class of railway-borne suburbanites, see
R.C.K.Ensor, England 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, \ 1936), pp. 164–6.
One example is the growth in the Royal Society of Arts, whose membership
quadrupled between 1850 and 1870—Derek Hudson and Kenneth W.Luckhurst, The
Royal Society of Arts, 1754–1954 (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 364. Some
intellectual trends implicated in the growth or foundation of so many learned
societies during this period are explored by Stefan Collini in Public Moralists:
Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), pp. 210–18. The professional or intellectual societies of this period can
be contrasted with the social clubs founded in the Napoleonic period, clubs such as
The Carlton and White’s—see John Summerson, Georgian London [1945]
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 242–9.
6 T.W.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London
and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 57–8. For the building of association
headquarters in the other metropolises of Great Britain, see Gary S.Messinger,
Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-known City (Manchester, and Dover,
NH: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 90, 118–19, 132. The character of this
age of railways and cities may also be read in the growth of societies in the
provincial cities of other countries. Of the thirty intellectual or pseudo-intellectual
societies in Lyons in 1900, the ten oldest were founded between 1700 and 1856, and
the next ten were founded in the fifteen years from 1861 to 1876: Theodore Zeldin,
France 1848–1945, vol. 2, Intellect, Taste, and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977), pp. 38–9. Zeldin cites H.Delaunay, Annuaire internationale de sociétés
savantes (1903). A similar impression for Marseilles as well as Lyons may be
gathered from H.Delaunay, Les sociétés savantes de france (Paris: Imprimerie
Générale Lahure, 1902)—this compilation also reveals that Paris’ Société des Études
Notes 139
coloniales et maritimes was founded in 1876, and that no earlier societies interested in
colonies were extant in France at the turn of the century, except for sections of the
Société de Ethnographie (itself founded in 1859).
7 They might even be drawn to live in one of the new specialized neighbourhoods, so
full of journalists or artists or what you will. A wonderfully evocative picture of the
expansion and sorting out of the metropolis into the neighbourhoods so prized
today—from teeming Soho to journalistic, domestic Islington to international
Bayswater to up-scale artistic Hampstead, and so many more—is to be found in
Donald J.Olsen, ‘Victorian London: Specialization, Segregation, and Privacy’,
Victorian Studies, 17, 3 (March 1974), pp. 265–78.
8 John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London. With Anecdotes of its former coffee-
houses, hostelries, and taverns, from the seventeenth century to the present time
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1872; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1967). Two
witnesses to the disruption of traditional sociability and club life caused by the
growth of London by the mid-nineteenth century—one being Henry James—are
mentioned in Francis Sheppard, ‘London and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), pp. 51–74.
9 David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 1, A World of its Own, 1815–1890
(London: Pimlico, 1995), pp. 244–7.
10 Becker began well back, with the Royal Society; he did not look at all the new
scientific institutions of his day, only at the well-established ones and one or two of
the oldest but least successful remnants—Bernard H.Becker, Scientific London
(London: Henry S.King & Co, 1874), p. v.
11 Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, p. 59. Not all the journals were of the
highest quality. Stefan Collini, building on the work of J.W.Burrow, notes that the
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (itself founded in 1868) were for some
years ‘more a collective form of vanity publishing than of con-certed scholarly
enquiry’—Collini, Public Moralists, p. 218. Some of the less serious journals, such
as that of the Royal Institution, quickly failed; see Morris Berman, Social Change
and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1978), pp. 141–5.
12 In June 1869 it became the ‘Royal Colonial Society’, only to become the ‘Royal
Colonial Institute’ nine months later, after the Royal College of Surgeons objected
to sharing the initials. In 1928 the name was changed to ‘Royal Empire Society’,
and yet again in 1958, this time to ‘Royal Commonwealth Society’. Apparently
there are now so many societies in the London universe that the Royal College of
Surgeons no longer cares about the duplication. However, the surgeons do insist that
the Fellows of the Royal Commonwealth Society refrain from using the initials
‘FRCS’. See Reese, Royal Commonwealth Society, pp. 17, 131–2, 217–18. Since
this study concentrates on the Colonial Society’s membership between August 1868
and April 1869, and on what the members were doing before 1868, I will use the
name ‘Colonial Society’, and the word ‘Society’ itself for short.
13 Circular of 26 June 1868, General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, p. 1,
RCSA.
14 For the coffee house world, see John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the
Notes 140
Most Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis; With Fifty Years’ Personal
Recollections (London: David Bogue, 1855), pp. 200–5. The coffee houses that
survived the end of the nineteenth century, such as the Baltic and the Jerusalem,
transformed themselves into commercial exchanges—Ben Weinreb and Christopher
Hibbert, The London Encydopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983).
15 M.B.Filby of East Croydon, who joined the Colonial Society on 13 April 1869, and
who left little more information about himself than that.
16 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 1.
17 Becker, Scientific London, pp. 317–19; Ian Cameron, To the Farthest Ends of the
Earth: The History of the Royal Geographical Society 1830–1980 (London and
Sydney: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1980), pp. 16–18.
18 Bury to Russell, 25 January 1869, C.S. Gen. Corresp., vol. 1, fo 31, RCSL.
19 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 2.
20 See (for the social wing of the Royal Society) Sir Archibald Geike, Annals of the
Royal Society Club: The Record of a London Dining-Club in the Eighteenth &
Nineteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan & Co, 1917); and (for the main
organization) Sir Henry Lyons, FRS, The Royal Society, 1660–1940: A History of its
Administration under its Charter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944),
pp. 230–4 and 252–66. For the Society of Arts, see Hudson and Luckhurst, Royal
Society of Arts, pp. 5–20, 58, 171–9, 218–20, 234–53. For another body beginning
to undergo the same processes of formalization at the same time, namely the Royal
Institution, see Berman, Social Change, pp. 127–33, 187–8.
21 Circular of 26 June 1868, p. 2.
22 C.S.Coun. Min., 18 August 1868, fo 5; 6 October 1868, fo 11; 16 December 1868,
fo 21; 20 January 1869, fo 25. See also A.R.Roche to William Denison, MP, 10
September 1868, C.S.Gen. Corresp., vol. 1, fo 10.
23 Henry James, ‘London’, in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain
and America, Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1993),
p. 38. The passage is given as it appeared in James’ 1905 collection, English Hours.
The original wording, from Henry James, ‘London’, Century Magazine (December
1888), pp. 219–39, was identical except for the words coming after ‘globe’ at the
end of the first paragraph: ‘as the margin of the agglomeration on the Thames.’
24 Colonial Society [1837], Rules and Regulations of the Colonial Society, with a list
of members (London: Harrison & Co, 1842), pp. 8–10.
25 Colonial Society [1837], The Rules and Regulations of the Colonial Society, with
an Alphabetical List of the Members (London: George Nichols, 1837), p. 7.
26 One member remains mysterious, although not completely obscure. He was
William Walker of 48 Hilldrop Road, Tufnell Park. A fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society, he would serve on the Council of the 1868 Colonial Society
from 1868 until 1889. About the other three men who would be members of both
societies there is much more to be said. William Thomas Denison and Patrick
Leonard MacDougall, both Army men, were on the twelve-member Committee of
Management appointed on 5 July 1837 at the earlier Society’s meeting; Denison
joined the Council of the later Society on 8 September 1868. A greater name yet is
that of George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll. He joined the first Colonial
Notes 141
Society in 1840, and was appointed one of the Trustees in 1842. But it is hard to say
what Argyll’s views on the empire were in this period. He made his views known
very extensively in a later era, as Secretary of State for India, and as a voluminous
writer on anthropology and race.
27 A.R.Roche to Captain Whitty, 12 October 1868, General Corresp., vol. 1, fo 15,
RCSA; Council Minutes, 6 October 1868, vol. 1, p. 10, RCSA.
28 See Glenn Melancon, ‘Honour in Opium? The British Declaration of War on China,
1839–1840’, International History Review, 21, 4 (December 1999), pp. 855–74.
29 East India Committee of the Colonial Society [1837], Report of the East India
Committee of the Colonial Society on the Causes and Consequences of the Military
Operations in China, 2nd edn (London: James Maynard, 1843; David Bryce, 1857),
pp. 2–3.
30 Ibid., p. 1.
31 The Times, 7 April 1843, p. 5.
32 East India Committee of the Colonial Society [1837], Report of the East India
Committee of the Colonial Society on the Causes and Consequences of the Military
Operations in China, p. iii; idem., Report of the East India of the Colonial Society
on the Causes and Consequences of the Afghan War (London: James Maynard,
1842); Papers of the Colonial Society of 1837, RCSL.
33 General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, n.p., RCSA. See Reese, Royal
Commonwealth Society, p. 14.
34 Annual Register (1868), p. 167.
35 Two of these three numbered among the eleven founding members who sent letters
of regret, joining in that fashion rather than in person. The only peer actually in
attendance was the Marquis of Normanby. A colonial governor, he was the son of a
man who had been Colonial Secretary and who, as Ambassador to France, had
befriended Tocqueville.
36 The London member was George Joachim Goschen; the absentee was the Hon.
Dudley Fortescue, who was represented by his brother (and fellow MP), the Rt.
Hon. Chichester Fortescue. General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1, 26 June 1868, n.p.,
RCSA.
37 General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1,12 August 1868, n.p., RCSA.
38 A fourth meeting of the provisional committee was held at lunchtime on 12 August,
a few hours before the general meeting. The committee would have met more often
if some of the members at the June meeting had not left town during August and
September (General Meetings Minutes, vol. 1., RCSA; A.R. Roche to Col. Sir
William Denison, 9 September 1868, RCS Letter Book, I, fos 8–9, RCSA). For the
rest of the year, most of the meetings of the Council (as it was soon called) were
held in the offices of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at 12 Spring Gardens
(Coun. Min., pp. 4, 6, 15, 17). These meetings were in August, September, and
December. October and November saw only one meeting each, and these meetings
were held in Lombard Street. Later in December, the Council began meeting at the
Institution of Civil Engineers, and continued doing so until the Society’s own rooms
were ready in late May.
39 Membership figures are collated from the Society’s Minutes. Donald Simpson,
Notes 142
Librarian Emeritus of the Royal Commonwealth Society, made the original study of
the Minutes, and he was kind enough to share his work with me. See his brief
reviews of the early membership in the ‘Royal Commonwealth Society Library
Notes’, new ser., nos 262 and 263 (August and October 1984). Unlike me, he
aggregates the whole of the membership of the first five years, and he excludes
active members of the Provisional Committee from the membership if they did not
go on to join the Society.
40 A.R.Roche to the Marquis of Normanby, 6 October 1868, C.S. Letter Book, vol. 1,
fos 12–13, RCSA.
41 F.Musgrove, ‘Middle-class Education and Employment in the Nineteenth Century’,
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 12 (1959–60), pp. 99–111. To look at it another
way, personal (not real) property worth £5 (£10 in London) was all it took to send an
estate into probate—granted in only 13.3 per cent of deaths in London in 1850.
Thus, people who could afford the Society’s dues were well up in the top one-tenth
of society. See David R.Green and Alastair Owens, ‘Metropolitan Estates of the
Middle Class, 1800–50: Probates and Death Duties Revisited’, Historical Research,
70, 173 (October 1997), pp. 294–311.
42 H.C.G.Matthews (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. 6, 1861–1868 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 635.
43 Blanc to Dilke, 3 December 1868 and 27 July 1871, DP vol. XI, BL Add. MS.
43884, fos 38–9.
44 Postscript to the dispatch of Governor Sir G.F.Bowen to Lord Granville, 29 March
1869, given in the PP, Correspondence and Papers Relating to New Zealand, No.
307 (1868–69), p. 392.
45 The Times, 10 March p. 7, col. 3; 31 March p. 4, col. 2; 6 April p. 5, col. 1; 7 April
p. 10, col. 2; 14 April p. 5, col. 6; 15 April p. 11, col. 2; 19 April p. 6, col. 1.
46 Meanwhile, a few people might have glanced at a short-lived periodical called The
Anglo-Colonial: A Monthly Magazine & Review for the Colonies. This substantial
and intriguing production, published by Sampson Low, ostensibly debuted on 1
January 1869. It had a second issue on 1 February, although the British Museum
acquired both issues on 20 March: The Anglo-Colonial: A Monthly Magazine &
Review for the Colonies (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1869). The
Anglo-Colonial never appeared again. There is no internal evidence of who wrote
for it or of who the editor was, much less of who if anyone read it (many pages in
the Museum’s copies, at least, remain unopened). Still, it may have been connected
to an ‘R.Currey, M.A.’, who made an abortive attempt sometime in March 1869 to
secure the Minutes of the Colonial Society for his own new (and unspecified)
periodical on the colonies; the Society was indeed willing to supply him with its
transactions, but nothing seems to have come of the idea. A.R.Roche to R.Currey,
29 March 1869, C.S. Letter Book, vol. 1, fo 72, RCSA. Perhaps The Anglo-Colonial
was founded as a successor to the similar magazines which had existed in the 1840s,
as the Colonial Society’s secretary assumed that it was. From 1840 to 1842, there
was The Colonial Magazine, edited by Robert Montgomery Martin; Fisher’s
Colonial Magazine appeared from 1842 to 1845; Simmond’s Colonial Magazine,
founded in 1844, went through several mergers and changes of name before its
Notes 143