A year in the empire
Alan Lester describes how a small group of officials sought to administer Britain’s extensive imperial possessions
From central London, a huddle of harried clerks sent out an endless stream of dispatches that influenced the fate of the British empire. Alan Lester focuses on the year of 1838 to reveal how these city-bound bureaucrats managed to govern the world’s largest maritime empire
When James Stephen arrived at his desk on 1 January 1838, he was confronted by piles of dispatches from across the world. As the permanent under-secretary at the Colonial Office, which administered all 32 crown colonies that were controlled directly by the British government, Stephen spent every day “diligently… keeping back the flood of papers from deluging us”. He even warned his sister that “I shall soon become a mere bit of blotting paper myself!” Amid letters from imperial governors in Australia, southern Africa, Sierra Leone, Malta and Canada, Stephen faced – among other issues – the spectre of colonists’ rebellions, which deeply concerned him; anxieties about the aftermath of emancipation; and massacres of indigenous peoples carried out by British settlers.
Stephen was the personification of the Colonial Office, working 18-hour days, six days a week to interpret every dispatch and draft most of the responses on behalf of the British government. He and his staff of 25 worked from a dilapidated townhouse in Downing Street, its floors creaking under the weight of filing cabinets. The politician Charles Buller wrote of its “sighing rooms”, where supplicants waited endlessly for appointments in dark, dingy annexes, providing Charles Dickens with a model for Little Dorrit’s “circumlocution office”.
The rest of the British empire was governed from East India House, a grand neo-classical palace in the heart of the financial district. Here the East India Company directors oversaw the governance of India and associated territories with a staff three times as large as Stephen’s. (In India the territories acquired by the East India Company’s armies had been governed by the Company alone until, in 1784, more parliamentary oversight was brought to bear by the government’s Board of Control. In 1838 the board was headed by John Cam Hobhouse, who had been a friend of Lord Byron. He had spent time in jail for radical pamphleteering in his youth but was now a mellowed Whig MP.)
However, despite the differences in their workplaces, both the Colonial Office and the East India Company were plagued by the same problem: dispatches took weeks, if not months, to travel from the far-flung colonies to London. Steamships were in their infancy, and the vagaries of ocean current and wind determined sailing times – and the speed of communication. When William Nicolay, governor of Mauritius, complained to Stephen in a dispatch dated 10 October 1837 that he had still not been notified officially of Queen Victoria’s accession back in June 1837, although the news had already arrived with the London newspapers, Stephen explained tersely that “Merchant Vessels are simultaneously advertised as about to sail from London, Liverpool, Bristol… [and] the actual time of their departure cannot be stated with any degree of certainty, until immediately before they sail”, adding “vessels do not arrive at their destination in the order… in which they may have… left England”.
Hobhouse’s communications were no more reliable. The quickest route for dispatches from India was from Bombay (Mumbai) or Karachi via the Red Sea, across the Isthmus of Suez by land and then on by sea from Alexandria. With sailing ships frequently becalmed in the Red Sea, the Company was a pioneer investor in steamships. In January 1838 its agent in Alexandria negotiated access to coal depots at Ottoman ports en route. Dispatches sent from East India House that March would reach Bombay in a record 41 days.
Given its dispersed nature, its fragmented administrative structure and the difficulties of
communication, how was the largest empire that the world had ever seen governed, everywhere and all at once? Based on research for my new book, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the 19th Century British Empire, this article takes a snapshot of the first full year of Queen Victoria’s reign: 1838. By focusing on one year, we can see how Colonial Office clerks and Company men made the decisions that shaped the rest of the world.
On 1 January, Lord Auckland, the East India Company’s governor general of India, and his sister Emily were diverted from touring northern India by reports of an unusually severe famine in the Agra region. The economic volatility brought about by the end of the Company’s monopoly on trade with Britain in 1813 and with China in 1833 had contributed to extreme poverty.
Indians who were reliant on cotton production and export had been undercut by British imports. And they were charged rent purely for the privilege of being governed by the Company; this money was poured into the pockets of the Company’s shareholders, whose annual dividends of 10.5 per cent were funded wholly by the rent. None of this was helping impoverished peasants to buy food. El Niño weather events had then caused harvest failure, further raising prices.
Hobhouse received Auckland’s “harrowing accounts of famine and distress” in February. He and the Company directors agreed to pay a sum of 2 million rupees for the able-bodied who could work for it, but prohibited handouts to the incapacitated so as to afford “the greatest possible facilities for free and unrestricted commerce”. In all some 800,000 Indians would starve to death by the end of the summer.
Power hoarding
In the Colonial Office, Stephen was dealing with the aftermath of abolishing slavery. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which he had drafted, had not actually freed enslaved people from their owners’ control. Instead, 800,000 enslaved people had become unpaid “apprentices”, obliged to continue working for their former owners. This period of “apprenticeship”, along with the payment of £20m compensation to the slave owners (not the enslaved), had been necessary to secure parliament’s approval for abolition. Apprentices were due to be freed to find their own employers from 1 August 1838.
Their emancipation would significantly increase the free black population of Jamaica, and these freed apprentices would potentially be eligible to vote for the colony’s assembly. Governor Lionel Smith had a suggestion – that the property qualification be raised in anticipation, so as to maintain white planter
Steamships were in their infancy, and the vagaries of ocean current and wind determined sailing times – and the speed of communication
domination. From Mauritius, governor William Nicolay agreed: “The period is far – very far – distant… [when a] representative legislature could be safely introduced, founded on… the equality of legal rights.”
Stephen affirmed that any explicit racial discrimination could not be allowed. Setting a precedent for other colonies where property-less, formerly enslaved people of colour were about to join the predominantly white free population, the Jamaican Assembly would raise the property franchise without specifying any form of racial exclusion.
However, in the early months of 1838 Stephen’s overriding concern was the rebellion in Canada. British settlers in Upper Canada were joining with French-speaking colonists in Lower Canada to force the governors’ cliques to share power. Armed US citizens were raiding across the border in support of the rebels, and Stephen feared a second American Revolution. “Oh Canada” he lamented, “what wrongs have I done thee that thou… pursuest me in my house & my office, my walks & my dreams?”
Turbo-charged colonisation
The rebellion was a by-product of decades spent encouraging Britons to emigrate to the colonies of North America, Australia and southern Africa as a cure for supposed overpopulation at home. Turbo-charged “systematic colonisation” was now government policy. The accelerated British diaspora was causing Stephen two major headaches. The first, manifesting in Canada, was how to respond when British settlers demanded the right to govern themselves. The other was how these settlers should engage with the indigenous peoples whose lands they were taking.
Stephen was simultaneously digesting the recommendations of a select committee which condemned emigrants for the brutality of their invasion. He agreed that the Christianity and “civilisation” of indigenous peoples should be the objects of British colonisation, not these peoples’ destruction. Yet he still had to encourage further emigration.
Stephen felt the Christianity and “civilisation” of indigenous peoples should be the object of colonisation – not their destruction