Zoë Laidlaw - Colonial Connections 1815-45
Zoë Laidlaw
Colonial Connections 1815-45:
Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005
Pp. xii + 241 Hardback ISBN 0 7190 6918 1 £50
Although Zoë Laidlaw’s well-researched book focuses upon New South Wales and the Cape Colony in the first half of the nineteenth century, it made me think of the sixteenth-century Tudor Revolution in Government, and the late twentieth-century explosion of the Internet. G.R. Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell introduced a wholly new administrative system into Henry VIII’s England. Elton’s critics contended that Cromwell had simply started a new set of books. Forty years ago, as an example of historical debate and methodology, this was the biggest show in town, and many an Honours degree fed off the controversy. But a proto-Eltonian interpretation had long dominated the orthodox historiography of the Colonial Office. This view held that the permanent under-secretary (alias head pen-pusher) R.W. Hay presided over a charming shambles, for instance with incoming documentation sometimes filed by colony and sometimes by correspondent. Happily both for Victorian efficiency and historical research, a wholly new system of regularity was imposed after 1836 by Hay’s replacement, James Stephen like Thomas Cromwell, a firm Protestant with an intensely tidy mind. He was of course the father of Leslie and Fitzjames and grandfather of Virginia Woolf a famous intellectual dynasty whose brains operated on permanent overdrive. Unfortunately their throbbing craniums also vibrated an obsessive streak which, it seems, with James Stephen took the form of unyielding hostility to unauthorised correspondence. In Hay’s time, every colonial official with a grievance had showered letters and vitriol around the desks of Downing Street. Stephen ordained that all communications must come through the governor, and that the governor alone had permission to write privately to the secretary of state.
Historians liked this revolution in colonial government. Issues could be traced through ordered documents, decorated with another Stephen foible, juicily idiosyncratic scribblings called “minutes”. Here was policy in formation, decisions in the making, the pure ore of imperial history in easily mined form. But Laidlaw urges us to look behind the documents, and appreciate that Stephen’s refusal to recognise the importance of unofficial networks actually risked a massive reduction in the influence of the Colonial Office. Even if Hay was not in control of the paperwork, he knew what was going on around his empire. Like Malvolio, Stephen made the mistake of assuming that if he were virtuous, there would be no more cakes and ale. The networks remained in existence, but Stephen’s self-denial meant that they were no longer accessible to the Colonial Office. Laidlaw shows how Sir Richard Bourke had used his son, Dick, as his unofficial lobbyist in London. The Macarthurs were past-masters at the game, running rings around the emancipist Australian Patriotic Association in the late eighteen-thirties. If necessary, Hay could have gone back-of-Bourke and got the low-down on New South Wales issues from his own sources. Thanks to his self-denial, no such alternative channel was available to James Stephen. What could save his new system from irrelevance?
It is here that the Internet analogy comes into play. Laidlaw identifies an “information revolution” as the basis for renewed Colonial Office hegemony in the administrative processes. Collection of statistics had been a growing fad for decades, and the Colonial Office was in hot pursuit of tabulated figures from the eighteen-twenties. After 1815, parliamentary committees developed as an aggressive tool for prising open the hidden corners of society and government, publishing much of the revealed data in lengthy reports. But the material was hardly reader-friendly, and required some more accessible format to punch home its message. Enter Robert Montgomery Martin, who made himself into a one-man web-site, with a series of fact-packed books culminating in 1839 with his publication of the collected statistics of empire. He estimated that he had amassed around three million raw figures, and had added an equal number of basic calculations by way of tabulation. Another R.M. Martin innovation was to produce maps which coloured British territory in red. The legacy, according to Laidlaw, was “a transition from a conception of Britain’s foreign possessions as primarily a collection of diverse colonies” to one of an integrated empire, which in theory might be run from the centre according to uniform principles (p. 195).
Laidlaw’s argument extends in several directions, and is presented as having formative implications for the imperial policy in the later nineteenth century. It will require reflection and testing on a broader canvas. Her comparative approach suggests that the informal networks operated more effectively for New South Wales than for the Cape. Given that Britain’s African foothold was predominantly run by the military and naval officers whom she sees as one of the most influential home-based networks, it may be that there was an element of benign accident in the smooth functioning of Australian lobbying. Will the analysis apply more generally? Laidlaw refers to the activities of John Beverley Robinson, chief justice of Upper Canada, who lobbied in London energetically on the future of the province throughout 1838-40. Robinson was a fossil survivor from another age and it is by no means clear that he advanced his various causes by turning up in person. Eventually Lord John Russell bluntly ordered him to go home. Another reservation may be that Laidlaw tells us a good deal about how lobbyists sought to influence officials in Downing Street, but much less on the wider formation of opinion through the press and parliament.
Laidlaw’s information revolution may also prove to be less momentous than it seems. In fairness, she qualifies her claims, acknowledging that statistical information was often out of date, inaccurate and assembled under so many inconsistent headings that genuine comparison was impossible. Thus in practice officials grasped that solutions which seemed to work in one colony would not necessarily transfer elsewhere. Moreover, the Colonial Office had been collecting tables of figures for some years before Stephen took charge. In theory, statistics formed a mighty engine of control; in practice, the Colonial Office never got the engine into gear. As a result, officials in distant dependencies spent a great deal of time compiling in returns which nobody in London knew how to use effectively. (Inmates of British universities will find this has a familiar sound.) Furthermore, to borrow again from the Internet analogy, the publication of colonial statistics meant that ministers and their civil servants were no longer in sole control of the power of knowledge. This may help to explain why, in important respects, the Colonial Office did not tighten its control over significant components of the empire in the decades which followed, as Laidlaw’s theory seems to postulate. Indeed, the reverse was the case, with responsible government coming to most of the main settler colonies within a decade of the close of her period of study. If we step back a little and see the tiny cadre of Downing Street clerks with their red tape and their blue books in a broader perspective, we may perhaps qualify the notion that a coherent entity called the “Colonial Office” existed at all. Laidlaw refers to ministers as “the political staff” (p. 174), but the secretary of state and the parliamentary under-secretary operated in a different world and were subject to wider influences including, again, parliament and the press. Indeed, some of the political critics of the Office in the eighteen-thirties, such as Earl Grey and Benjamin Hawes, would later come in and run the place. On the big subjects, it was their decisions that drove imperial policy and the information revolution had helped to form their opinions before they walked through the doors of number 14 Downing Street.
Two minor grumbles. At one point, Laidlaw refers to Edward Macarthur’s connections with “Mr Estcourt, the MP for Oxford” (p. 133). It is always a sign of defeat when a historian has to mister-fy some personality from the past, and in any case, there were three Oxford constituencies: the borough, the county and the university in rising order of prestige. T.G. Bucknall Estcourt was member for the University from 1827 to 1847, when he was succeeded by Gladstone. Personally respected rather than politically regarded, he took an interest in police issues, and by extension this may explain why he was a useful contact for a New South Wales lobbyist. However, Estcourt’s high toryism meant that he could hardly be influential after 1830. It took a couple of minutes to identify him from Shanacoole reference sources. Presumably the same works are available in the libraries of his constituency where Laidlaw wrote her doctorate. As it happens, Estcourt was not very important but he might have been, and it is the task of the historian of networks to hunt down such people. The other complaint? A misplaced apostrophe on page 201. To mention it all is a backhanded compliment to Manchester University Press, for from most other publishers one would simply wince and shrug.
Zoë Laidlaw has written an intriguing book. I look forward to its sequel.