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British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820-1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

A. G. L. Shaw
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Extract

In an article in the Journal of British Studies in November 1965, Helen Taft Manning, referring particularly to the period 1830 to 1850, asked the question, “Who ran the British Empire?” She was especially concerned with the influence of the famous James Stephen, but her question raises matters of wider concern.

“Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change,” she wrote.

Much of what is still being written about colonial administration in the nineteenth-century British Empire rests on the partisan and even malicious writings of critics of the Government in England in the 1830s and '40s who had never seen the colonial correspondence and were unfamiliar with existing conditions in the distant colonies. The impression conveyed in most textbooks is that the Colonial Office after 1815 was a well-established bureaucracy concerned with the policies of the mother country in the overseas possessions, and that those policies changed very slowly and only under pressure. Initially Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller were responsible for this Colonial Office legend, but it was soon accepted by most of the people who had business to transact there.

This legend is still to be found, as Mrs. Manning says, in general textbooks, among the more important of the fairly recent ones being E. L. Woodward's Age of Reform, and more surprisingly in the second volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Of course, Wakefield and the so-called colonial reformers are well recognized as propagandists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , November 1969 , pp. 71 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1969

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References

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