The Imperial Mind (i)

A draft chapter of a book I am currently researching and writing on 'The British Empire in the Pacific, 1870 - 1920' looking at how contemporary attitudes and policies towards Pacific Islanders were shaped by a new and, at times, insidious form of racism that grew in legitimacy and usage during the late 19th century. While in many respects the inhabitants of the islands and island groups that fell under British control were more fortunate than indigenous peoples in other parts of the Empire, in order to understand the decisions of the Colonial Office and the actions of traders, settlers, sailors and missionaries, it is useful to understand the context and environment in which such decisions were taken. Spoiler: the Colonial Office was better than most . . . .

N.B. It is a draft chapter so any comments and suggestions would be welcome.

To understand the forces at play in the Pacific by the late 19th century is to understand what we might  conveniently label the  ‘imperial mind’. This process of identification with the views and opinions of governments and prominent leaders and agents of change is not a means to excuse, justify, shame or celebrate contemporary behaviours, prejudices and actions, is the wont today, but to help understand them. In order to do this (and to avoid going back as far as the Athenian City State), a convenient starting place especially in tracing the British variant would appear to be the mid 18th century with its combination of the American and French revolutions, the propagation of the ideas of the enlightenment and writings of Rousseau and Diderot, Herder and Paine amongst others; and the development of folk theory and new national mythologies. It is a period that coincided with the age of exploration and discovery in the Pacific, when the largest corporate trader in British history, the East India company held sway over all of India, the burgeoning of the industrial age and the spread railways and urbanisation. Moving on from the temporal to the spiritual, (although in the Pacific they were inextricably linked), it was a time the formation of new missionary societies, notably those of the Catholic and Anglican churches spurred into social action by John Wesley and his Wesleyan Society, whose aim was not only to convert, but to civilize, primarily by hastening the process of assimilation. It was a time of noble sentiment and romantic notions leading at home to the Catholic emancipation, to the Poor Laws and penal reform, but also of the workhouses, to profit-making enterprises based on selling the new world and its resources, on imperial ambition, and of racial and cultural assumptions based on a Eurocentric world view that brooked no other. It was also a time of humanitarian zeal, when the movement to abolish slavery was gaining momentum and the British government was beginning to question the impact western civilization, often in the guise of their own merchants and agents, was having upon indigenous peoples. It was a period of flux that created those huge -isms so favoured by schools keen for such labels to make sense of the past, including the sequential phases of romanticism, nationalism and imperialism. 

In England the seeds of the anti-slavery were already stirring. There were many who saw slavery as abhorrent and challenged the wealthy and influential  landowners and slave traders. Possibly the most significant of these was Granville Sharp,  who is remembered today for his pioneering work as a civil campaigner on behalf of the enslaved. His most famous case was that of the slave, James Somerset, who was brought to Britain by his ‘owner’ Charles Stewart. Seeing the opportunity to remain in England as a free man under British law, he was determined not to be sent back to the Colonies. The case was held before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, who was deeply uncomfortable about making a judgement that might affect thousands of slaves in England while also upsetting the slave owners in the American colonies at this precarious moment in American history, yet ended up being manoeuvred into doing just that. In his crusade, Sharp was supported by such counsels as William Davy, Francis Hargrave, Thomas Clarkson and John Glyn as well as numerous church goers, Quakers, Wesleyans and Anglicans, who assisted by baptising slaves, in the mistaken belief that these would mean they were no longer heathens and therefore safe. Along with others who saw slavery as abhorrent, they challenged the law, citing the ruling made in 1569 that ‘England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in’  and that that applied to all who lived there. (ii)  It was a great moral surge that led to the abolition of the British Slave Trade in 1807 and the banning of British citizens from being involved in the Slave Trade in 1838 when 800,000 slaves were purchased from slaveowners by the Government and released from bondage.  The crusade against slavery gathered momentum after the formation of the Abolitionist movement in 1787 that managed over the twenty years to galvanise the nation with meetings, protests and petitions (one of over 400,000 signatures was presented to parliament in 1806).  It is worth recalling this moral outrage that swept the country against enslavement a century later when racism had become embedded and institutionalised, encouraged by nationalism with the idea of a distinct national identity, fuelled by Darwinism and the maxim of the survival of the fittest and by the missionaries who contrasted Christians with the heathen without.

The idea of the noble savage, that was resurrected by Rousseau in the 1770s, of a people untouched by sin who lived a truly noble life was one that captured the European imagination. Rosseau’s writings were loosely based on the accounts of travellers who were experiencing new cultures through contact with peoples whose beliefs, languages, and religion (as well as attitudes to land and resources) were vastly different to theirs 

Early responses were, indeed, an endorsement of Rousseau.

On his early voyage around Australia, Captain James Cook described the Aborigines of Australia:

‘They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff, they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing. . . ,’ 

and were, in Cook’s estimation, 

“far more happier than we Europeans”. (iii)

Meeting other islanders, similar words and phrases kept appearing: Of the Tahitians, he wrote, 

‘ . . . their features in general comely and pleasing, and their eyes animated and expressive. They are courteous and affable in their deportment, easy and graceful  in their persons, and brave, candid and unreserved in their dispositions.’  (iv) 

The inhabitants of New Ireland were a

‘gentle, inoffensive people, and fond of beads and trinkets . . . .’  (v) 

while the inhabitants of New Holland, were described as

‘a clean-limbed, active people, with chocolate complexions and tolerable good features.’  (vi)   

Beneath these largely complimentary (although irritatingly patronising) observations were others,  more critical and damning, highlighting the savagery of some of the island populations and their ignorance of science and technology and social mores, but on the whole, the idea of the noble savage was writ large in Cook’s journals. Omai was a young man taken back from the Society Islands to England by Captain Cook and, in 1776, he was painted in classical garb by Joshua Reynolds, that perpetuated the image and added to the mythology.

In the same year, at an exhibition at the Royal Academy, the descriptions of Cook were collaborated by the paintings of William Hodge, an artist who accompanied Cook on one of his voyages. His depictions of South Sea islands, particularly Tahiti, with its tall palm trees, luxuriant foliage, with their lagoons and waterfalls, populated by semi-naked local women often depicted in classical poses enchanted the London public and added to the allure and the mystique of Oceania.  This mythologizing of the South Pacific, itself a significant part of the Romantic movement, was to continue well into the 19th century and for many of the smaller and more remote islands, beyond that.

Happier or not, the pressure for change to the islanders way of life was going in the other direction. Increasingly contact threatened or broke down local chiefly hierarchies, laws and traditions, provoking a number hostile responses to which the counterpunch was invariably ever more brutal. Although the myth of an idyllic lifestyle and a semi-paradise lingered, particularly in western culture throughout the 19th century, as reflected again in the controversial works of Paul Gauguin, the truth was that the noble savage could only be tolerated as an ideal, never as an impediment to the western idea of progress. It was not long before the concept of the ignoble savage, needing to be saved, replaced that of the noble savage and, before the end of the century, both were overtaken by the notion  of ‘the dying savage’ as island populations were at their nadir.

As the romantic period unfolded, Western Europe looked once again to glorify the past and to draw from its own history and civilization, feats of valour and endurance. In Western art,  the French public celebrated the image of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa’ with its heroic, yet doomed crew and Delacroix’s ‘Liberty storming the Barricades’ and the triumph of the people over their tyrannical masters. In England, ‘The Death of General Wolfe’ by the American artist Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley’s ‘The Death of Major Pierson’ served the very same iconic purpose, of promoting the heroic and glorifying the state. In literature, also, writers celebrated the past, through history and mythology, lore and legend, including such diverse writers as Sir Walter Scott and the Brothers Grimm. The Grand tour which had strengthened the attachment many Europeans  had to their own past, with classical Italy and Greece being amongst the favourite destinations of the Romantic poets, made nations more acutely aware of their own history and mythology. People were encouraged to look more closely at their own cultural cache, their cultural heritage and what made them distinctive as a race of people.

It was to be the creation of the nation-state that fuelled the second, and most powerful movement of the 19th century, nationalism  and led to the shift from a distinct national group, that is a group of people who identified with a common  history, language, culture and religion, into a state (a separate single political unity)  with the result being the creation of the nation-state. The most obvious examples of this process are Belgium in 1830, Italy in 1861 and Germany ten years later, but it was a roadmap that was followed invariably as national movements transformed the political institutions around them to create the nation-state. (vii)  It was ironic that the same calls for self-determination and self-governance  when exercised by subject peoples of the empire was to meet with such resistance.

The links between romanticism and nationalism are intertwined, yet have a profound impact on what follows. At the heart of nationalism is the emphasis on identity, on what makes a people and a country distinctive form others. It is an intellectual, if not an artificial construct emphasising a common past, language, religion, culture (for instance, the music of Wagner and the brothers Grimm were important in feeding into German identity and belonging). Yet with the sense of belonging and national pride, nationalism was also responsible for producing animosity between peoples and rivalry amongst nations, especially when the lines on the map cut across linguistic and racial groups. With its focus on the uniqueness of the state it is no surprise that rivalry, persecution, pogroms, even war have all been waged in order to preserve and strengthen it, a process that in Western Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, meant accumulating an empire.

The step from nationalism and the loyalty and adherence to the state that it created, to imperialism, the idea extending that rule to include the subjugation other lands and peoples, was a relatively small one, especially with power rivalries, and increasingly as a by-product of industrialization and the demands it made on countries to find new sources of raw materials., Even the conversion of the Pacific islanders to Christianity took on the appearance of a national competition for saving souls, as the various Christian missionary societies saw it as their role to convert and civilize indigenous peoples, making their own judgements of religion and worship through their own prescribed spiritual prisms, seizing the opportunity to piggyback on colonists and settlers albeit with a quite different, but equally harmful agenda of evangelical humanism. 

The power of nationalism had, at its heart, its exclusivity. In order to set apart and define the national group, it was set against those excluded who were seen as not belonging and almost always, inferior.  The creation of a nation-state invariably adopted or manufactured its own national mythology, whether by glorifying its common history or cultural achievements or by racial comparisons. This belief in the primacy of the nation-state, that had its nadir in Nazi Germany, has started to emerge again in the 21st century in such movements as ‘Make America Great again’ and in right-wing nationalist movements that are emerging throughout the western world. 

Nationalism thrives on promoting competition amongst neighbours. Rivalry and tensions, fuelled by overt patriotism, are just part of the cocktail. When mixed with the need for labour, land and raw supplies especially from the late eighteenth onwards, the link between nationalism and imperialism, however contradictory, is complete.

In order to deny the previous existence of communities and nations in the areas of the new world that were settled and exploited, imperialism worked by a new mantra, that of doing good, of measuring new countries and territories by a western rule. The introduction of western European ideas, beliefs, traditions, and technology, intended to lead to either assimilation and betterment if you followed the word of the church or subjugation to the needs and requirements of foreign powers if you listened to traders and settlers. All that was needed was a rationale and a mechanism. The idea that, in order to convert people, it was first necessary to civilize and westernize them was one the missionaries were only too keen to advocate. (viii) The mechanism, however, had more to do with what was in the economic and political interests of Britain and the settler governments.

By the late 1840s, however, with the heady days of abolition passed, Britain was coming to terms with some of the realities of abolition. While the West Africa Squadron patrolled the coast of Africa and intercepting slave ships when they could, there was a palpable shift in public opinion in England, exacerbated by the economic pressures that were being felt in the cotton industry in the Midlands and in the large slave port, and most notably Liverpool. As the American Civil War loomed and cotton supplies dwindled, support for the Confederate defence of slavery grew. 

In 1849, the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote an essay (anonymously at first) entitled “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ that attacked the abolitionists head-on while attacking the enslaved and free blacks in words that were shocking. He wrote,

‘my obscure black friends you are not “slaves” now nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again; but decidedly you will have to be servants to those who are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you - servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you.’  (ix)  

Anti-abolitionist feeling grew as the economic consequences of abolition became more evident, especially in the cotton mills of Lancashire and led to further unlikely contributions to the debate, once such from Anthony Trollope who wrote,

‘The negro’s idea of emancipation was and is not emancipation from slavery but from work. To lie in the sun and eat breadfruit and yams is his idea of being free.’  (x) 

Meanwhile, back in England in 1859, a newly published book was causing a considerable stir.  ‘The Origin of the Species’ by Charles Darwin with its hashtag taken from Herbert Spencer, ‘survival of the fittest’ not only posed a threat to the Church with its radical ideas about evolution, but provided another justification for imperialists to latch on to and to include in their rhetoric. Herbert Spencer was quick to adapt the theory to society, thereby providing imperialism with a political and racial justification in the form of Social Darwinism for competition for life and land.

It was soon incorporated into the growing trend to categorize people by racial type. In 1863 mid-Victorian racial stereo-typing gained a further disciple with the founding of the Anthropological Society of London with its founding members including the explorer Sir Richard Burton and his admirer and devotee, the poet Algernon Swinburne. The Society opposed the anti-slavery movement and belittled the abolitionists and do-gooders, notably the various missionary societies. Many of their number were also followers of the cult of phrenology, the pseudo-science that believed that the measurement of a person’s skull could determine their intellectual capabilities.  (xi) As a result, by the second half of the century, racism in Britain was becoming more accepted and institutionalized, whether intentionally or not, either in its mild form of presuming to care for a weaker people or in its denunciation of the idea of equality using pseudo-science and the interpretations of social Darwinism.

This was the basis for the growth of paternalism, the idea of one country assuming the responsibility to look after (albeit to control) the interests of another, based on racial lines. Yet within the Empire, there were hardening attitudes, possibly exacerbated by the experiences of the First Indian War of Independence (still known as the Indian Mutiny in many textbooks) in 1857.   As the abolitionist anti-slavery of the first decades faded, there was a hardening of racial attitudes. In 1865, an uprising occurred in Morant Bay, Jamaica to which the Governor, Edward Eyre one time magistrate and protector of Aborigines in Australia and later Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand, responded by ordering reprisals that resulted in the killings and / or executions of over a thousand Jamaicans and the burning of a similar number of homes. At first it was celebrated as a victory in Britain (an article in The Times commented that it demonstrated that it was ‘impossible to eradicate the original savageness of African blood’ ) before evidence came out of the ruthless and unwarranted brutality that eventually led to a government inquiry. (xii)   And yet, despite the judgement of his actions being ‘barbarous, excessive, wanton and cruel’ leading to a charge of murder, and the ignominy of his dismissal and recall to England, on his return he was feted, not only by the anti-abolitionists, but by a committee set up to defend Eyre and his actions, that included several leading literary figures of the day. The tide had well and truly turned. (xiii) 

Britain’s move towards paternalism that was to have wide-spread consequences throughout the empire, was underpinned by racial stereotyping and a growing self-belief in the superiority of the British mission. As Churchill observed,

 “I have seen enough in peace and war of the frontiers of our Empire to know that the British dominion all over the world could not endure for a year, perhaps not for a month, if it was founded upon a material basis. The strength and splendour of our authority is derived not from physical forces, but from moral ascendancy, liberty, justice, English tolerance, and English honesty.”   (xiv)  

Toye notes that Churchill was both a son of empire, by schooling and breeding and a reflection of the prevalent views of the time, that 

“. . . although he was undoubtedly sincere in his intention that all races should be treated with justice, that notion was perfectly consistent in his mind with the concept of white supremacy. For him, there was a duty incumbent on the superior British race to safeguard and improve lesser ones. That, indeed, was part of the justification for imperial rule.” (xv) 

While Churchill never went quite so far as Cecil Rhodes whose belief was that being born English was to win first prize in the lottery of life, his views were those that commonly prevailed by the turn of the twentieth century which were based around a widely held belief in racial type. The enemy were described as savages or as devils, especially when the unexpected happened and the other side prevailed against the might of empire (as happened with the defeat by the Zulu forces at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879). After the pomp and ceremony of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and her diamond Jubilee in 1897, with the Empire was near its zenith after the carve up of Africa. Kipling’ wrote the poem "The White Man's Burden" to emphasis the moral obligations (in this instance, that of the United States in the Philippines), to advance the cause of non-white peoples by civilizing and converting to them Christianity. As the colonization of Asia, Africa and the Pacific rim gathered pace in the 19th century, other countries sought to justify the right to take land from less developed peoples whose land or way of live became an obstruction to settlement and colonization. In the United States, God was invoked on the side of settlers through the idea of Manifest Destiny, a phrase first used in 1845 to justify the right of settlers to move west, (popularly by the Oregon trail) onto any Indian land and communities in their way, thereby expanding the dominion and spreading ‘democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ across the entire North American continent, a process that was pre-ordained and destined by God. 

This acceptance of colonial imperialism as a moral burden by the white race, and the imposition of Christianity at the expense of traditional religions is one that we can see time and again throughout the Pacific during this period. 

This assumed duty of the white peoples to manage the affairs of the less developed non-white peoples was one that was very acceptable to the population at large who were seldom aware of what it actually meant for the colonised peoples – or indeed even what ‘development’ meant. Even into this century, the view persisted that imperialism worked better than the alternative of self-rule and even remains prevalent today amongst some politicians and historians. In 2010, Boris Johnson wrote of Africa that, 

“The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”   (xvi)

going on to suggest that 

“The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction”.  (xvii)

It was a short step to another dogma seized upon by imperialists, that of eugenics. Coined by a half-cousin of Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, this new “science” went way beyond providing a justification for the survival of the fittest by advocating an active policy of ridding society of its “undesirables. While eugenics didn’t garner much traction in the Great Britain (unlike in the United States where it was used against Black Americans and other minorities), its influence still lingered. In 1910, Churchill was newly promoted to the Home Office when he wrote, 

‘I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race.’  (xviii)

All of these forces: the concepts of romanticism, nationalism, imperialism; social Darwinism and eugenics; conversion and civilization; paternalism, westernization and assimilation – contributed to the state of the imperial mind in the late 19th century. The official view of government and of the army ranged from altruistic on one hand to economic self, or national, interest on the other. In looking at the ‘what’ however, we also need to consider the ‘how’: what were the vehicles that promulgated these ideas and turned them into a creed for the Empire builders?  What happened to the moral crusade and belief in the liberty of all races and peoples that held sway in the late 18th century and early 19thcentury?  Why did Britain appear to countenance more outright racist opinions and action in 1900 than at start of the preceding century? How was a consensus of ideas constructed that explained the rationale and basis for imperial policy? 

In the late 18th century and early 19th century, concurrent with the period of nationalism and the expansion of the empire into the Pacific rim, Britain saw what Colley describes as ‘

the emergence of a genuinely British ruling class.’ (xix) 

that was nurtured and consolidated by 

‘a uniform patrician education’ (xx) 

that stressed patriotism and noble deeds, taught through such vehicles as Classics that highlighted heroic deeds and values of the past 

But it was, she went on to argue, a                

‘ . . . patrician patriotism in the British present that the public schools and universities sought to inculcate’ p. 168. (xxi) 

This job of inculcation was led by a number of public schools as well as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was intended to educate a conveyor belt of young men ready to play a leading role in the Colonial Service and armed forces, according to values commensurate with preserving and extending the Empire.

This strain of fidelity with its cult of heroism and service to country and empire sitting at the heart of the leading public schools meant that men from landed backgrounds became significantly more prominent in the Army and Royal Navy, in Parliament and in the Colonial Office  during the eighteenth century. 

By 1800, 70% of all English peers received their education at just four public schools – Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow - while 60% of English peers spent some time at university; it is easy, therefore, to see how a coherent message of service and of empire was channelled through the institutions. 

That this was happening at a time when the empire was expanding was no coincidence.  Precipitated by the loss of the American colonies and feeding on the acquisition of new colonies and territories, for exploitation, for settlement and for ‘civilizing’, a common view was being forged, both in the traditional public school and through a new breed of schools, established in the shadow of Waterloo, with links to the army (Wellington College) or the East India Company (Haileybury). Their founding articles were full of the rhetoric of patriotism and public service, embedded through a narrow traditional curriculum and abetted by such innovations as cadets and ball games, creating what was labelled ‘public school form,’ giving rise to alumni who were later to be credited with running the British Empire.

In a letter from India in 1911, Lady Wilson described the process. 

‘What impresses me most perhaps, in our talks about everyday life, is the tyranny of public School ‘form’. It is not more characteristic of soldiers than of civilians or any typical Englishman. “The trail of The serpent is over them all” and they go through the short spells of life with the tall hats as the armorial shield of good form held carefully over here hearts. (xxii)  

. . . before going on to wonder, 

‘ . . . if it is not just this traditional ‘form’ and its code, the only certainty that a boy carries away with him from his years at a public school, which will land him successfully at the North Pole or help him to rule the inhabitants of the equator.’

(xxiii) 

This view of the heroic that was instilled into the students was one of bravado and a sense of adventure, themes running through speech days, school magazines and essays and evident from the destinations of their alumni. The bravado and confidence they learnt was never forgotten, as was well-illustrated by Winston Churchill’s diary entry on the north-west frontier.  

‘I forgot everything else at this moment except the desire to kill this man. I wore my long cavalry sword well sharpened. After all, I had won the public schools fencing medal. I resolved on personal combat . The savage saw me coming. . . .’  (xxiv)

They contributed, inadvertently perhaps, to the widening social divisions that we see today. For there was another victim of empire we often forget and that was the British working class many of whose lives were subject to the same economic and political hardships and consequences of economic ambition that affected many in the colonies – and still do.

One other notable expression of empire was the Boy Scout movement, founded in 1910 by Robert (later Lord) Baden-Powell.  After a military career serving in India and South Africa, he had founded the Boy Scout movement in Dorset to engage the young in a programme of outdoor education, to learn, amongst other survival skills, woodcraft and hiking while promoting a love of country and patriotic duty commensurate with that expected by the Empire.  Before long however, the world was to be immersed in World War One, a conflagration that ended with the creation of new mandates and protectorates over former German territories, a reconfiguring of the Middle East and the growing agitation for self-determination in India . While little changed between the wars, by 1945 the idea of empire was on its last legs. The Second World War saw the defeat of the extreme views represented by Nazism (including that of eugenics) and the creation of the United Nations in 1945, who were to champion the right of self-determination. For the British Empire, ruled by a bankrupt and war-weary Britain, it was to signal the beginning of the end. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the beginnings of the decolonisation of Africa in 1957 with Ghana’s independence, blew ever harder after Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech in February 1960. This was especially so in the Pacific territories whose fortunes were to change dramatically over the following two decades.

When we turn our attention to the 19th century and to the Pacific Islands  that were under the flag of Great Britain, notably Tonga, Fiji and Samoa, it is, therefore,  helpful to keep in mind the context under which contact and settlement were conducted, and to start by identifying the official attitudes at the time. When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, for instance, bringing New Zealand / Aotearoa under the British crown, there was little official appetite for expanding the empire back in England. After all, as James Belich noted in his authoritative history of New Zealanders,

‘Britain had the lion’s share of world shipping and industrial trade goods; they got most of the profits from trade with far-flung regions anyway. As long as trade could flow freely with far-flung regions, why go to the bother of governing them? Whalers got their whales, pork, sex and potatoes, and merchants got their flax and timber in New Zealand, empire or not  .… It  was reinforced by humanitarian police that empire despite the best intentions, was often a bad thing for indigenous peoples, and by the colonial offices most consistent principle: parsimony, an extreme reluctance to incur new costs.”  (xxv)  

By 1870, however, this view had changed due to a renewed demand for trade, the push and pull factors of migration and settlement, often driven by the agents of contact who, with financial backing in England, who became effectively agents of empire in the Pacific by selling their vision of empire back home; the settlers themselves; and by the Methodist and Anglican missionary societies who were responding to the increasing activity of the Catholic Missionary Society in the Pacific.

Even so the impact of empire moved slowly in the Pacific, due to the paucity of raw materials to be exploited and to the vast distances and small, isolated communities that, once claimed, had to be administered. (xxvi) Hence, as attitudes to empire changed, British attitudes and ambitions as reflected through policies of the British government often dulled the impact of the less salubrious aspects visible in India and South Africa at the time, (less of Rhodes Anglo-centrism and racism and more of Kipling’s emphasis on paternalism and responsibility) due in part to scale, the paucity of valuable resources and the benign, even romanticised attitude the British displayed towards the Islands. Even so, this gently-gently approach was to prove as deleterious to the Pacific people, the death toll of islanders in 19thcentury Pacific being overwhelmingly the result of disease. (xxvii) The truth was that any contact was harmful, regardless of the motivation. When the intention was couched in paternalistic terms, in Christian terms by stripping away traditional cultural and spiritual belief systems, or in terms of economic possibilities, none profited the islanders.

The popular presumption by the 1880s that indigenous peoples were likely to die out was also behind a more conciliatory approach to the island communities. After all, the South Sea isles were places of Romance, a view promoted as such early explorers and later visitors including Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. Yet the reality was these idealised societies were already under the sway of western civilization with its trappings of diseases, weapons and alcohol that were decimating local communities. In New Zealand, as Maori numbers plummeted, primarily  from warfare and disease, the belief was that Maori Race was doomed and that those who did not die would be assimilated, a view given voice by the physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston in 1856 when he said it was the duty of Europeans to 

‘smooth down . . . (the)  dying pillow of the Maori race.’  (xxviii )

In 1901 Mark Twain followed up the words of Kipling with an attack on this soft empire, noting in his essay, ‘The People Who sit in Darkness’ that 

‘The ‘Blessings-of-Civilization’ Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played,’ while at the same time warning that ‘the people that Sit in Darkness’ were starting to see the light.’  (xxix)

Other writers also questioned the Christian and civilizing approach to empire, attacking imperialists and missionaries alike, whose stated goal of “helping the savages,” was no more than a justification for the rapaciousness of European society.  Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ highlighted the greed and spiritual darkness that lay at the heart of Western society and the extent of its destructive force, made worse when vested in the hands of missionaries. ( xxx) 

Yet while some novelists flailed the vested interests of the Empire in their books, and increasingly those of the settlers, after 1870 and particular to the Pacific, the British Government was more often minded to help protect the indigenous people, especially the vulnerable and non-threatening, from the interests of settlers – no easy task when the latter were determined to acquire land and as ‘johnnies on the spot’ were able to influence and manipulate laws and information and exert some considerable measure of control over the administrators. 

But there were larger forces at play in the second half of the 19th century than just those of the new settlers. Following the reunification of Germany, the Congo Conference that was held in Berlin in 1884 paved the way for the scramble for Africa as the major European powers engaged in an unprecedented land grab. This was fuelled not so much by the acquisition of wealth and resources, (some of the territories were considerable liabilities, financially and administratively), but as a means of extending power and influence in competition, resulting in an increase in formal European control over African territories from ten percent in 1870 to almost ninety percent by 1914. (xxxi) 

While Africa was the major battle ground for the playing out of imperialism ambition, the Pacific was its much smaller cousin, the micro to Africa’s macro. Yet all the major powers were keen to stamp their mark here as well. In the north, Russia, Japan and the United States extended their spheres of influence (to Hawaii, Aleutian Islands, Taiwan and Sakhalin) while to the south the European powers made their presence increasingly felt after 1870: Germany (in New Guinea, The Solomon Islands, Samoa, the Bismark Archipelago, the Marshall Island and the Marianas); the Dutch in Indonesia; The French in Tahiti and New Caledonia; the Spanish in the Philippines; the Portuguese in East Timor; and the British in Tonga, Fiji, Cook Islands, New Hebrides, Kiribati Tuvalu and Vanuatu. War changed the flags of many territories in 1898, in 1919 and in 1945 as territories were bounced between ruling powers (none more so that the German territories in Micronesia that were passed over to Japan in 1919 and then the United States in 1945), but for the British, there was to be little change. Instead, they set about discharging their responsibilities of stewardship in the Pacific, first through local contacts and agents and thereafter  through the British Western Pacific Territories act of 1876, legislation that was to endure for the following ninety-nine years.

 So when we come to answer the question, what were the forces at work in the period 1870 until 1920 that informed imperial policy in the Pacific, the answer is many layered. The obvious pressures were those generated by power struggles far away in Europe, between countries intent on growing their empires and on missionaries, attempting to do the same for their churches. In the Pacific itself, there are agents of change and settlers, promoting trade and settlement, exerting pressure on the British Government although increasingly making their own decisions. There are the intellectual forces that are swirling around, shaping attitudes and actions, from eugenics and racism to paternalism and humanitarian ideals, however misguided or inappropriate.  And then there is the British Foreign Office, underfunded and largely toothless, trying to protect the interests of indigenous peoples from those driven to act through self-interest. It was a cocktail that rumbled throughout this period and beyond, shaping the politics of the Pacific, then and now.

Footnotes:

(i) The empires of the future would be the empires of the mind' declared Churchill in 1943, envisaging universal empires living in peaceful harmony. Robert Gildea exposes instead the brutal realities of decolonisation and neo-colonialism which have shaped the postwar world in his book, ‘Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present.’

ii For an excellent summary of the judicial proceedings against slavery, read Chapter 4 of Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga 

ii Cook’s Journals, August 1770, p. 323  (he added by way of a footnote, The native Australians may be happy in their condition, but they are without doubt among the lowest of mankind. Confirmed cannibals, they lose no opportunity of gratifying their love of human flesh. Mothers will kill and eat their own children, and the women again are often mercilessly illtreated by their lords and masters. There are no chiefs, and the land is divided into sections, occupied by families, who consider everything in their district as their own. Internecine war exists between the different tribes, which are very small. Their treachery, which is unsurpassed, is simply an outcome of their savage ideas, and in their eyes is a form of independence which resents any intrusion on THEIR land, THEIR wild animals, and THEIR rights generally.

iii   Martyn, William Frederick  p.580

iv   Ibid  p. 576

v   Ibid   p. 575

vi  In Papua New Guinea in 1974 we can see the process in reverse where an independent state was created first before a sense of identity had been established, a process that happened through education, through promoting a common language, history, and symbols by using schools and the army.

vii The concept of bringing of western European ideas, beliefs, traditions, and technology to other cultures 

viii   Speech to the Conservative Club, November 1903, cited in Toye, p.93

ix  Olosuga, p.371

x  Ibid p. 373

xi  ibid p. 374

xii  The Times 13 November, 1865  Olusoga  p. 388  

xiii ibid  p. 394

xiv Richard Toye,  Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made,   Macmillan 2011   p. 121

xv  Ibid

xvi Boris Johnson   ‘Africa is a mess, but we can’t blame Colonialism’   in The Spectator,  2 February 2002 (Boris Johnson was a former editor of the Spectator magazine)  

xvii Ibid

xviii Churchill, W S  in a letter to the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, December 1910 cited in Toye, R p.126 

xixColley, L. p. 164  Britons Forging the Nation, 1707 - 1837

xx Ibid  p. 167

xxi ibid, p. 168

xxii Wilson, Lady  p. 140

xxiii Wilson, Lady   p. 141

xxiv Churchill, W S My Early Life- A Roving Commission  Chapter XI, The Mamund Valley

xxv Belich, J   Making Peoples  p. 182

xvi  The best known account of a Colonial Administrator is that Arthur Grimble whose account of his time in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Kiribati and Tuvalu) from 1913 until 1919, A Pattern of Islands, first published in 1952 

xxvii  It is estimated that the population of most Pacific island communities declined by 50 – 90% during the 19th century largely through epidemics of smallpox, influence, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid, whooping cough and leprosy.

xxviii    Isaac Featherstone cited in Belich, J  p. 248

xxix    Twain, Mark,  The People who Sit in Darkness, 1901

xxx  A theme that other writers since, from Jean Rhys’s novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’  to Chinua Achebe’s  Things Fall Apart have developed and expanded. Time moves on, however, as do attitudes. More recently, Chinua Achebe labelled ‘Heart of Darkness’ as “a totally deplorable book” by “a bloody racist”. 

xxxi Only Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia remained independent.