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Abstract
This article explores two attempts to envisage a new global world, one created by the West, and to create new colonial subjects. One of these attempts was in Sierra Leone in the 1790s, the other in India in the 1830s. The two case studies are seen through the lens of a father and son, Zachary and Thomas Babington Macaulay, each a representative figure in a particular phase in the development of colonial politics.
Notes
1 This essay is part of a larger project on T.B. Macaulay and the writing of national and imperial histories. I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for their support.
6 Knutsford, Life and Letters, 7–8.
2 Margaret Holland, Viscountess Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay (London: Edward Arnold, 1900), 13.
3 An autobiographical fragment, written in Sierra Leone in 1797, in Knutsford, Life and Letters, 3–11.
4 See Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004)
5 Charles Booth, Zachary Macaulay: His Part in the Movement for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and of Slavery (London: Longmans Green, 1934), 13.
7 Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth‐Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon 1997)
8 Knutsford, Life and Letters, 59.
9 Cited in Tolley, Domestic Biography, 38.
10 Cited in Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn, 1976) 291.
11 Postscript to the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court Held at London on Wednesday the 19th of October 1791 (London: 1791), cited in Suzanne Schwarz, ed., Journal of Zachary Macaulay, Part 2, 16 October–December 1793 (Leipzig: University of Leipzig, Papers on Africa, 2002), Introduction, iii.
12 Ibid.
13 Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 31.
14 Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court (London 1794), cited in Schwarz, ed., Journal of Zachary Macaulay, Part 2, iv.
15 Deirdre Coleman, Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999). Coleman stresses the importance of the connections between Botany Bay and Sierra Leone as different types of colonial experimentation.
16 Henry Thornton to John Clarkson, 20 November 1792, Thomas Clarkson Papers, British Library, Add.Mss.41,262A f.188.
17 There are a number of accounts of this period in the history of Sierra Leone, and in particular Macaulay’s time there, all of which make use of his journal and letters, now in the Huntington Library. See particularly Knutsford, Life and Letters; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks; Schwarz, ed., Journal of Zachary Macaulay; James St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone (London: Longman, 1976); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journies of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon, 2006) and ‘A less favourable specimen”: the Abolitionist Response to Self‐Emancipated Slaves in Sierra Leone’, Parliamentary History Supplement (2007): 98–113; Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti‐Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005)
18 For an account of this, and of the conflict over Zachary’s engagement to Selina, see Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
19 Cited in Tolley, Domestic Biography, 27.
20 Hannah More, Letters to Zachary Macaulay Esq. containing notices of Lord Macaulay’s Youth, ed. Arthur Roberts (London: James Nisbet and Co, 1860), 12–13.
21 Cited in Schwarz, ed., Journal of Zachary Macaulay, Part 2, xxiv.
22 Thomas R. Metcalf makes this argument in relation to India. Ideologies of the Raj, New Cambridge History of India, vol III.4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
23 On the rule of difference, a variation on Partha Chatterjee’s ‘rule of colonial difference’, see Catherine Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Gendered Nations. Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 107–36. On the ‘grammar of difference’ see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Introduction.
24 For a much longer case study of this colonising vision see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
25 Schwarz, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, Part 1, 15 September 1793, 17 September 1793, 60–1.
26 Ibid., 15 September 1793, 60.
27 Ibid., 19 June 1793, 10.
28 Journal of Zachary Macaulay, 15 December 1796, 22 December 1796, Adam Matthews microfilm, Abolition and Emancipation. Part 1, Reel 7.
29 Council Minutes, 7 March 1795, cited in Wilson, The Black Loyalists, 323.
30 Journal of Zachary Macaulay, 15 December 1796, Adam Matthews microfilm.
31 Schwarz, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, Part 2, 5 December 1793, 29.
32 Zachary Macaulay to Selina Mills, 5 May 1798. Cited in Knutsford, Life and Letters, 195.
33 Zachary Macaulay, ‘The African Prince’ (1796). Reprinted in P. Edwards and J. Walvin, eds., Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (London: Macmillan, 1983), 204–10.
34 Journal of Zachary Macaulay, 11 December 1796, Adam Matthews microfilm.
35 Ibid., 25 March 1797.
36 Fyfe, History, 69.
37 Journal of Zachary Macaulay, 25 March 1797, Adam Matthews microfilm.
38 Bruce L. Mouser, ‘African Academy – Clapham 1799–1806’, History of Education 33, no. 1 (January 2004): 87–103.
39 Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 356.
40 Zachary Macaulay to Selina Mills, 1 June 1799, cited in Knutsford, Life and Letters, 221.
41 Standish Meacham, Henry Thornton of Clapham 1760–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 110–11.
42 Mouser, ‘African Academy’, 98.
43 C.J. Shore, Reminiscences of Many Years, 2 vols (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1878), 1–3.
44 For biographical information see George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, Green, 1881); John Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973)
45 A fuller appraisal of T.B. Macaulay’s contribution to racial and colonial thinking is part of my current project.
46 Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with regard to Morals, and the means of improving it. Written chiefly in 1792. Printed by the House of Commons, 15 June 1813, 39, 74, 76.
47 Ibid., 77.
48 Ibid., 24.
49 Eric Stokes, in his classic work The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), stressed assimilation as the key to the Anglicising movement.
50 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest. Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1990).
51 Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 8.
52 Lynn Zastoupil, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Indian Education Debate. Documents relating to the Orientalist–Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843, ed. Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1999).
53 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches on Politics and Literature (London: J.M. Dent, 1909), 125, 109.
54 Ibid., 117.
55 Macaulay to Mrs Edward Cropper, 15 June 1834, 27 June 1834 in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 6 vols, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), vol. 3, January 1834–August 1841, 36, 55–6.
56 Charles E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1838), 181. I am grateful to Katherine Pryor for showing me her excellent unpublished essay on Trevelyan, ‘Calling “Time” on Macaulay’s Minute: Charles Trevelyan and the Calcutta Education Debate of the 1830s’.
58 Minute recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the Governor General’s council, dated 2 February 1835. Reprinted in Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Education Debate, 165.
57 For a good introduction to this literature see Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 166, 171.
61 Macaulay to Mrs Edward Cropper, 7 December 1834, in Pinney, ed., Letters, 3, 102.
62 Clive, Thomas Babington Macaulay, 451.