Readers of this journal have many reasons to feel gratitude to Andrew Porter, who died on 4 March 2021, aged 75. In the first place, he was editor of the journal from 1979 to 1990, initially with Bernard Porter and after 1983 with Robert Holland. Over a very long period from 1972 until 2010, Porter boosted the journal's academic standing by publishing 15 articles of very high quality in it. These articles covered a wide range of topics in British imperial history from the late eighteenth century to the end of empire. Geographically, they spanned the world with a special focus on Africa. Porter wrote on the politics, economics and cultural life of empire and above all on Christianity and empire. As well as articles, he also contributed numerous book reviews to this journal For the years from 1972 to 1992, which are covered in an index of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19 book reviews by him are listed.
Andrew Porter was the author of what was the very first article in the first number of the new journal's existence in 1972, a year after he had taken up the post of lecturer in history at King's College, London, where he was to spend the rest of his working life, rising to be Rhodes Professor of Imperial History and head of the History Department. The 1972 article was entitled ‘Lord Salisbury, Mr Chamberlain and South Africa, 1895–99’. Those with any acquaintance with his work will recognise a wholly characteristic approach in it. A current orthodoxy is stated and then refuted. In this case, the orthodox belief was that the South African War had been Joseph Chamberlain's personal war. Not so; it was a war supported by the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and by the Cabinet collectively, on the grounds that British supremacy in southern Africa must be sustained even at the price of war. In this article, Porter gave notice of the future appearance of a book on the crisis in South Africa, based on his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis that had been supervised by F. H. Hinsley. The book duly appeared in 1980. It was called The Origins of the South African War: Joseph Chamberlain and the Diplomacy of Imperialism 1895–99. It is an ambitious and impressive first book. Together with an authoritative narrative of the South African crisis, it offers an original interpretative twist in its analysis of the role played by ‘public opinion’, carefully defined.
The Origins of the South African War is very much an analysis of the politics of the British response to the South African issue. In his Preface to the book, Porter stated that he had not tried to contribute to ‘the debate on the economic considerations which may underlie imperial policy’. The interpretation of the war as one promoted by capitalists to gain control of the precious metals of the Transvaal was, however, running strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. Porter was sceptical of the force of such interpretations, expressing his doubts most fully in an article in the Journal of African History for 1990. The evidence, judged by the rigorous standards that he invariably applied to evidence, did not support them. He found no documentary basis for assertions that concern for control of gold and diamonds shaped British policy, rejected the argument that the existence of a set of commonly held but unspoken assumptions on the topic among the British elite did not require documentary evidence, and restated his conviction that ‘the character and development of metropolitan politics in the 1880s and 1990s’ had a profound effect on British relations with the Afrikaner republics.
Rejection of an economic interpretation of the South African War did not signify that Porter was not closely engaged with the economic history of the British empire. The imperial economy seems rather to have become his main interest during the 1980s. In 1985 he and Robert Holland sponsored and edited a special issue of this journal, also published in book form, entitled ‘Money, Finance and Empire, 1790–1960’. Porter's next book, Victorian Shipping, Business and Imperial Policy: Donald Currie, the Castle Line and Southern Africa, appearing in 1986, was a study of a particular imperial businessman. Through the close examination of an individual case Porter set himself the relatively modest task of ‘throwing light on relationships in the late nineteenth century between government, business and empire’.
Notice of a very much more ambitious project for understanding the economics of British imperial expansion was, however, being given by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins in articles in The Economic History Review. In the first of these, appearing in 1980, Cain and Hopkins stated that the main thrust of their approach would be to interpret imperial expansion as arising from the development of the metropolitan economy rather than as reactions to events overseas, ‘on the periphery’, as it was then fashionably called. The driving force within the metropolitan economy was, they argued, not, as was almost universally supposed, the needs of manufacturing industry, but those of an alliance between landed society and finance, centred on the City of London. This alliance Cain and Hopkins called ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Its interests were in investing money and selling services overseas rather than in selling goods. The full development of their ideas appeared in the two volumes of British Imperialism, covering the years from 1688 to 1990, which were published in 1993. In their British Imperialism Cain and Hopkins were offering what they intended to be a comprehensive explanatory framework for understanding British expansion over a very long period. Many historians, even if they did not accept its claims to be comprehensive, welcomed it, as I did in a review for the Times Literary Supplement, for adding the role of gentlemanly capitalism to debates on the impulses driving British imperialism. On the basis of the articles, however, Andrew Porter signified his deep reservations about the project in a 30 page essay appearing in this journal in October 1990. He could not accept either of the main propositions advanced by Cain and Hopkins. The needs of the metropolitan British economy were not the determining force in British expansion. His essay ends with an appeal to historians ‘to recognize more fully the autonomous power of peripheral change to shape the terms of dependency’. Nor could he accept an interpretation of the British economic involvement in empire that gave supremacy to London and the south of England. He found this ‘a rather insular and parochial approach’; it diminished the role of English regions, such as Liverpool and Lancashire, or of Scotland, and therefore it inevitably underestimated the significance of manufacturing industry.
Behind his rejection it is possible to detect a deeply held belief that influenced all Porter's writing. The history of Britain and its empire was too diffuse and complex, and too little was known with any certainty, for much progress to be made by putting forward fallible overall interpretations. For instance, in 2003, in reviewing Niall Ferguson's Empire, he maintained that the British empire was ‘almost everywhere too multi-faceted or ambiguous’ for Ferguson's claim it had established a relatively benign world economic order to be substantiated. Since his articles usually began by demolishing some current interpretation – it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the more currently fashionable and widely received it was, the more fit he thought an interpretation was for demolition – and since he could wield a sharp pen, Porter could be open to accusations that he had an unduly negative approach to the development of imperial history. After the demolition, however, Porter's articles nearly always offered his own highly informed and creative interpretation of the issue, while insisting that sustainable generalisations about the British empire could only be based on exact mastery of the particular.
In the 1980s Porter was also developing an interest in the ending of the British empire. He taught a University of London undergraduate special subject on decolonisation. To provide teaching material for that course and to take account of increasing scholarly interest in the subject, he and A. J. (Tony) Stockwell brought out in 1987 and 1989 two volumes of documents entitled British Imperial Policy and Decolonization 1938–64. Porter also involved himself closely in the major project to publish a multi-volume collection of British Documents on the End of Empire, established in 1987 at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London. Porter was chairman of the Steering Committee which coordinated the work of the scholars who undertook the editing of particular volumes. During the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century all of what were known as the series A volumes, that is those devoted to the evolution of British policy, were published, together with volumes relating to eleven individual countries or areas. This has been a massive contribution to the understanding of the end of the British empire.
Andrew Porter was commissioned by Wm. Roger Louis to edit what was to be the third volume of the Oxford History of the British Empire, covering the nineteenth century. This volume was published in 1999. It is a very large undertaking of 774 pages with thirty chapters divided into two halves: the first half consists of thematic chapters, discussing ‘the fundamental dynamics of British expansion’; the second half deals with individual regions of the world drawn into the British orbit, including chapters on Britain and China and on Britain and Latin America.
Publication in the closing years of the twentieth century meant that the Oxford History of the British Empire appeared at a time when new ways of studying and interpreting British imperial history were emerging and were competing with older versions in what Dane Kennedy has called ‘the imperial history wars’. To many commentators, the five volumes of the Oxford History appeared to have taken little account of new approaches and to be still addressing the history of the British empire largely within a framework established the 1960s and 1970s. Kathleen Wilson, for instance, defined her aspirations for a ‘New Imperial History’ in terms of what she saw as the conservatism of the Oxford History. In a courteous review of the last three volumes, including Porter's Volume 3, reprinted in 2018 in his Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire, Dane Kennedy summed up the Oxford History as more ‘a monument to a particular generation of scholarship than a signpost pointing towards the future’. It was certainly the case that what were emerging as new themes in the writing of imperial history did not feature very prominently in the Oxford volumes. Presumably in recognition of this, supplementary Companion volumes have since been published by Oxford University Press to widen the scope of the Oxford History.
Andrew Porter was not averse to some new developments, specifically welcoming, for instance, the increased study of gender relations in an imperial context. There were, however, limits to what he was prepared to incorporate. He had a sceptical cast of mind and required convincing. The new imperial history, for instance, is very much concerned with culture and especially with cultural transformations which empire has brought about in Britain itself. Porter too was keenly interested in the cultural history of empire, but not in the same way. One of his most engaging pieces of writing was an essay on ‘Empires in the Mind’, aimed at a non-specialist audience, in the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, and culture features prominently in Volume 3 of the Oxford History. The emphasis in both, however, is principally on how colonial peoples rejected, accepted or adapted British cultural influences. A single chapter in Volume 3 by John MacKenzie is devoted to ‘Empire and Metropolitan Cultures’.
What Volume 3 abundantly reveals, however, is the vitality of what might be regarded as conventional imperial history as it was being studied at the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps the major feature of that era is the determination of its practitioners to try to incorporate into their work the findings of historians of the peoples brought under British rule. In a essay contributed to the issue of this journal in 2008 in honour of Andrew Porter, Richard Rathbone, Professor of African History at SOAS, wrote that ‘accommodation followed by a degree of mutual admiration’, exemplified by relations between him and Andrew Porter as Rhodes Professor, had replaced ‘the sharp hostility of the 1960s’ between historians of empire and of Africa. African historians were no longer averting their eyes from the imperial phase in the continent's history, while imperial historians were seeking to absorb into their own work the findings of historian of Africa. In his commissioning of chapter authors for Volume 3, Porter sought to further such accommodations. Thus the displacement and subjection of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, as well as the triumphs of white settlement, which would have been the staple of an early imperial history, are given full treatment in the chapters on Australia and New Zealand. Particularly distinguished chapters in Volume 3, those by David Washbrook on ‘India 1818–1860’, by Susan Bayly on ‘The Evolution of Colonial Cultures’ in Asia and by T. C. McCaskie on ‘Colonial Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century’ were contributed by scholars who would not regard themselves as imperial historians. The coming together of British imperial history and the history of the non-European world would seem to have done much to facilitate the later morphing of imperial history into global history.
Andrew Porter's own chapters in Volume 3 were on themes which had long interested him and were to become the dominant ones in the later stages of his career, that is, Christian missionary activity and the moral issues raised for contemporary British people by the exercise of their power over other peoples. Until recently, religious themes rarely featured much in accounts of empire. Those who wrote about them were for the most part committed Christians, often from the denominations whose activities they were describing. My understanding, however, is that Andrew Porter did not approach missionaries with any Christian agenda. His son, Simon, works in a missionary body in Southeast Asia, but this is a calling he found for himself, not through parental influence. Although he always insisted that missions should not be treated as just another facet of British imperialism, Porter's work did much to encourage the integration missionary history into imperial history as a whole.
Andrew Porter's first study of missionary Christianity was an important article published in this Journal in 1976 as ‘Cambridge, Keswick and late nineteenth-century Attitudes to Africa’. It offered a new explanation of why missionary strategies on the Niger changed radically at the end of the nineteenth century. Hopes for a self-sustaining African church under African leadership, were by then being replaced by insistence on European control. Most historians interpreted this change as taking place within the context of the development of new ideologies, including racist denigration of African capacities that were underlying the shifts from European influence in West Africa to full colonial rule. Characteristically, Porter urged that more specific questions should be asked about the particular missionaries who devised these strategies. He found that they were thorough-going young Evangelicals, subjected to certain influences at Cambridge with a common experience of religious conventions at Keswick. These young men were committed to purifying what they saw as corrupted churches regardless of other considerations. This article is strongly suggestive of ways ahead in Porter's work. Insistence on disentangling the specific from generalised explanations would mark all his future writing. In this case, he insisted that we should try to reconstruct and must take seriously the beliefs of a particular group of people, rather than assuming that they can be accounted for within a general imperial ideological framework. Not surprisingly, he found analysis of missionary activity as an aspect of ‘cultural imperialism’ unsatisfactory and dismissed it in an article in this journal for 1997. In that article, Porter also insisted that generalisations about missionaries’ power to reshape indigenous cultures were likely to be very wide of the mark. The missionary impact must be studied in local contexts. The success of missionaries ‘depended on their value and usefulness, the willingness of local leaders and their people to cooperate with them and the possibility of Christianity being construed in a manner answering to local circumstances’.
Study of missionary history over many years came to fulfilment in Andrew Porter's last and probably most important book, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 of 2004. ‘The subject of this book’, Porter's Introduction states at its outset, ‘is at once the entanglement of British missions with Britain's empire and the extent of their separate development’. The Introduction goes on to show that missionaries in general were likely to be committed at any time to maintaining their independence of secular imperial authority, but that their difficulties in doing so would be formidable. The interplay between the desire for independence and the perceived necessities and sometimes ready acceptance of compromises with empire are explored in very rich narrative resting on a vast body of learning, precisely focused on particular conditions at home and at different points throughout a world-wide empire. The principles on which missionary endeavours should be studied, established in earlier articles, are now fully developed. Missionaries might well be under secular pressures, but their intentions could only be understood by accepting that ‘they viewed the world first of all with the eye of faith and then through theological lenses’. The book comes to the conclusion that
Although missions could not avoid empire, they were determined to put it in its place. The extent of their determination, the universal sweep of their theology, the global extent of their contacts and their consciousness, deserve more acknowledgement than they have generally received.
Andrew Porter will be remembered by many as a colleague devoted to the cause of history in general as well as to that of British imperial history. In their appreciation of him for the special issue of this journal, Holland and Stockwell remind us of his aids to the study of the British empire, such as his Atlas of British Overseas Expansion or his work on the Royal Historical Society's Bibliography of British History, and they give a most impressive list of offices held and tasks undertaken in, as they put it, ‘a leadership role in history beyond his subject area’. There are others who will be fortunate enough to remember Andrew Porter as a much cherished friend. On paper and sometimes in seminar discussions he could appear to be austere. Face-to-face, he was benign and convivial and revealed an engaging sense of humour. Although he insisted on high standards, he was always encouraging to students at all levels who responded warmly to his obvious concern for them. My life was enriched by his friendship for some fifty years.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Sarah Stockwell for her generous help.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).