Abstract
In 1886, Conyngham Crawford Taylor, a Canadian businessman and investor, reflected on the impact of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition, held that year at South Kensington in London:
Who can predict the result of this union of the great British family, brought together in this way for the first time? The Hindoo of India will shake hands with his brother, the red man of the Canadian forest; and the New Zealander, described by Macaulay as one day sitting on London Bridge sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s, will be there to falsify the prediction on behalf of his future countrymen … Then will soon arrive the time when those vast regions, traversed by the iron road, will be peopled by untold millions of happy and contented settlers, all true in their allegiance to the great Empire of which Canadians are now amongst the most loyal subjects.1
His words highlight that for all the rhetoric surrounding the British Empire of the late nineteenth century, no theme was more central than that of imperial inclusivity. The Canadian was as much a British subject as the Indian, the Malay, and the Londoner himself. Sanford Fleming, the Scottish-Canadian railway engineer, likened this imperial unity to a fistful of coins: while in ‘currency there are dissimilarities of name, of value, of colour and of metal, all are impressed with the stamp of the one sovereign; so in the people there are diversities, but all can be recognised as British subjects.’2
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Notes
C.C. Taylor, Toronto ‘Called Back’ from 1886 to 1850 (W. Briggs, Toronto, 1886), p. 339.
S. Fleming, England and Canada: A Summer’s Journey between Old and New Westminster (Dawson Bros., Montreal, 1884), p. 4.
J.E. Wetherell, Over the Sea: A Summer Trip to Britain (Evans Bros, Strathroy, 1890), p. 26.
P.J. Ragauiah, Pictures of England: Translated from the Telegu (Gantz Bros., Madras, 1876), pp. 68–9.
S. Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930 (Frank Cass, London, 2000), p. 35.
A. Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001), pp. 147–9; and
C. Morgan, Happy Holiday: English-Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870–1930 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2008), pp. 9–10.
Quote reprinted in F. Ney, ed., Britishers in Britain: Being the Record of the Official Visit of Teachers from Manitoba to the Old Country, Summer 1910 (The Times Book Club, London, 1911), p. 71.
C. Haight, Here and There in the Homeland: England, Scotland, and Ireland as Seen by a Canadian (W. Briggs, Toronto, 1895), pp. 219–21.
J. Griffiths, ‘Were There Municipal Networks in the British World, c.1890–1939?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37, 4 (2009), 576; and
S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), p. 16; and see
A. Lester, ‘Historical Geographies of British Colonization: New South Wales, New Zealand, and the Cape in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in S.J. Potter (ed.), Imperial Communications: Australia, Britain, and the British Empire, c.1830–50 (King’s College Australia Centre, London, 2005), p. 96.
M. Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols., vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999), p. 101.
S.J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 622.
Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune, pp. 163–5; and P.H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001), p. 130.
J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Roberts Bros., Boston, 1883), p. 301.
G. Smith, A Trip to England (New York: Macmillan, 1892), p. 6.
State Library of Victoria, MS 12390, (W. Carter, Diary of a Voyage from Melbourne to London, 1852–56), pp. 5, 12. Compare this with W. Fox’s 1882 journey, in which he notes that the ship is ‘about 20 hours behind Melbourne time’, State Library of Victoria, MS 8985 (Diary of William R. Fox, 2 July 1882).
Mrs. E. Copleston, Canada: Why We Live In It, and Why We Like It (Parker, Son & Bourne, London, 1861), p. 2.
A. Smith, British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution-Making in an era of Anglo-Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2008), p. 16.
W. Pennington, A Trip to the Old Country (R.L. Crain, Ottawa, 1894), p. 12.
P. Buckner and R.D. Francis (eds), Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity (University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2006), p. 7; and Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p. 23.
K.S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History, 1788–1870 (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974), p. 31.
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (Abacus, London, 2009), p. 145.
J. Kapferer, Being All Equal: Identity, Difference and Australian Cultural Practise (Berg, Oxford, 1996), p. 74.
E.-M. Kröller, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851–1900 (University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1987), p. 109.
J. MacKinnon, Travels in Britain, France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Holland (Schurman & Taylor, Summerside, 1887), p. 1; and see
A.L. Spedon, Sketches of a Tour from Canada to Paris, by Way of the British Isles, during the Summer of 1867 (John Lovell, Montreal, 1868), pp. 98–100.
L.R. Ford, Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skid Rows, and Suburbs (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996), pp. 187–8.
J.F. Hogan, The Australian in London and America (Ward & Downey, London, 1899), p. 137.
J. Godden, Notes and Reminiscences of a Journey to England (John Lovell, Montreal, 1878), p. 37.
J.R. Elliott, Rambles in Merrie, Merrie England: Glimpses of Its Castles, Its Cathedrals, Its Abbeys, Its Traditions, and Its Rural Life (J. & A. McMillan, St. John, NB, 1897), p. 1.
A. Holman, My Wander Year: Some Jottings in a Year’s Travel (William Brooks, Sydney, 1913), p. 31.
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (Abacus, London, 2009), p. 155.
F. Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), p. 98.
W.H. Warren, Touring in Britain, or, Brief Sketches of a Recent Visit to England and Scotland (Paterson & Co., St. John, 1899), p. 5.
See for instance the late-nineteenth-century debate in Canada over the role of British influence in Canadian progress, in C. Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Idea of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1970).
J.E. Ritchie, Days and Nights in London, or, Studies in Black and Grey (Tinsley Bros., London, 1880), pp. 41, 44f.
D. Bell, ‘The Idea of a Patriot Queen? The Monarchy, the Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain, 1860–1900’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34, 1 (2006), 10.
See A. Tink, William Charles Wentworth: Australia’s Greatest Native Son (Allen & Unwin, Crow’s Nest, NSW, 2009). Even his biographer termed him ‘the grand old man of Australian politics’. (p. 1).
Quote reprinted in D. Cannadine, ‘Imperial Canada: Old History, New Problems’, in C. Coates (ed.), Imperial Canada, 1867–1917: A Selection of Papers Given at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of Canadian Studies Conference, May 1995 (Centre for Canadian Studies, Edinburgh, 1997), p. 9.
D. Keene, ‘Cities and Empires’, Journal of Urban History, 32, 1 (2005), 14–5.
R. Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (Pluto, London, 1986), p. 177; and
E. Braddon, Life in India (Longman’s, Green & Co., London, 1872), pp. 224–5.
T. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002), p. 55.
Sir E. Arnold, India Revisited (Roberts, Boston, 1886), pp. 54–5.
L. James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (Little, Brown & Co., London, 1997), p. 324.
B. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996), pp. 123–5.
T. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008), pp. 16–45. Metcalf makes the argument that compliance was not only achieved with gifts, but also through British foresight in allowing natives to remain ostensibly governed by Indians, subject to the Indian Penal Code, a blend of British and traditional Indian law. The success of such a model saw it used repeatedly in Malay and African contexts as the century wore on (pp. 46–67).
James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, p. 326. Indeed, such a method had been in use since the eighteenth century, allowing Indian elites to produce and consume high-level goods (the same the British wished to export) to ensure stability and a measure of British control in the region. See C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988), pp. 202–5.
S.K. Bhuyan, London Memoirs from a Historian’s Haversack (Gauhati Publications Board, Assam, 1979), p. 1.
R.D. Jones, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007), p. 20.
T.N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (W. Newman & Co., Calcutta, 1889), p. 27.
H.S.S. Mahomed, Journal of My Tours Round the World, 1886–1887 and 1893–1895, Embracing Travels in Various Parts of Africa, Australia, Asia, America and Europe (Duftur Ashkara, Bombay, 1895), p. 265; and
A.M. Wainwright, The Better Class of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2008), p. 102.
For a good example of this process affecting literary and artistic forms, see R. Guha, ‘A Colonial City and its Time(s)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45, 3 (2008), pp. 329–51, and especially pp. 332–5.
I. Dasa, A Brief Account of a Voyage to England and America (Presbyterian Mission Press, Allahabad, 1851), p. 27.
N.L. Doss, Reminiscences, English and Australasian: Being an Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Ceylon, etc. (Herald Press, Calcutta, 1893), p. 42.
G.P. Pillai, London and Paris through Indian Spectacles (The Vaijayanti Press, Madras, 1897), p. 3.
B. Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life, or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (Archibald Constable & Co., London, 1893), p. 44.
F. Driver and D. Gilbert, ‘Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16 (1998), 12.
S.M.B. Bahadur, My Jubilee Visit to London, K.S. Rao, trans. (Thacker & Co., Bombay, 1899), p. 69.
F.N. Jang, An Indian Passage to Europe: The Travels of Fath Nawaz Jang, O. Khalidi, trans. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), p. 51.
R.B. Nadkarni, Journal of a Visit to Europe in 1896 (D.B. Taraporevala & Sons, Bombay, 1903), p. 22.
J.F. Codell, ed., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Rosemont Publishing, London, 2003), p. 21.
See for instance T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: 1876–1912 (Phoenix, London, 2001) for an excellent account of how imperial power relations in Africa were often the result of individual choices made in theatre.
M. Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Palgrave, New York, 2001), p. 156.
J. MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in J. Walton (ed.), Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict (Channel View Publications, Clevedon, 2005), p. 19.
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© 2014 Joseph De Sapio
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De Sapio, J. (2014). ‘The Bonds of Empire and Imperial Fraternity’: London as Imperial Capital. In: Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407221_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407221_2
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