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Sep. 2021 Empire Made An Historical Survey of the English Universities and of the Processes Globalisation by Allen George Duck A Thesis submitted to the School of Social Science and Public Policy in candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 30th September 2013 Kings College London Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Meg Maguire, whose knowledgeable guidance and generous support has been invaluable during the preparation of this thesis. I would also like to thank the staff of the various libraries that I have consulted for their patient assistance. 2 Contents Introduction 7 Contextual setting 12 Chapter 1 1789-1890 The French tyrannies 26 Von Humboldt’s concept 30 Adam Smith revisited 32 London’s University and King’s Colleges 34 Free trade, the Corn Law and the gold standard 36 Thomas Arnold 39 Newman’s idea of a university 43 Victorian science and engineering 46 Civil administration 49 The Indian Civil Service examinations 52 A British civil service 55 An exhibition of globalisation 57 Durham University and the colleges 60 Laissez-faire, national wealth and free trade 64 Oxbridge accepts ‘reforms’ 67 The colleges strive to become universities 69 The civic universities recognised 73 Chapter 2 1890-1930 Fin-de-siècle slippage 77 New century, new universities 80 Webb, Haldane and the LSE 81 European alliances: a basis for war 83 British espionage 86 The conflict begins 87 Mud, blood, trenches and politics 90 International repercussions 92 Germany and the new Russia 94 Wilson’s fourteen points 95 The first global pandemic 96 The war ends in Europe 1918 98 Paris peace conference and the League of Nations 99 Britain’s proxy hegemony 100 English higher education 1918/1919 104 The University Grants Committee 105 The post-war economic slump 108 1920’s higher education 109 Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin and MacDonald 113 Britain returns to gold 115 A general strike and a general election 116 The ‘Great Depression’ 118 3 Chapter 3 1930-1944 Oxbridge in the thirties 122 The University of London in the thirties 125 The civic universities in the thirties 126 MacDonald’s second premiership 128 Britain forced off gold 130 Fascism in Europe 132 Chamberlain’s troubled premiership 136 Britain declares war 138 Churchill becomes Prime Minister 139 Lend-Lease and the ‘Atlantic Charter’ 141 The international war 143 Declaration of the United Nations 143 The tide starts to turn 145 The Bretton Woods agreements 147 The United Nations Organisation 150 The atom bomb 153 The Manhattan Project 155 The Beveridge Report 156 The wartime ‘Redbrick’ critic 159 Chapter 4 1944-1974 The ‘guilty men’ and the 1945 election 162 The 1945 Labour government 164 The British bomb 165 Welfare and education 167 Beginning of the end of Empire 169 The last Viceroy and Indian Independence 176 The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 181 The Marshall Plan 183 Two higher education inquiries 186 Attlee in difficulty 188 The fifties: higher education goes to market 190 The Empire ebbs away 193 Higher education in the sixties 196 The Robbins Report 198 Attempts at educational equality 202 Britain joins the European Economic Community 205 The end of the Bretton Woods system 207 Britain’s Heath government 209 4 Chapter 5 1974-1989 Labour return to office 216 Sir Keith Joseph 219 The rise of the think tanks and Margaret Thatcher 221 Thatcher opposes the Labour government 223 Thatcher wins the ‘Crisis’ election 228 Thatcher’s second year in office 231 Joseph moves to Education 233 An overseas diversion... 234 Thatcher’s second term in office 237 Industrial confrontation 238 An honour withheld... 239 A second overseas diversion... 241 Privatisation: Joseph’s last bow 242 The ‘Big Bang’ 244 Exit the UGC 246 Thatcher’s third election victory 247 Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev 250 Post Cold War economic globalisation 252 America’s universal culture 254 Conclusion 257 5 Abstract This thesis argues that English higher education has, for several centuries, progressed in a loose confederation with the spread of the economic and culturally homogenising phenomenon we now recognise as globalisation. The study comprises an historical survey that maps the evolution of the universities and their international influence. This interaction becomes more identifiable toward the end of the eighteenth century, after the independence of the American colonies when the British consolidated their empire elsewhere. The thesis argues that the universities, in their role as educators of the elite for the world’s largest empire, shaped the politics and the progress that contributed to modern globalisation. English institutions of higher education crafted their own attitudes and philosophy into a formula that was adopted, adapted and integrated into a worldwide ‘knowledge society’. This investigation spans two centuries, the long nineteenth and the short twentieth. The long nineteenth century is considered to have begun in 1789 with the French revolution and the publication of the ‘Rights of Man’ and to have finished in 1914 with the start of the Great War, which wrecked the existent globalised network. The short twentieth century starts with the conflict of 1914 and finishes in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism in Eastern Europe. It is not my intention to construct a complete history of this period but, rather, to trace the steady progress of the technological and socio-economic conditions that have created an ever shrinking world. This ‘time-space convergence’ is central to globalisation theory and will be juxtaposed with the equally complex cultural, economic and often political route of English higher education from an exclusive elite system to massification. 6 Introduction This thesis argues that for several centuries the economic and cultural processes of globalisation and English higher education have advanced in a loose confederation. From the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain employed both ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and ‘colonial dominance’ to advance a policy of international commercial expansion that would develop into an overseas empire (Nayyar, 2006, p139). While Britain’s aristocractic gentry were happy to share in the profits from this overseas trade they preferred to leave the ‘everyday running of the Empire’ to a new strata of middle class university educated administrators (Morris, 1979, p219). This greatly increased graduate opportunities and prompted institutions of higher education to consciously produce ‘an identifiable elite’ who shared similar ‘values and codes of honour’ and were suited ‘for public service and the running of an Empire’ (McCulloch, 1991, p15). As Britain’s overseas possessions expanded, its universities became ever more ‘imperialised’ by their efforts to meet the demand for suitable graduates (Rubinstein, 1994, p104). By the end of the nineteenth century the interconnectedness of Britain’s international trade had become recognisable as the foundation of ‘modern globalisation’ (Went, 2002, p10); equally the Oxbridge ethos of 'education for leadership' had become widely accepted as ‘a specifically English tradition’ (McCulloch, 1991, p16). Thus, the universities, which have ‘always figured in the global environment’ (Altbach, 2004, p4) were among the earliest of the establishment institutions to create a niche in the ‘the long history’ of globalisation (Scholte, 2005, p19). The foundations of Britain’s imperial expansion had been established in the eighteenth century by the free market theories of philosophical ‘economists’ like Adam Smith and David Ricardo (Jones, 2003). Their innovative views gained political credibility and came to provide the basis of a lobby for the reduction of protectionist import and export tariffs (Cain, 1999, p1). The 1846 abolition of the restrictive Corn Laws removed the last ‘serious opposition’ to the British government’s unilateral declaration of free trade (Trevelyan, 1922, p276) and enabled the international release of the ‘forces of capitalism’ (Das, 2009, p6). These were the events that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would create the demand for increasing numbers of university educated colonial officers and civil servants (Hoppen, 1998, p112). 7 Ferguson argues that their aptitude for organisation and fair-play did much to promote ‘Western norms of law, order and governance around the world’ (Ferguson, 2003, pxxii). Britain’s combination of public school and ancient university has long been recognised as a 'nursery of power' (Anderson, 2006, p137). For example, between 1868 and 1955 only one cabinet minister who had attended a public school did not also study at Oxford or Cambridge university (Guttsman, 1963, p156).