UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Recall to Life: Imperial Britain, Foreign Refugees and the Development of Modern Refuge, 1789-1905 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8219g6tg Author Shaw, Caroline Emily Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Recall to Life: Imperial Britain, Foreign Refugees and the Development of Modern Refuge, 1789-1905 By Caroline Emily Shaw A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Thomas W. Laqueur, Chair Professor James Vernon Professor Catherine Gallagher Professor David Lieberman Spring 2010 Recall to Life: Imperial Britain, Foreign Refugees and the Development of Modern Refuge, 1789-1905 © 2010 By Caroline Emily Shaw ABSTRACT Recall to Life: Imperial Britain, Foreign Refugees and the Development of Modern Refuge, 1789-1905 by Caroline Emily Shaw Doctor of Philosophy in History The University of California, Berkeley Professor Thomas W. Laqueur, Chair The dissertation that follows offers the first historical examination of the nineteenth-century origins of the “refugee” as a modern humanitarian and legal category. To date, scholars have tended to focus on a single refugee group or have overlooked this period entirely, acknowledging the linguistic origins of the term “refugee” with the seventeenth-century French Huguenots before skipping directly to the post-WWI period. I find that it is only through the imperial and global history of British refuge in the nineteenth century that we can understand the sources of our contemporary moral commitment to refugees. Through most of the eighteenth century, “refugees” were understood to be Protestants fleeing persecution on the Continent. The refugee category expanded during the French Revolution and the decades that followed, as British philanthropists, officials and civil servants defined their nation in contrast to oppressive governance across the globe. By the mid-nineteenth century, “the refugee,” although nowhere defined in British law, was recognized from the political fringes to the heights of the imperial government as a foreigner who had been persecuted overseas and hence required special philanthropic attention. The British media and a broad contingent of supporters from all social classes celebrated refuge as a national moral imperative. They applied the category to any foreigner who fit the now standardized refugee characteristics regardless of his or her religion, race, or politics. This high moral aspiration encountered two distinct difficulties in the years after 1870, however. First, while the British routinely assumed that they were more liberal than other powers, imperial rule bred pockets of resistance and created its own political refugees. This raised troubling questions of ethical consistency, as British politicians and philanthropists themselves recognized. Second, Britain’s ability to harbor foreign refugees depended on its imperial reach. The increasingly obvious limits to Britain’s international power after 1870 made it more difficult to resettle refugees throughout the Empire or to persuade foreign powers to protect refugees at Britain’s behest. Ironically, these limitations also drove British philanthropists and officials to pursue refugee relief on an increasingly international basis, the legacies of which remain with us today. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION: Persecuted Foreigners and the Place of Modern Refuge 1 SECTION I. FROM A CONFESSIONAL MODEL TO A LIBERAL MODEL FOR REFUGE, 1685-1870 CHAPTER ONE: Emigrés, Aliens and the Logics of Refuge, 1792-1793 13 CHAPTER TWO: Refugee Stories: The Emergence of a ‘Refugee’ Narrative, 1815-1870 39 CHAPTER THREE: Pragmatics and Politics and Refugee Relief, 1815-1870 64 CHAPTER FOUR: Governing Morals? Refuge at home and in the Empire, 1848-1861 90 SECTION II. A UNIVERSAL RIGHT? DEBATES OVER THE LIMITS OF BRITISH REFUGE, 1870-1900 CHAPTER FIVE: Criminal or Political? Foreign Refugees, Irish Fenians and International Extradition Law, 1870-1900 120 CHAPTER SIX: British Liberty & Sovereign Rights: The Fugitive Slave Circulars and Refuge in East Africa, 1875-76 153 SECTION III. THE ENDS OF BRITISH REFUGE, 1880-1905 Chapter Seven: Humanitarian Dreams, Domestic Nightmares: Persecution, Resettlement and the Re-working of British Refuge, 1880-1905 177 Conclusion: The Strictures of Hospitality: Universal Rights and the Peculiarities of British Refuge 209 BIBLIOGRAPHY 222 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Better not to mention the subject, anywhere or in any way, and to remove him – for a while at all events – out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, […] avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’ which may mean anything. ~ Jarvis Lorry in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities I arrived in London in early July of 2005, eager to use my two months in the archives to settle on a dissertation topic while away from coursework. Interested in the history of international news, I agonized for three weeks over different potential topics, peppering my wonderful advisor James with emails about the latest topic of interest and catching up with Tom over tea at the British Library. I’d return to my room at the appropriately named Goodenough College each night to collapse from the day’s work. A Tale of Two Cities was my solace. Little did I realize when I selected a copy of the novel from Moe Books in Berkeley how appropriate this choice would be. It took almost a month before I realized that refuge was my topic. In the four years since that summer I’ve realized how unlike Jarvis Lorry British refugee supporters were in the long century between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Great War in 1914. British refuge was hardly a “secret service.” The effort to rescue foreign refugees from persecution overseas was a noisy, nation-defining affair. Refugee supporters – private philanthropists and public officials – relied on mass protest meetings and media coverage. To “recall” foreign refugees “to life” was a popular moral imperative, one Dickens himself shared. This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, guidance and criticism of my advisers in the History Department at UC Berkeley, James Vernon and Thomas Laqueur. They, along with Catherine Gallagher in the English Department and David Lieberman in History and Jurisprudence and Social Policy, form the best dissertation committee I could imagine. They have waded through memos from the archives and drafts of chapters with patience, encouragement and thoughtful advice. Barbara Hayashida, Mabel Lee, and Candace Groskreutz provided invaluable guidance and moral support in navigating Berkeley officialdom and the merry-go-round of fellowship applications, conferences and job applications that marks graduate student life. I do not know if I would have ended up in British history, or history at all, if it had not been for the inspiration of mentors. From my freshman year through my senior thesis at Johns Hopkins, David Bell encouraged me to seek out new academic challenges. Judith Walkowitz, whom I had the fortune to work with from early in my Hopkins years, taught me how to research in the archives and imparted to me a love for cultural history and for bringing novels and newspapers into the study of the past. Encouraged to delve deep into the archives at Hopkins, I found myself pulled in the opposite direction at Berkeley, prompted at every turn to think broadly and deeply about historical change by friends, professors and visiting scholars. I cannot imagine my years at Berkeley without Susanna Barrows and Tyler Stovall’s urging me to think comparatively. Susanna’s ability to make even studying for exams a social activity is without ii parallel. She reminded me, even at the most stressful of times in a graduate student’s studies, that the point and the pleasure of academic life is sharing and debating ideas. In the summer of 2005 and in 2006-2007, I conducted the archival work for my dissertation in London, Newcastle, and Southampton with the generous financial support of the University of California, Berkeley History Department, the UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies Simpson Fellowship, and the UC Berkeley Center for European Studies. I am indebted to the many archivists who helped me to access rare books and manuscripts at the British Library, the British National Archives, Bishopsgate Institute, the London Metropolitan Archives, newspapers at the British Library at Colindale, and the special collections at the Friends’ House, the British Red Cross, University College, London, the London School of Economics, Rhodes House, Oxford, and the University of Southampton. Joan Allen’s hospitality and knowledge of the Joseph Cowen Collection at the Tyne & Wear Archives Service in Newcastle salvaged an otherwise disastrous research trip in which my computer died upon arrival. My friends in London, old and new, helped stave off the isolation of the archives. Since returning to Berkeley from the archives, this project has benefited immensely from the Center for British Studies’ events and reading groups, from discussions during efforts to establish