Jamaica, Genealogy, George Eliot: Inheriting the Empire After Morant Bay by Tim Watson Columbia University

First published in Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, College of the Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, ISSN 1098-6944, Volume 1, Issue 1: https://legacy.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/WATSON.HTM NOTE: Links in this article will direct to the online journal version. Jamaica, Genealogy, George Eliot: Inheriting the Empire After Morant Bay by Tim Watson Columbia University Copyright (c) 1997 by Tim Watson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the editors. 1. When we reflect on the nineteenth century, the mid-1860s does not immediately spring to mind as a moment of great crisis in British domestic and imperial affairs. The mobilization that led up to the Second Reform Bill in 1867 lacks the revolutionary drama of the first round of Reform agitation and the great Chartist movement in the 1830s and 40s; the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in late 1865 was hardly on the same scale as the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857 or the Anglo-Boer War that brought the Victorian age to an end. Nevertheless, social commentators and cultural critics of the 1860s believed themselves to be living through a period of major upheaval. And although some anticipated a positive outcome from the winds of change they sensed blowing through musty old Britain, others saw only threats and possible catastrophe. Thomas Carlyle, for instance, blustery as ever in his old age, fired off a letter in August 1866 promising support for the Eyre Testimonial and Defence Fund, set up to defend the governor of Jamaica against criticism of his methods in suppressing the Morant Bay rebellion: The clamour raised against Governor Eyre appears to me to be disgraceful to the good sense of England; and if it rested on any depth of conviction . I should consider it of evil omen to the country, and to its highest interests, in these times. The English nation never loved anarchy; nor was wont to spend its sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and half-brutish type; but always loved order and prompt suppression of seditions. (Workman 91-2) The shift to the past tense in the second of Carlyle's sentences here nicely conveys the sense that anarchy may actually be the new order of the day, and the disturbing fact that the opposition to Eyre not only rested on strongly held convictions but also had mass appeal. This second sentence also recalls (anachronistically, as it turns out) that most famous statement of the troubles of the 1860s, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy , first published as a series of magazine essays in 1867-68 and printed in book form in 1869. 2. In the conclusion to that work, writing about the disorder in Hyde Park in 1866 during a massive rally for Reform, Arnold demonstrates his firm conviction that seditions of any kind must be put down forcefully: For us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll, is sacred; and whoever administers it . we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection. (180-1) In the original magazine version of this essay, and in the first edition of Culture and Anarchy , this passage is immediately followed by these notorious lines: With me, indeed, this rule of conduct is hereditary. I remember my father, in one of his unpublished letters of more than forty years ago, when the political and social state of the country was gloomy and troubled and there were riots in many places, goes on, after strongly insisting on the badness and foolishness of the government, and on the harm and dangerousness of our feudal and aristocratical constitution of society, and ends thus: "As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!" (qtd. in Super 526) In later editions of the book, Arnold deleted this passage, for reasons that have never been entirely clear[1]. Perhaps the country seemed less gloomy and troubled by the time of the second edition (1875), and thus less in need of Thomas Arnold's lawgiving. Or perhaps Matthew revised his text in response to the answer, now lost, that his mother gave to this letter that he sent to her on July 25, 1868: In the passage quoted from Papa, [Arthur Penrhyn] Stanley's impression is that Papa's words were "Crucify all the slaves" instead of "Flog the rank & file"--but as the latter expression is the milder, and I have certainly got it in my memory as what he said, I have retained it. Do you remember which the words were, and in what letter they occur? (qtd. in Super 455)[2] Buried deep within Arnold's text, we find a connection between the unrest in the Caribbean--"Crucify all the slaves"--and the sometimes unruly agitation for working-class enfranchisement and parliamentary reform--"Flog the rank and file." [3] It is this conjuncture, this alchemy of race and rights, that forms the subject of this essay. I argue that what has come to be known, rather misleadingly, as the Governor Eyre controversy enabled the articulation of the discourses of class, race, and empire in Britain, discourses that were all in a state of major transition. It was these connections, more or less explicitly made, that gave the Jamaica uprising such a disproportionate significance at the time, and produced the sense of crisis that Arnold and Carlyle felt compelled to respond to. And it is out of this sense of crisis, I argue, after the Morant Bay rebellion, that the modern notion of the British Empire as a single conceptual, territorial, and political unit emerges. 3. Jamaica in the 1860s had been in serious economic decline for half a century; the days when ownership of a Jamaican sugar plantation was virtually a licence to print money were a distant memory. The Afro-Jamaican labouring classes, however, were beginning to leave behind the legacies of chattel slavery, establishing an internal island economy based on foodstuffs grown on small plots of land (often the same fields cultivated during slavery days, known as provision grounds). A combination of drought and ruling-class attempts to push squatters and poor tenants from abandoned estate lands led, in the southeast of the island in the mid-1860s, to a volatile situation. In October 1865, a group of Afro-Jamaicans, led by Paul Bogle, rescued one of their friends from punishment before the hated magistrates in the nearby town of Morant Bay; then they overwhelmed the police sent to arrest them the following day; finally, several hundred of them marched on the town to demand justice. The local worthies, expecting trouble, had called out the volunteer militia; shots were fired, and several rebels were killed; then the rebels laid siege to the courthouse and took over the town, killing eighteen and wounding dozens, predominately whites. The insurgents, however, were never well organized, and they were no match for the might of the colonial military machine once it rolled into action. The British governor of the island, Edward Eyre, declared martial law in the district, and in the month-long suppression of the abortive uprising that followed, upwards of 400 people were killed, most without trial, hundreds were flogged, and a thousand houses were burned. Bogle, along with the other leaders of the rebellion, was quickly captured and executed.[4] 4. The response to the Jamaica events in England was initially predictable: the governor was generally praised for saving the island from destruction. It seemed unlikely that much controversy would ensue; this was just another in a long line of colonial rebellions put down with brutal force and then conveniently forgotten--except by its victims. But as more details began to emerge, opposition from liberals in England began to grow against Eyre's handling of the crisis, and by the end of 1865 the "Governor Eyre Case" had become the hottest topic of national debate. A coalition of antislavery activists, radical politicians, and lawyers formed the Jamaica Committee, chaired by John Stuart Mill; public pressure led to the government sending a Royal Commission of inquiry to Jamaica to gather evidence on the uprising and its suppression. It delivered its report in April 1866, and while it broadly exonerated Eyre, it concluded that British and Jamaican troops had often used excessive force. The controversy raged throughout 1866, coinciding with the intense debates over parliamentary reform and the enfrancisement of the working classes in England--indeed, this was a connection that was frequently made at the time. [5] 5. I argue in this essay that the relationship between national and imperial histories needs to be rethought. With "Britain"--or, still worse, "England"--no longer the unexamined organizing principle of cultural and historical studies, events in "the colonies" will have a relevance beyond their traditional marginal locations. Affairs in the colonies will no longer be relegated to the discrete field of "imperial history" and to those rare moments in British national history when they happen to illuminate English questions.

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