Framing Britain's Official Mind, 1854-1934 Blake Allen Duffield University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 5-2016 The Grey Men of Empire: Framing Britain's Official Mind, 1854-1934 Blake Allen Duffield University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Recommended Citation Duffield, Blake Allen, "The Grey Men of Empire: Framing Britain's Official Mind, 1854-1934" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1447. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1447 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. “The Grey Men of Empire: Framing Britain’s Official Mind, 1854-1934" A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Blake Duffield Ouachita Baptist University Bachelor of Arts in History, 2008 University of Arkansas Master of Arts in History, 2010 May 2016 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. __________________________________ Dr. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon Dissertation Chair ___________________________________ __________________________________ Dr. Joel Gordon Dr. Randall Woods Committee Member Committee Member Abstract “The Grey Men of Empire: Framing Britain’s Official Mind, 1854-1934,” examines the crucial, yet too often-undervalued role of Britain’s imperial bureaucracy in forging the ethos and identity behind the policy-decisions made across the Empire. Although historians have tended to dismiss them as the faceless and voiceless grey men of Empire, this study argues that the political officers of the Colonial Services represented the backbone of British colonial administration and, quite literally, were responsible for its survival and proliferation. These so- called ‘men on the spot’—the District Officers, Assistant District Officers, and Cadets of the C.S.—made innumerable day-to-day, minute-to-minute decisions free from the oversight of Government House and Whitehall. Rather than proving representative of their reputation as ‘grey men’, Britain’s district officers were colorful, opinionated, independent, influential, and exceedingly defiant. They were the products of Britain’s elitist public schools and universities, where their schoolmasters indoctrinated them with the belief that they were to be the next leaders of Britain and its Empire. The strict hierarchy of the school system taught boys how to exercise responsibility and authority, to embrace it, and to accept it as their lot in life. These were not the kind of individuals who sat quietly, pen in hand, waiting for orders. They were movers and doers; what their hands found to do, they did with all the confidence of someone who had been told from adolescence that it was their job to make decisions. Neutrality and impartiality were simply not in their nature. Such vibrancy easily translated to the Empire with profound results. ©2015 by Blake Duffield All Rights Reserved Table of Contents I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 1 Setting the Scene……………………………………………………………………… 15 Structure………………………………………………………………………………. 26 II. Part I: Enslaving the Intellectual……………………………………………………… 28 Gentlemanly Indoctrination and its Origins…………………………………………... 40 Not Scholars, but Men………………………………………………………………… 53 The Arnoldian Legacy………………………………………………………………… 73 The ‘Oxbridge’ Ethos…………………………………………………………………. 83 The Fruits of the System……………………………………………………………… 88 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………. 108 III. Part II: The Sons of Martha…………………………………………………………... 111 “Seven Days from my Chief”………………………………………………………… 148 “Of Jobs and Dead Men’s Shoes”…………………………………………………….. 169 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….. 204 IV. Part III: Si monumentum requires circumspice……………………………………….. 207 The Imperial ‘Other’………………………………………………………………….. 210 The Golden Rule of Empire—“Slowly, Slowly: Take Care”………………………… 228 The Curse of the Motorcar……………………………………………………………. 241 V. Conclusion: The head boys of Empire………………………………………………... 259 VI. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...261 I. Introduction Civil servants and bureaucrats are, by the very nature of their positions, an army in the shadows. They are the force behind the scenes of the great production that is statecraft, diplomacy, and policy-formation. They are the stagehands and the prop-builders; they are the caretakers and the attendants, but scarcely ever are they the stars. Their presence is constantly felt, but rarely seen or acknowledged. The echoes of their existence can be read in the thousands of pages of memoranda circulating the desks of government ministers, in the transmission of official correspondence, and in the eternal stacks of legislation drafted by their ink-stained hands. Though they are instrumental to the functionality of modern states, they are perceived as the unheard and unseen grey men—and so they have remained throughout history. As long as historians have been able to write of modern state structures, state sovereignty, and the existence of centralized government—a process that began to take shape in the early seventeenth century—these individuals have played a dynamic, yet unacknowledged role in the inner- workings of government. Who, if not the bureaucrat, oversees the collection of taxes? Who drafts legislation? What institution, but the civil service, ensures that the leaders of government do not drown in a sea of red tape? Ministers come and ministers go with the tide of public opinion, but the civil servant remains. In short, the show could not go on without them. Despite their undeniable importance, historians tend to completely ignore the integral role played by civil servants in ensuring the efficiency and survival of governing establishments. In his seminal work on the construction of the modern British state structure, Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783, historian John Brewer attempted to explain this phenomenon when he wrote of bureaucratic institutions: “No group can ever have written so much and yet remained so anonymous. This is partly attributable to the difficulties of 1 reconstructing their lives, but also the consequence of snobbery.”1 Brewer’s analysis provides an apt description for why bureaucracies have for so long remained ignored entities. Although deeply engrained into the state establishment, Brewer hypothesizes that little is made of the role of the civil servant because either, at first glance, too little information is known about them to gain an understanding of their influence, their ambitions, and their ideology; or, more likely, because of a snobbish tendency to dismiss them as actors without agency. Historian Michael J. Braddick represents this latter explanation well in his State-Formation in Early Modern England, 1550-1700, where he explained: “bureaucrats have no personal control over their actions, they are simply implementing the rules and doing their job.”2 Generally, the tendency for most scholars has been to adopt a similar stance to Braddick, depicting civil servants as non-aligned, apolitical robots—they are given orders; they follow orders: nothing more, nothing less. 3 The 1 John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), xvi; See also, Michael Man’s, “The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms, and results” in John A. Hall (ed.) States in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 2 Michael J. Braddick, State-Formation in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 21 3 Max Weber, Gunther Roth, and Claus Wittich, Economy and Society: An outline of interpretive sociology (London: 1979); Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s geographics, 1680- 1780 (New York: 1998); William Ashworth, Customs and excise: Trade, Production, and consumption in England, 1640-1845 (Oxford, 2003). In each of these examples, the authors view the creation of modern bureaucracies as being integral to the formation of modern state systems, but view bureaucrats themselves as “neutral,” “impartial,” and “mathematical.” In particular Weber insinuates that bureaucrats were mere facilitators of information passing. Their function began and ended with transfer of data back and forth between the center and the periphery; See also, Gail Savage, The Social Construction of Expertise (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 8, 183-189. Savage concludes that civil servants “did not commonly exhibit a self- conscious class identity;” instead, she argues, their identity was almost solely limited to their own professional identity. Further, she contends that civil servants in Britain used any power and influence they did have to achieve only limited ends. Other examples of bureaucratic neglect include Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961, 1980); Charles Tilly’s argument in Coercion and Capital And European States, AD 990-1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell publishing, 1992), hinges on the thesis that ‘war made the state so the state could make war’; For an excellent overview of this trend 2 typical historical understanding of the machinery of government insinuates that policy is handed down to the civil servant at the whims and pleasure of the so-called ‘great men’. Then and only then, with no amount of agency or influence,