Studies in imperialism This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the Metropolis, India and progress in the nineteenth century.This process took place within an uneven field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to colonial imagination exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects.Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population – seen as the most threatening to imperial progress – were inscribed within discourses of western JOHN MARRIOTT civilisation as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, the legacy of which remains to this day. This comparative analysis looks afresh at the writings of observers such as Henry Mayhew, Patrick Colquhoun, Charles Grant, Pierce Egan, James Forbes and Emma Roberts, thereby seeking to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history it also attempts to extend our understanding of the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The other empire will be of value to students and scholars of modern imperial and urban history, cultural studies, and religious studies. John Marriott is Senior Lecturer in History, School of Cultural and Innovation studies, University of East London, and Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre Jacket image: St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta (1860s). By permission of the British Library, MARRIOTT 394(65) River Design, Edinburgh Jacket design by general editor John M. MacKenzie Established in the belief that imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies, Studies in Imperialism seeks to develop the new socio-cultural approach which has emerged through cross-disciplinary work on popular culture, media studies, art history, the study of education and religion, sports history and children’s literature. The cultural emphasis embraces studies of migration and race, while the older political and constitutional, economic and military concerns are never far away. It incorporates comparative work on European and American empire-building, with the chronological focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when these cultural exchanges were most powerfully at work. The other empire AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF BRITISHNESS ed. Dana Arnold BRITAIN IN CHINA Community, culture and colonialism, 1900–1949 Robert Bickers NEW FRONTIERS Imperialism’s new communities in East Asia 1842–1952 eds Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot WESTERN MEDICINE AS CONTESTED KNOWLEDGE eds Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews THE ARCTIC IN THE BRITISH IMAGINATION 1818–1914 Robert G. David IMPERIAL CITIES Landscape, display and identity eds Felix Driver and David Gilbert SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ed. Saul Dubow EQUAL SUBJECTS, UNEQUAL RIGHTS Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, 1830s–1910 Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips and Shurlee Swain EMIGRATION FROM SCOTLAND BETWEEN THE WARS Opportunity or exile? Marjory Harper EMPIRE AND SEXUALITY The British experience Ronald Hyam REPORTING THE RAJ The British press in India, c. 1880–1922 Chandrika Kaul LAW, HISTORY, COLONIALISM The reach of empire eds Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR REAPPRAISED ed. Donal Lowry THE EMPIRE OF NATURE Hunting, conservation and British imperialism John M. MacKenzie IMPERIALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE ed. John M. MacKenzie PROPAGANDA AND EMPIRE The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960 John M. MacKenzie GENDER AND IMPERIALISM ed. Clare Midgley GUARDIANS OF EMPIRE The armed forces of the colonial powers, c. 1700–1964 eds David Omissi and David Killingray FEMALE IMPERIALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire Katie Pickles MARRIED TO THE EMPIRE Gender, politics and imperialism in India, 1883–1947 Mary A. Procida IMPERIAL PERSUADERS Images of Africa and Asia in British advertising Anandi Ramamurthy IMPERIALISM AND MUSIC Britain 1876–1953 Jeffrey Richards COLONIAL FRONTIERS Indigenous–European encounters in settler societies ed. Lynette Russell WEST INDIAN INTELLECTUALS IN BRITAIN ed. Bill Schwarz JUTE AND EMPIRE The Calcutta jute wallahs and the landscapes of empire Gordon T. Stewart THE IMPERIAL GAME Cricket, culture and society eds Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandiford BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward The other empire METROPOLIS, INDIA AND PROGRESS IN THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION John Marriott MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by PALGRAVE Copyright © John Marriott 2003 The right of John Marriott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ROAD, MANCHESTER M13 9NR, UK and ROOM 400, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by PALGRAVE, 175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC PRESS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2029 WEST MALL, VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6018 4 hardback First published 2003 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow To the memory of the last member of a generation Lena Margaret Marriott (1913–2002) and to those of a new one Molly Marriott Haresign Ira Marriott Haresign Jude Marriott Haresign Niah-Jane Marriott Arjun Singh Simran Kaur CONTENTS General editor’s introduction — page ix Acknowledgements — xi Introduction: metropolis and India page 1 1 The antinomies of progress 9 Poverty and progress 12 Slavery and progress 15 Colonialism and progress 18 Progress and the human order 21 Progress and its antitheses 29 2 Desarts of Africa or Arabia 41 The needy villains’ gen’ral home 41 Tricks of the town 47 The vast torrent of luxury 49 India in European cosmography 56 Forraigne sects 60 3 The intimate connexion 68 Discovery of the metropolitan residuum 68 Gothic heaps of stone 72 Late eighteenth-century travel in India 76 Early evangelical activity 82 The conversion of heathens 89 4 A complete cyclopaedia 101 Unknown London 101 Metropolitan evangelicalism 107 Racialization of the poor 110 Wandering tribes 114 Mayhew’s legacy 120 [ vii ] CONTENTS 5 So immense an empire 130 A new mode of observation 130 The privilege of the traveller 134 Racialization of India 144 Castes of robbers and thieves 148 6 In darkest England 160 The meaning of dirt 161 Degeneration and desire 166 Crowds bred in the abyss 171 Problems of the race 176 7 The great museum of races 187 Urban mythology 189 Nascent ethnology 191 1857 and its aftermath 195 Discovery of caste 204 Race and progress 210 Conclusion 221 Index — 231 [ viii ] GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION When the Rev. Dr Robert Laws was preparing himself for missionary work in Central Africa in the 1870s, he went to work in a Glasgow medical mission. He was taken by the Superintendent to visit houses in the slums, ‘frightful dens of viciousness and dirt’, in one of which a ‘Roman Catholic virago attacked them as heretics, flourishing a long knife in their faces, and threatened to murder them’ (W.P. Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia, London, Hodder and Stoughton, n.d. [c. 1924], p. 29). Later he was involved in ‘drives’ in which students of divinity and medicine would act as decoys to lure prostitutes to a hall for a late-night revivalist meeting. On one occasion they collected together a hundred and ‘about forty declared for a new life’ (ibid., pp. 32–3). In the same period and in another Scottish city, Dundee, Mary Slessor, preparing for missionary work in West Africa and herself a slum dweller, was caught up in the establishment of a mission in slums even poorer than her own. There, she and her fellow workers were subjected to violence and frequently found the mission room wrecked (W.P. Livingstone, Mary Slessor of Calabar, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916, p. 9). In the 1950s, the same sense of social proselytization survived into my own lifetime and experience. In the West End of Glasgow, Finnieston (later Kelvingrove) Church of Scotland, a middle-class and upper-working-class congregation in a grand Victorian classical building adjacent to the great gates of Kelvingrove Park, continued to maintain a mission in the nearby slums of the Glasgow docklands. It was in a street appropriately named for a mission, but not for the poverty and misery to be found there, Grace Street. In my youthful mind, brought up to loathe the pubs, the drunkenness and alleged criminal fecklessness of such ‘darker’ regions of the city, there was unquestionably a parallel between the Grace Street mission and the stations of the missionaries who came, on furlough, to speak about India and Africa. Indeed, I soon made the connection myself by going to live in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). This analogy between missions