Colonial Secretary Research Articles

The social consequences of control: accounting for indentured labour in Fiji 1879-1920

Purpose This is a study of the social consequences of accounting controls over labour. This paper aims to examine the system of tasking used to control Indian indentured workers in the historical context of Fijian sugar plantations during the British colonial period from 1879 to 1920. Design/methodology/approach Archival data consisting of documents from the Colonial Secretary’s Office, reports and related literature on Indian indentured labour were accessed from the National Archives of Fiji. In addition, documented accounts of the experiences of indentured labourers over the period of the study gave voice to the social costs of the indenture system, highlighting the social impact of accounting control systems. Findings Accounting and management controls were developed to extract surplus value from Indian labour. The practice of tasking was implemented in a plantation structure where indentured labourers were controlled hierarchically. This resulted in their exploitation and consequent economic, social and racial marginalisation. Research limitations/implications Like all historical research, our interpretation is limited by the availability of archival documents and the theoretical framework chosen to examine these documents. Practical implications The study promotes a better understanding of the practice and impact of accounting controls within a particular institutional setting, in this case the British colony of Fiji. Social implications By highlighting the social implications of accounting controls in their historical context, we alert corporations, government policy makers, accountants and workers to the socially damaging effects of exploitive management control systems. Originality/value The paper contributes to the growing body of literature highlighting the social effects of accounting control systems. It exposes the social costs borne by indentured workers employed on Fijian sugar plantations.

The Elgin–Grey papers 1846–52: a triangular correspondence

Extensively published in 1937, the correspondence between Lord Elgin (governor-general of Canada, 1847–54) and Earl Grey (colonial secretary, 1846–52) forms a major scholarly resource for studying the evolution of responsible government. In fact, the correspondence was triangular, with Britain’s prime minister, Lord John Russell, an active third party. Most letters from Elgin were routinely submitted to him, and he frequently commented on them. However, Grey controlled the correspondence, filtering Russell’s contributions, sometimes summarising his arguments to Elgin without attribution, but ignoring impractical suggestions. Although never formally notified of the triangular character of their correspondence, Elgin probably guessed that he addressed a wider audience. Russell generally supported Elgin, but he was occasionally critical. Appreciation of its triangular character is fundamental for a full understanding of the Elgin–Grey correspondence.

“Set Alight to Her Husband’s House”: Teaching as Scholarship and Activism in the Gambian Archives

“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.” — Bessie Head, A Question of Power “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” — Steve Biko Speech in Cape Town, 1971 In the middle of 1951, at the start of the rainy season, a womanhunt was launched in the knotty mangroves on the shores of Bathurst, The Gambia. According to a letter sent by the Secretary of prisons, R.J.S. Pearson, to the Colonial Secretary, Ms. Haddy Dukeri had managed to escape into the marshlands where the Gambia River meets the Atlantic Ocean, but she was ultimately found and reconfined. 2 The missive penned by Pearson provides little insight into Ms. Dukeri’s plight and grave circumstances. The conditions of her confinement were deeply concerning even to colonial administrators all the way up to the colonial governor; nevertheless, little action was taken to remedy or even ameliorate the situation. What Pearson’s statement does not make known is that Ms. Dukeri was housed in a men’s prison, hundreds of kilo meters from her family. Documents reveal that she was the only woman at Mile 2, at the time an all male facility, because a female prison did not exist. She was charged with a capital offence, the details of which will be outlined shortly. Dukeri’s case was not entirely unique in the broader context of female imprisonment in British colonial Africa. 3 In many ways, this was a problem not exceptional to Bathurst, The Gambia, or British African colonies. Scholarship reveals that other territories and nations, including the United States, wrestled through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century with the issue of where and how to house

Organic Union or Aggressive Altruism: Imperial Internationalism in East Africa in the 1920s

This article assesses the influence of international questions on the Conservative and Labour parties’ imperial policy in East Africa in the 1920s. Conservatives encouraged a policy of ‘organic union’, which meant the consolidation of settler control in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika by either formal or informal means. They preferred to ignore or minimise the influence of the League of Nations mandates provisions in Tanganyika, arguing that colonial questions, which in their view included mandatory affairs, were a domestic jurisdiction. The Labour Party was more sympathetic to ideas of liberal internationalism, and pursued a policy of ‘aggressive altruism’ in East Africa when in office, especially in the late 1920s. The article compares the two parties’ respective positions with reference to closer political union, settler relations, labour and land policy, and Indian rights, and by detailing the personal relationship between the conservative governor of Kenya, Sir Edward Grigg, and Labour's colonial secretary, Lord Passfield.

Normative geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine

In recent years, there have been several calls for geographers to engage more closely with the normative in their work. This paper supplements those calls by suggesting that geographers turn their attention to popular understandings of and discourses about justice. In the first part of the paper, I make a case for such scholarship and argue that it should be undergirded by two premises. The first premise is that understandings of justice depend not only on abstract ideas about the just, but on the geographical and historical frames – geographical imaginaries – through which we understand the world; the second is that understandings of justice (including both abstract ideas and geographical imaginaries) are deeply historical and social. In the second part of this paper, I demonstrate the centrality of historical and social geographical imaginaries to assessments of justice by examining the discourse surrounding the controversial 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine. Put in place at the behest of British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, the Regulations restricted the areas in which Jews could buy land in Palestine. While Jews in Palestine condemned the Regulations as racially discriminatory, MacDonald defended them as necessary if the British were to fulfil the British Mandate Government's obligations to the Palestinians as well as to the Jews. A close look at the positions of each side reveals that their differences lay not in their abstract principles of justice but in the geographical imaginaries through which they viewed Palestine and the Palestinians.

THE FORMATION, COMPOSITION, AND CONDUCT OF THE BRITISH SECTION OF THE PALESTINE GENDARMERIE, 1922–1926

ABSTRACTThe British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

‘The Belfast Chameleon’: Ulster, Ceylon and the Imperial Life of Sir James Emerson Tennent

Using the varied life and career of the Belfast-born writer, parliamentarian and sometime colonial administrator James Emerson Tennent as a case study, this article explores the complexity of imperial lives and highlights some aspects of Ulster's connection to empire in the pre-Home Rule era. One of many Ulstermen active in imperial administration, Emerson Tennent served as colonial secretary in Ceylon between 1845 and 1850. Although short-lived and controversial, his career as a colonial administrator is nevertheless revealing, particularly insofar as it offers insights into the personal animosities and the networks of connection that existed in Ceylon's close-knit British community. More broadly, the article seeks to view the metropolitan and the colonial as a whole, arguing that while Emerson Tennent spent only a brief time in the Empire his imperial life was longer and more complex than this suggests. To this end, the imperial rhetoric he expressed as a parliamentarian in the 1830s and early 1840s is discussed, as are his later writing on Ceylon and his donations of scientific specimens and ethnographic artefacts to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. Through writing and donation, it is argued, Emerson Tennent continued his imperial career, mediating empire to metropolitan audiences, both local and national.

Understanding the British Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding the British Empire Aaron Windel Understanding the British Empire. By Ronald Hyam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 576 pp. $116.00 (cloth); $40.97 (paper). This volume brings together essays drawn from throughout the career of Cambridge University historian of the British Empire Ronald Hyam. The book’s title, Understanding the British Empire, suggests two meanings. As an intended capstone on almost sixty years of study in varied themes related to imperial history, the book admirably serves as an overview of the history of the British Empire. But these essays also offer readers glimpses of how Hyam has understood the field of British imperial history writing through its many methodological twists and turns over the past half century. The volume includes eighteen essays, many of which were published previously as book chapters or as journal articles. Nearly all show the author’s preference for political history. Some are from the realm of high politics, as with chapters on Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts in which Hyam offers somewhat sympathetic views of the controversial statesmen. Other chapters find angles of vision on the imperial state from much further down, from the vantage point of minor officials. A great share of the research represented here comes from deep excavations of government documents that over Hyam’s career have yielded valuable clues into the dreams and perceived duties of empire builders and forgotten colonial servants alike. There is more to this volume than political history. The essays range widely to offer insights on the history of British Christian missions abroad, to the question of whether economics was a constitutive factor behind the growth of the empire, and to the role of sexuality in British imperial policy and in the lives of members of the colonial service. While most of the essays work from the metropolitan center outward, some offer case studies drawn from locations in the empire itself. Chapters related to the history of Britain’s relationship with Africa are the most developed of these. The author includes helpful reflections at the head of each chapter to put these in the context of their original publication and sometimes [End Page 714] to answer critics. Hyam’s work on sexuality in the 1980s was somewhat controversial then, and in his chapter preambles in a section titled “Sexuality,” he concedes some points to critics who contended that he focused too narrowly on the testimony of male imperialists. Critics aside, the chapter reprinted here on the official prohibition of concubinage in the empire in 1909 (by an order of the colonial secretary that Hyam publishes here for the first time as an appendix) remains a fascinating account of how sexual scandal could be a vector for debate and reform of colonial practice. Other essays appear for the first time. One surveys the Colonial Office career of John Bennett, who, while not remembered in most histories of the end of the empire, was a constant dissenting voice in the Colonial Office. As early as 1947, and thus much earlier than most, Bennett was calling for rapid decolonization. Hyam assembles a composite of Bennett’s politics by reading the minutes and marginal notes found in Colonial Office records. Through the lens of Bennett’s career, Hyam is able to show how the internal machinery of imperial government was rife with class-based tensions and personal rivalries and how these could make a difference in which policies were promoted or abandoned. The collection offers frequent glimpses of what Hyam views as wrong turns in recent interpretations of the history of the empire. The volume is peppered with what seem like parting shots at writers who have helped to take British imperial historiography first down a Marxist path and later through the linguistic turn. For instance, Hyam chastises the historical anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff for indulging the “speculations of Edward Said” in their work on missionaries in Africa (p. 183). In a new essay, “The Myth of ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism,’” Hyam takes aim at the influential economic argument proposed by P. J. Caine and A. G. Hopkins that the large landholders had forged an alliance with London merchants and bankers in the seventeenth century and thus...

Book Review : A Tale of Ambition and Unrealised Hope: John Montagu and Sir John Franklin by Craig Joel

The clash between Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land 1837–1843, and his ranking bureaucrat, Colonial Secretary John Montagu, has a long and distinguished historiography. Joel's book is reviewd by Michael Roe,author and historian, and was formerly Professor of History at the University of Tasmania from 1975 to 1996. He has a particular interest in Tasmanian history. He is the recipient of The Royal Society of Tasmania Medal for 2009.

Joseph Chamberlain: a most radical imperialist

Joseph Chamberlain was a dynamic orator, notable reformer and superb parliamentary tactician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his early political career Chamberlain was a radically minded Liberal Party member and a supporter of political reform, yet after the Liberal Split, his allegiance changed dramatically when his Liberal Unionist Party entered into alliance with the Conservatives. As Colonial Secretary in Salisbury's government, he was a prime instigator of the Boer War and an important negotiator in the attempts to build an Anglo-German alliance. Ultimately disenchanted with the Conservative leadership of Salisbury and Balfour, he played an integral role in the Unionist Split over the issue of Tariff Reform which ultimately led to Balfour's downfall. Travis Crosby here sheds light on an often-overlooked, but exceptionally influential politician. He argues that Chamberlain was driven primarily by a personal need for power and control - characteristics that went beyond political loyalties. Nevertheless, his accomplishments as chief spokesman for electoral and social reform, and his achievements as Colonial Secretary, were genuine and lasting. This book sheds new light on an influential character who played an important role in the development of British politics.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921: The Response of the British Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour Press

The British Labour Party became increasingly aware after the First World War that it was potentially an alternative government in waiting. In opposition the party was generally supportive of Irish nationalism. It supported Home Rule and was adamantly opposed to the partition of Ireland contained in the 1920 Government of Ireland Bill. As the demands of Irish republicans became more radical and their tactics more extreme the Labour parliamentary leadership became wary of the electoral damage that could ensue if it was perceived by the British public that it was sympathetic to revolutionary Irish republicanism. Despite the fact that the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was inconsistent with Labour party Irish policy cementing as it did the partition of Ireland as well as hardly being an exercise in “self-determination”, both Labour MPs in the debate on the Treaty as well as the Labour press supported the Treaty as it offered a way out of the Irish imbroglio and a return to rational class-based politics. The overriding concern of, in particular, the parliamentary leadership of the Labour Party by now was to prove to the British electorate that it could be as protective of British state interests as its rivals. The article argues that that this pragmatic about turn was adopted as many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in particular were acutely aware that the party needed to be seen as patriotic, moderate and responsible if it was to stand any chance of being elected to power. The article traces this reversal in policy by reference to contemporary parliamentary debates as well as through the columns of the contemporary Labour Press. These are the only sources evidencing this change in Labour Party policy. Recent literature on the Labour Party in the 1920s does not address this issue. There is no reference to the Anglo-Irish Treaty either in the minutes of the PLP nor in the papers of the two major players in Labour Party policy on Ireland, the leader Ramsay MacDonald or J. H. Thomas, later Colonial Secretary in the first Labour Government with responsibility for Ireland. [Author]

The Aboriginal volumes of The Dictionary of Western Australians

Sylvia Hallam, together with her friend the late Lois Tilbrook, made a major scholarly contribution through her work on Aborigines of the Southwest Region, 1829–1840, the first of four Aboriginal volumes in what later became the Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians series, which were initiated in the mid-1970s after a conversation with its general editor, Rica Erickson, and Dr Pamela Statham, editor of Volume 1 (Statham 1979). A sub-committee was subsequently formed to help complete the first volume and oversee the production of two further volumes with funding assistance from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and a fourth volume was produced by Neville Green and Susan Aguiar with AIATSIS assistance. To the New Norcia volume, which was initiated by Lois Tilbrook and completed by Neville Green, Sylvia also contributed an important analysis of the detailed Aboriginal census material collected by Bishop Salvado (Hallam 1989). In what follows, Neville Green provides a brief account of the history of the Aboriginal volumes project and then both Sylvia Hallam and Neville Green talk about their modus operandi. Inevitably, there are some inconsistencies between recollections of events for which records no longer exist, but this is a minor issue in a timely and revealing account of what continues to be a unique Aboriginal biographical undertaking. In addition to the four published volumes, the 31 unpublished annotated indexes of names extracted from specifi c primary sources, such as The Perth Gazette and the Colonial Secretary’s Offi ce (CSO) fi les, now deposited with AIATSIS and the Battye Library, constitute an invaluable set of research tools for a broad range of studies in Aboriginal history in Western Australia, 1829–1892. Some of the card indexes produced in the project have also been deposited in the Battye Library, together with the tape-recording of interviews on which this paper is based.

Rebellious Younger Brother: Oneida Leadership and Diplomacy, 1750-1800. By David J. Norton. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. x, 239 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-087580-399-9.)

Except for a few minor twists and turns, David J. Norton's Rebellious Younger Brother appears to be little more than a (certainly unintentional) distillation of Alan Taylor's important volume on the Oneidas, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2006), bolstered by a number of—though not nearly enough nor the most authoritative—secondary works by scholars of the Iroquois. Taylor's work, however, is absent from Norton's bibliography, while Daniel P. Barr's commonplace synthesis, Unconquered: The Iroquois League at War in Colonial America (2006), for example, is not. Norton's stated objective is to tell the story of the Oneidas' diplomatic efforts to secure their lands in the years from the French and Indian War (1754–1763) through the American Revolution. Worthy of study and appreciation, writes Norton, is the Oneidas' system for choosing and advising speakers in order to obtain favorable results at conferences; the possibility that League chiefs, peace sachems, Pine Tree chiefs, or warriors could all serve as speakers, or hold more than one position simultaneously; the likelihood that the status, qualifications, and expectations made of the leaders could change over time and in varying situations; and the ramifications that ensued when colonial secretaries at conferences erroneously mistook speakers to be chiefs. (pp. 7–8)

Securing the Colonies for the Commonwealth: Counterinsurgency, Decolonization, and the Development of British Imperial Strategy in the Postwar Empire

On the 26th of July, 1956, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, the chief of the imperial general staff, sent a memorandum to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the colonial secretary. He suggested that the parachute battalions slated to leave Cyprus at the end of the year be replaced by two light artillery regiments rather than infantry. This was not, he explained, due to the changing nature of the conflict in Cyprus, nor to any apparent need for more heavy weaponry, but because the British infantry battalions had finally succumbed to the burden placed upon them since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, at the time of his writing, Templer revealed that there were only nine infantry battalions remaining in the United Kingdom that had been resident there for a period of more than twelve months, three of which were already earmarked for internal security operations in Somaliland. With a reserve of only six battalions and with tensions in the Suez Canal region rising, Templer simply could not afford to send more infantry to Cyprus.1 As chief of the imperial general staff, Templer was under increasing pressure in

'The Workings of My Own Mind': The Private Correspondence of the Governor-General of Canada, 1839–66

Historians of nineteenth-century British–Canadian relations use the rich archive of Colonial Office despatches, supplemented by the private correspondence of governors-general and colonial secretaries where such collections survive. This article contends that, from 1839 to 1866 – the period of the Canadian Union – the private correspondence constituted a parallel channel of communication, operating on a quasi-official and semi-continuous basis. Private correspondence was used to discuss issues too sensitive for the official record, material that was deliberately omitted from despatches. The correspondence was controlled by the secretary of state, who shared it at his discretion with political colleagues and bureaucrats. Its major shortcoming lay in the difficulty of securing continuity of information between successive ministers, as was shown in the British response to the Canadian federation initiative of 1858. Private correspondence gradually became less important after Confederation as Canada ceased to...

‘Close and Merciful Watchfulness’

ABSTRACTDuring the 1840s the Colonial Secretary at the Cape, John Montagu, instituted a new system of convict labour in the colony. Though the success of this system in building roads and mountain passes has attracted attention, its reformatory and penal aspects have received insufficient consideration. Nor have historians examined the origins of these reforms within the context of Montagu's earlier experience of the Convict Probation System in Van Diemen's Land and against the background of British and imperial debates about the future of convict transportation in general. This article seeks to broaden the discussion about the origin and nature of the Cape's convict system and to explain why it was regarded as one of the most successful systems of convict control in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

How Trans-Jordan was severed from the territory of the Jewish National Home1

The decision to sever Trans-Jordan from the territory of the Jewish National Home was taken during the period when Winston Churchill, an avowed friend of the Zionists but not au fait with Middle Eastern problems, served as Colonial Secretary. It was T.E. Lawrence who persuaded him that Britain was indebted to Emir Faisal for his contribution to the Allied victory over the Turkish army and that therefore the territory of Trans-Jordan should be allotted to Sharifian control. Churchill disregarded the consensus among British ministers that the boundary between Palestine and the Arab state should run about ten miles east of the River Jordan, and thus caused a heavy disappointment to Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues. It was H. St. John Philby, Lawrence's successor in Trans-Jordan, who more than anyone else was responsible for the final demarcation of the boundary along the River Jordan, bisecting the Dead Sea, in contradiction to what had been understood as the borders of the Jewish National Home at the time of the Balfour Declaration.

The quest for a census of the British Empire c.1840–1940

Regular population censuses are an integral part of the oversight functions of the modern state. Whereas the United Kingdom instituted a decennial enumeration in 1801, it was not extended to the overseas Empire. The administration of the British Empire was decentralised and early nineteenth-century census taking was subject to local initiatives. However, from the 1840s successive Colonial Secretaries considered a unified imperial census necessary to fulfil their oversight functions and demanded the taking of censuses by colonial governments to coincide with that in the United Kingdom. Initial responses were mixed, but with each decade the coverage improved, although no agreement was reached on the questions posed and the classification systems employed. These remained severe drawbacks to the creation of a comprehensive imperial view. Only in 1906 was an official volume entitled Report on the Census of the British Empire published. The experience gained in its preparation, collating the diverse colonial reports prompted the undertaking of a fully coordinated enumeration in 1911. The First World War intervened and prevented publication. Although subsequent attempts were made to revive the concept, little was achieved. The combination of the pursuit of local interests, accentuated by greater political independence, and the lack of adequate resources at the General Register Office in London to coordinate and analyse the results ensured that the quest for a unified census was finally abandoned with the onset of the Second World War.

The Voice of History? Patients, Privacy and Archival Research Ethics in Histories of Insanity

These documents and letters – which I have placed in chronological order, and taken excerpts from, but have not otherwise edited or changed in any way – can be found at the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository.2 They comprise, in the main, correspondence between various officials from the offices of the Colonial Secretary, the Attorney General, the Minister of Justice and Public Works, and Dr James Hyslop, Medical Superintendent of the Natal Government Asylum from 1882 to 1913. The file concerning Mrs Emma L also contains depositions, statements, correspondence to and from the legal firm appointed by the family of Mrs L, and a number of petitions, affidavits, and letters by several members of the family, most notably by Mr Henry Debney L and by Emma L herself.

Nationalist Voices in Jordan

Jordan has existed now for nearly 60 years, since the termination of theBritish mandate in 1946, and has generally been studied in terms of itsHashemite rulers and the “King’s men,” those who helped the Hashemitesconstruct it. These historical narratives, argues Anderson, have privilegedthe Jordanian monarchy and the “high” elements of society and, consequently,have ignored the “urban” elements that played an equal, if not agreater, role in constructing the Jordanian national identity. In this sense,Anderson gives voice to narratives that were previously unknown andunheard and, by so doing, makes a significant contribution to the body ofliterature on Jordan.She contends that the “Arab Street” “holds a key to understandingJordan in the twentieth century” and, in this regard, focuses upon the “true”Jordanian natives and their narrative. Taking a subaltern approach toJordanian history, she examines the foundation of the Jordanian NationalMovement (JNM), a coalition of leftist parties based loosely upon Arabnationalism, and its influence upon the nation’s formation. Given her uniqueapproach to Jordanian history, she admits that her work is incomplete, formany first-hand accounts and memoirs, which cannot be found, should beexamined in light of the larger body of literature on Jordan.The history of Jordan is that of post-colonial independence and nationhood,of a nation that had never existed in the hearts and minds of those whowould live within its borders until it was actually drawn on a map. In anagreement brokered in late March 1921 between Winston Chuchill, then theBritish colonial secretary, and Abdullah I, the latter would accept British ...