By the late 1830s the word, imperialism was becoming one of the more sensitive nouns in the British Empire. Imperialism means conquest followed by absolute rule and to the British, it meant national confidence just as it had the Romans and the French. Since the 13th century, the British nomanklatura had fought the monarchy's claim that its rule was beyond question. But now the British were proclaiming the monarch's inalienable right to rule something approaching a quarter of the globe.
Right into the second half of the 20th century the term was firmly in the British constitutional lexicon. Britain held Imperial Conferences, her highest military commander was Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Trade subsidies were known as Imperial Preferences. Imperial measures. Imperial gallons. Crown Imperial. Mint imperials. All as innocent but as meaningful as Members, Orders and Companions of the British Empire.
The paradox is that imperialism coincided with increased democracy that was to be extended to the colonies. They were no longer replicas of the shires as the founding fathers had expected. It was one thing to reform British voting systems and representation but harder to apply it to a constellation of colonies in which each settlement had separate demands.
Even getting information to and from the colonies was more complex as the Empire expanded and administrators attempted to coordinate policies. As Robert Peel observed, there was hardly any colonial decision that could not be taken at leisure. Yet what happened in Sydney was supposed to be as important as what happened in Cardiff or Bristol or London.
Consequently, changes in a more formalized colonial policy came mostly from the colonies themselves. The conditions in, say, Canada or New Zealand had to be understood in their contexts, not in legislation that best suited the English shire counties. Therefore, colonial planners and would-be reformers like Edward Wakefield were to have more influence on the management of Imperial policy than the unimaginative mandarins of an increasingly recognizable Whitehall colonial bureaucracy.
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Edward Gibbon Wakefield 1796-1862
Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a thinker, a reformer and although he never had direct power, his ideas were accepted. In 1826 Wakefield ran away to Gretna Green with a schoolgirl called Ellen Turner. Captured in Calais, she was sent home and he to jail for three years. In prison, Wakefield wrote A Letter from Sydney which suggested reform of the way in which land was granted to settlers in Australia. Wakefield's name was made. He assisted Lord Durham on his report on the future of Canada, founded the New Zealand Association and his brother William, always to be known as Colonel Wakefield, led the first settlement expedition of the Association. Edward Wakefield only went to New Zealand late in life and was politely ignored by the then administration.
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That in 1814 New Zealand was declared a dependency of New South Wales and annexed as a colony by Britain in 1840.
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Events of this episode took place in Australasia region. We're interested to hear your comments on the influence of Empire on this region:
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Stark advice on the colonization of New Zealand
From Edward Gibbon Wakefield's address to the House of Commons, 1836
"Very near to Australia there is a country which all testimony concurs in describing as the fittest country in the world for colonisation, as the most beautiful country with the finest climate and the most productive soil. I mean New Zealand. Adventurers go from New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land and make a treaty with a native chief, a tri-partite treaty (the poor chief not understanding a word about it), but they make a contract on parchment and with a great seal; for a few trinkets and a little gunpowder they obtain land. After a time in these cases, after some persons have settled, the Government at home begins to receive hints that there is a regular settlement of English people formed in such a place; and then the government at home generally has to be actuated by a wish to appoint a Governor and says 'This spot belongs to England. We will send out a Governor'. The act of sending out a Governor according to our constitution, or law, or practice, constitutes the place to which the Governor is sent a British province. We are, I think, going to colonize New Zeeland, though we be doing so in a most slovenly and scrambling and disgraceful manner."
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