STUDIES IN BRITISH IMPERIAL HISTORY A. P. Thornton Photograph by Kenneth Quinn, 1983, courtesy of University College Archives, Toronto STUDIES IN BRITISH IMPERIAL HISTORY Essays in Honour of A. P. Thornton Edited by Gordon Martel Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-18246-6 ISBN 978-1-349-18244-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18244-2 © Gordon Martel 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-36198-6 All rights reserved. For information write: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd. First published in the United States of America in 1986 ISBN 978-0-312-77080-8 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Studies in British Imperial history. Bibliography: p. Includes index. Contents: Introduction, A.P. Thornton, realism tempered by wit/by Nicholas Mansergh A system of commands/Robin Winks - An Imperial idea and its friends/ Ged Martin - [etc.] I. Great Britain--Colonies- History Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Thornton, A.P. (Archibald Paton) I. Thornton, A. P. (Archibald Paton) II. Martel, Gordon. DAIO.5.S78 1985 941 85-8110 ISBN 978-0-312-77080-8 Contents A. P. Thornton frontispiece Priface by Gordon Martel Vll Notes on the Contributors x Introduction: A. P. Thornton: Realism Tempered by Wit by Nicholas Mansergh A System of Commands: the Infrastructure of Race Contact 8 Robin Winks 2 An Imperial Idea and Its Friends: Canadian Confederation and the British 49 Ged Martin 3 The Imperial Historian as Colonial Nationalist: George McCall Theal and the Making of South African History 95 Deryck Schreuder 4 The Raj as Daydream: the Pukka Sahib as Henty Hero in Simla, Chandrapore, and Kyauktada 159 Edward Ingram 5 Shadow and Substance: Mackenzie King's Perceptions of British Intentions at the 1923 Imperial Conference 178 John M. Carland 6 Emergencies and Elections in India 201 D. A. Low The Works oj A. P. Thornton prepared by George 221 Urbaniak Index 227 v Preface My first sight of Archie Thornton was a great shock. I had read The Imperial Idea and its Enemies early on as an undergraduate and, like many others, had been impressed with the erudition, the grand perspective and the wit to be found there. That book, like each of those that followed, was teeming with ideas, rich in new possibilities for eager students to pursue. Without giving it much thought, therefore, when I showed up at the great professor's office in 1970, I expected a white-haired antique, a man heavily burdened by his years of scholarship and further weighed down by the responsibilities incurred in chairing a famous department of some eighty members. What I found instead was a young man, even younger than his years, a man as lively and as vivacious as his books. To those of us who were his students 'A. P. Thornton' will always conjure up a vision of 'Archie' sitting in his office, lost in thought, staring out at the Toronto snow, his cigarette slowly burning its way towards his lips, until the ash suddenly drops and the smoker is roused into a frenzy of activity. It is hard for a professor to remain remote while he weekly sets himself on fire in front of his students. But Archie has never tried to elevate himself to that lofty plane of the god professor. He has always been as willing to share his ideas as he has his scotch. For thirty years undergraduates and graduates alike at the University of Toronto have been blessed by his presence, and this book of essays is partly intended to betoken their gratitude to him; a small thanks for leaving his Caribbean paradise to join them in the frozen north. But these essays, contributed by admirers from Australia, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States as well as Canada, attest to an influence far greater and more widespread than through teaching alone. Two things, I believe, explain this. First, Archie was in the vanguard of those who rescued imperial history from the ineffable boredom of the Whig interpretation upon Vll Vlll Preface which so many of us were reared. After the publication of The Imperial Idea it became impossible for any imaginative student of the subject to continue to adhere to that dull progression from representative to responsible government, from the Durham R.eport to the British Commonwealth. Instead, imperial history became a study of the ideas, the ambitions and the follies of real men; complexity and irony replaced simplicity. Secondly, in the books that followed, in Doctrines of Imperialism, The Habit of Authority and Imperialism in the Twentieth Century, in numerous essays and reviews (some of them reprinted in For the File on Empire) Archie has steadfastly maintained that there is a subject in imperial history. While many have succumbed to the under standably alluring temptation of writing national, regional and local histories set in the age of empire, he has consistently reminded us that there are themes and problems, ideologies and structures, that can be properly appreciated only when viewed from the larger perspective of the whole imperial phenomenon. He has allowed his mind to roam widely over the vast terrain involved imperialism, sometimes breaking new ground, more often throwing new light on ground we thought familiar until he showed us that we had never really looked at it before. Neither of these effects would have been so pronounced, however, had his thoughts not been expressed in some of the liveliest and most engaging prose written by an historian in this century. These essays attempt to show some of the directions in which Archie's work has led us. Here are familiar favourites: the difficulties of relations between foreign cultures when one takes the role of master and compels the other to play the part of slave; the ambitions of colonials enamoured of the imperial connection; the role of cultural imperialist played by the historian who imagines himself to be objective; the fusion offact and fiction and the utility of literature as a source for the historian; the rise of colonial nationalists who come to suspect everything connected with 'empire'; and finally, the legacies of imperialism - not all of them bad - in the contemporary world. I think it is unlikely that essays of this kind would have been written, or found a receptive audience, had it not been for the stimulus proved by A. P. Thornton. My main regret in presenting these essays to him is that many who wished to contribute were prevented from doing so, mainly from lack of space: J. S. Galbraith, Keith Sinclair, John Cell, Preface IX Roger Louis and the late Eric Stokes should be numbered among those wishing to pay their respects; I withdrew my own essay to make room for others. But no testimonial could ever be entirely satisfactory, and we hope that this imperfect one will suffice in signifying the gratitude of the profession and the affection of his students. GORDON MARTEL Notes on the Contributors Gordon Martel is Associate Professor of History at Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, British Columbia. Educated at Simon Fraser University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto under the supervision of A. P. Thornton. He is editor of The International History Review and author of Imperial Diplomacy: Rosebery and the Failure of Foreign Policy. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal, Middle Eastern Studies, and the Journal oj Imperial and Commonwealth History. Nicholas Mansergh, O.B.E., was the first Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth, Cambridge from 1953 to 1970, and Master of St John's College, Cambridge from 1969 to 1979. He is an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He has worked in the Empire Division of the Ministry of Information between 1941 and 1946, and was Assistant Secretary of the Dominions Office from 1946 to 1947. He has been Visiting Professor at the Australian National University, the University of Toronto, Duke University, the Indian School of International Studies at New Delhi, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His published works include The Irish Speeches on Commonwealth Affairs, 1931 - 62; The Commonwealth Experience; and Prelude to Partition. Since 1967 he has been editor in-chief of the India Office Records on Constitutional Relations between Britain and India: the Tranifer of Power, 1942 - 47. Robin W. Winks is the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History at Yale University and Master of Berkeley College. He attended the University of Colorado, Victoria University (New Zealand), and received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at Yale since 1957, except for leaves of absence to serve as US Cultural Attache to the American Embassy in London; as chairman of the National Parks Advisory x