Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience 1759–1856 PDF
Preview Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience 1759–1856
COLONIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT CAMBRIDGE COMMONWEALTH SERIES Published in association with the Managers of the Cambridge University Smuts Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Commonwealth Studies General Editor: E. T. Stokes, Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth, University of Cambridge Titles published by the Cambridge University Press JohnS. Galbraith: Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878-1895 G. Andrew Maguire: Toward 'Uhuru' in Tanzania Ged Martin: The Durham Report and British Policy Ronald Robinson (editor): Developing the Third World Titles published by Macmillan Roger Anstey: The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 Partha Sarathi Gupta: Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964 Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin: Reappraisals in British Imperial History John Manning Ward: Colonial Self-Government Colonial Self-Government The British Experience 1759-1856 JOHN MANNING WARD Challis Professor of History University of Sydney ©john Manning Ward 1976 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1976 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1976 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Dublin Melbourne johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 18773 3 ISBN 978-1-349-02714-9 ISBN 978-1-349-02712-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02712-5 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement Contents ~" ri Abbreviations ix 1 Introduction 1 2 The British Constitution for British Colonies: Canada, 1759-1831 4 3 The Canadas Troubles, 1831-41 38 4 The Crown Colony System 82 5 Anomalous Societies: Newfoundland and New South Wales 124 6 Responsible Government in Britain 172 7 The New Idea of Self-Governing Colonies of Settlement 209 8 Party Government in British North America 247 9 The Policy of Responsible Government 291 Notes 330 Bibliography 371 Index 391 Preface Richard Pares once pointed out, in a context quite different from that of this book, that the most important part of the history of an empire is the history of its mother country. My attempt to discover why. it was that between 1759 and 1856 rights of self-g~vernment were granted to some British colonies and not to others, and why so many forms of self-government existed in the empire, is an unintended exercise on the theme that Pares stated as an economic historian. Constitutional change in Britain and, above all, the prevailing views in Britain of good government, political rights and political justice were always at the roots of the development of colonial self-government after American independence. Even when, as in the Canadas in the 1830s, indigenous factors shaped colonial demands that challenged the assump tions of British statesmanship, no solutions were adopted until great changes had taken place in the British constitution and in the associated ideas about large colonies of British settlement. British governments granted colonial self-government in various forms, partly in response to pressure from the colonies, but more in accordance with their own notions of what just British polity permitted and required. In some senses, the British knew better what to do than they knew what they were doing, for policy was rarely explicit or constant. What I had expected, when I began this book more than ten years ago, to be of great importance, the influence of one colony on another, proved to be always relevant but only occasionally decisive. British interests, economic or strategic, were rarely potent in constitutional matters, partly because stability within the empire was always valued more highly than any 'interest', partly because those responsible for the various 'interests' rarely doubted that imperial ascendancy would be preserved. I have to thank the Australian Research Grants Committee and the University of Sydney for financial support over a long period on this and a connected project. I thank also the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, who made me a Visiting Fellow in the early months of 1968. The University of Cambridge again placed me in its debt when the Managers of the Smuts Memorial Fund elected me to a Smuts Visiting Fellowship in 1972. The Master and Fellows of StJohn's College, where I was Dominion Fellow in 1951, welcomed me again and allowed me to live viii Colonial Self-Government and work in the College. For this, as for much good company, I am most grateful. Sir Stephen Roberts, Challis Professor of History in the University of Sydney from 1929 to 1947 and later Vice-Chancellor, was an invigorating teacher, and till 1971, when his death brought to an end our long association, an unfailing inspiration to write history. I am grateful to the historians who have read parts of the book, or have discussed its arguments with me, and hope that they will recognise that the slightness of this acknowledgement is no measure of my great thanks for patience and scholarship generously bestowed. I am indebted also to the librarians, keepers, archivists and custodians, in England, Australia, Canada and the United States, who indulged my quest for sources and permitted me to quote from the collections in their care. Every historian of the British Empire has to face the problems of the immense diversity of the imperial experience and the weight of other writers' scholarly researches. I have concentrated, with the aid of my predecessors, on the developments that seemed most significant to well informed contemporaries in Britain and the colonies. To the statesmen, administrators and political economists so placed in the foreground, I have attributed not a great, commanding role, but a sense of history and an ability to perceive from time to time the nature of problems and the course of change. This book begins in 1759, but contains little about the Thirteen Colonies and the American Revolution. I did write a chapter on the American colonies from 1756 to 1783, but omitted it for two reasons. One was space. The other was the nature of my interpretation of colonial self government in the British experience. The formal beginning of the post American trends with which this book is mainly concerned is the Canada Constitutional Act of 1791, to which earlier Canadian experience of British government is an indispensable prelude. No ~ne could write on the many subjects mentioned in this book without incurring more debts to other historians than he knew of and committing more errors of omission and commission than he dreaded. Almost every reader of the book will be able to suggest questions, of interest to historians, political scientists, or sociologists, to which I have given answers only implicitly, if at all. I shall be content if what I have written is accepted as a contribution towards understanding the nature and growth of colonial self-government within the British Empire. University of Sydney jOHN M. WARD 18 March 1974 Abbreviations AHR American Historical Review AjPH Australian journal of Politics and History CHBE Cambridge History of the British Empire CHj Cambridge Historical journal CHR Canadian Historical Review EHj Economic History journal EHR English Historical Review Fj Freeman's journal, Sydney Hj Historical journal, Cambridge University HRA Historical Records of Australia HS Historical Studies, University of Melbourne HSANZ Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand IHR Institute of Historical Research, London jBS journal of British Studies, Hartford, Conn. jMH journal of Modern History jPE journal of Political Economy jRAHS journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Sydney ML Mitchell Library, Sydney MM Maitland Mercury NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra NeC Newcastle Papers, University of Nottingham Archives PA People's Advocate and NSW Vindicator PAC Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa 1, 2, 3 PD Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st, 2nd or 3rd series PH Cobbett's Parliamentary History pp British Parliamentary Papers PRO Public Record Office, London RHS Royal Historical Society, London SMH Sydney Morning Herald V & P (LC, NSW) Votes and Proceedings, Legislative Council of New South Wales 1 Introduction According to John Stuart Mill in 1861, Britain had 'always felt under a certain degree of obligation to bestow on such of her outlying populations as were of her own blood and language, and on some who were not, representative institutions formed in imitation of her own'. 1 What was obvious to Mill then had not been obvious to William Pitt seventy years before. Introducing the Canada Constitutional Bill2 into the Commons on 5 March 1791, Pitt had declared that, as a great innovation of principle, the Bill would introduce a system of government formed 'in imitation of the constitution of the mother country'. 3 Like his cousin, William Grenville, who had drafted the Bill,4 Pitt recognised that it broke new ground in British policy towards colonial government. Mill, looking back over the whole course of British imperial history, from the beginnings of colonisation in the seventeenth century to the granting of responsible government to Canada, New Zealand and Australia in the middle of the nineteenth, was overimpressed by the new liberal concept of self-governing colonies of settlement, a concept that had emerged less than two decades before he wrote. Taking a long view of British policy towards colonial government, he found in it a consistency that neither Pitt nor Grenville had seen in 1791. Essentially, Mill was offering a 'Whig interpretation', based on satisfaction with the most recent developments and on a strong disposition to treat their evolution as a wise unfolding of considered principles. Pitt and Grenville, as reformers, had been sure of the merits of the aristocratic, parliamentary monarchy under which they themselves lived and, remembering the disasters of American independence, had taken an altogether different view of colonial history from Mill's. They knew that the representative institutions of the West Indian and American colonies before the Revolution had not been bestowed 'in imitation' of those of Britain, but had evolved through expediency from a variety of consti tutional precedents that had been followed for reasons other than those that he suggested. They knew that in practice the toloniallegislatures had developed in ways that conflicted with official British views of the imperial constitution and had proved irreconcilable not only with changing British constitutional ideas, but also with the basic assumptions of British polity.
The list of books you might like
