Imperial Statesmen: Who Truly Ran the British Empire and What is Their Legacy?

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Context: My PhD addresses the locus of 'power' as the British administrative and information state grewrapidly in the first half of Britain's 'Imperial Century', between 1825 and 1855. The historiographicalliterature (Porter, 1999; Searle, 2004, Hyam, 2010) is replete with leadership figureheads, 'systems', andthe development of a Civil Service. Yet in terms of the extension of State knowledge and reach we knownext to nothing about how power was claimed, distributed, controlled and wielded at lower levels of thenascent State apparatus. Higg's magisterial 2001 analysis of the rise of the British information stateacknowledged the need to study these lower levels of government to uncover the 'real' seat of power.None has been forthcoming. My project will fill this gap through the medium of the British Empire'sdomestic colonial administration. I focus on the Colonial Office (disbanded 1966) as opposed to other,perhaps more easily accessible and widely known, departments because although popular and academicdiscourse around the Empire and the nature of Colonial administration has grown rapidly, very littleattention has been given to the importance of the administration of empire in shaping and formalisingthe power structures at the lower levels of the domestic Civil Service. We know much more aboutinformation and people flows and Colonial administrators in situ than we do about the importance ofEmpire for the domestic information state project.Key Questions:With which key individuals and officeholders did power reside?7 / 22What relationship existed between these individuals?How, individually and collectively, did they seek to defend, accrue and use political and administrativepower?What is the legacy of this process and experience for modern British government institutions?Method: My project focuses on individual administrators at lower levels of government. It uses (seeoffsite activities) letters by Colonial administrators to colleagues, superiors, and subordinates, privatejournals, personal letters, government acts and gazettes, sessional papers, and confidential memorandato reconstruct their individual and collective understandings of and relationships with political andadministrative power. The work will adopt Higg's 2001 three strand definition of 'power' (assumed,devolved, discretionary) and transcribed data will be coded to identify linguistic patterns in relation tothis definition. I will use NVivo to analyse the whole corpus and supplement this broad analysis withdetailed case studies of individuals, particular time periods and particular events that emerge aswaymarkers in the extension of the information state.Impact: There is a concerted attempt to decolonise the past and (more widely) to explore groups andindividuals whose stories have been either ignored or suppressed. While it may seem that my projectfocuses on 'traditional' themes of politics and governance, this is not the case. In analysing the rise ofthe lower Civil Service I will both make a contribution to the literatures on governance and Colonialismbut also uncover the stories of those outside the political elite who have risen to become a part of it fromoften humble beginnings, including a significant number of white and non-white immigrants by the1850s.