BEHIND THE TIMES

Colonial Mentalities
A culture war on race and empire divided the
intellectual classes of Victorian Britain.
Jake Subryan Richards | Published in History Today Volume 70 Issue 9 September 2020

Ben Jones

According to the historian Hilary Beckles, British colonial state forces

killed more Black people when suppressing revolts in the Caribbean in
the 50 years after slave emancipation in 1838 than in the 50 years
leading up to it. Emancipation brought compensation for former
slaveowners but not for the enslaved. The extreme inequality between a
wealthy, politically powerful white minority and a Black and mixed-race
majority with little or no property continued after emancipation. In
Jamaica, British Guiana, St Vincent and Barbados, many people freed
from slavery (freedpeople) burned plantations and seized land and
resources in protest against these conditions in which Black lives barely
mattered. The most infamous of these protests and their aftermath were
the events in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1865. The suppression of a
rebellion, killing of rebels and protestors and the subsequent failure to
punish the colonial agents responsible changed politics, racial ideologies
and Empire in Jamaica and Britain.

Politics and violence

After the ending of compulsory apprenticeship for the enslaved in 1838,
white former slaveowners demanded that the local legislature, the House
of Assembly, and the Colonial Office in Whitehall approve new laws that
would force the freedpeople to work on plantations as contract labourers.
These new laws criminalised alternative work choices, such as land
cultivation or petty trading without formal contracts. For contract work,
any breach of terms by the employee, but not the employer, was also
punished under criminal law. The laws restricted freedpeople’s mobility
and work choices.

As these laws and a stagnating economy increased political tensions,

prominent political opposition to colonial governance emerged. One
leader was the assemblyman George William Gordon, the son of an
enslaved woman and white plantation-owning enslaver. Gordon was a
vocal opponent of Edward Eyre, Jamaica’s governor from 1864. Gordon,
and others, alleged that Eyre and his officials had fraudulently
commissioned a toll road and tramway project between Kingston and
Spanish Town. In 1865, Gordon helped organise meetings across
Jamaica to discuss grievances with infrastructure projects, the lack of
investment in education and job opportunities and the discriminatory
enforcement of laws.
Gordon was part of the radical political opposition to Eyre. Other
radicals included newspaper publishers, spiritual leaders in belief
systems, such as Native Baptism, and women workers in urban areas.
Together, these groups provided freedpeople with information networks,
material resources and ideologies to oppose Eyre.

In October 1865, the tensions between Eyre’s administration and his

various opponents produced a flashpoint. Some residents of the eastern
parish of St-Thomas-in-the-East protested against perceived injustices in
the local court. The protestors resisted the police when they tried to
arrest them. Paul Bogle, a Native Baptist deacon, led a raid on the local
police station to seize weapons. Over several days, hundreds of rebels
killed targeted individuals held responsible for the worst injustices of
colonial rule and seized property, spreading northwards and westwards
from Morant Bay. 

Governor Eyre called in the army to launch a counter-insurgency. He

requested that the House of Assembly suspend its legislative authority so
that he could govern with emergency powers, putting parts of the island
under martial law. It was unclear whether martial law was recognised in
Britain or its empire, or if the governor had authority to invoke it.
Nonetheless, it was a fateful decision: the army killed at least 439 people
in suppressing the rebellion, some of whom had surrendered to the
authorities and others who had never engaged in armed resistance.
Colonial forces also flogged hundreds of people and burned down many
homes. 

The army arrested assemblyman Gordon in Kingston, which was not

under martial law, and transferred him to Morant Bay. Even though the
rebellion was over, martial law was still in force there. State authorities
could try him by court martial with officers rather than a jury of his peers
deciding his fate. The court found him guilty of high treason and sedition
based on spurious evidence related to his participation in the political
meetings earlier in the year. The authorities executed him on 23
October. 
Culture war
Debates over the causes of rebellion and the authorities’ actions caused a
culture war in Britain. Prominent intellectuals established rival
committees. The Eyre Defence Committee, led by the writer Thomas
Carlyle, sought to protect Eyre’s reputation and raise funds for his
possible legal defence. The Jamaica Committee, led mainly by the MP
and philosopher John Stuart Mill, fought to widen an official
investigation into violent suppression in Jamaica, to bring Eyre and
other perpetrators to justice and to increase public opposition to colonial
oppression.

The Eyre Defence Committee relied on support from the literary,

propertied and church establishment. Carlyle was its most virulent
member. He had published a notorious anti-Black diatribe in 1850 that
demanded that freedpeople continue serving white sugar plantation
owners. Sixteen years later, Carlyle lionised Eyre as saving not just
Jamaica but ‘all our West Indian Possessions’. Carlyle and his fellow
writer, John Ruskin, campaigned for financial support, leading Charles
Dickens and Alfred Lord Tennyson to pledge money. Dickens opposed
‘that platform-sympathy with the Black – or the Native, or the Devil’,
which he felt distracted attention from the poor in Britain. He seemed
unaware, or perhaps his anti-blackness prevented him from seeing, that
many working-class people were protesting against Eyre’s actions, too.  
Ben
Jones

As well as the working class, the Jamaica Committee drew membership

and support from political radicals and scientists, including Charles
Darwin, his scientific ally Thomas Huxley and the barrister Frederic
Harrison. When Darwin’s son, William, dared to criticise the Jamaica
Committee, his father told him to ‘go back to Southampton’, the port
where Eyre had landed back in Britain. Although there were some
differences in strategy and outlook, the Committee members all believed
that Eyre must fall.

The Jamaica Committee published eight pamphlets that criticised

colonial policy in Jamaica, Eyre’s actions and martial law. It tried five
times to bring a court case against Eyre for murder and high crimes in
office, but each attempt failed to result in an indictment for trial. The
Committee brought a private prosecution for murder against two
officers, Alexander Nelson and Herbert Brand, who had participated in
Gordon’s court martial. The grand jury did not find a charge to answer.
In 1868, Alexander Phillips, a Black man whose property was destroyed
by the colonial counter-insurgency, brought a private prosecution
against Eyre in England for wrongs committed against his person and
property, with the Committee’s support. The case failed, because the
House of Assembly in Jamaica had passed an act preventing
compensation for any state actions in suppressing the rebellion. Perhaps
the Committee’s most tangible success was to question the legality of
martial law, making it less likely that colonial governors would declare it
in future. 

The Committees’ culture war exposed some developing faultlines among

British intellectuals. Eyre and the Defence Committee membership
overlapped with the Anthropological Society of London (ASL), which
claimed that different racial groups had different origins as humans and
different capacities. In 1866, the ASL’s co-founder told the annual
meeting that ‘the merest novice in the study of race-characteristics ought
to know that we English can only successfully rule either Jamaica, New
Zealand, the Cape, China, or India, by such men as Governor Eyre’. In
contrast, the Jamaica Committee and its supporters aligned more with
the Ethnological Society of London, which advocated a common point of
origin for all humans. This belief produced a ‘liberal’ view that Black
people would become the ‘civilised’ equal of white people through
imperial guidance. 

On neither view were Black people considered the equal of white people;
some form of imperial rule was necessary. Historians disagree about how
far the growing pseudo-scientific explanations of racial hierarchy
continued, or diverged from, 18th-century ideologies of civilisational
stages. Nonetheless, the Eyre controversy intensified the intellectual
faultlines and made anti-Black authoritarian rule more appealing to
many white Britons in the later 19th century.

Continued failure
The Morant Bay Rebellion and its suppression resulted in the
metropolitan decision to abolish the House of Assembly and govern
Jamaica directly. Without electoral representation, the formal political
power of Black and mixed-race subjects declined. Paul Bogle and George
Gordon became heroes of Jamaica’s anticolonial independence struggle.
In Britain, Eyre was never appointed to another colonial office.

In the longer term, the Eyre culture war intensified British attitudes that
treated Black colonial subjects as a problem. Most recently,
discrimination against the Commonwealth citizens of the Windrush
generation has demonstrated how British state institutions still deny full
citizenship rights to certain Black Britons. These institutions often treat
Black people as more suited to confinement than citizenship.

The most virulent aspects of the Eyre Defence Committee’s racial

ideologies are still alive, too. There is no scientific basis for racial
subgroups within the single human race. Racial classifications vary
between and within societies according to power, language and cultural
meanings. Despite this, many intellectuals have persisted in creating
racial categories and measuring them according to a single scale, such as
IQ, to try to demonstrate significant variation between groups. This
research has contributed to eugenics and experiments in sterilisation and
infectious disease. It helps to continue to underpin discrimination
against Black people from childbirth to the operating table, from the
classroom to the job market, and from property ownership to prison.
Recent scandals attest to the presence of these pernicious views even
among government advisors and university researchers. We still inhabit
a world harmed by white supremacy, one that subjects many Black
people to deprivation and death. How much longer will it last? 

Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of law, empire and the African

diaspora and Assistant Professor of History at the LSE.