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

Context: My PhD addresses the locus of 'power' as the British administrative and information state grew
rapidly in the first half of Britain's 'Imperial Century', between 1825 and 1855. The historiographical
literature (Porter, 1999; Searle, 2004, Hyam, 2010) is replete with leadership figureheads, 'systems', and
the development of a Civil Service. Yet in terms of the extension of State knowledge and reach we know
next to nothing about how power was claimed, distributed, controlled and wielded at lower levels of the
nascent State apparatus. Higg's magisterial 2001 analysis of the rise of the British information state
acknowledged 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's
domestic 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 academic
discourse around the Empire and the nature of Colonial administration has grown rapidly, very little
attention has been given to the importance of the administration of empire in shaping and formalising
the power structures at the lower levels of the domestic Civil Service. We know much more about
information and people flows and Colonial administrators in situ than we do about the importance of
Empire for the domestic information state project.
Key Questions:
With which key individuals and officeholders did power reside?
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What relationship existed between these individuals?
How, individually and collectively, did they seek to defend, accrue and use political and administrative
power?
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 (see
offsite activities) letters by Colonial administrators to colleagues, superiors, and subordinates, private
journals, personal letters, government acts and gazettes, sessional papers, and confidential memoranda
to reconstruct their individual and collective understandings of and relationships with political and
administrative 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 to
this definition. I will use NVivo to analyse the whole corpus and supplement this broad analysis with
detailed case studies of individuals, particular time periods and particular events that emerge as
waymarkers in the extension of the information state.
Impact: There is a concerted attempt to decolonise the past and (more widely) to explore groups and
individuals whose stories have been either ignored or suppressed. While it may seem that my project
focuses on 'traditional' themes of politics and governance, this is not the case. In analysing the rise of
the lower Civil Service I will both make a contribution to the literatures on governance and Colonialism
but also uncover the stories of those outside the political elite who have risen to become a part of it from
often humble beginnings, including a significant number of white and non-white immigrants by the
1850s.