THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EMPIRE-BUILDING

Edward Gibbon Wakefield and ‘systematic colonisation’

Tony Ballantyne

The modern British Empire was a messy agglomeration. Even when propagandists, money men and politicians were confident in articulating a clear set of ideas to guide empire­building, in reality the empire was an ad hoc assemblage fashioned out of the endeavours and aspirations of shifting coalitions of actors who sought power, profit and influence.

This chapter examines the writings and career of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an important critic of the pattern of Britain’s imperial development and the chief architect of a new type of colonial endeavour that was designed to replace the messy and contingent nature of existing imperial enterprise with a new model of ‘systematic colonisation’.

Wakefield was an industrious and restless empire-builder. Throughout his public career he juggled multiple roles: thinker and theorist, propagandist and activist, parliamentarian and public man, speculator and arch backstage manipulator. During the 1830s and 1840s he was a leading critic of Britain and its empire in its existing form and an influential architect of an alternative vision of colonial development. His critical commentaries on empire stressed the importance of the colonies, especially what are now routinely called the ‘settler colonies’ (primarily Canada, Australia and New Zealand), to Britain’s future. At the same time, he played a key role in laying both the material and intellectual foundations for real colonial settlements in the Antipodes. Central to these endeavours was the way in which Wakefield’s work connected the issue of ‘population’ with questions about how best to organise economic life in a capitalist society. His writing therefore tackled a set of questions at the very centre of anglophone thought in the middle of the nineteenth cen­tury. Recent generations of historians have been critical of Wakefield’s character and have frequently dismissed the significance of his writings and work as they have read the colonial communities established along Wakefieldian lines as ‘failures’. But this assessment of Wakefield not only mistakenly takes the loftiest ideals of his vision of ‘systematic colonisa­tion’ as a misleading benchmark for assessing the ‘success’ of colonial schemes, but it also is grounded in a fundamental misreading of the significance of his work.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield sketched his earliest ideas about the state of the British Empire and how colonisation should be undertaken in unusual circumstances. In 1829 Wakefield penned the manuscript of ‘A Letter from Sydney’, a work that used a searching evaluation of the development of the colony of New South Wales to reflect on the pattern of colonial development in Australia, to offer a new vision of how colonies should work and the ways in which they should relate to England itself. This text was not written from a permanent position in a university, from a parliamentary seat, from a merchant’s or industrialist’s office, or from a comfortable vicarage. In 1829 Wakefield’s ideas about the empire were not shaped by such secure personal circumstances, nor could they draw on the particular types of authority that would come with each of those socio-economic loca­tions. During 1829 Wakefield, then a 23-year-old London-born man who had previously worked as a low-level diplomat, was in fact incarcerated in London’s Newgate Prison, where he was serving out the final year of a three-year sentence that had resulted from his abduction of Ellen Turner, the 15-year-old daughter of a rich manufacturer and county sheriff. Wakefield, an impulsive, temperamental and mercurial character, had convinced himself that marrying Ellen Turner, whom he had never previously met, would win him the patronage of her father, enabling Wakefield to become a parliamentarian. This scheme backfired terribly: Wakefield’s deception was quickly exposed and, although he did marry Ellen at Gretna Green, her family rescued her. Wakefield, on the other hand, was indicted at the Lancaster Assizes and the case became a public sensation.

As a result of this stain on his character, Wakefield’s early writings on empire were published anonymously. His assessment of the colony of New South Wales was published without his name in nine instalments in the Morning Chronicle newspaper between 21 August and 8 October 1829. These articles, together with a new preface and an introduction, were subsequently published in a still anonymous book version, as A Letter from Sydney, supposedly ‘edited’ by Robert Gouger, a friend of Wakefield and a fellow advocate for colonisation. This authorial strategy not only allowed him to prevent questions about his character from impinging on the take-up of his ideas, but it also meant that he was able to draw upon a credible body of published material to support the arguments he made in letters, public speeches and before parliamentary inquiries during the rest of the 1830s and 1840s.⁶

The core arguments in Wakefield’s Letter from Sydney crystallised during his incarceration. In Newgate he came to conceive population, emigration, poverty and crime as interlocking problems that not only plagued the development of British society ‘at home’, but were also distorting the growth of colonial society in New South Wales. Wakefield suggested that excessive population was creating poverty and crime, and limiting opportunity in England, while the colonies were struggling because of a shortage of labour. In order to develop a critique of the established pattern of colonial development and to sketch an alternative vision, Wakefield drafted a series of fictional letters from a colonist in New South Wales.

But, in fact, Wakefield had no firsthand knowledge of Australia. His knowledge of the empire was mainly gleaned from reading, something he was able to extend during his imprisonment as Newgate prisoners were able to purchase a range of resources: Wakefield rented a room to himself and retained a servant, and his family supplied him with a variety of reading material.⁸ Imagining a colony through reading was also something of a family tradition. Edward Gibbon’s grandmother, the influential Quaker social reformer and pio­neering female writer Priscilla Wakefield, travelled little beyond London, but her reading and imagination enabled her to produce a sequence of popular fictional travel texts. Most of these works followed family groups on journeys within the United Kingdom, Europe, America and Asia, allowing her to evaluate Britain and its place in the world. For exam­ple, in her Excursions in North America (1806), Priscilla Wakefield suggested that New World societies had regressed because colonists were dispersed, polite social intercourse foundered and civilisation faded away. Land grants encouraged both undesirable social and geo­graphic mobility. Colonists built simple houses, initiated crude cultivation and placed great value on hunting as a means of subsistence. Frequently, she suggested, they ‘quit the spot on which they have bestowed some labour, before it is completely clean, and remove fur­ther into the forest, where they can live unrestrained by law or good manners’.

The text Edward Gibbon crafted in Newgate suggested that New South Wales had developed slowly because land policies had distorted the colony’s labour supply. He argued that the common practice of making land grants, often of large tracts by British standards, allowed colonists to quickly become landowners rather than having to work to accumulate the capital required to purchase land at a realistic price. This value, which he would later term the ‘sufficient price’, would prevent most colonists from immediately becoming landowners, producing an equitable balance between the interests of capital and labour. Wakefield argued that colonial land should be slowly fed onto the market so that settle­ment was restricted and concentrated, rather than dispersed across large tracts. Through such a strategy, colonial officials would enhance their ability to ‘civilise’ the colonists by bringing them into regular contact, interdependence and mutuality. Wakefield’s letters from his fictional ‘Colonist’ underlined the dangers of the existing system through the case of the Colonist’s servant, who abandoned him after eight years of happy service in Britain. With the £150 he had saved from his wages, the former domestic worker suddenly became a rich man in the colony because he did not have to expend his capital to buy land. Rather he took up a grant of free land ‘near Hunter’s River’. The Colonist complained that this man, who had previously been dependent on him, almost instantly became ‘one of the most consequential persons in the Colony, has grown enormously fat, feeds upon greasy dainties, drinks oceans of bottled porter and port wine, damns the Governor, and swears by all his Gods, Jupiter, Jingo and Old Harry, that the colony must be soon independent’.¹⁰

In A Letter from Sydney Wakefield suggested that the haphazard underpinnings of colonial life had to be swept away and replaced with something more ordered. Wakefield was critical of some important forms of colonial economic organisation, especially pastoralism. He believed that extensive sheep-farming across vast areas of unfenced land resulted from the provision of large blocks of land by colonial officials to colonists. As a result colonists were scattered across a vast landscape, towns did not develop properly and thus social connections, which had the power of fostering ‘civilisation’, emerged very slowly. The dispersed pattern of settlement, Wakefield suggested, eroded the value of marriage and the family. Large, isolated land-holdings undercut the tender ties of marriage. In such circumstances, a colonial wife simply became a ‘drudge’ and children were reduced to being ‘little savages’.

The lack of order in colonial economic and social life meant that cultural decline became characteristic of the new society: haplessly following their sheep across their large farms, colonists swiftly became ‘a Tartar people’. This degeneration meant that civilisation would founder in the colonies, and the colonists would be ungovernable by Britain: ‘Our grand-children will assert their independence’ and they ‘will govern, or rather, misgovern themselves’. Fixing the price of colonial land, financing and directing migration to the colonies, and fostering stable and civilised colonial communities would reimpose order on the chaotic frontiers of empire.

Thus the new theory of colonisation that Wakefield fashioned during his imprisonment did not imagine colonies as distinct and self-sufficient entities distant from Britain, but rather saw that systematic colonisation would make these colonies cultural and economic outgrowths of England. These lands were important because they could be solutions to the problems that blighted England itself: if properly managed, they could relieve the population pressure that produced pauperism and closed off economic opportunity in the imperial metropole. But colonies would also function as new fields for British capital and new markets for British goods. Wakefieldian schemes for colonisation were built around a simple, but innovative mechanism that also stitched colony and metropole together: the money from colonial land sales would subsidise the cost of migration from Britain.¹¹ Thus

Wakefield argued that if properly managed the colonies ‘would no longer be new societies’ but ‘so many extensions of an old society’.¹² For all their failings, Wakefield was inclined to believe that the colonies already offered greater happiness and opportunity than life in England. But he thought that properly ordered colonies would improve England and make it happier, by curbing ‘Want’, the terrible desire for food, land and security that blighted British life.

James Belich has correctly observed that Wakefield’s writings from 1829 did not summon up a surge of migration to the colonies from nothing, noting that emigration from Britain had accelerated from 1815. This led Belich to suggest that ‘revolution in colonial thought’ identified by Viscount Howick, the undersecretary of the colonies, in 1830, actu­ally occurred around 1815. Thus Belich argued that Wakefield was ‘riding the wave of public opinion [for emigration and colonisation], not creating it’.¹³ This formulation underplays the persistent strength of opposition to emigration and colonisation in Britain, within Parliament and from some key elite thinkers such as Thomas Malthus, and it wrongly reduces Wakefield to a belated publicist for a set of common sentiments.¹⁴ If the growing readiness of the Whig ministry and the Colonial Office to countenance migration and colonial land sales did amount to a ‘revolution in colonial thought’, Wakefield was central in driving that transformation.¹⁵

But Belich’s argument about the importance of migration from Britain to North America and Australia from 1815 is important because it reminds us that in fact Wake­field’s criticisms of colonial societies were a response to the growth of settlement in North America and Australia. Wakefield was, in other words, a critical commentator. He was certainly immersed in the political economy tradition, but his thought was never purely theoretical nor was it simply utopian, as many Australasian historians have suggested.¹⁶ In offering his critical commentaries on New South Wales, the United States, South Australia, New Zealand and on Britain itself, Wakefield cast himself as a critical reformer, not merely the author of an idealised model. He was hoping to shape the population flows that had accelerated since 1815, to replace haphazard emigration with systematic colonisation, imposing an order on the mobility of Britons, to uplift it and to make it efficient and useful. These arguments were important in revaluing the place of the colonies of settlement within the broader terrain of the empire: Wakefield placed greater worth on the colonies of settlement and the economic and cultural connections that linked these colonies to Britain, stressing the beneficial nature of these linkages in comparison to the forms of imperial resource extraction that underpinned British imperial activity in the tropics of Asia and Africa.¹⁷

Print culture was central to Wakefield’s work and he took advantage of the growing social reach of newspapers and periodicals. These forms of media were a pivotal element in Whig political culture, which was structured by an extensive network of clubs, jour­nals and newspapers that espoused political and social reform. Wakefield, who had strong links to many influential Whigs, used these print networks to disseminate his ideas widely during the 1830s. If it was the Morning Chronicle that first published Wakefield’s ‘Letter’, over the next decade or so it was primarily through the Spectator that his ideas were championed. In April 1830, while Wakefield was still incarcerated, the Spectator published his ‘Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by means of Systematic Colonisation’, which elaborated the theories set out in A Letter from Sydney, but focussed more narrowly on the question of pauperism, which stood at the heart of moral, economic and political debate within Britain.

Joseph Hume, the influential radical, had helped initially finance the Spectator and was instrumental in its foundation in 1828. Robert Rintoul, its editor, had first made his name as an advocate for reform as the editor and printer of the Dundee Advertiser. Under Rintoul, the Spectator became a significant political and cultural force, consistently advocating for reform. Rintoul’s investment in critiquing established practices and political conventions provided an ideal platform for Wakefield, who emerged as the paper’s most important and influential writer.¹⁸ The Spectator lent its weight to the cause of colonisation, and Rintoul himself believed that the great political economist Adam Smith was mistaken for not valuing the colonies as ‘a profitable field for investment, labour and accumulated capital’.¹⁹ This perhaps helps explain his willingness to found and edit the Colonial Gazette from 1838; it functioned as an important mouthpiece for Wakefield and his supporters, especially on the colonisation of New Zealand and with his criticisms of the administration of Canada.²⁰

In the 1830s and 1840s Wakefield penned several large and substantial volumes along­side his pamphlets, opinion pieces, journalistic writing and tracts advocating the colonisa­tion of New Zealand and South Australia. All of these works revised, extended and elaborated his theories. Most notably, Wakefield’s sprawling two-volume England and America (1833), which offered a critical analysis of migration, the colonisation of America and the state of England, once again appeared anonymously. While writing England and America Wakefield may have chosen to mask his authorship given that he was lobbying hard for the foundation of a colony in South Australia; whatever his motivation, the veil of anonymity allowed him to launch staunch attacks on those such as Malthus, the influential demographer, who were sceptical of colonisation.²¹

Wakefield’s final substantial work, A View of the Art of Colonization (1849), offered a further articulation of ‘systematic colonisation’. A View was not a carefully constructed political economy treatise. Rather it was a rambling volume that provided readers a range of sup­plementary material in addition to an imagined exchange of letters and arguments between ‘Colonist’ and ‘Statesman’, an exchange ‘edited’ by Wakefield.²² Through this epistolary exchange, Wakefield criticised his old adversaries, such as Lord Grey and James Stephen, who were dubious about the benefits of colonisation. Rather than reflecting on the development of the colonies that he had actually helped ‘plant’, Wakefield relished the chance to best leading public figures in Britain, but A View of the Art of Colonization lacked the restraint and discipline that helped define Victorian ‘public men’.

It is important to note that Wakefield’s early writings paid relatively little attention to native groups, the people who would be displaced by colonisation. At one level, this resulted from his lack of firsthand knowledge of life on the frontiers of empire, where indigenous groups often placed significant constraints on colonial aspirations. This limited attention to indigenes also reflected his belief that colonisation was essentially about Britain: he imagined it as a mechanism for building new demographic, economic and cultural connections between the metropole and colonial territories, rather than a project that would create the foundations of autonomous colonial communities, which James Belich has described as ‘Better Britains’.²³ In his later writing, however, questions of native rights and policies became more prominent. For example, Chapter 2 of Wakefield’s Colonization of New Zealand (1837) was devoted to the question of how Maori might be ‘civilised’. This growing engagement with the question of native policy was at some level pragmatic, given that the humanitarian and evangelical critiques of colonisation, which reached their peak between 1830 and 1837, hinged on the mistreatment of indigenous and colonised peoples by British administrators, merchants and settlers.

The arguments that Wakefield had developed since 1829 continued to be important in British intellectual exchanges into the 1840s and beyond. The great philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill endorsed Wakefield’s core vision of ‘systematic colonisation’.²⁴ But perhaps the most significant treatment of Wakefield’s work came from Karl Marx. Marx believed that Wakefield’s writings were extremely important because they challenged many of the arguments made by Adam Smith, the foundational figure in the anglophone political economy tradition and the most influential theorist of capitalism. Marx’s reading of Wakefield attached primacy to the question of labour rather than the price of land itself; he took Wakefield’s argument that wages determined the capacity of labourers to purchase land as demonstrating that labour relations were pivotal in deter­mining colonial development. Marx suggested that Wakefield’s writings offered a crucial insight as he had ‘discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things’.²⁵ Equally importantly, Wakefield’s theory, Marx suggested, offered ‘not something new about the colonies, but, in the colonies, [it identified] the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country’.²⁶

Although Wakefield’s position and reputation in Britain remained somewhat difficult, his ideas certainly proved influential in shaping colonial development. His arguments shaped the Ripon Regulations of 1831, which were drafted by Viscount Howick of the Colonial Office, who acknowledged Wakefield’s influence. These regulations aimed at promoting the greater concentration of colonial settlement and increasing emigration to Australia: they curtailed land grants, standardised the process of selling land, set a minimum price for land sold at auction and stipulated that funds from these sales should be used to assist migrants to the colony. These regulations brought into being a new land market and signalled a fundamental shift in the economic base of the colony.²⁷

Despite the criticisms made by Governor Gipps of New South Wales of Wakefield’s notion of ‘sufficient price’ and his highlighting of the difficulty of applying the theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ to Australian landscapes that varied so greatly in their productive capacity, Wakefieldian notions were embedded in the 1842 Australian Waste Lands Acts. This legislation earmarked half of the proceeds of colonial land sales for the support of emigration.²⁸ Wakefield’s arguments also played a key role in shifting official attitudes towards emigration to the Australasian colonies. Eric Richards has argued that Wakefield’s theories provided a key framework for population movement to the ‘settler colonies’ in the mid-nineteenth century and, in particular, underwrote the operation of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, which used funds from colonial land sales to finance the transportation and accommodation of new colonists to the Australasian colonies, the Cape Colony and Natal.²⁹ John Gascoigne has suggested that Wakefield’s influence was central in the increase of free (as opposed to convict) migration to the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s and that his ideas represented an important taproot of colonial democratic thought.³⁰

Wakefield also played a key role in the plan for the colonisation of South Australia. Robert Gouger, Wakefield’s ‘editor’ and close associate, was a prominent advocate for the colonisation of South Australia on Wakefieldian lines, framing arguments around the principles first set out by Wakefield’s 1829 text. In 1831 the South Australian Land Company was formed, and it argued for the granting of a Royal Charter that would enable the establishment of a new colony in South Australia. That colony, Gouger sug­gested, should be administered by the Company, which would control land sales, using a fixed proportion of the income to finance assisted emigration. This initial scheme failed; but Wakefield played a more direct role in the successful colonial initiative. Collaborating with his brother Daniel, he worked on drafting a bill to create South Australia as a ‘British province’ and enable the colonisation of the region by British emigrants. Alongside Gouger, Wakefield stood at the forefront of the campaign that led to the successful passing of the bill by Parliament in 1834, and his writings provided rich material for the advocates of the project. This campaign provided him another opportunity to restate his theories, and he produced a manual for colonists setting out for Adelaide despite his lack of personal experience of Australia. That volume, The New British Province of South Australia, was so successful that it quickly ran into a second edition.³¹

Wakefield’s writings also provided templates for the establishment of colonies in New Zealand. He was the moving force behind the establishment of the New Zealand Association in 1837, a body that argued for the acquisition of New Zealand as a British colony and its ‘systematic’ settlement. Wakefield remained at the forefront of the ideologi­cal clashes between the Association, reconstituted as the New Zealand Company in 1839, and humanitarian and evangelical opponents of colonisation. He worked hard to win Colonial Office support for his vision of New Zealand’s future. In 1839, when he feared that the Colonial Office might proceed in such a way that its annexation of New Zealand would shut the Company out, he ensured that the latter dispatched its first colonists to Port Nicholson (Wellington) to arrive before New Zealand’s incorporation into the empire was formalised. Wakefieldian ideas not only underwrote the colonisation of Wellington (1840), but also provided a template for the settlement of Wanganui (1840), Taranaki (1841) and Nelson (1841). And his later reworked vision of systematic colonisation, which accorded more prominence to religion as a safeguard of colonial civilisation, also underpinned the foundation of the Otago (1848) and Canterbury settlements (1850).

Wakefield’s theories were also influential in Canada, providing an important template for the Hudson Bay Company’s land policies from the 1840s.³² Canada itself, of course, had been an important touchstone for the Letter, where it appeared as an example of the ill-effects of colonial policy and a demonstration of the pernicious consequences of dis­persed settlement. In A Letter Wakefield echoed Robert Gourlay’s Statistical Account of Upper Canada (1822), which suggested that this pattern produced a colony lacking community and cooperation, and ‘retrograded in civilization and moral worth’.³³ Wakefield had ongoing connections to Lower Canada: he served as an unofficial adviser to Lord Durham, from June to October 1838, and drafted the section on Crown lands in the influential ‘Durham Report’. In this, for the first time, he tried to rework his colonisation theory to fit North American conditions, and—to ensure that these arguments reached the British public—he leaked the report to The Times. His Canadian connections developed subsequently: he acted as an agent for the North American Colonial Association of Ireland in the purchase of the Beauharnois seigneury in 1839. During a visit to Canada in 1841—1842 he won a by-election in Beauharnois as a result of his public championing of French Canadian interests (mainly through the Colonial Gazette) and he remained entangled in Canadian politics until 1844.³⁴

In reality, Wakefield’s ideas turned out to be awkward and ineffectual templates for building functioning colonies. In most cases, it quickly became clear that controlling the price of land could not dictate the pattern of colonial development as easily as the Wake­field writing in Newgate believed. Nor did his vision for an ordered system of migration live up to its promises: although a significant number of Britons did migrate, Wakefieldian schemes were much less of a safety valve than migration to the United States. Moreover, in the settler colonies, Wakefield’s model of a carefully balanced mix of colonists, in terms of gender and class, was rarely the reality.

South Australia revealed many of the difficulties in regulating the land market: Wakefield’s principles proved difficult to translate into an effective mechanism for balancing the interests of labour and capital. The labour supply in the fledgling colony was irregular as land speculation, rather than agricultural improvement, drove its early economic development. But the economy was also badly managed, persistent conflict wracked the administration and the proceeds of land sales were not devoted to financing migration.³⁵ By 1842, South Australia’s founding principles were set aside. The Coloni­zation Commissioners who had acted as a powerful check on the power of the colony’s Governor were dismissed, as it was transformed into a regular Crown colony. This was hardly a ringing endorsement of Wakefield’s theory. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise this new settlement did have a more equitable gender balance than other Australian colonies, it had a free labour market with no use of convict labour, and colonists quickly were invested in its political institutions.³⁶

Wanganui and Taranaki are good examples of the difficult development of Wakefield settlements in New Zealand. Wanganui, on the North Island’s west coast, was founded in 1840 as Petre (named after Lord Petre, a New Zealand Company director) to serve as an extension of the Company’s first settlement, Port Nicholson (Wellington), where the Company was unable to provide new migrants with a regular supply of suitable land for settlement. But the colonists who ventured north to Wanganui found a settlement that was hardly a model colony: the Company’s land purchase had been hastily negotiated by Wakefield’s son Edward and it was swiftly contested by local Maori. The resulting tension plagued the fledgling settlement for seven years until the purchase was renegotiated. Even then commercial development was slow and the town remained small and undeveloped, lacking the institutional infrastructure and social connections that Wakefield believed provided crucial antidotes to colonial cultural decay.

Further north in Taranaki, the Plymouth Company, which was closely connected to Wakefield’s New Zealand Company, oversaw the migration of six ships of colonists from Cornwall and Devon to the new town of New Plymouth. But the Plymouth Company proved financially unstable and as a result it was swiftly reabsorbed by the New Zealand Company. Its failure was indicative of some of the deep-set problems that the new colony faced. New Plymouth was relatively isolated, relying on intermittent maritime connections to the detriment of its economic development.³⁷ It lacked a natural harbour, which placed further restrictions on its commercial development until the 1880s. But the settlement was deeply troubled by conflicts over land: the original sale of land to the Plymouth Company was contested and colonists found it increasingly difficult to purchase land from Maori. This not only slowed the demographic growth of the settlement, but also fed a deep-seated resentment that was vented in open warfare in the early 1860s.

The patchy growth of primary production and commercial life in these colonies suggests that Wakefield’s models of colonial development were extremely difficult to actualise and that his notion of ‘sufficient price’ was a weak tool for controlling colonial growth. Never­theless it would be a significant misreading of the imperial economic and intellectual landscape to discount the significance of Wakefield’s work, as John Weaver has done.³⁸ Australasian historians have been consistently critical of Wakefield: in part, they have been fixated with the way in which his time in prison has rendered him a difficult cultural forebear, but equally because no settlement that developed under the influence of

Wakefield emerged as an orderly and civilised extension of Britain that Wakefield envi­saged. Erik Olssen has noted that New Zealand historians have generally given Wakefield colonies ‘failing grades’.³⁹ But historians have been less sensitive to how he shifted the lexicon for discussing empire and offered influential models for colonial development on the global stage. Most obviously, Wakefield’s ideas about the operation of the land market, the value of emigration and the nature of colonial ‘civilisation’ certainly constituted an important, if contentious, thread in political thought in Australasia.

Wakefield’s thought also had some impact beyond the ‘settler colonies’. His ideas were influential in the shaping of land policies in British Ceylon in the 1830s and 1840s.⁴⁰ Wakefield’s theories were also an important touchstone in the agitation for the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission to provide new emigrants to Jamaica to resolve that colony’s growing labour crisis in the 1840s.⁴¹ The great Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell imagined deploying Wakefield’s ideas in establishing a colony of ‘free people of colour’ as a buffer to protect Mexico from American expansion.⁴² As this example suggests, Wakefield’s ideas were seen as applicable beyond the British Empire. They also fed into debates over policy and practice in the United States, where questions about land, markets and migration remained central in nineteenth-century politics.⁴³ Furthermore, they were translated into French and were prominent in French reflections on the nature of colonial societies, especially at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴⁴ In addition, Wakefield’s theories shaped a reframing of a key Brazilian land law in 1850.⁴⁵

By the 1850s Wakefield had settled in Wellington, where he was, briefly at least, an important political figure. He resigned from colonial politics in 1855 and lived out his days, depressed and isolated, in that town, dissatisfied with the implementation of his ideas in Australia and New Zealand. He wrote and worked in the hope that he could help correct the ‘mess’ of empire. He imagined that he could transform haphazard streams of emigrants into organised and systematic legions of colonists who would produce energetic, progressive and stable extensions of England. In reality, his ideas and schemes added to the mess of empire: he fashioned a new political language to describe colonisation, linking emigration from Britain and colonial development through the mechanism of a regulated colonial land market. This was an ingenious theory, but one difficult to implement, and the influence of local environments and colonised populations meant that colonies rarely progressed in simple or predictable ways.

Nevertheless it was an energising vision, which recalibrated the value attached to emi­gration from Britain and gave new value to temperate colonies, which were best suited to settlement, agriculture and pastoralism rather than the plantation production typical of Britain’s tropical holdings. And it was a theory that propelled the transfer of the land and sovereignty of colonised peoples to Britain; again this was a messy and fraught process, leading to open warfare in New Zealand. When Wakefield died in 1862, the future of New Zealand appeared far from clear as Maori military capacity stretched imperial and local resources. In the end, it was the continual arrival of emigrants that secured British dominance in New Zealand. Migrants, not rifles, were the most potent instrument of empire, and demography rather than brute military power ultimately marginalised Maori. As we have seen, the loss of native lands and authority was never Wakefield’s primary concern as a theorist of empire because he always conceived of colonies as solutions to Britain’s problems rather than spaces that possessed their own complex histories and social dynamics. These dynamics, however, ensured that systematic colonisation was never especially systematic. Even if Wakefield failed in reordering the ‘mess’ of empire, there is no doubt that this vision of the value of migration and colonies was an important force that transformed British empire-building and underpinned the growth of new colonial societies.

Notes

1 John Darwin, ‘Britain's Empires', in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1-3.

2 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire (London, 1849), p. 58.

3 Morning Post (London), 15 May 1827, p. 1.

4 London Standard, 7 June 1827, p. 2.

5 Some of these alleged that Wakefield had been unable to consummate his relationship with Ellen because he suffered from venereal disease. Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland, 2002), p. 560, n. 47.

6 On Wakefield's anonymity as a strategy, see the lengthy discussion in Tony Ballantyne, ‘Remaking the Empire from Newgate: Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney’, in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books that Changed the British Empire (Durham, NC, forthcoming).

7 Morning Chronicle (London), 21 August 1829, p. 2.

8 Temple, Conscience, p. 118.

9 Priscilla Wakefield, Excursions in North America: Described in Letters from a Gentleman and his Young Companions, to Their Friends in England (3rd edn) (London, 1819), p. 83.

10 [Edward Gibbon Wakefield], A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia (London, 1829), pp. 12-13.

11 Eric Richards has suggested that there was no ‘precise precursor' to this ‘brilliantly simple solution'. Eric Richards, ‘Wakefield and Australia', in Friends of the Turnbull Library, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington, 1997), p. 96.

12 Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney, p. 186.

13 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783--1939 (New York, 2009), p. 147.

14 On the growing hostility to emigration from 1828, see Edward Brynn, ‘The Emigration Theories of Robert Wilmot Horton 1820-1841', Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d'Histoire, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1969), pp. 57-58.

15 Brynn, ‘The Emigration Theories of Robert Wilmot Horton', p. 61, n. 73.

16 For a recent revaluation of this claim and a reading of Wakefield in the English utopian tradition, see Michael Radzevicius, ‘England Elsewhere: Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Imperial Utopian Dream', PhD dissertation, University of Adelaide, 2011.

17 Robert Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800-1860 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 48.

18 Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement, pp. 464-465.

19 Spectator, 1 May 1858, p. 465.

20 Temple, Conscience, pp. 204, 218; Peter Burroughs (ed.), The Colonial Reformers and Canada, 1830-1849: Selections from Documents and Publications of the Times (Toronto, 1969), pp. xv, xix.

21 England and America. A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations, 2 vols (London, 1833), Vol. I, p. 78.

22 A View of the Art of Colonization: with Present Reference to the British Empire; in Letters Written Between a Statesman and a Colonist, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (ed.) (London, 1849).

23 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders (Auckland, 1996), p. 303.

24 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, Vol.

II (Boston, 1848), pp. 286-289; Temple, Conscience, pp. 131, 216.

25 Karl Marx, Capital:A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, Ben Fowkes (trans.) (London, 1990), p. 932.

26 Ibid., p. 938.

27 S.H. Roberts, ‘The Wool Trade and the Squatters', in Ernest Scott (ed.), Australia: Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume VII, Part I (Sydney, 1988 [1933]), pp. 187-190; A. Grenfell Price, ‘Experiments in Colonisation', in Scott (ed.), Australia: Cambridge History of the British Empire, p. 214; John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2002), p. 64.

28 Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, p. 64.

29 Eric Richards, Britannia's Children: Emigration From England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland Since 1600 (London, 2004), pp. 127, 137-138.

30 Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, pp. 64-65.

31 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, The New British Province of South Australia, or, A Description of the Country, Illustrated by Charts and Views: With an Account of the Principles, Objects, Plan, and Prospects of the Colony (London, 1834; 2nd edn London, 1835). Graeme Pretty suggests that there was a further edition published in Edinburgh in 1835: Pretty, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796-1862)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wakefield-edward-gibbon-2763. On the centrality of Wakefield's writings to the agitations for a colony in South Australia see Temple, Conscience, pp. 156-157.

32 Adele Perry, ‘The State of Empire: Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849-1871', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2001), paragraph 9. More fleetingly, see Elizabeth Vibert's allusion to Wakefield's significance for Atlantic Canada in her ‘Cape Breton Island, 1843', Victorian Review, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2010), pp. 14-18.

33 Robert Gourlay, General Introduction to Statistical Account of Upper Canada: Compiled with a View to a Grand System of Emigration, in Connexion with the Reform of the Poor Laws (London, 1822), p. cccl.

34 HJ.M. Johnston, ‘Wakefield, Edward Gibbon', Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www. biographi.ca/en/bio/wakefield_edward_gibbon_9E.html.

35 A.W.P. Whimpress, ‘The Wakefield Model of Systematic Colonisation in South Australia: An Examination With Particular Reference to its Economic Aspects', PhD dissertation, University of South Australia, 2008, p. 255.

36 Manning Clark, History of Australia, abridged by Michael Cathcart (Carlton, 1993), pp. 174-185; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (3rd edn) (Melbourne, 2009), p. 79.

37 See Margot Fry, Tom's Letters: The Private World of Thomas King, Victorian Gentleman (Wellington,

2001).

38 John C. Weaver suggests that Wakefield's ideas were of limited significance even in ‘Wakefieldian' colonies; see Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650--1900 (Montreal,

2003), p. 381, n. 76.

39 Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment in Post Enlightenment Experimental Practice', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1997), p. 198.

40 K.M. de Silva, ‘The Third Earl Grey and the Maintenance of an Imperial Policy on the Sale of Crown Lands in Ceylon, c. 1832-1852: Some Influences of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Doctrines in a Tropical Colony', Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1967), pp. 5-20.

41 George Brizan, ‘The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission and Immigration to Jamaica 1840-1860', Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 20, Nos. 3/4 (1974), pp. 39-58.

42 Annie Heloise Abel, ‘Mexico as a Field for Systematic British Colonization, 1839', The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1926), pp. 63-67.

43 Geoffrey Sanborn, ‘Hawthorn's Desert: “Wakefield” and the Imagination of Colonial Space', in Johar Schueller and Edward Watts (eds), Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (New Brunswick, 2003), pp. 121-135.

44 See, for instance, ‘Les trois colonies d'Australie', Revue britannique (Fevrier 1868), pp. 257-285; Albert Metin, Le Socialisme sans doctrines: la question agraire et la question ouvriere en Australie et Nouvelle- Zelande (Paris, 1901); Andre Siegfried, Edward Gibbon Wakefield et sa doctrine de la colonisation systematique (Paris, 1904).

45 Weaver, Great Land Rush, p. 24; Joao Biehl, ‘The Mucker War: A History of Violence and Silence', in Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good (ed.), Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley, 2004), p. 383, n. 5.

Further reading

Ballantyne, Tony, ‘Remaking the Empire from Newgate: Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney', in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books that Changed the British Empire (Durham, NC, forthcoming).

De Silva, K.M., ‘The Third Earl Grey and the Maintenance of an Imperial Policy on the Sale of Crown Lands in Ceylon, c. 1832-1852: Some Influences of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Doctrines in a Tropical Colony’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1967), pp. 5-20.

Friends of the Turnbull Library, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington, 1997).

Garnett, Richard, Edward Gibbon Wakefield: The Colonization of South Australia and New Zealand (London, 1898).

McLintock, A.H., The History of Otago: The Origins and Growth of a Wakefield Class Settlement (Dunedin, 1949).

Olssen, Erik, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an Experiment in Post Enlightenment Experimental Practice’, New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1997), pp. 197-218.

Prichard, M.F. Lloyd (ed.), The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (Glasgow, 1968).

Temple, Philip, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland, 2002).