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ABSTRACT
This article explores changes in British liberal thought during the second half of the nineteenth century by investigating the work of Sir George Campbell, a Scottish MP and long-term colonial official in India who was influential on Gladstonian land reform in Ireland. Campbell’s life and writings show that colonial experience in Ireland and India were influential on the increasing desire to safeguard small farmers during a time of consolidation under agrarian capitalism. Many histories of these changes in British liberal thought focus instead on debates in political economy and the subsequent questioning of universal models that allowed policy to match social differences in various localities, like in Ireland and India. I instead highlight the myriad of influences that impacted Campbell’s romanticisation of small farmers, including morality, concepts of masculinity, a conservative criticism of modernity, agricultural science, and class anxieties. In the end, the rehabilitation of small farmers was meant to protect social hierarchies between a passive landlord benefitting from the productivity of his tenants, and between the modern scientist and the practical traditions of the small farmer.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, volume 329, column 305 (23 July 1888).
2. Dewey, “The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor”; and Ray, “Small Holdings and Agricultural Cooperation in England.”
3. “1890 Report of the Select Committee,” Parliamentary Papers, vi.
4. Ibid., xvi.
5. He particularly sympathised with “moderate landholders” who he claimed were the majority in eastern Scotland. Campbell, Memoirs, 1, 11.
6. Campbell, Memoirs, 1, 9.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Ibid., 189–90.
9. Campbell, “Tenure of Land in India.”
10. Dewey, “The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor.”
11. See chapter 1. Chakrabarti, Assembling the Local; and Glendlay, “Richard Jones: A Reappraisal.”
12. Steel, “J.S. Mill and the Irish Question”; Lebow, “Introduction”; Zastoupil, “Moral Government”; Kinzer, England’s Disgrace?; and Campbell and Varley (eds), Land Questions in Modern Ireland.
13. Gray, “Famine and Land”; and Sartori, Liberalism in Empire.
14. See especially, Gray, “Famine and Land,” 200–02.
15. For example, Sartori argues that the new protection afforded to the peasant proprietor in British liberal thought in the second half of the nineteenth century helped instil the idea that state intervention was necessary to provide for more equitable distribution of income, and allowed for the emergence of the Labour Party and the creation of the welfare state in the twentieth century. Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, 95.
16. Holt, The Problem of Freedom; and Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
17. This critique of the inherent patriarchal qualities of liberalism, even the newer liberalism, was first elaborated in Pateman, The Sexual Contract.
18. Sartori mentions this even though his overemphasis on the Lockean labour theory of property produces a history that is a coherent theory of doctrine. Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, 199.
19. This is not to say that empire was the only influence on liberalism, as many Britons were also inspired by the small farmers on the European continent. Dewey, “The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor.”
20. Some of these works emphasise a moral reaction to the deaths caused by the Irish famine: Zastoupil, “Moral Government”; and Kinzer et al., A Moralist. Still others emphasise the influence of Irish reformers and political movements in pressing the issue of Irish land reform in the British parliament. Campbell et al., Land Questions; Steel, “J.S. Mill and the Irish Question”; and Lebow, “Introduction,” John Stuart Mill on Ireland.
21. Some exceptions exist. Aulakh, “British Empire, Land Tenure.”
22. Chakrabarty, “The Time of History.”
23. Campbell, “Tenure of Land in India,” 156. This interest in Punjab continued during Campbell’s lieutenant-governorship in Bengal, where he included octroi duties (duties on particular goods entering a town or province) in the new municipalities bill of Bengal. Many in his council expressed worries that this sort of tax was not suited to Bengal, to which Campbell complained that anything Punjabi was regarded with “a sort of horror” in Bengal, and so he asked for the council to remain objective. Proceedings of the Council of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, 93.
24. Cook, Imperial Affinities, 15–18.
25. Ibid., 51–7.
26. O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire; Silvestri, Ireland and India; Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism; and Bender, “The Imperial Politics of Famine.” There’s also a section on Sister Nivedita/Margaret Noble and James Cousins, who connected Ireland and India in their forms of anti-colonialism and nationalism in O’Connor and Foley (eds), Ireland and India.
27. For example, see Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks; Crosbie, “Ireland, Colonial Science, and the Geographical Construction of British Rule in India”; Silvestri, “‘An Irishman is Specially Suited to be A Policeman;’” and Silvestri, “‘The Sinn Fein of India.’”
28. Laird, “India and the Translation of the Irish Brehon Laws”; and Laird, Subversive Law.
29. Boylan, “Victorian Ideologies of Improvement.”
30. Gray, “Famine and Land in Ireland and India.”
31. This is in contrast to some other British writers who focus on the depredations of the “middlemen” in Ireland, or the moneylender in India.
32. Campbell, “Tenure of Land in India,” 146–7.
33. Campbell, The Irish Land, 5–6.
34. Campbell, Memoir, 1, 10.
35. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol 263, column 1401, (20 July 1881).
36. He describes the problems of the “modern” system of the Cis-Sutlej states, and page 59 the agrarian difficulties due to excess litigation in Awadh after turning Talukdars into property owners. Campbell, Memoir, 1, 189
37. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 80.
38. Ibid., 79.
39. Ibid., 44.
40. Ibid., 39.
41. Campbell, “Extract from Judicial Commissioner’s Report,” 118.
42. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 59–60; but he also made this analogy much earlier, in The Irish Land, 24.
43. Campbell, Memoir, 1, 54.
44. This represents a modification of what Sartori identifies as a Lockean labour theory of property in Liberalism in Empire (though so many people have expressed modified visions of this idea that it ceases to be the sole property of Locke). Whereas both Locke and Campbell identify labour as providing the first “primitive” creation of property by transforming nature, Locke is more positive about the next step in the social evolution of property, whereas Campbell identifies it purely as conquest.
45. Campbell, Irish Land,16–17.
46. Ibid., 20–3.
47. Ibid, 26–8.
48. Campbell, “Tenure of Land in India,” 174–5.
49. Campbell is particularly careful in The Irish Land to ensure his readers that his criticisms do not apply to the majority of Irish landlords, 12.
50. “Selections from JS Mill’s Editorials,” 5. Though Ned Lebow does point out that Mill did mitigate his criticism of Irish landlords in later writings. Lebow, “Introduction,” 7.
51. Campbell, “The Tenure and Cultivation of Land in India,” 422.
52. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, volume 263, column 458, (08 July 1881).
53. Here he specifically calls for the same “legal recognition of their ancient rights in land which has been so liberally granted to the Irish.” House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol 275, column 400, (30 November 1882).
54. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol 302, columns 642–63, (18 February 1886).
55. See column 464 for Campbell’s quote. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol 304, columns 458–566, (1 April 1886).
56. This sort of influence can particularly be seen in the quantity of romantic references to what the Highlands of Scotland used to be. For example, he claims that he saw previous customs of the highlands, like the runrig, in other parts of the world, Memoir, 1, 10. These were strips of land periodically reassigned to individuals for cultivation by the township and represented a sort of collective management of land. He also equates the tenant rights that existed in Awadh before the settlement as similar to what they had in the highlands before the clearances. He also equates the old Highland chiefs before their defeat at the Battle of Culloden to the Sikh chiefs, Memoir, 1, 55.
57. House of Commons, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol CCL, column 1413, (5 Feb 1880–28 Feb 1880).
58. He compares the “prudent, saving, almost penurious habits” of Ulster farmers to inefficient and slovenly farms of the “southern” Irish. This is due to the racial influence of the Scotch, who have a more “sturdy and independent character.” Campbell, The Irish Land, 55.
59. He defines these groups, and then on pages 156 to 157 he describes the democratic “village constitutions” of such people as opposed to places changed by Muslim rule or the chaos and violence in transition between Muslim and British rule. Campbell, “Tenure of Land in India,” 148.
60. Campbell, The Irish Land, 59.
61. Campbell, “The Tenure of Land in India,” 423.
62. For example, he only states that Irish money (and abilities) would suffice for “ordinary farming purposes” and that English capital and science would only be necessary for reclaiming “the morasses and render[ing] productive the great tracts now lost.” Campbell, The Irish Land, 157.
63. He was first proposed as a member when he was Deputy Commissioner at Loodianah at a meeting on 9 August, 1849, and duly elected at the next meeting, Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, Journal, Vol. 7, xxxiii & xxxv. He then continued paying his dues as he repeatedly appears in the member lists. In, Journal, volume 8, list of members for 1852, he is listed as a non-contributor, absent from India. But he is re-elected as a member in 1858, volume 10, proceedings, 9 June, 1858, xiii & cxvii.
64. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 127–8.
65. Royal Society of Arts, Proceedings, volume XXIII, 181.
66. AHSI, Journal, Vol. 3, Part 2 (January to December 1871), lxiii-lxx.
67. Kochhar, “Cultivation of Science in the 19th Century Bengal,” 1026.
68. “Agricultural Reform in Bengal by means of Model Government Farms,” 611.
69. Ibid., 612–14.
70. Supplement to The Calcutta Gazette, June 13, 1872, 621–2.
71. Kochhar, “Cultivation of Science in the 19th Century Bengal,” 1036; The Sessional Papers printed by order of The House of Lords in the session 1874, Vol. XIII, 147.
72. Royal Society of Arts, Proceedings, Vol. XXIII, 29 Jan, 1875, 181.
73. The journals of the AHSI had been devoted largely to cash crops during the 1830s and 40s, see Tavolacci, “Vegetable Gardens versus Cash Crops.” But the Society began to return to horticultural and gardening topics in the 1860s. For example, their Journal, Vol. 4, for 1872 begins with an article on “Indian Gardens and What to Grow in Them,” 1.
74. Campbell, Memoir, 1, 88.
75. Royal Society of Arts, Proceedings, Vol. XXIII, 29 Jan, 1875, 181.
76. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 299.
77. Royal Society of Arts, Proceedings, Vol. XXIII, 29 Jan, 1875, 186.
78. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 26, No. 1331, May 24, 1878, 605.
79. Journal of the Society for Arts, 29, No. 1480, April 1, 1881, 427.
80. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 73–4.
81. Royal Society of Arts, Proceedings, Vol. XXIII, 29 Jan, 1875, 186.
82. Journal of the Society for Arts, 29, no. 1480, April 1, 1881, 426–7.
83. Campbell, The Irish Land, 54.
84. Campbell, Memoir, 2, 73.
85. Campbell, The Irish Land, 13.