Biagini, Eugenio. “Exporting ‘Western & Benificent Institutions’: Gladstone and Empire,” in Gladstone Centenary Essays, eds. David Bebbington and Roger Swift (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 202-24.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Biagini seeks to explore Gladstone’s approach to imperialism that reaches beyond Gladstone’s reputation. That is, Gladstone had a reputation as a politician of personal conviction and his ethics of conviction gave rise to a reputation of being hostile to imperial expansion. Because of this reputation, Biagini notes that “contemporaries and historians alike have often been baffled by the ambiguities and apparent (or actual) inconsistencies in Gladstone’s attitudes towards the empire and colonial expansion” (203). Biagini’s keys to interpreting Gladstone on this front are: (1) intellectual indebtedness to Edmund Burke, (2) the importance of financial stability and (3) self-government as an imperial strategy aimed at reconciling indigenous opinion to continued British rule. Alongside these three principles Biagini places the general circumstances of his target timeframe, the 1880-85 administration. The circumstances are such that foreign policy was determining financial policy; a significant impediment to financial stability at home was the expenditure associated with empire. Gladstone much rather wanted imperial expansion to be controlled by “fiscal constitution,” but world affairs tend to impinge themselves upon empire so that the ‘home office,’ as it were, is not the sole or even the last word on imperial policy.
Well then, the first principle for understanding Gladstone’s approach to empire is the influence of Edmund Burke (1729/30-1797), an Irish political philosopher and sometime MP. From Burke, Gladstone learned “a sensitivity to national differences, and a historicist approach to constitutional conservation through change and reform – or, if we prefer, a historicist approach to ‘organic growth as permanent change’.” The first – sensitivity to national difference – was generally a function of Burke’s Irish perspective. The latter – an historicist approach to change and reform – gave rise to the idea that government should “legislate in such a way as to provide a constitutional framework for peaceful and orderly progress.” Ultimately, Gladstone’s hope was that a natural disposition of love and devotion would obtain between colonies and England through governing upon the principle of freedom rather than force and coercion. Conciliation of indigenous peoples was an essential component, but coercion was not totally ruled out as a short-term necessity when those yearning for freedom are unfit for self-government and/or dangerously misguided by demagogues.
A primary locale for the working out of this Burkean model is Biagini’s second key to interpreting Gladstone on empire: financial stability. A key way for colonies to demonstrate their fitness for self-government was financial viability. But there are further implications to the financial dimension, because to achieve such stability and viability entails the adoption of a corresponding Western and commercial ideology. It is here that the cultural diversity of empire could produce different paths of imperial governance. That is, cultural recalcitrance (as Gladstone appears to have seen in Islamic peoples) was an impediment to political and economic independence.
Finally, the principle of self-government (underlying both of the previous two points) is Biagini’s third key to interpreting Gladstone on empire. Gladstone approached imperial administration not from the perspective of efficiency alone, but rather “combined considerations of administrative and fiscal efficiency and responsibility with concerns for civil and political liberties.” Efficient government could be sacrificed for the sake of educating and grooming a people toward self-government.
Thus, Gladstone’s approach to empire is shaped by sensitivity to national difference and historicism learned from Burke so that empire was approached in much the same way as reform: with an emphasis on social and political peace, retrenchment, responsibility, moral improvement and civic virtue.
