Reviewed Work: Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 556, $35.65
Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects is a thought-provoking book that engages with a number of fascinating topics. First, she provides a wonderful examination of several generations of British Baptist missionaries in Jamaica and Birmingham. She examines how their ideas about slavery, emancipation, race, and freedom for Africans shifted over time. Second, she places Jamaica and Birmingham in one “analytic frame” (a fundamental tenet of post-colonial historiography) making the metropole-colony dynamic “mutually constitutive” (8). In other words, to understand the national formation, Hall argues, we “have to look outside it” (9). Finally, Hall’s work incorporates several mini-biographies, “A Cast of Characters,” throughout her work, which includes but is not limited to: Baptist missionaries (i.e. William Knibb), colonial politicians (Edward Eyre), and abolitionists (Joseph Sturge). These actors wrestle with a number of questions over ideological, social, and cultural issues arising in both colonial Jamaica and metropolitan Birmingham.
The fulcrum of Hall’s lengthy text is Baptist ministers and missionaries, which she follows from 1830 to 1867. In Part I, Hall introduces us to these missionaries, such as William Knibb. They were important agents for anti-slavery because they argued that Christianized black workers in Jamaica would industriously work without compulsion. Baptists evangelists like Knibb were “shocked by the moral degradation of slavery and the mindless existence…to which enslaved were condemned” (100). Missionaries and slaveholders clashed over the religious future of slaves. On one side, men like Knibb argued that slaves needed to be baptized and brought into the Christian faith. On the other side, planters feared that Christianity would lead slaves to demand for more freedom. By the 1823, a propaganda war erupted between anti-slavery missionaries and pro-slavery planters. Like Gelien Matthews, Hall argues that following the Jamaican Slave Rebellion of 1831 (later called the First Baptist War), abolitionists adopted the framing positions that emancipation would prevent another Haitian Revolution.
Following the abolition of African chattel slavery and apprenticeship (Part II), Hall examines how Englishmen started to question emancipation, especially in Birmingham. With the fall in West Indian sugar production, the removal of protective tariffs (free traders won out), and growing reports about the reemergence of African religion and African idleness in Jamaica—Englishmen started to claim that abolition was disastrous. This was most pronounced in Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 essay “Occasion Discourse on the Negro Question” (republished in 1853 with a more racist title). He clearly identified with the planters’ cause and argued that abolition “led to the ruin of the colonies, the ruin of the planters, and the ruin of black people who would not work” (349). The Baptist Missionary Society’s (BMS) hopeful vision of Jamaica as a Christianized industrious colony was no longer credible. The watershed moment for this change in thinking was the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865), led by a black Baptist leader named Paul Bogle (see video below). Following the rebellion, biological essentialism ascended to prominence. Englishmen used science to claim a genetic difference between whites and blacks, civilized and heathens. Although stalwart abolitionists continued their humanitarian crusade, according to Hall, Joseph Sturge’s death marked the passing of an older generation and the arrival of more racist one.
Hall’s work is wonderful and will play a large role in the development of my dissertation. First, her work has encouraged me to explore the British Missionary Society Archives. Religion has not been a major aspect of my preliminary research, so far, but the BMS collections at both Yale and Wheaton College will most certainly be fruitful. I also have her footnotes to help guide my archival research. Although she downplays the BMS’s involvement in India, it was helpful to see the Jamaican side (which I knew little about).
Second, I like the structure of this work and how Hall handles a large group of characters. I also deal with a diverse group of people who thought about anti-slavery in the Victorian Era. Her prose and intertwining of narrative, biography, and argument provides a nice blueprint for writing the intellectual and cultural histories of several individuals, groups, and societies. Finally, I enjoyed her transnational framework, which does not favor either the colony or metropole. She moves fluidly between Jamaica and Birmingham, making her argument and thoughts easy to follow. Moreover, I am also excited to see how the Morant Bay Rebellion influenced India. Both Matthews and Hall focus on rebellions and their importance in transforming abolitionism, ideas about race, and humanitarian reform movements. This is something I would like to explore as I move forward with my own research.
I want to conclude with a few words on her overarching narrative, which highlights the rise and fall of humanitarian sentiment in England during the Victorian period. I understand why historians like Hall make this argument, but I am still finding myself aligning with Richard Huzzey’s anti-slavery pluralism. I believe that the British Empire held a core set of anti-slavery principles, which was used for various ends. After reading Huzzey and Hall, however, I am thinking about how central these core anti-slavery principles were at any given time. This issue will most likely be my end project for this class. I agree with Huzzey that anti-slavery never goes away, but I also think it was not static. My feeling is that we should look at these core principles on a continuum. How central were these values during events such as: the debates over free trade, East Indian emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the Sepoy Rebellion, the scramble for Africa, and so forth. Instead of the solar system metaphor espoused by Huzzey, maybe we should think of it as a pendulum, where anti-slavery swings from one side to the other based on certain events.
Video of Morant Bay Slave Rebellion with Stuart Hall, Catherine’s Husband