Ben Weinstein

Throughout the reform crisis of the 1830s and 1840s, Archibald Alison was among the most outspoken and persistent of all Cassandras. His pessimistic, sometimes even apocalyptic, visions of the post-reform future filled countless pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the leading organ of ultra-Tory doom-mongery (and referred to as ‘MAGA’ by its reactionary readers). During the 1830s, when Blackwood’s hysteria over reform reached fever pitch, Alison was almost certainly the journal’s most prolific contributor. Indeed, Maurice Milne has estimated that Alison published roughly one-and-a-half million words in Blackwood’s, and that two-thirds of these words were devoted to political analysis and complaint.¹ Given his renown as an historian of the French Revolution, especially as author of the best-selling History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (1833–42), scholars interested in Alison have tended to focus on the ways in which European developments informed his analysis of the British reform crisis.²

This chapter acknowledges the importance of European comparisons in Alison’s work, but also seeks to emphasise the centrality of extra-European, and especially imperial, developments and perspectives to Alison’s anxieties about the post-reform future. In particular, I hope to illustrate Alison’s fear that the ‘English revolution’ (a phrase that Alison used repeatedly in his work to describe the changes of the 1830s and 1840s) would initially be most damaging on the imperial periphery, before rebounding and inflicting even greater damage on metropolitan Britain. As he put it in 1833,

[revolution] will gradually spread from the extremities to the heart of empire. They [the great colonial interests] were the first to fall before the revolutionary tempest, which now whistles through the empire, just as the external leaves and branches are torn from the oak tree before the great arms are crushed off, which spring from the heart and are coeval with its first growth.³

This anxiety was compounded by Alison’s more generalised concern over the permeation and corruption of metropolitan political culture by extra-European practices. Indeed, in both his historical scholarship and his political journalism, Alison drew heavily on a Scottish enlightenment world view that can only be described as ‘orientalist’.⁴ Alison quite clearly worried that the purely domestic impacts of constitutional reform would be dangerous on their own terms. However, he also believed that the shocks initiated by these reforms would not be confined to the Atlantic archipelago. In fact, he was certain that these shocks would gain amplitude as they fanned out across the empire, to the point that they would fatally undermine the stability of the post-Napoleonic imperial order. But these shocks would also rebound, and when they did they would bring with them revolutionary changes to Britain itself which would fatally undermine, and ultimately ‘orientalise’, domestic institutions.

Much of Alison’s work presented French, and indeed wider European, developments as valuable salutary lessons to contemporary Britain. Many of Alison’s early contributions to Blackwood’s drew explicit parallels between the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 and the contemporary British reform crisis, and Alison clearly invoked the French experience as a cautionary tale.⁵ Michael Michie’s monograph, still the only book-length account of Alison’s life and work, emphasises this dynamic, noting that ‘Alison’s analysis of the French Revolution, and his comparison of it with the development of liberty in Britain, provided him with the political framework within which all his subsequent accounts of contemporary politics were set’.⁶ Clare Simmons, meanwhile, has described Alison’s history of the French Revolution as operating in what she calls the ‘prophetic mode’ of historical writing, aimed as much at addressing the British future as the French past.⁷ Moreover, the Franco-British comparison seems to have cut in both directions. In other words, in addition to providing a cautionary tale for contemporary Britain, Alison’s reading of French developments was deeply informed by his understanding of the British present. As Simmons puts it, whatever Alison’s original intentions in writing on revolutionary France, as he began to produce the early volumes amidst the ‘days of May’, the History became a clear ‘Tory response to the Reform Act’.⁸ Revolutionary France provided contemporary Britain with a useful warning, and contemporary Britain provided a lens through which to study the pathologies of revolutionary France.

But what kind of warning, exactly, did revolutionary France provide and, more to the point, how did Alison present this ‘cautionary tale’? The answer is surprising, given the received status of Alison’s History as an explicitly Tory interpretation of the revolution.⁹ Alison’s analysis is not nakedly partisan in its tone, assumptions and judgements. In fact, his analysis rests on a series of tepid early nineteenth-century commonplaces that would have appealed as much to moderate reformers as to right-of-centre sceptics of reform. In addition to advancing a series of very well-established centrist pieties about the merits of constitutional balance, ‘regulated liberty’ and the organic development of institutions, the History endorses a Whiggish faith in the merits of progress through sensible and timely concession. In fact, Alison explains the 1789 revolution as a consequence of historic French resistance to timely and sensible reform and adaptation. The under-development of the French middle class, the centralisation of power in the French crown, the political weakness of the French aristocracy, and the general immiseration of the third estate are presented as evidence of, and indeed consequences of, the French failure to modernise. For this reason, the causes of the 1789 revolution, as presented by Alison, were not immediately applicable to the British context, where these political, social and economic failings were not operative, mainly due to the astute and successful constitutional settlements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This analysis would have met with much agreement at Holland House, Bowood and any of the other Whig salons so brilliantly brought to life by Peter Mandler in his Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform.¹⁰

Unlike its causes, the revolution’s outcomes were characterised by Alison as highly relevant to the British context, and indeed as a strong warning against any precipitous programme of reform. In his analysis of revolutionary outcomes, Alison emphasised the dangers of unintended consequences. In particular, he claimed that French ‘moderates’, who had initially been able to manage, if not completely thwart, plans for speculative change, lost all control over events during the earliest phases of the revolution. As developments spiralled out of control, radicals began to unleash all manner of untested, theoretical and synthetic changes, many of which, in the fullness of time, encouraged the emergence of Napoleon’s despotism and consequently proved fatal to French liberty.¹¹ This Burkean analysis, in which democratic innovation comprises the most pernicious of all political sins, and ensures its despotic nemesis, had clear applications to Britain in the grip of a reform crisis. Indeed, it was precisely this runaway momentum, paired with and fed by an increased willingness to entertain visionary projects for change, that Alison’s early Blackwood’s articles characterised as both the key dynamic of the French revolution and the chief danger facing Britain on the cusp of a self-inflicted programme of constitutional and economic reform.¹² Just as the excesses of the revolution had enabled Napoleonic tyranny, so the slower-moving ‘English revolution’ of the 1830s would also devour its children.¹³

If, in its Burkean dynamics, its celebration of constitutional balance, and its general antipathy to innovation, Alison’s History offered very little deviation from conventional British accounts of the revolution, in one way it departed from the norm. Namely, Alison’s work relates its analysis in a much more explicitly orientalist idiom than other early histories. I would suggest that this has been somewhat under-appreciated in the scholarship. Orientalist motifs are found throughout the History’s ten volumes, and especially in volume eight, where Alison spends nearly 100 pages outlining the core features of eastern autocracy.¹⁴ One might even claim that ‘oriental servitude’ and ‘Asiatic despotism’ are among the key organising concepts through which Alison made sense of French developments. Not only, for instance, did Alison explain the impact of the August decrees by suggesting that they paved the road to ‘Asiatic despotism’, he also claimed that the ‘slavery and decrepitude of oriental despotism’ were the defining features of French political life from at least 1792.¹⁵ To what end, asks Alison in the History’s tenth and final volume, did the revolutionaries murder the king, guillotine the nobility, destroy the church, confiscate estates and bankrupt the nation? Alison’s answer is simply this: ‘to exchange European for Asiatic civilisation’. Moreover, once debased in this way, France would struggle to restore its liberty. Should the wrongs of the revolution – especially the widespread confiscation of aristocratic property, but also the centralisation of state power – not be put right, the History confidently predicts that France will continue its decline into Asiatic dis-function. ‘If reparation has become impossible’, observes Alison, ‘retribution must be endured; and that retribution, in the necessary result of the crimes of which it is the punishment, is the doom of oriental slavery’.¹⁶

As suggested above, Alison’s reading of the post-Napoleonic European landscape was also deeply informed by orientalist themes and tropes. In fact, and rather counter-intuitively, he believed that the July Revolution, which had humbled the French throne and placed it under the influence of the haute bourgeoisie, would make France more prone to ‘Asiatic’ autocracy. In particular, Alison characterised the new revolutionary bureaucracy in terms familiar to later Victorian critics of French ‘centralisation’. However, in Alison’s hands this tendency to administrative centralisation was framed as an oriental innovation, rather than any sort of native French practice. In an 1833 essay devoted to the failings of the French regime, Alison emphasised the post-revolutionary newness of centralised state power and he expressed his critique in thoroughly orientalist terms. ‘New France’, he claimed:

has not the elements within it to frame a constitutional throne. The people must remain slaves to the central Government, because they have destroyed the superior classes who might shield them from its oppression. Asiatic has succeeded European civilisation, and political power is no longer to be found independent of regal appointment. All superiority depends on the possession of office; the distinctions of hereditary rank, the descent of considerable property, have alike disappeared; over a nation of ryots, who earn a scanty subsistence by the sweat of their brow, is placed a horde of Egyptian taskmasters, who wring from them the fruits of their toil.¹⁷

In these kinds of comparisons, Alison drew heavily on what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has called ‘the topoi of Oriental despotism: absence of laws, arbitrary royal power and a penchant for blood-lust, absence of private property’, but he adapted these topoi to fit his European subjects.¹⁸ Consequently, as in the passage above, the pitiless centralised administrative state and its unaccountable bureaucracy could be substituted for the blood-thirsty Suba or Sultan. Just as all political authority in Asiatic regimes was said to be vested in the person of the sultan, unchecked by any kind of permanent aristocracy, so in the orientalised West all power emanated from appointed officials, unchecked by mitigating institutions or any form of local self-government. Perhaps nowhere is this schema clearer than in a fascinating 1835 essay entitled ‘Whither Are We Tending?’, which can be read as Alison’s European-facing contribution to the ‘spirit of the age’ debate – taking its place alongside similar essays by Mill, Carlyle, Southey, Robinson and others. In this essay, Alison’s vision of the British future is very explicitly informed by his understanding of an ‘orientalised’ French present. As in his Blackwood’s essay ‘France in 1833’, Alison characterises the July monarchy as an over-centralised despotic bureaucracy. The faint and feeble glimmers of ‘European liberty’ that had survived the 1789 revolution have been entirely snuffed out by the revolution of the barricades and its aftermath. The essay marvels at the servility and apathy of the mass of French property holders in the face of the ‘arbitrary and despotic’ acts of Louis Philippe. ‘In truth,’ Alison asks, ‘who can look at the present condition of France and seriously confirm that either liberty exists there, or that there is any reasonable prospect of its being re-established?’¹⁹ As evidence of the regime’s tyranny, Alison points to its bloody treatment of the Canut rebels, its suppression of the dissenting press and its eagerness to fill new prisons such as Sainte-Pélagie in Paris. Disturbing though these developments were in themselves, Alison’s greatest concern was that they portended the British future. As the essay’s title suggests, ‘Whither Are We Tending?’ is an exercise in political prophecy, and, to this end, it suggests that the reformed British state will necessarily follow the July monarchy’s slide into centralised tyranny. ‘Such is the state of France’, claims Alison, ‘and such, when the triumph of the revolutionists is complete, will be the state of England’.²⁰ The enabling development will be identical in both places: the centralisation of state power, the enervation of local, regional and peripheral interests, and the decimation of the conventional ‘pillars of European liberty’. With these pillars of liberty destroyed, Britain will enter into a death spiral which can only end in ‘the servility of oriental bondage’, ‘perpetual, unchanging despotism’ and ‘never ceasing slavery’. In seeking ‘American equality’, the reformers will find only ‘Asiatic servitude’.²¹ In its closing paragraphs, the essay outlines Alison’s remarkable vision of a far-flung future in which a completely orientalised Britain awaits its delivery from Asiatic slavery by a ‘fresh race of northern conquerors’ who will re-establish all the European virtues that have been so foolishly given away by the ‘English revolutionists’ of the 1830s.²²

But how, exactly, does Alison characterise these virtues of European liberty and civilisation? His analysis enumerates five ‘pillars’ of European freedom: lineal royal descent; a powerful hereditary aristocracy; strong church establishments; legislatures representing substantial property-owners; and self-selecting municipal corporations. Although Alison describes each of these pillars as vital to the maintenance of European liberty, the individual pillars are not presented as entirely virtuous in themselves. Rather, the value of each pillar is most fully realised in the company of, and in equilibrium with, the rest. When they stand together, Alison claims, these five pillars ensure the ‘peculiar liberty’ enjoyed by British subjects and act as ‘barriers to arbitrary power’. Here, again, Alison celebrates ‘balance’, but also permanency. The durability of these pillars encouraged both social stability and steady, long-term civilisational ‘progress’. If they are, as Alison claims, the most efficient support to the cause of liberty, ‘they are so because they are permanent bodies, actuated by lasting interests, and not liable to be swept away by every sudden impression. Slow to move, therefore they are tenacious of purpose.’²³ In comparison, Alison finds that ‘all these features are awanting in Asiatic civilisation’, where the defining dynamic is an aimless transience caused by the complete centralisation of political authority in the person of the sovereign.²⁴

Yet, despite the ensemble quality of these five pillars, Alison clearly regarded one pillar as more important than the rest. A strong hereditary aristocracy is repeatedly characterised by Alison as the best, and historically the most effective, check against despotism, ‘Asiatic’ and otherwise. Throughout his journalism, and also in the pages of his historical scholarship, Alison presents a strong aristocracy as the defining feature of European civilisation and the ‘ordered liberty’ which it produces. Frequently, this European advantage is posed in explicitly orientalist terms. In calling on the Lords to reject constitutional reform in 1831, for instance, Alison leaned very heavily on such comparisons, reminding his readers that the Peers comprised an essential barrier against despotism, and going so far as to claim that:

all that we now possess, or that distinguishes us from the Asiatic people – our laws, our liberty, our religion – have been preserved by the barrier of the feudal aristocracy … Compare the steady progress, regular government, and unceasing improvement, of the European states, with the perpetual vacillation, periodical anarchy, and general slavery, of the Asiatic dynasties, and the immeasurable benefits of a hereditary nobility must appear obvious to the most inconsiderate observer. The freedom which is now so much the object of deserved eulogium was nursed in its cradle by the feudal nobility.²⁵

Again and again in Alison’s writing, the absence of this aristocratic safeguard is characterised as counteracting any prospect of progress for ‘Asiatic’ polities, and the presence of this aristocratic barrier is characterised as underwriting European liberty.²⁶

Importantly, and rather predictably, not all European aristocracies were regarded by Alison as equally up to the task of defending ordered liberty. In particular, Alison uses the French example to explain the dangers of a corrupted aristocracy and the prospects, even at the heart of the European metropole, for ‘oriental’ backsliding. In Alison’s telling, the ultimate cause of the 1789 revolution, for instance, lay quite clearly with an over-privileged, but also weak and servile, French aristocracy which could not stand up to the democratic challenge when it came. ‘Not the corruption of the court, nor the infidelity of the philosophers,’ claimed Alison, ‘produced the Revolution – for these were of partial application; but the pride of the nobles, based on centuries of exclusive power, and intolerable in an age of rising improvement.’²⁷

By contrast, Alison refuses to blame the British aristocracy for their own prospective demise, which he instead attributes to the impact of the 1832 constitutional reforms. Despite their manful resistance to parliamentary reform, Alison characterises the British and Irish aristocracy as the very first, and the most completely devastated, victims of the new constitution. The principal aim of the reform campaign, Alison claimed, was to undermine not only the direct political authority of the House of Lords, but also the indirect political influence of the nobility within the Commons. More than that, the ‘movement party’ sought to broadly de-legitimise the peerage and convince the public to regard them not as ‘friends’ or ‘protectors’, but as ‘enemies’ and ‘oppressors’. In so far as constitutional reform embodied these notions, the 1832 reforms comprised a political but also ‘a social revolution’.²⁸ Indeed, Alison regarded the popular mistrust of the aristocracy engendered in the course of the reform campaign as among the very worst outcomes of the reform crisis.²⁹ To Alison’s mind this was doubly unfortunate because, unlike their corrupted French counterparts, the British aristocracy fully merited their prestige and power. Moreover, they had not bargained this power away, but retained it until the moment of their desolation.

Theirs was no long period of weakness or decay’, observed Alison, ‘no decline of virtue or failure of patriotism, no long and degrading history of the Empire, succeeding the triumphs of the Republic, sullied the overthrow of the British nobility. They fell in the fullness of their glory and their usefulness.³⁰

The consequences of this assault on the political authority of the aristocracy could not have been more severe or far reaching. ‘By the destruction of the power of the nobility’, predicted Alison, ‘we shall be handed over, first, to the horrors of popular licentiousness, and, next, to the tranquillity of undisturbed despotism. This is not a fanciful apprehension—it is the uniform history of the decay of freedom in past ages: future historians will probably point to the present Reform Bill as the first step in the extinction of British liberty’.³¹ Ultimately, the fall of the British aristocracy had placed Britain on the French road to oriental ruin.

The desolation of the aristocracy, and the extent to which this would orientalise the domestic political culture, was a key theme within Alison’s critique of the reform crisis. However, it was by no means the only theme within this critique. Closely aligned with it was Alison’s belief that constitutional reform would homogenise parliamentary politics and fatally undermine the representation of ‘minority interests’. Indeed, the aristocracy was just one of the minority interests that would now be swamped by the crude majoritarianism of the reformed constitution.³² In Alison’s telling, the richness, variety and capaciousness of the unreformed constitution, its ability to accommodate a wide range of antagonistic groups and interests, had been its crowning glory and had attracted the admiration of foreign observers.³³ The reformed constitution, by contrast, would inaugurate the narrow and self-serving tyranny of the £10 householder. ‘The circumstances which render the present reform utterly fatal to every interest of society,’ observed Alison in August 1831,

are its being based on a uniform system of representation; the overwhelming preponderance which it gives to numbers over property; the undue majority which it confers to inhabitants of towns … the electors composed – or, what is the same thing, for the most part composed – of a certain class in society, cannot sympathise with other bodies; they are careless as to their complaints, indifferent to their welfare, swayed probably by an adverse interest.³⁴

Whereas ‘uniformity of representation’, as Alison called it, might be workable in young and relatively undifferentiated societies such as Jacksonian America – which Alison seems to have conceptualised as Jefferson’s yeoman farmer ideal – or the Canadian colonies, it could only spell ruin for old, highly civilised European ones. British society, and by extension the British economy, was simply too fully developed, composed of too many distinct parts, to endure the supremacy of any one of these. Consequently, Alison’s central complaint focused not on enfranchisement, but on redistribution and disfranchisement. In fact, Alison claimed to be eager for the constitution to absorb the middle class, which he held in very high regard.³⁵ He was even happy to create new parliamentary constituencies that would more fully and directly represent the interests of these new voters. Consequently, for Alison the true act of spoliation was not the enfranchisement of the £10 householders; it was, instead, the abolition of so many nomination boroughs and the disfranchisement of the interests represented through them. As Alison put it in 1831, anticipating the most egregious impacts of reform:

the numerous and weighty interests now represented by the nomination boroughs will no longer be able to raise their voice in Parliament: and if they are, a relentless majority, tied down by pledges to their imperious constituents, will dispose of their opposition as effectually as the resistance to reform has been overthrown in the present legislature.³⁶

Importantly, Alison’s ‘weighty interests’ were almost entirely colonial. Miles Taylor has noted this type of colonial-centred objection to the reform legislation, and has also acknowledged Alison’s role in articulating some of these objections.³⁷ Clearly, Alison was not alone in his concern over the disfranchisement of colonial interests. Yet, with the possible exception of Joseph Hume, he was perhaps the most outspoken figure on this dimension of constitutional reform. Indeed, anxieties over the representation of colonial interests were central to Alison’s critique of constitutional reform, and they ensured that this critique would be tied to his other great cause: protectionism. Throughout his journalism, Alison explains the dangers of constitutional reform through its impact on empire and imperial interests. First, he quite clearly tied the fate of imperial interests directly to the fate of the nomination boroughs. ‘The most valuable feature of the British constitution’, he observed in 1831,

that of affording an inlet through the close boroughs to all the great and varied interests of the empire, will be destroyed. The reform bill, in this view, may be entitled ‘a bill for disfranchising the colonial, commercial and shipping interests, and for investing the exclusive right of returning members to Parliament in the populace of Great Britain and Ireland’.³⁸

Moreover, Alison nurtured this view long after the deed had been done. Writing seventeen years after the Great Reform Act, Alison recalled a prelapsarian time when the franchise had been ‘multiform and various’, when not only the colonial interests but also fledgeling political talent of all stripes found a ‘ready inlet in the close boroughs’, and when the virtual representation offered by these constituencies held together the empire ‘in all its parts’, not least by the protection that it offered to colonial commerce.³⁹

With the closing of this ‘inlet’ the colonial interests had been silenced, and the empire had been sacrificed at the altar of political economy and free trade. Indeed, Alison understood the removal of colonial commercial preference and protection to be a direct result, and indeed an intention, of the 1832 reforms.⁴⁰ His essay ‘The Crowning of the Column and the Crushing of the Pedestal’, written in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of the Navigation Acts, and his essay ‘Navigation Laws’, written a year earlier, make this abundantly clear, and both essays link policies of free trade and the death of colonial preference directly to parliamentary reform. As Alison put it in the 1848 essay, ‘whatever we were in the days when Napoleon said it, we are now, if not a nation of shopkeepers, at least a nation ruled by shopkeepers. The colonies are entirely unrepresented’.⁴¹ The pecuniary interests of the new electorate trumped all, and these interests did not align with imperial preference. The decision to equalise duties on Canadian and Baltic timber, for instance, was explained by Alison as a direct consequence of the need to satisfy the wishes of the ‘English ten pounders’.⁴² Even the East Indian interest, which presented itself as aligned with the free trade lobby in many respects, and which retained a kind of parliamentary influence through the many MPs who were also shareholders, was in Alison’s view immediately compromised by constitutional reform. The Charter Act (1833) was rushed through parliament with minimal debate. Alison interpreted this haste, and the lack of any real negotiation over the Charter terms, as a consequence of attenuated East India Company (EIC) parliamentary representation. Moreover, through its removal of the China monopoly, the Charter itself clearly condemned the Company to bankruptcy and eventual dissolution. This too was a consequence of the schedule A and B disfranchisements and the short-sightedness of the £10 householders.⁴³

Damaging though the 1832 reform might have been to Canadian timber merchants and EIC nabobs, when Alison complained of the abandonment of ‘colonial interests’ he generally meant the West Indian interest. In fact, Alison repeatedly singled out the post-reform ill treatment of the West Indies as uniquely unjust, once going so far as to claim that ‘there is perhaps no parallel to be found, in the annals of human misrule and oppression, to the catalogue of injuries by which the dominant multitude in the British islands have alienated the affections of their West Indian possessions’.⁴⁴ As Michael Taylor has recently demonstrated, Alison should be counted as a member of that diffuse network known simply as ‘the interest’.⁴⁵ In addition to characterising Alison’s racial thought, Catherine Hall has also outlined Alison’s personal and family connections to West Indian slavery. According to Hall, Alison’s many rationalisations and justifications of the ‘peculiar institution’ were at least partly informed by these personal connections.⁴⁶ Regardless, Alison’s strong critique of slave emancipation sat at the heart of his wider critique of the reform crisis. In addition to having been enabled by metropolitan constitutional reform, in Alison’s critique slave emancipation was also a revolutionary act in itself, insofar as the freeing of slaves cleared the ground for immediate social dislocation and economic decline across the West Indies. In the first place, Alison argued that the West Indian slaves were not prepared for emancipation and that no period of apprenticeship, especially one of such brief duration, could possibly prepare them for what Alison called the ‘desolation of freedom’. This critique (which was entirely conventional among pro-slavery lobbyists) was partly underpinned by Alison’s aversion to abrupt social changes induced by legislation, but also by his racial ideology, which, although it advanced developmental, rather than essentialised, notions of African inferiority, nonetheless also emphasised the wide chasm of evolutionary time standing between ‘Anglo-Saxon civilisation’ and ‘African barbarity’. In particular, Alison, like many apologists of slavery, emphasised the barbarous preference for sloth over toil, and anticipated that freed slaves would refuse to enter free labour markets, retreating into rude self-sufficiency. This choice, in Alison’s view, would condemn the freed slaves to degenerate into ever more profound states of barbarity. Atavism would sweep through the ex-slave colonies, resulting not only in social degeneration but also in economic ruin. Crucially, the economic ruin of the West Indies would also spell economic ruin for Britain itself, and in this way the revolution of the imperial periphery would be brought back to the heart of the empire.

More importantly, high-handed metropolitan mistreatment of the West Indies would, in Alison’s view, inevitably provoke scepticism within the colonies over the value of the imperial relationship and possibly even lead to the empire’s collapse. ‘Amidst such an unstable and ruinous system [that is, the reformed constitution]’, Alison wondered on the eve of reform, ‘how is the colonial empire of Britain to be maintained? The answer is obvious – it will speedily be dismembered; and England, in addition to the destruction of its freedom and prosperity, will have to mourn the loss of its immense colonial possessions’.⁴⁷ In the case of the West Indies, Alison claimed that slave emancipation would inevitably drive the Caribbean colonies into the waiting arms of the United States, which would be only too happy to expand its slave economy.⁴⁸ Moreover, it was clear to Alison, as a strong protectionist, that schemes for free trade would only stiffen colonial resolve to sever ties. Alison’s concern over the unravelling of the empire peaked in the aftermath of the Canadian rebellions and as apprenticeship ended, as his July 1839 Blackwood’s piece ‘Colonial Government and the Jamaica Question’ makes clear. ‘Colonial Government’ expresses Alison’s severe pessimism over the future of the empire, and his conviction that the unity of the empire will soon be ‘put to the test’. Noting evidence of discontent spanning the empire – from the ‘great trek’ out of the Cape to the anti-transportation movement in New South Wales and the ‘rebellious spirit of our Greek subjects’ on the Ionian Islands – the essay claims that the fate of the empire rests on a knife edge and that a single ‘shock of adverse fortune’ might bring the whole edifice crashing down.⁴⁹ Surveying historical analogies, drawn mainly from the classical world, Alison concludes that ‘colonial jealousy and discontent is the rock on which the great maritime powers of the world have hitherto split’ and he fears that, in its myopic and selfish mistreatment of the colonial interests, Britain has learned nothing from this record of loss and decline.⁵⁰ Interestingly, however, colonial discontent, and even prospective colonial rebellion, was characterised by Alison as a consequence of more than just unpopular legislation and the material undermining of colonial interests. It was also a consequence of the new political forms initiated by constitutional reform. By simultaneously valorising parliamentary sovereignty and withholding actual political agency from the colonial legislatures, the reformed British state created a very powerful source of colonial discontent. Again turning to historical comparison, and assessing the relative proximate causes of past imperial implosions, Alison observes that ‘it is the denial to one part of the empire of the privileges and forms of government which are enjoyed by another … which is often the more immediate cause of the rupture’.⁵¹ In other words, ‘democratic’ states cannot maintain autocratic empires. Yet, as one would expect, Alison was not in favour of extending democratic constitutions to the colonies. Nor, by 1839, did Alison believe that direct colonial representation within the Westminster parliament was possible. The fatal step, reforming the constitution in 1832, had been taken and no remedial effort could possibly save the empire once the £10 householder had been given the whip hand.

But, as the catastrophic vision mapped out in ‘Whither Are We Tending?’ suggests, the impact of the ‘English revolution’ would not be contained within the imperial periphery. Events there would necessarily rebound to destroy the imperial metropole itself, and the implosion would be spectacular. An old, highly civilised (that is, urbanised), increasingly overpopulated and sclerotic society such as that found in Britain required the counter-balance offered by ‘young’, under-populated and rustic colonial societies. Should these societies emancipate themselves from the colonial relationship, Britain’s decrepitude would become more pronounced and more problematic. Indeed, Alison argued that Britain would suffer far more than her colonies in the aftermath of any such separation. As Alison put it when contemplating West Indian independence:

the old and the young are mutually dependent on each other; but the consequences of a rupture are likely to be more irreparable to a man of seventy than to a youth of fifteen … teeming with inhabitants, bowed down by debt, overflowing with capital which cannot find employment, and paupers who cannot earn bread, it [Britain] will never recover the loss of a portion of the empire, through which so large an artery of its heart’s blood flows; and the ruinous policy which severs from its body so fair a member, will cause it to bleed to death, or to perish under the attempt to staunch the wound.⁵²

In Alison’s analysis, Britain’s status as a maritime power and a commercial nation only compounded its vulnerability. Indeed, historically, for such maritime states the loss of colonies has ‘inevitably been the certain forerunner of approaching ruin’.⁵³ Consequently, while the undermining of the five pillars of European freedom would nurture the growth of popular despotism, Britain’s ultimate desolation, and its final decline into Asiatic tyranny, will be sealed by the loss of its empire. Only once the colonial commercial interests have been sacrificed, the slaves have been freed, the China trade has been ‘thrown open to the clamorous multitudes’ and the colonies have been lost will the ‘English revolution’ come to its inevitable conclusion.

Such extreme disasters will for certain produce one effect. All parties will become weary of distraction and suffering; the period, the inevitable period, will arrive, when the dominion of a firm hand will be required to staunch the wounds of the state. A Caesar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon will seize the sceptre, and military despotism close the drama of British reform. It will close after years of anguish and suffering; after the empire has lost its colonies, and with them its naval supremacy; after unheard of suffering has tamed our people, and the glories of the British name have ceased forever.⁵⁴

In some respects, Alison’s concerns over an imperial rebound, coupled with his orientalist reading of French and British political developments, hark back to earlier panics over nabobism.⁵⁵ Like the eighteenth-century critics of Thomas Rumbold, Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, and others, Alison worried about the permeability of metropolitan culture by imperial vices, and he seemed to have believed in the vulnerability of metropolitan political norms and institutions to the challenges of the wider world. Like these critics he also emphasised that civilisational hierarchies admitted of ‘progress’ but also backsliding. There is no question that Alison’s intellectual debts to Scottish enlightenment thinkers opened him to such an orientation. That said, it would be a mistake to understand Alison’s critique as essentially a revival of older anxieties or as a fundamentally backward-looking response to reform. Rather, his anxieties were informed by the prospective demolition of the post-Napoleonic empire. Alison realised correctly that the ‘pro-consular despotisms’, the penal regimes and the slave colonies of the ‘autocratic empire’ would be the earliest casualties of reform, and he realised that ‘reform’ would be most extensive outside of metropolitan Britain. In other words, Alison’s orientation was anticipatory rather than merely reactionary. Alison understood that the political economists owned the imperial future, and that the ‘colonial reformers’ would use the empire as a laboratory for their ideas. To a degree impossible in metropolitan Britain, the empire’s ‘archaic’ institutions and practices would be swept away by a tide of modernisation and ‘improvement’. The push would be for ‘systematic colonisation’, ‘free’ colonial labour markets and free trade. Moreover, reformed government at home would necessarily lead to ‘responsible government’ and liberalised political settlements abroad. The age of the despotic governor had passed, and a new generation of ‘Anglicising’ governors took their places. In India, a Benthamite governor-general pushed hard for reform and retrenchment; in the Cape, a Whiggish Governor presided over what one historian has described as ‘nothing short of a revolution’ in that colony’s administration;⁵⁶ in the Canadas, a ‘radical’ Governor, aided (to put it mildly) by prominent Benthamites, solved the problem of rebellion by granting self-determination and gerrymandering an Anglo majority. Indeed, the magnitude of the changes on the imperial periphery seems to have justified Alison’s charge of ‘revolution’. The reordering not only of colonial labour systems, but also of colonial law and administration suggests nothing less.⁵⁷ Undoubtedly, much of Alison’s analysis of the reform crisis was overblown and even ridiculous. The empire did not unravel during the 1830s and 1840s. Rather, it grew and became even more central to British metropolitan prosperity. Alison eventually reconciled himself to this new empire and to reformed politics more generally. However, his critique as he navigated the reform decades is suggestive of the globalised alarm felt by some who lived through these changes. Fantastical though many of his claims were, and although many of his predictions never came to pass, there was some truth to Alison’s analysis. Perhaps because of Alison’s hyperbole, and because the empire survived its transformation, historians of political reform have not taken the scale of this transformation seriously enough?