'An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.' Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) is the best account of the history and working of the British political system ever written. As arguments raged in mid-Victorian Britain about giving the working man the vote, and democracies overseas were pitched into despotism and civil war, Bagehot took a long, cool look at the 'dignified' and 'efficient' elements which made the English system the envy of the world. His analysis of the monarchy, the role of the prime minister and cabinet, and comparisons with the American presidential system are astute and timeless, and pertinent to current discussions surrounding devolution and electoral reform.
Combining the wit and panache of a journalist with the wisdom of a man of letters steeped in evolutionary ideas and historical knowledge, Bagehot produced a book which is always thoughtful, often funny, and seldom dull. This edition reproduces Bagehot's original 1867 work in full, and introduces the reader to the dramatic political events that surrounded its publication.

The English Constitution

The Utilitarians have usually been regarded as exponents of a moral theory, but in this work Dr Stokes lays emphasis on their claim to have developed a practical science of society. Political failure caused their practical character to languish in England, but in India the Utilitarian principles won far greater success. He analyzes James Mill's influence as the London head of the Indian administration on Macaulay's Benthamite reforms and on Fitzjames Stephen's significance in the passage of Utilitarianism into Imperialism.

The English Utilitarians and India.

A History of the Pacific Islands

Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin

Victorian Bibliography for 1999

i. Officially, Britain was a reluctant coloniser in the Pacific. Unwilling to take on the expense and responsibility of colonial administration, or to interfere with the imperial ambitions of other European powers in the region, successive British governments in the nineteenth century turned down offers of protectorates and other opportunities to colonize Pacific lands. But the energies and ambitions of individual British subjects were not similarly constrained, and the many who went to the Pacific to evangelize, to plant, and to trade established a strong unofficial British presence in the region. Acts of private colonization and a range of quasi-colonialist activities by Britons eventually forced their government to alter imperial policy and take on island protectorates and colonies, but except for the annexation of Fiji in 1874, this did not begin to happen until the late 1880s. For most of the century, Britain contented itself with passing a series of laws which attempted to control what its subjects did on the other side of the world, while minimizing responsibility for the administration of colonies.1 This tension between the expansive energies of individuals and the curbing power of law, which characterized British activity in the Pacific in the nineteenth century, is evident in R. L. Stevenson's Pacific fiction. His novellas "The Beach of Falesa" (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) depict the shadow empire created by traders and missionaries operating outside imperial boundaries. The realm of unofficial colonialism in the Pacific, as elsewhere, was marked by the practices of piracy and slavery - twin spectres which also haunted the official British Empire and its claims to moral legitimacy. British policy in the Pacific became driven by the need to separate the empire proper from these practices, which government and public opinion disavowed, but which some renegade British subjects embraced. However, in Stevenson's fiction, exploration of the moral and legal dubiety of the unofficial empire suggests a critique of imperialism itself. In both cases, the relation between piracy, slavery, and empire centred on the most highly charged topic in European relations with the nineteenth-century Pacific: labour. The problem of obtaining labour was the great problem in the economics of colonialism. It always confronted those who wished to exploit new territory economically but were faced

Piracy, slavery, and the imagination of empire in stevenson's pacific fiction

Stevenson's ‘sterling domestic fiction’, ‘the beach of falesá’

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503591

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law

Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author's Profession

Katherine Mansfield’s story of a white (Pakeha) child kidnapped by Maori women and taken to their community is formally distinguished by its creation of a ‘naive’ perspective on colonialism through the use of a young child as the narrative focalizer. The story illuminates and problematizes the historical question of the place of children in empire. With reference to works by Stevenson and Ballantyne, this essay discusses the relation between Mansfield’s short story and the nineteenth-century tradition of imperial adventure fiction featuring child protagonists. It additionally compares the childhood perspective on colonialism offered by Mansfield with the ‘authorized’ perspectives presented in imperial literature specifically produced for child readers by publishing outlets such as the Religious Tract Society. Mansfield’s story, it will be seen, unsettles a hegemonic tradition of using children to filter an ‘innocent’ perspective on the colonial other. The question of the other is the major theoretical issue explored in this story, which explores the dynamic of ‘othering’ in an imperial context as a two-way, mutually determining process. Pearl is as exotic to her Maori hosts as they are to her. By leaving unresolved the question of the kidnappers’ motives, the story presents empire as an indeterminate space of mutual fear and desire between colonizers and colonized.

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Roslyn Jolly

Papers

Piracy, slavery, and the imagination of empire in stevenson's pacific fiction

Stevenson's ‘sterling domestic fiction’, ‘the beach of falesá’

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author's Profession

Children of Empire: Rereading Katherine Mansfield’s ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (1912)