All posts by lucymccann

The Flying Machine of Hiram Maxim

On Tuesday 31st July 1894 the American-born inventor and engineer Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) was testing the latest version of his flying machine at his home, Baldwyn’s Park near Bexley in Kent. He had laid out a steel track, 1800 feet in length, in order to run the machine in a straight line between the trees of the Park.

Photograph of Hiram Maxim's flying machine in the grounds of Baldwyn's Park, c.1894.

Hiram Maxim’s flying machine in the grounds of Baldwyn’s Park, c.1894. MS. 21798, file 4. Click to enlarge.

On the final attempt of the day, having increased the pressure of the machine’s steam boiler, the wheels rose from the track and it flew for eight seconds at a speed of 45 miles per hour before crashing to the ground. The flying machine weighed more than three tons. Maxim was on board along with two mechanics, Arthur Guthrie and Thomas Jackson.

Should this be recognised as the first heavier-than-air flight, nine and a half years before the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903?

Photograph of the flying machine after crash landing, 31 July 1894

The flying machine after crash landing, 31 July 1894. MS. 21798, file 4.

William McGregor Ross (1876-1940), a young admirer of Maxim who also became an engineer, thought that Maxim’s achievement had not received the recognition it deserved. He used every opportunity to correct this and a collection of papers and photographs, recently donated to the Bodleian by his grandson, records the efforts he made until the end of his life. William was educated at Southport Grammar School and began keeping a diary from an early age, recording in meticulous detail and tiny handwriting the events of his daily life. His diary of 1892, when he was 16 years old, reveals his interest in flying machines and in August he wrote to Hiram Maxim asking for advice on screw propellers.

William McGregor Ross's diary entry for 30 August 1892, describing the receipt of a letter from Hiram Maxim.

William McGregor Ross’s diary, 30 August 1892, MSS. Afr. s. 2305, box 1, item 3

Maxim replied (sending ‘several wrinkles’, i.e. tips or hints) and a lifelong friendship developed between them with Maxim and his wife Sarah supporting William’s interest in engineering, which he went on to study at Liverpool and Dublin Universities. In September 1892 William was invited to visit Baldwyn’s Park where he saw the development of the flying machine which Maxim had been working on for a year, eventually testing the thrust of over 200 types of propeller before the flight in 1894.

William McGregor Ross's diary entry for 5 September 1892, describing an invitation to visit the Maxims at Baldwyn's Park.

William McGregor Ross’s diary, 5 September 1892. MSS. Afr. s. 2305, box 1, item 3

William’s diary entry for 15 September 1892 records the running of the machine on the track through the Park, reaching a speed of 27.5 miles an hour. He notes that photographs were taken after the experiments and the donation to the Bodleian includes one of the photographs of young William together with Hiram Maxim on board the flying machine.

William McGregor Ross's diary entry for 15 September 1892, describing the testing of the flying machine.

William McGregor Ross’s diary, 15 September 1892. MSS. Afr. s. 2305, box 1, item 3

Photograph of William McGregor Ross and Hiram Maxim on the flying machine, 15 Sep 1892.

William McGregor Ross and Hiram Maxim on the flying machine, 15 Sep 1892. MS. 21798, file 4.

William did not witness the short flight in 1894 – his diary records that he was in Southport on the day – however his interest in flying machines continued as evidenced by a letter full of questions to Mrs Maxim in February 1899.

                 Letter from William McGregor Ross to Mrs Maxim, 9 Feb 1899. MS. 21798, file 2, click images to enlarge

Maxim continued to develop his machine but came to realise that powering it by steam, requiring boilers and water, added excessive weight and his experiments came to an end.

Following Hiram Maxim’s death in 1916 William continued to correspond with Sarah Maxim and in 1934 made particular efforts to have the 40th anniversary of the flight recognised, writing to the national press, scientific journals, the BBC and film companies. He repeatedly argued that any history of aviation excluding Maxim’s role in the development of heavier-than-air flight was incomplete and pointed out that he held the altitude and duration records for 9 years and 139 days and the weight record for even longer. The newly available papers present William’s observations on the remarkable events at Baldwyn’s Park on their 130th anniversary.

 

Sources

Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. 21798: Papers of William McGregor Ross relating to Sir Hiram Maxim and his flying machine

Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MSS. Afr. s. 1178, 1876 and 2305: Papers of William McGregor Ross and Isabel Ross

Uncovering Histories of Humanitarianism: the Aborigines’ Protection Society 1837-1866

By Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne.

This is the fifth in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) and the Anti-Slavery Society merged in 1909, formalising a history of engagement and occasional rivalry stretching back to the 1830s. The APS had long argued that concern for the welfare of Indigenous peoples in Britain’s empire was a logical extension of anti-slavery activism. But, while key personnel moved between the two societies, public support for the APS remained much more muted. Not least, this was because the APS struggled to explain its remit. In 1847, a decade after starting work, the APS acknowledged that many still asked ‘Who are the Aborigines, and who is their Friend?’ but struggled to address these basic questions:

“Government documents and other publications have given a currency and acceptation to the word Aborigines, which, however, is not so general as to render explanation unnecessary … When the overflowing or restless population of a civilized country quit their homes, and seek a country where a wider space is open before them, they often find the land imperfectly occupied by a race of men greatly differing from themselves. These are the so-called Aborigines of the country; and the interests of both races are involved in the character of the intercourse which ensues between them.”

As this comparative and pejorative definition of ‘Aborigines’ suggests, the APS was both Eurocentric and paternalistic. Its leaders recognised that British colonialism led to Indigenous peoples’ dispossession and exploitation, but they argued for the radical reform of colonialism rather than its eradication. In the utopian future they envisaged, colonisers and colonised alike would be more civilised, Indigenous rights recognised and protected and Britain’s empire more economically productive.

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‘Probable Prospects’: Richard Hill and Black Activism in The Archive of the Anti-Slavery Society

By Olivia Carpenter, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York.

This is the fourth in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

Afro-British writer, politician, and activist Richard Hill was born in 1796. Hill was born in Jamaica but spent much of his youth in England, where some of his earliest efforts on behalf of Abolitionism and the rights of free Black people in the British Empire took place when he agreed to act as an agent of the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1830. A series of several letters exchanged between Hill and the Society’s President and Secretary are among the Bodleian’s collection of the Society’s papers. These letters, exchanged over a period of just over two years, allow us to trace Hill’s experience of traveling to Haiti on behalf of the Society. The Society sent Hill to ascertain the condition of this first and only new Republic created by formerly enslaved people who had fought and won a war to become a free, independent nation. Reading Hill’s correspondence with Thomas Pringle can help us gain a greater understanding of Black British anti-slavery activism in the early nineteenth century and what Haiti’s unique sociopolitical history meant for Black organizers like Hill, who hoped to establish Black freedom in the British Empire. The letters also give us unique insight into the day-to-day successes and struggles of a nineteenth-century Afro-British activist as Hill worked to earn a living in precarious circumstances while remaining committed to developing his career.

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Zachary Macaulay and the ‘Anti-Slavery Reporter’

By Iain Whyte

This is the third in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

In the various commemorative items produced in 2008 to mark the bi-centenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, the names and portraits of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Buxton appeared frequently and less so those of the formerly enslaved such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.  But one name almost universally absent was that of Zachary Macaulay. Better known as the father of Lord Thomas Macaulay, the historian and politician, Zachary played an invaluable role both in the Parliamentary campaign against the trade, and later plantation slavery in the British Empire, and in galvanising public opinion through local committees. A shy and in many ways inhibited man, he never made a speech, but his first hand experience in Jamaica and along the Sierra Leone river enabled those in Parliament to speak with authority, and above all the research and writing he did in the 1820s to expose the reality of slavery, provided ammunition against the powerful attempts to shore up the profitable system. This was most marked in his founding in 1825, and editorship throughout the vital campaigning years, of the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, a magazine that survives to this day under the auspices of the charity and campaigning group Anti-Slavery International.

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The Anti-Slavery Society and British Slavery in 20th Century Peru

By Nic Madge.

This is the second in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

The Putumayo Atrocities

The work of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in exposing the Putumayo Atrocities is well known. In 1907, W. E. Hardenburg, a U.S. railway engineer, left Buenaventura, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, to travel across South America to the Atlantic.   While descending the Putumayo River, he was captured and detained by agents of the British registered Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. He discovered that “peaceful Indians were put to work at rubber-gathering without payment, without food, in nakedness; … their women were stolen, ravished, and murdered;  [they] were flogged until their bones were laid bare when they failed to bring in a sufficient quota of rubber or attempted to escape, were left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, and their bodies were used as food for the agents’ dogs; … flogging of men, women, and children was the least of the tortures employed; [they] were mutilated in the stocks, cut to pieces with machetes, crucified head downwards, their limbs lopped off, target-shooting for diversion was practised upon them, and … they were soused in petroleum and burned alive, both men and women.” (Hardenburg The Putumayo, The Devil’s Paradise page 29)

Hardenburg escaped and travelled to Britain where he contacted the Anti-Slavery Society. John Hobbis Harris, the Society’s Organising Secretary, raised the issue with the Foreign Office and arranged for questions to be asked in the House of Commons. As a result of the Society’s pressure, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, appointed diplomat Roger Casement to conduct an enquiry. Casement travelled to Peru in July 1910. His report was finalised in January 1911, but only laid before Parliament in 1912. He found that the worst accounts were confirmed. The company’s agents had enslaved “the whole native population … by intimidation and brutality on a scale and of a kind which forbid description.” Sometimes, victims were pegged-out on the ground. At other times, they were flogged in stocks. Rubber “pirates” were “shot at sight”. Private rubber wars recalled “the feudal conflicts of the early Middle Ages.”

Studio portrait of John Hobbis Harris, seated and holding a pen.

John Hobbis Harris on the front cover of ‘The Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend’ (Series V, Volume 30, number 2, July 1940). Shelfmark: 100.221 r. 16.

There was outrage in the British press that representatives of a British company should act in this way. In August 1912, Canon Hensley Henson, who had attended an Anti-Slavery Society committee meeting, used his Sunday sermon in Westminster Abbey to condemn the atrocities. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and Lord Rothschild contributed to a Putumayo Mission Fund organised by the Duke of Norfolk.  On 20 November 1912, Travers Buxton, the Society’s secretary, and John Hobbis Harris both gave evidence to a House of Commons select committee which was considering whether the British directors of the company had any knowledge of the atrocities. The Anti-Slavery Society vigorously pursued the issue; sending a delegation to see the Prime Minister; instituting proceedings in the Chancery Division to remove the liquidator of the Peruvian Amazon Company; and drafting amendments to anti-slavery legislation to enable prosecutions to be brought in England for acts committed overseas.

The Prime Minister, Lord Asquith, referred to “the exceptional circumstances” of the Putumayo allegations. Francis Dyke Acland, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, gave an assurance that, “No outrages of any kind were committed by Englishmen.” However, these opinions were disputed by British explorer

Letter from Percy Fawcett to 'The Times', 31 July 1912.

Letter from Percy Fawcett to ‘The Times’, 31 July 1912.

Colonel Percy Fawcett, who wrote to The Times suggesting that the rubber industry in “the whole of forest Peru” should be investigated. It was “obviously improbable that such scandals are confined to one of the better known and relatively more accessible affluents of the Amazon. Other tribes are held up to slavery besides those of the Putumayo.” Fawcett’s view was that “real slavery was the rule (though covered by quasi-legal formalities)”.

A Great Uncle and Colonel Percy Fawcett

My research into Peruvian rubber extraction has focussed upon another British company, the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate, and its enslavement of indigenous people a thousand miles from the Putumayo, at the opposite end of Peru. My interest was triggered by a letter from a great uncle, written to one of his daughters in 1953. He commented on Fawcett’s book Exploration Fawcett and mentioned that Fawcett and his companions had stayed with him between 1910 and 1912 at San Carlos and Marte, two barracas (rubber collection stations) on the Tambopata river. I never met my great uncle and knew little about him, except that he had left Manchester at the beginning of the twentieth century and, apart from fighting in World War 1, spent the rest of his life in South America. Exploration Fawcett refers to Fawcett’s work on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society delineating the border between Peru. He travelled with James Murray, a Scottish biologist, who had accompanied Ernest Shackleton on his 1907-1909 Nimrod expedition to the Antarctic, and Corporal Henry Costin, a former army gymnastic instructor. However, his book gives little detail about San Carlos and Marte.  Was there more information in the diaries and letters of Fawcett and his party?

Fawcett’s diaries are now held by the Torquay Museum. There is a transcript of Murray’s diary in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. I obtained copies of some of Costin’s letters from his daughter in Australia. I found records of the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate and their British agents, Antony Gibbs and William Ricketts, in the National Archives, Kew, the London Metropolitan Archives and the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú in Lima. Murray mentioned my great uncle briefly, but, more significantly, these sources gave a vivid and disturbing description of the activities of the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate.  

Enganche por Deudas

Tambopata Rubber used between 300 and 500 indigenous workers, mainly picadores (choppers) and peones (general labourers) to collect rubber. Many came from the Peruvian and Bolivian Altiplano. Some were members of the local Ese Eja community who had been pressed into service. Like many other companies in Peru, Tambopata Rubber operated a system of enganche por deudas (literally “hooking by debts”). It was bonded labour, often forced. Employers advanced money or some other benefit (transport, accommodation and/or food) which became a debt which workers had to pay off by their labour. It was common for workers to be forced or tricked into this arrangement. Illiterate peones found themselves bound by written contacts which they had signed or marked with thumb prints, but did not understand. The necessaries provided in return for their employment (food, accommodation) were normally over-priced. Debts tended to increase not reduce. Under Peruvian law, a worker was legally obliged to stay with his employer until the debt was paid off. Often that was impossible. Some of the labourers had been transferred over to Tambopata Rubber from the previous owner of the barracas, a German called Carlos Franck. Effectively, this was the sale of human beings tied to the barracas by their debts. The Franck and Tambopata Rubber contracts provided that the workers would pay interest at the rate of 2% per month in the event of any breach of contract; renounced the legal code of their own area; and secured the performance of their enganche obligations with their “person and the best of their goods.”  In other words, enganche was slavery.

Photograph of Percy Fawcett standing, facing camera.

Percy Fawcett in 1911. Image in the public domain.

The workers were paid on Sundays with lead fichas (tokens) which could only be used in the company almacenes (stores). Prices for food at San Carlos were high and the picadores were routinely swindled over the rubber they brought in.

Tambopata Rubber sought to recover the debts of any workers who fled against their property and via sub-prefects and any new employers. Even in death, workers were bound by debt. On 26 September 1910, a guard who had been working at Marte for over two years, died of a brain haemorrhage. Franck wrote to Lawrence, the local manager, “He has left a wife and three orphaned children. The family of the deceased overwhelm me with their complaints and cries and they demand that I give them at least something to be able to support their little offspring. … I would like you to tell me if the deceased has left any balance so that his family can be protected.”

Lawrence replied, “This ill-fated employee has not left any balance in his favour. On the contrary, he has died owing us a sum.” The Tambopata Rubber Syndicate actively pursued relatives of other workers who died to recover outstanding enganche debts – on at least one occasion forcing them to sell their home.

Food and Health

Fawcett and Murray noted that food at the barracas was always in short supply. In 1910, Fawcett found Marte “in a state of starvation” with only a quart of maize left in the stores. The labourers had existed on leaves and grass for some time. By 1911, there were no provisions at all at Marte and there were often periods when workers went for days without any food. That year, four or five men died of starvation. The Marte manager led raiding parties to rob the banana trees of the Ese Eja in a neighbouring valley.

Given the climate, predatory insects, poor nutrition, the lack of sanitation and the absence of any doctor or medical assistance in the region, it was inevitable that there would be serious health problems on the two barracas. The company’s own records frequently refer to illness and death. In 1910, ten percent of Tambopata Rubber Syndicate workers died as a result of disease and hunger. Fawcett described a group of labourers from Marte arriving at San Carlos as “a grizzly, weak, thin, diseased crew.” There were many cases of malaria and beri beri. In 1911, there was a severe outbreak of fever at Marte. Fawcett described some thirty indigenous workers lying “in a filthy shed … in various stages of collapse, putrid with boils and other disorders.”

Oppression on the barracas

Severe beating was common on rubber estates. Fawcett, Murray and Costin all noted with disapproval that Lawrence frequently flogged workers. Murray stated, “Flogging is practiced at San Carlos, though we could not know to what extent, as a good face is put on things for our benefit. Lawrence, however, uses a whip on the house ‘boys’ and often without justification. For instance, Costin’s pistol was stolen. Lawrence whipped the three house-boys, without having any reason to suspect them.”

Fawcett noted, “In Peru the punishment for whacking an Indian is some years of prison but the Indian has to put up 500 Peruvian soles to state his case.” He described how one of the bookkeepers at San Carlos beat an indigenous worker so badly that complaint was made to the provincial authorities. However, in accordance with the law, the bookkeeper insisted that the victim deposit 500 soles against the expenses of the prosecution. He was unable to produce that sum and instead the bookkeeper accused him of calumny. He was imprisoned for eight months, but died after four months.

Lawrence “bought” people. He boasted to Murray that he bought a woman he kept at San Carlos (despite having a wife in La Paz) for 150 bolivianos. Fawcett wrote, “The savages bring in their children to sell frequently.” On one occasion, Lawrence exchanged two guns, each worth nine shillings and six pence (47½ pence) for two small boys.

From time to time, the workers rebelled against this regime. On 4 September 1909, there was “a serious insurrection” involving one hundred workers at Marte. They fled, after burning the almacen and account books. Tambopata Rubber’s managers, with the help of the local authorities, managed to capture and return most of them. One of the workers who returned surrendered and went down on his knees, begging for forgiveness. A manager shot and killed him as he knelt.

Denunciation of the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate

The final pieces in my research jig-saw were the records of the Anti-Slavery Society at the Bodleian which contain press-cuttings and correspondence with the Peruvian Asociación Pro Indígena. They recount how, in 1910, three picadores managed to escape from Tambopata Rubber’s barracas. They complained about their treatment to the manager of the Inca Rubber Company at Cojata. He informed Pedro Zulen, Secretary of the Asociación Pro Indígena, who wrote to the Puno Prefect:

“Manuel Machicao, Mariano Tito, and Modesto Villa, all three natives of the Department of Puno, have been subjected to corporal punishment, Machiao and Villa at the barraca “Marte” and Tito at the barraca “San Carlos”, which belongs to the Sindicate “Tambopata Rubber”.  The … workmen were punished for the least reason. …  A certain Braulio Peñaranda is named as the chief tormentor of the labourers; the provision of food is not sufficient for the people, who live on half-rations, and are forced to work from 6 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon, so that many get ill with forest diseases.”

The Asociación Pro Indígena petitioned for workers to be allowed to leave the barracas because “at present the labourers cannot leave …   whether or not they owe a debt, but are kept like slaves, condemned to die for want of resources, without receiving any aid”.

This issue was discussed at an Asociación Pro Indígena meeting on 20 January 1911. It resolved to send details to the Anti-Slavery Society under the title “La Esclavitud en la Montaña”. (Due to, in Pedro Zulen’s words, “an involuntary clerical error” publicity of the allegations wrongly named Inambari Para Rubber Estates as the company responsible, not the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate.) The allegations were published in El Deber Pro-Indígena, the Asociación’s newspaper, and repeated in the Peruvian newspapers El Comercio and La PrensaEl Comercio stated that the “abuses reached the point of ripping indigenous people out of their homes to enslave them in the montaña.” The London Times published a telegram from its Lima Correspondent stating that the President of the Asociación petitioned the Peruvian Government to punish and put a stop to the abuses. In London, Ernest Bartlett, Tambopata Rubber’s Company Secretary, wrote to the Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, stating, “the alleged ill-treatment of natives can hardly be taken seriously”; “there is not an iota of truth” in the accusation; the allegations were driven by internal “political rather than humanitarian considerations”; and that he had “no doubt nothing in the nature of an outrage has taken place on [their] property”. Just like Peruvian Amazon’s denial of the Putumayo Atrocities, that attempted rebuttal is not credible in the face of the independent evidence of Fawcett, Murray and Costin.

During 1911, the Anti-Slavery Society received reports of “conditions of debt slavery prevailing throughout Peru”, but in the end only actively pursued the Putumayo Atrocities. The complication of Zulen’s “involuntary clerical error” naming the wrong company delayed its investigation into the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate and its Committee concluded that there was insufficient information to enable it to make any definite recommendation.

Postscript

In any event, by 1911, the Amazonian rubber boom was over. Rubber prices were plummeting and it was clear that the Tambopata Rubber Syndicate project was economically unsustainable. The cost of producing rubber was three times higher in South America than in the Far East. Transport was too difficult and too costly. Despite the enslavement of indigenous workers, there was a shortage of labour. There was never sufficient food for the workers. Latex could only be extracted from the local species of rubber tree by felling, rather than tapping, meaning that picadores had to travel further and further to find rubber. The company decided that the barracas could not be made financially viable and abandoned them in 1913. In December 1913, a shareholders’ meeting passed a resolution formally winding up the company and appointed a liquidator.

 

A more detailed version of Nic Madge’s research will be published in the next edition of La Revista de Historia de América (Volume 165, May-August 2023).

www.nicmadge.co.uk

 

Rethinking the Aborigines Protection Society through its Informants

By Darren Reid, University College London

This is the first in a series of posts by researchers drawing on the archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, part of the Bodleian’s We Are Our History project.

 

Within the archives of the Anti-Slavery Society are the correspondence records of its cousin, the Aborigines’ Protection Society (1837-1909), which merged with the Anti-Slavery Society in 1909. The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) was administered from its headquarters in London by a range of middle-class White philanthropists who felt dissatisfied with the state of relations between Britain and the range of Indigenous peoples who found themselves within the professed territories of the British Empire.

Image from the cover of the publication 'The Aborigines Friend' in January 1850 depicting the meeting of five individuals from differnt parts of the world in their traditional clothing.

Figure 1: Cover of The Aborigines’ Friend, 2 no. 21 (January 1850).

Problematically, the APS was not opposed to colonization, but only believed that colonization could be done in a nicer and more “humane” fashion by ensuring that Indigenous land was taken in a consensual and equitable manner, and that Indigenous peoples were educated to enjoy the best that European superiority could offer. At first glance, such a blatantly imperialist raison d’être may seem to limit the value of the APS as a subject of historical inquiry. For, in an academic and social environment which values diversity and seeks to shatter ethnocentric and racist discourses, do we really want to hear from a group of nineteenth-century do-gooders trumpeting the “White Man’s Burden” to assuage their imperial guilt?

However, while the APS was run by a small group of middle-class telescopic philanthropists in Britain, it was dependent upon a network of informants who wrote letters about colonial events from across the British Empire, and these letters are extremely valuable for assessing diverse lived experiences of empire. The APS correspondent archive contains over 9,000 letters from men and women, settlers and Indigenous peoples, convicts and lawyers, missionaries and soldiers, and everything in-between. Each of these informants interpreted the purpose of the APS in ways reflecting the diversity of their interests and attitudes towards empire.

Here, I examine one particularly complex case study to demonstrate the diverse perspectives on empire that can be found in the APS collections: the Thaba Nchu succession dispute of the 1880s. Thaba Nchu was a small kingdom in southern Africa which, in the mid nineteenth century, found itself within the borders of the newly established Orange Free State. The Orange Free State technically fell under the suzerainty of the British Empire, but due to a complicated series of rebellions and treaties, it was effectively an independent Afrikaner state. The sovereignty of Thaba Nchu was therefore a hot-button issue: as an independent kingdom within an independent state within a suzerain empire, there was no clear consensus on who was actually in control.

Map of southern Africa showing Thaba Nchu in relation to Cape Town, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg.

Figure 2: Map showing Thaba Nchu in relation to Cape Town, Bloemfontein, and Johannesburg. © Darren Reid

The indeterminacy of Thaba Nchu’s status led to crisis in 1880, when the death of the paramount chief led to a succession dispute between two contenders: Samuel Moroka and Tshipinare. Moroka favored strengthening ties with Britain, whereas Tshipinare wanted to strengthen ties with the Orange Free State. Tshipinare made an under-the-table deal with the president of the Orange Free State, Johannes Brand, who arrested Moroka and banished him in return for a generous cession of land. In response, Moroka travelled to London to petition the British government to intervene and back him as the true chief of Thaba Nchu.

Throughout Thaba Nchu’s succession dispute, the APS received letters from at least ten different informants hoping to establish their own narrative of events, five of whom I will discuss in this blog post. There was Samuel Moroka himself, who tried to convince Britain of its obligation to intervene. There were also two settlers, David Smith of the Cape Colony and Edmund Bourdillon of the Orange Free State, who capitalized on Samuel Moroka’s petition to bring their own Anglo-Dutch rivalry before the British public. Finally, there were Richard and Elizabeth Whitfield, a brother and sister living in London who used the succession dispute to argue for the illegitimacy of British intervention within independent states. Attending to the differences in how these informants wrote about Thaba Nchu is suggestive of the multiplicity of perspectives on empire that can be found within the APS correspondent records.

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Bicentenary of the Anti-Slavery Society: first minute book digitised

On 31st January 1823 a group calling itself the Committee on Slavery assembled at the Kings Head Tavern, Poultry, in the City of London. William Smith M.P. was in the Chair and those present included Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Hoare, Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Gurney, Thomas Babington, Thomas Hodgkin and William Wilberforce junior. The committee agreed that it was ‘deeply impressed with the magnitude and number of the evils attached to the system of slavery which prevails in many of the colonies of Great Britain, a system which appears … to be opposed to the spirit and precepts of Christianity as well as repugnant to every dictate of natural humanity and justice’ and resolved to found an association ‘for mitigating and gradually abolishing the state of slavery throughout the British dominions’ (MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 20, E2/1, pages 1-2).

Opening page of the minute book of the Anti-Slavery Society recording, in manuscript, its first meeting.

Opening page of the first minute book of the Anti-Slavery Society, MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 20, E2/1, page 1 [click to enlarge]. © Anti-Slavery International      To mark the organisation’s bicentenary the minute book has been digitised and is now available from Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts and Digital Bodleian.

This was the beginning of a campaigning organisation, the successor of which is still in existence today, two hundred years later. The Committee on Slavery changed its name a number of times during the 19th century but came to be known as the Anti-Slavery Society and extended its focus from British territories to a commitment to end slavery worldwide. It merged in 1909 with the Aborigines Protection Society (founded in 1837) which campaigned against the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples. In 1990 the Society changed its name to Anti-Slavery International and continues to campaign against modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking.

 

The Society’s archive was purchased for the Bodleian Library in 1951, with further tranches of papers added in later decades, and is available for consultation in the Weston Library. The archive includes:

  • minute books from 1823 to 1935
  • long runs of correspondence from many parts of the world, bringing examples of slavery to the Society’s attention
  • correspondence with government departments
  • territorial files
  • lantern slides and photographs
  • financial papers
  • newspaper cuttings and printed ephemera
  • the records of associated groups such as the Mico Charity, the Committee for the Welfare of Africans in Europe and the British Armenia Committee

The Bodleian also holds The Anti-Slavery Reporter, published by the Society since 1825 with various changes of title.

The archive records key events during the Society’s history including the organisation of the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the campaign against the atrocities perpetrated against enslaved labourers in the Congo and in Peru, the lobbying of the League of Nations and later the United Nations leading to international agreements to end slavery and the promotion of human rights for indigenous peoples. The Society’s work had a global reach from the apprenticeship system in the Caribbean, forced labour in Russian timber camps and pass laws in Africa to lynching in America and Mui Tsai in China and southeast Asia.

Oil painting of the Anti-Slavery Society Convention in 1841 showing packed room of delegates listening to a speaker.

The Anti-Slavery Society Convention in 1840 by Benjamin Robert Haydon. Oil on canvas, 1841. NPG 599. © National Portrait Gallery, London. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

To mark the organisation’s bicentenary the minute book recording the first meeting has been digitised and is now available from Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts and Digital Bodleian.

Common Threads: From Past to the Present

The race and diversity narratives project with the Bodleian Libraries and the Museum of Oxford allowed me to explore a crucial aspect of the city of Oxford and its inhabitants. For my research I looked at the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) archives, dating back to the 1960s, directly in correlation with the contemporary Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) 2.0 protests from summer and the global Black Lives Matter movement.

MSS. AAM 607. Reproduced with the permission of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives Committee.

MSS. AAM 607. Reproduced with the permission of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives Committee.

It was fascinating to trace the common elements between these two historical protests that the city of Oxford has witnessed. The simple but powerful Black Power Fist signifies just how connected the movements are. A poster from the 1980s for ‘End Repression in South Africa’ depicts a man raising his fist and can be directly compared with a picture from 2020 RMF movement and a protestor using the same powerful symbol.

Beyond significant symbols, the city as a space, the involvement of the students and city dwellers together, all become a part of the continued common history.

‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford, June 2020.

‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford, June 2020.

The AAM archives hold several letters and correspondences between the local chapter and the national one, between AAM and Oxford citizens who want to be more involved and supportive of the movement, minutes and proceedings of Oxford City Meetings and AAM meetings. The call for protests above is similar to the calls we send out today, the method of dissemination might have evolved, the sentiment remains the same – to unify and stand together.

One particular incident that stood out to me was the boycott of the Apollo Theatre during the Christmas of 1987 because the theatre starred Marti Caine, an actress who said: ‘The best thing we can do for the blacks is send them back into the jungle to recover their culture.’ The protest and the boycott led to Caine issuing a public apology and signing the AAM petition. Caine and Rhodes, Apollo Theatre and Oriel College, these are not the same issues, but similar in how spaces and people come to represent ideologies, often extremely problematic ones, but simultaneously how a unified stand against such ideas brings them down.

The idea of common elements or ‘threads’ between the two protests, for me, reflects how the fight for racial equality is an ongoing conversation and struggle but it has multiple sides to it. While the positives show that the people of Oxford have time and again stood up against the injustice, the counter-question becomes why have these injustices continued well into the 21st century? A critical exploration of archives at the Bodleian relating to the city of Oxford allowed me to ask these questions while contributing to and continuing the conversation. It is perhaps in these historically extending common threads across the decades that the meaning of ‘a movement and not a moment’ truly shines through as minority identities continue their struggles against historical and contemporary injustices.

MS. 18592/3, item 6.

MS. 18592/3, item 6.

Devika
Summer Intern 2020, Bodleian Libraries and Museum of Oxford
MPhil Modern South Asian Studies (2019-2021), St Antony’s College, University of Oxford