Chapter Fourteen
The architect responsible for introducing Jefferson’s blueprint to the British Empire was a jailbird. Edward Gibbon Wakefield began to write about land and empire in 1829 while serving three years in Newgate Prison for abducting a wealthy fifteen-year-old girl from school and marrying her in order to gain her fortune. Born into a prominent Quaker family but with a father who lived by his wits, Wakefield’s character faithfully reflected his genetic inheritance. There was something of the evangelist about his boldness, conviction, and eloquence, and at least as much of the fraudster, yet his intelligence and the intensity of his self-belief, apparent in the stare of his pale blue eyes, swayed all but the most skeptical listeners. They, however, had much to be skeptical about.
Although the abduction was what most tarnished his name, the reason for it was equally disreputable. The thirty-two-year-old Wakefield was already wealthy, having eloped with and married another young heiress, but when her premature death left him short of the money he needed to win a seat in Parliament, he attempted to forge the will of her father in his favor. The failure of the forgery was what impelled him to kidnap the schoolgirl. Their unconsummated marriage was later annulled by act of Parliament, but Wakefield’s reputation as a scoundrel remained indelible.
Nevertheless, the articles he wrote from Newgate had an immediate impact. Entitled Letter from Sydney, referring to the city in New South Wales, Australia, they purported to be from a colonist in Australia with plans for attracting more immigrants. But, when published in the liberal Morning Chronicle in 1829, they caused a sensation because they addressed a problem that weighed more heavily on Britain than the fate of any colony: what should be done with the rapidly growing numbers of workless poor who crowded the streets of every major city in the land?
In the past, the poor had often been sent as indentured servants or criminals to the colonies—North America, the West Indies, and, from 1787, Australia. Since 1815, more had gone voluntarily, often subsidized by charities, but, as one acerbic critic declared, the policy amounted to “little more than shoveling out your paupers to where they might die without shocking their betters with the sight or sound of their last agony.” What Wakefield pictured was the creation of a new society in the colonies. He wanted middle-class emigrants, “merchants, clergymen, lawyers . . . If you can induce many of this class to settle in a colony, the other classes, whether capitalists or labourers, are sure to settle there in abundance.”
Half a century had passed since there had been any policy for disposing of land in the colonies. In 1772, reflecting the opinions of British landowners, the Privy Council had declared, “Experience shows that the possession of property is the best security for a due obedience and submission to government.” But putting the principle into practice had been a disaster. Legislation was passed in the 1770s and 1780s extending virtually the same rights as property-owning English squires to seigneurs in Quebec, Irish clan chiefs, and Bengali zamindari, or tax collectors. Nowhere did anything like English conditions develop: there had been rebellion in Ireland; the passage of the Quebec Act had helped propel the American colonies toward revolution, and the zamindari had turned into a type of upper class, moneylending official that was specifically Indian.
For want of any coherent plan, colonial authorities disposed of what was known as “waste land,” meaning territory occupied by indigenous inhabitants, on a haphazard basis. The Canadian colonies had leased, sold, or granted ground to companies and individuals according to the influence they exercised on autocratic governments in Toronto, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces. In Australia’s penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, shortly to be renamed Tasmania, a succession of governors had leased land on an equally random basis to cattle and sheep farmers, many of whom simply dispensed with formalities and squatted on gigantic spreads of twenty square miles or more without any authorization. The only official to try to impose order, William Bligh, already notorious for causing a mutiny on H.M.S.Bounty, provoked another revolt in New South Wales when as governor he ordered the destruction of squatters’ cabins built on public land. His senior staff arrested him and had him sent back to Britain.
As had happened in colonial America, however, private land companies in Britain were beginning to take an interest in these distant sources of profit. In the 1820s, the Australian Agricultural Company, floated in Britain, had raised $2.5 million to invest in buying land in New South Wales, and the Van Diemen’s Land Company put more than one million dollars into property and harbor-building in Tasmania.
In proposing an entirely new system, Wakefield, like Jefferson, was intending to create a society fashioned by the way land was distributed. His scheme was refined constantly over the next twenty years, but its essential features remained constant: colonial land should be sold at a price that was sufficiently high, firstly, to act as an incentive for the new owner to produce a profit and, secondly, to pay for the passage of poor immigrants to be employed as laborers on the new properties. Initially only the middle classes would be able to afford the “sufficient price,” but because the colonies possessed more land than workers, wages would have to be high, enabling the immigrants to buy property for themselves within two or three years and employ laborers of their own. It was not an egalitarian society Wakefield proposed, but a capitalist economy with employers and employees, capitalists and workers.
When he came across Wakefield’s writings later, Karl Marx regarded them with sidelong respect. “It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield,” he wrote in Capital, “to have discovered not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the condition of capitalist production in the mother-country.” But for just that reason, free-market economists welcomed Wakefield’s thinking because it offered a capitalist rationale for empire that had not existed before.
Seen through the eyes of eighteenth-century mercantilists, colonies were adjuncts of the mother country. Consequently their goods had to be sold to the mother country, and their imports could only come from the same source. Inevitably therefore, the British Empire was vilified by Adam Smith’s free-market followers. Its monopoly trade kept prices higher than they needed to be, and it wasted good capital that would be more efficiently employed as investment in the free-market of industrial production at home. “Great Britain derives nothing but loss,” Adam Smith declared unambiguously “from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.”
The particular bête noire of the free-marketeers was the West Indies sugar industry, whose planters knew that, in return for buying British goods, they had a guaranteed market of ten million dollars a year for their over-priced product in Britain. Discredited and increasingly flouted, the mercantilist orthodoxy nevertheless remained in place throughout the long, hidebound administrations of William Pitt and Lord Liverpool. Compared to that bleak, outdated pattern, Wakefield’s optimistic, brightly colored vision of the colonies as new, capitalist Britains had the appeal of a vacation advertisement in winter.
Wakefield emerged from the confines of Newgate in 1830, not redeemed but cautiously respected, with powerful allies among the reformers who were about to take power. To promote his ideas, he founded the National Colonization Society, whose influential members included the advocate of Utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham, the economist John Stuart Mill, the banker Sir Francis Baring, and a dozen members of Parliament. In 1832, a Whig government was at last voted into office, and their Reform Bill began a process of electoral change that would shift power from the dead hands of the landowners and reflect more accurately the weight of property possessed by the new industrial classes. The following year, the government’s momentous decision to abolish slavery throughout the empire showed that it was ready to take a more active role in colonial affairs.
On the crest of the reforming wave, Wakefield published England and America, a book that made clear the debt he owed to the Public Lands Survey. He began with a comparison of the two countries’ social and economic policies. Britain’s overwhelming capital strength and its enormous investment in the infrastructure of factories, roads, canals, docks, and gaslit towns gave it the economic advantage. In almost every other way, however, he found American society to be preferable. It was more confident and open, and it was free of the divisions that split British society into upper, middle, and lower classes, or in Wakefield’s terms, “the Spending class,” “the Uneasy class,” and “the Laboring class.” But his chief concern was to answer one question: “What is the best way in which to dispose of waste land with a view to colonization?”
Deeply though Wakefield admired American society, it was nothing compared to his respect for the United States as “a colonizing power.” The challenge it faced in incorporating the settlements in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase beyond the Mississippi were exactly the same as those that Britain encountered in administering colonies in Canada and Australia. “What is a new state formed in the western deserts of America,” he demanded, “if it be not a new colony?”
The secret of the United States’s wealth was not just the productivity of the soil, but its ability to dispose of it with secure title. While capital invested in the improvement of land in the Australian colonies had disappeared because neither the extent of the property nor the nature of the ownership could be known with certainty, Wakefield observed, the security of American titles had encouraged Dutch banks to lend money for the construction of the Erie Canal, enabling midwestern wheat to be transported cheaply to New York, and, even as he wrote, a British bank was arranging a $3.5 million loan to Alabama repayable over thirty years. From a capitalist point of view, everything that Britain had got wrong in its empire, America had got right. Above all it had obeyed the first rule in what he called “the art of colonization,” and that was never to throw away the “power over waste land.” This had enabled it to create a free-market economy that overcame the problem of under-capitalization by drawing in foreign investment in order to make full use of labor and land.
The uniform system of the Public Lands Survey, with its clear mapping, set prices, and secure titles, was, therefore, the model that Wakefield recommended for Britain’s colonies. Two changes needed to be made. Slavery would not be permitted, and the price of land needed to be higher than in the United States in order to dissuade buyers from taking more ground than they could work. But with those exceptions, “their rule for the disposal of waste land would be quite perfect.” Thus, by a supreme irony, the republican United States was made the model for the new British Empire.
As Wakefield’s detractors, and most of his admirers, subsequently pointed out, his scheme never worked in the way he intended. The impossibility of trying to control property prices in order to regulate immigration was pointed out at the time and only became more obvious during his lifetime. Nor was the idea of paying for the passage of poor emigrants original, since many charities and hard-pressed parishes were already putting it into practice. But what made Wakefield’s system so compelling was his unabashed appeal to free enterprise as the force that would make property-based colonization a success.
The vision of the colonies as new capitalist societies was coupled with a stirring appeal for international free trade, beginning with the repeal of the high tariffs that Britain’s Corn Laws imposed on cereals imported into Britain. Once they were gone, Wakefield predicted that “the English will hunt over the world in search of cheap corn” to feed their industrial economy. There would be an enhanced two-way trade between the colonies and the home country, and where Australia was concerned, the chance of opening up a three-way network exporting cereals to China, Chinese tea to Britain, and British manufactures to Australia.
Wakefield’s analysis of the colonies’ economic potential was grounded in the theories of the era’s two preeminent free-market economists, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Ricardo’s theories on profit made it clear that the high price of British property rendered its purchase an inefficient use of capital compared with investing it in cheaper, productive land elsewhere. Malthus’s stark warning of overpopulation focused more closely on the wastage of labor in the unemployed poor: “Increase the demand for agricultural labour by promoting cultivation, and with it consequently increase the produce of the country, and ameliorate the condition of the labourer, and no apprehensions whatever need be entertained of the proportional increase of population.”
Not only would Wakefield’s system employ the mother country’s excess of capital to maximum effect in a fresh, fluid market for land, it would reduce the “misery and vice” in its crowded cities that were the prime causes, in Malthus’s opinion, of too much breeding. In these circumstances, Wakefield’s theories of colonization were exciting enough to persuade many to overlook his abduction of the heiress.
The opening experiment was in South Australia, the first colony to be established on the continent without convicts as a source of cheap labor. Created by act of Parliament in 1834, it covered about three hundered thousand square miles, more than 10 percent bigger than Texas, but was inhabitable only along part of the coast and on the inland basin of the Murray and Darling Rivers. Wakefield’s influence was obvious throughout the legislation. Land commissioners were to be appointed to survey and sell the territory, their funds were to be devoted to bringing in new immigrants, and the capital accrued would allow government loans to be paid off and any further investment to be covered by bonds. Finally, reflecting the Jeffersonian impulse, once the colony had fifty thousand inhabitants, it could elect its own representative council and move toward self-government. In short, the new colony was to be a self-financing example of free-enterprise capitalism.
Unlike the creation of a new territory in the United States, the act made no mention of buying the land from its indigenous inhabitants. A later amendment did refer to respect for Aboriginal rights of “occupation and enjoyment” of the land, but in the original colony of New South Wales, Australia had already been declared to be terra nullius, or empty land, effectively obliterating fifty thousand years of occupancy by about a half-million Aboriginal Australians. In practice, many farmers, such as John Stieglitz, running sheep into the outback in 1835, chose to bring “sundry articles for conciliating the natives” and to employ them as trackers and herdsmen, but none ever recognized their claims to ownership.
Within a decade almost every part of Wakefield’s plan had to be adjusted: the emigration fund was applied to the survey itself, the London government had to write off its loan and reorganize the colonial administration, and the survey was haphazard. It used a combination of squares—in South Australia they were known as “parishes” and measured five miles by five—and metes and bounds that allowed ample scope for corruption, notably by the chief land commissioner, Robert Torrens, who acquired land worth more than £18,000, about $90,000, for himself. Beyond the coastal fringe and the inland region irrigated by rivers, the colony quickly became desert, and across the intermediate ground sheep and cattle had to range widely in search of meager pasture. Selling such variable soil at a uniform price of one pound, about five dollars, an acre was unrealistic, and even before the first boatload of colonists had sailed, the reluctance of buyers to commit themselves forced the commissioners to raise funds by selling off unsurveyed territory for twelve shillings, or three dollars, an acre to a land company.
Yet gradually the colony began to prosper. The process owed much to the discovery in 1845 of copper in the eastern mountains, and to the rising price of wool. But in the long run, wheat was the staple that was central to South Australia’s economy—by the 1850s 160,000 acres had been sown—and cereal farmers depended on having secure title to their land. As agricultural prosperity took hold, Wakefield’s virtuous circle of rising land prices and high wages at last appeared.
The letters home told of a society subtly different from the egalitarian one in the Jeffersonian experiment. There were similar references to the freedom and opportunities to be found in a new land, but the cost of travel raised the financial bar to ownership higher: immigrants had to find $250 for the price of a ticket to Australia, and it was reckoned to cost a minimum of $750 to buy and stock an eighty-acre parcel of land, about one third more than the investment needed to acquire a farm in Illinois. With 40 percent of the population living in Adelaide, it was also more urban and commercial than America, with skilled workers able to earn good wages: Thomas Newman, an apprentice carpenter from London, wrote his mother in 1838 that he was earning five dollars a week “with all my grub” and that he had already saved enough to buy an acre plot in the capital of Adelaide. He was the ideal Wakefield colonist, and his letter has a suspicious hint of boosterism, but his final sentence rings true: “nothing would give me greater joy than for you to come and bring Mary [his sweetheart] with you, for you really would think you was in Greenwich park.”
Toward the end of his life, with South Australia moving rapidly toward self-government, Torrens used to boast that “The colony devised by Mr Wakefield was planted [settled] by me,” but it was his son, Robert Torrens Jr., who solved the problems and corruption created by metes and bounds. He put in place the simple, almost foolproof “Torrens system” by which title to land depended on the registration document, a surveyor’s plat, and a description of the property with the owner’s name attached, which was held in the colonial land office. This clear evidence of ownership removed any confusion from competing claims, and cut through the complexities of common law deeds with their Hamlet-like history of entails, reversions, and covenants. Its simplicity quickly made the Torrens system the standard for the rest of the empire.
The South Australian model of surveying land and establishing title was immediately taken up by the next colony to be created, Victoria, and powerfully influenced subsequent settlement in New South Wales and Queensland. It received a further boost from the policies adopted by the legislative assembly of every Australian colony after it gained self-government, to use taxation and redistribution to break up the land claims of squatters.
The survey shaped both local government—its basis, the county, comprised sixty to seventy parishes—and the economy. Once land became an easily tradable property, banks rapidly followed, as in the new United States, giving owners access to credit. By midcentury, London investorshad put fifty million dollars into Australian land, primarily backing ventures where a return could be expected from exports of wool and copper. In 1856, South Australia’s 109,000 inhabitants became self-governing, with universal male suffrage exercised through secret ballot.
Long before then, Wakefield was engaged on his second experiment in colonization. It should have been in New Zealand. In 1837, he and the Earl of Durham, a maverick, landowning grandee, persuaded the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to let their land company, the New Zealand Company, acquire one millon acres and run a self-financing colony on Wakefieldian lines. Alarmed by the fate of Australia’s Aborigines, however, missionaries and their political supporters protested that the new company would acquire “a sovereignty in New Zealand which would infallibly issue in the conquest and the extermination of the present inhabitants.” Never enthusiastic about the new form of colonialism, Lord Melbourne withdrew support for the New Zealand project and presented Durham instead with the chance to rule another colony.
In British North America, a simultaneous rebellion of French and British Canadians had erupted against the corrupt and autocratic government of their two provinces, Lower and Upper Canada. The post offered to Durham was that of governor-general of all Canada, with complete power to put down the insurrection and establish a fairer form of government. Accepting the challenge, Durham appointed Wakefield as lands commissioner and a senior member of Wakefield’s National Colonization Society, Charles Buller, as his secretary. It was a measure of how toxic Wakefield’s reputation continued to be, that Melbourne immediately protested, “If you touch [Wakefield] with a pair of tongs, it is utter destruction, depend upon it.” But Durham insisted on keeping him, promising only that his contribution would be anonymous.
The revolts had petered out before Durham arrived in May 1838, and less than five months later the irascible peer resigned and returned home. But during that time he and his team drew up an extensive plan for the government of Canada. For almost a century, the Durham Report, snidely described by critics as “thought by Wakefield, written by Buller and signed by Durham,” occupied an iconic position in Canadian history. It presented for the first time a vision of a united Canada “with a representative government,” beginning with a union of the two Canadas and looking forward to a confederation that included the Maritime Provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. Modern historians are more inclined to give Durham the primary credit for his own report, but downplay its influence on the ground that a self-governing Canada did not arrive until 1867 and then largely as a result of internal political pressure aided by the cohesive effects of railroads and steamships. Yet Durham’s recommendations had two direct consequences of lasting importance: politically the two Canadas were united in 1841, and the distribution of land took on a more methodical, Americanized shape.
Whatever contributions Durham made, Wakefield’s thought and Buller’s writing are most obvious in the section on land sales. This criticized British Canada for having made free grants of land amounting to almost six million acres, or half the surveyed area of the province, to loyalists escaping the American Revolution, veterans, and government officials, including 670,000 acres to “Protestant clergy.” It noted that even when the ruling clique, known as “the Family Compact,” began selling land in the 1820s, it was offered on favorable terms to friends, including three million acres sold cheaply to the crony-led Canada Company. The report excoriated French Canada for the same customs, and especially for the 1.5 million acres allocated at no cost to “township leaders.”
Wakefield’s hand could be seen in the section that directly compared the Canadian system of selling land—needlessly handicapped by “useless formality and consequent delay”—with the United States, where title to property was obtained “immediately and securely.” Its shortcomings had already been exposed by the demands of a growing flood of immigrants: almost half a million would arrive in the Canadas during the late 1830s and early 1840s, virtually doubling the population. Despite the availability of vast tracts of ground, British purchasers had to pay bribes to officials or buy direct from surveyors to be sure of getting land, and a fourfold increase in the French population had only increased the area of settled land by a third. As a result, rates of settlement were beginning to slow as discouraged immigrants chose to move on to the United States. In language lifted straight from England and America, the report recommended more reliable surveys without which “there can be no security of property in land,” public auction of lands on the American pattern to produce “large funds for emigration,” encouragement for “the investment of surplus British capital,” and the promotion of settlement “to add to the value of every man’s property in land.”
Politically, Durham’s public exposure of government corruption led to reforms within Canada and an inexorable drive to transfer powers from the appointed Executive Council to the elected legislature. But what gave impetus to the domestic campaign for political reform was the land-based prosperity that surged through Canada in the decades after union.
The good times were powerfully affected by the United States land market as it recovered from the second great economic recession—the word was first used in that context in 1837—since independence. Attempting to cool the inflationary boom that saw thirty-seven million acres of public lands sold in the three years up to 1836, Andrew Jackson’s administration had ordered land offices to accept only silver and gold in payment, rather than paper. The move prompted a catastrophic fall in land sales in 1837, followed by a panic run on the banks that was exaggerated in its effects by the withdrawal of British investment. About one quarter of the country’s banks collapsed, reducing the money supply by an estimated 30 percent, and dragging down industrial and commercial business with it.
Fortuitously, the long recovery of United States land sales and the boom that followed began in 1841. As it spilled over the border, the first years of the united Canada were marked by widespread prosperity. Canada’s own land market, just visible before the 1836 rebellion, took off, creating a widespread increase in private, tradable property. To meet the market’s requirements, professional qualifications for land surveyors were introduced in the 1840s, and in 1847 the government of Ontario Province, formerly British Canada, introduced the American square township grid to survey public land before sale, beginning at the eastern end of Lake Huron.
The settlement of Bruce County, Ontario, carved out of the hunting territory of the Chippewas and Ojibwes on the shores of Lake Huron, illustrates the extraordinary speed with which some forested ground interspersed with hills, swamps, and lakes evolved into a private property society. The first sales, at two dollars an acre for parcels of fifty acres, occurred in 1849, with a bonus of fifty acres for owners who would clear a track through the trees. The 1851 census showed that twenty-seven hundred people were scattered across the county’s sixteen hundred square miles. In 1854, the first bank, a branch of the Bank of Upper Canada, was established in the village of Southampton to accept deposits on land parcels. By then sufficient land had been cleared to grow wheat, and in the mid-1850s the Crimean War in Europe caused grain prices to double. Good farmland sold for $7.50 an acre, and more than double that in the villages. During the decade, bonds began to be issued for the construction of roads, and the building of schools, a county hall, a courthouse, and a jail. The 1861 census showed the population to have grown to twenty-seven thousand people owning land worth four million dollars. In that year, they returned a representative to the Legislative Assembly and were pushing to have complete control over the county laws that affected their property.
What happened in miniature in one county was replicated in various forms as settlement spread across Canada. A dramatic jump in the number of immigrants traveling westward cheaply in the empty holds of vessels that had carried timber east to the United Kingdom doubled the population to more than one million in the 1850s, and boosted land prices. The development of a land market promoted in turn the growth of banking. In 1835 there were only six banks in the two Canadas, but in step with the land boom, another twenty-five were chartered in the next twenty years, each with multiple branches. The availability of credit allowed farmers to invest not only in the improvement of land, but, as in New England and Ohio, also in industry and commerce. And as Wakefield had predicted, secure title to land also attracted foreign investment, with London banks such as Barings investing more than one million pounds during the 1850s in financial securities and real estate.
“In no spot within British territory could we find aggregated in so striking a manner the evidences of this startling change,” the Anglo-American Magazine reported in 1852. “In none should we trace so strongly marked the imprint of national migration; in few discover such ripened fruits of successful colonization. The genius of Britain presides over the destiny of her offspring.”
Nevertheless, Canada’s frontier expansion never had the tigerish quality seen south of the border. In part, this was because George III’s 1763 proclamation prohibiting settlement beyond the Appalachians still held good north of the border, offering First Nation inhabitants a legal protection against settlers that was lacking in the United States. But more immediately, a quirk of banking regulation reduced the incentive to improve, sell up, and move on. While American banks, restricted by statute to one state, had to lend locally, Canadian banks were centralized, with local branches remitting funds, as much as ninety-five cents in the dollar, to a head office in Toronto or Montreal. The result was a slower recycling of capital resources into frontier investment. In the financial centers of Toronto and Montreal, however, larger funds were available to buy government bonds and to back loans floated in Canada and Britain to fund infrastructure projects such as canals and railroads to link the Great Lakes to the Saint Lawrence.
That Canada’s headlong economic surge during this period depended on the same factors as in the United States, the growth of rural capital and of a banking capacity to make use of its investment potential, is made clear by comparison with the slower agricultural development of Quebec, or French Canada. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Quebec’s population tripled in size, a growth rate that lagged far behind the twenty-fold increase in the number of people living in Ontario.
Every study of French-Canadian farming shows it to have been less profitable than in British Canada, not because Quebec land was poorer or farmed less intensively—its wheat was a major Canadian export to Britain—but because the overhang of seigneurial dues, such as the cens or rent, and the corvée or forced labor, added 30 percent to a farmer’s fixed costs, and because the province’s legal framework, with its essentially seventeenth-century emphasis on shared land ownership, clashed with the concept of an individual monopoly of land. In the late 1850s, when the price of improved land in Bruce County was rising toward ten dollars an acre, seigneurial farms in Quebec were selling for $2.50 an acre. Although the last feudal dues were abolished in 1854, the continuing shape of French Canada’s almost peasant system of agriculture, with its emphasis on family obligations and ownership, made banks reluctant to lend.
The Bank of Montreal, founded in 1817, was the oldest and largest bank in Canada, and its core deposits came from the province’s agricultural and timber sectors. But in the 1860s, when it had 30 percent of Canada’s banking business, two thirds of the bank’s lending, two million dollars, was to government, channelling potential investment capital away from the region’s producers. Consequently, the critical ingredient that lifted the profitability of Ontario farmers, the rising capital value of their land, played little part in Quebec’s development.
As early as 1843, a government investigation suggested that the seigneurial system was responsible for creating a culture in which “all the generous emotions of the habitant’s nature are stifled.” Indirect confirmation came from a French priest questioned by de Tocqueville about the lack of individual ambition among French Canadians compared to that of farmers south of the border. The conservative Quebecois, the priest admitted, had “not got the spirit of adventure or the scorn of ties of birth and family which are characteristic of the Americans.”
The Durham Report was read around the world, Wakefield bragged, “from Canada, through the West Indies & South Africa, to the Australias, & has everywhere been received with acclamation.” Seen from the twenty-first century, its direct influence is now deemed to have been limited to concentrating minds on the political goal of representative government. But that ignores the context of its times. For the group of nineteenth-century reformers who backed Wakefield, including such key contemporaries as Bentham’s social utilitarians and Mills’s economic liberals, Durham’s advocacy of free-market principles was taken as a decisive blow against the mercantile attitudes still entrenched in London. Karl Marx added his own backhanded compliment: “Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.”
Apprehensive of the report’s free-enterprise spirit, Melbourne tried to suppress it altogether, a move subverted by Wakefield leaking the document to the Times of London. Its argument for the creation of property in land, of waged labor, and of a responsive form of government had an impact not just in Bruce County, or Ontario, or even Canada itself, but across the entire farming area of the British Empire. Arguably its influence was felt even in South America, where Argentine and Brazilian governments both attempted to privatize native-held land, and in north Africa where the French, after experimenting with other forms of landholding, finally introduced surveys and individual titles to the territory they had conquered.
Lord Melbourne’s hostility went beyond an aristocratic dislike of capitalism. Britain’s painful colonial experience in North America had convinced his generation, and most of his successors as prime minister, with the notable exception of Lord Palmerston, that the acquisition of territory was a mistake. Until late in the century, the policy of the Colonial Office was to restrict new British settlements to armed trading posts like Hong Kong and Singapore, or coaling stations like Aden. The reluctance to acquire territory prompted the giant of late Victorian politics, William Gladstone, to warn against British ownership of the Suez Canal in 1877 on the grounds that “our first site in Egypt, be it by larceny or be it by emption [purchase], will be the almost certain egg of a North African empire.”
Official opposition to Wakefield’s plans continued to the day of his death, but the settlement of New Zealand demonstrated the unstoppable forces that led from individual land ownership, however brought about, to the creation of government.
In 1839, while Wakefield was still in Canada, the New Zealand Company on his advice sent out a ship to the islands with thirty-five colonists, including his brother, William, to buy land directly from the Maori inhabitants. Although not the first European settlers—whalers and sealers, and some adventurers from Australia had established permanent stations there—they were by far the most aggressive in acquiring land. Attempting to keep control of the situation, the British government dispatched its own representative, Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson, to negotiate an agreement with the Maori recognizing British sovereignty. In the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by some five hundred chieftains in 1840, sovereignty was acknowledged, and in exchange the British government guaranteed “to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess.”
Ignoring the treaty, William Wakefield concluded a series of purchase agreements with Maori chiefs for somewhere between three hundred thousand and twenty million acres—deliberately vague wording allowed for elastic interpretation—covering most of the South Island and the lower part of the North Island. Not only did this contravene the government’s commitment at Waitangi but, as one of Hobson’s team pointed out, “No Chief however high his rank could dispose of a single acre without the concurrence of his tribe.”
Back in Britain, the government’s fury was stoked further by the way the dubiously acquired property was being sold to investors “merely as means of carrying on gambling speculations by persons who never dream of becoming colonists,” as a government report put it. More officials were sent out specifically to protect Maori interests, and the Colonial Office asserted the Jeffersonian principle that only the government had the right to buy directly from its indigenous owners. But nothing could stop the property engine.
The first New Zealand land was quickly sold in London, and in 1842 some thirty-two hundred emigrants, almost half of them children, arrived to farm the presurveyed land at Nelson in the South Island. Following Wakefield’s blueprint, it had been planned that the first thousand lots, each of two hundred acres, would be sold for $7.50 an acre, with half the profits paying for the emigration of more buyers. The majority of immigrants, however, were laborers lacking the capital to create Wakefield’s virtuous cycle, and with many of the lots unsold almost a quarter of Nelson’s original inhabitants soon drifted away to squat on unsurveyed land. Harassed by the governor and short of money, the New Zealand Company attempted to seize more land in the South Island as assets to stave off bankruptcy. Angry Maori in the area resisted, and in a fight in 1843 William Wakefield and twenty-one settlers and surveyors were killed.
News of his brother’s death caused Edward Wakefield to suffer a stroke. Once youthful and mesmerizing—in Toronto he managed to hypnotize a girl so deeply medical assistance was needed to resuscitate her—Wakefield had grown into a stout, pop-eyed, cigar-smoking speculator who had succeeded in creaming off $100,000 from a canal project in Canada. But his Machiavellian touch was undiminished. By involving the Church of England in the colonization of what would become the city of Canterbury on the South Island, he succeeded in making the company’s program respectable, and by encouraging a press campaign to support British settlers farming land that had been lawfully purchased in Britain as private property, he made it popular.
However much the government disliked what a Colonial Secretary called the company’s “petty trickery,” it could not escape the overwhelming force of public opinion. With an ill grace, the Colonial Office arranged a loan to bail out the company, recognized the de facto validity of William Wakefield’s purchase of much of the South Island, and dispatched an infantry regiment backed by artillery to protect the settlers.
By the time Edward Gibbon Wakefield went out to join them in 1852, there were more than twenty-seven thousand settlers occupying land across both islands of New Zealand, from Auckland in the north to Otago in the south. Their outlook was essentially that of Benjamin Ironsides who decided to emigrate from Sheffield to try his luck in a new land. “Dangers and fatigues I fear not,” he told the company’s agent, “I rather court them, I am in fact quite tired of working continually for [a wage] & never perceiving any future chance of bettering my condition.”
The inevitable need to protect settler interests had by then brought into existence an elected legislature to represent their opinion alongside the executive power of the governor. Returned as a representative to the legislative assembly, Wakefield quickly gathered enough votes to push through the next constitutional step, to have the executive council answerable to the legislature rather than to the governor. The change decisively altered official policy toward New Zealand’s colonization.
For the next twenty years, until the 1870s, governments in both Wellington, the colony’s capital, and London supported the spread of colonists into the North Island, leading to a series of raids, retaliations, and occasional all-out battles, known collectively as the Maori Wars. In the course of them, most of the arable land in the island, home to the bulk of the Maori, passed into the ownership of settlers. The process was accelerated by the operation of the Native Lands Court set up in 1864 to combat the “communism” of tribal ownership. The court’s legal decisions enabled individual Maori to register individual plots of tribal land as their own and sell them on to white buyers. An estimated eighteen million acres in the North Island, almost two thirds of the total area, was sold on in this way.
In 1862, the would-be architect of this haphazard expansion of the private property empire died. The program of social engineering that Wakefield planned had proved to be utterly impractical. Yet the ease of understanding how it might apparently solve social problems in Britain and create wealth in the colonies gave it political momentum. And, as the Public Lands Survey had already proved in the United States, the natural development of landed property into rural capital brought in economic forces that knocked aside the government’s opposition.
In 1846, the voting strength of Britain’s industrialists carried through what Wakefield had always wanted, the repeal of the Corn Laws that protected British cereal farmers with a high tariff on imported grain. From then on, the search for cheap corn to feed the workers employed in Britain’s factories would suck farmers within its empire into a global trading network. The links that carried food and raw materials in one direction sent people and investment in the other, hastening the transition of imperial outposts from rural to industrial capitalism. It would be easy to suppose that such a pattern was inevitable. But without the colonizing example of the United States and the advocacy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the social and economic structure of the British Empire would have been very different.
Almost everywhere, however, the institution of individually owned title to land had devastating consequences for the existing inhabitants. In New Zealand, a population of perhaps one hundred thousand Maori in 1830 was reduced to about forty thousand by the early twentieth century, and, despite the Waitangi Treaty, they were left in possession of just 3 percent of the sixty-six million acres they had occupied a hundred years earlier. With the loss of land, the stories and histories associated with it almost disappeared, and a cultural identity built on owning the earth, not through the paper title recognized by the Torrens registration scheme, but through custom, use, and burial, was undermined. Despite the prominence of many Maori in the twentieth century, such as the reforming politician Apirana Ngata and the opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa, the symptoms of dislocation are still apparent in the twenty-first century in the poorer standards of housing and education and higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among indigenous New Zealanders.
A similar legacy of deracination afflicts to some degree the descendants of the hunter-gatherers who inhabited Australia for fifty thousand years and the First Nations of Canada. Amid the many attempts to restore a sense of identity, the most promising in each country seems to be the legal recognition of rights to land based on unwritten evidence of its central position in the community’s cultural past. And in a private property society where the law has been built around single possession, it is still notoriously difficult to ascertain ownership even today among the multiple claimants to tribal land, a problem that paralyzes the potential value, cultural and commercial, of more than one million acres that remain in Maori possession.
To the first incomers, however, there could be no question of accommodating the ubiquitous tradition of communal possession. With genuine concern, Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, declared that if the Indians were not to be wiped out by the incoming settlers, they had to learn “a love for exclusive property.” During the nineteenth century, the old justification of American settlers for taking Indian land, that their large hunting grounds could be used more efficiently for farming, was replaced by criticism of the social effects of tribal ownership. As Superintendent Elias Rector of the Southern Indian Agency put it in the 1850s, “the utter absence of individual title to particular lands . . . [removes] the chief incentive to labor and exertion, the very mainspring on which the prosperity of a people depends.”
Because there was not the same conflict between settlers and government, and the law left no doubt that the United States government alone could acquire land legally from Native Americans, the formal process of transferring land was more orderly than in the British Empire, but the result was not very different. In the name of progress—as Indian agents assured their clients, “common ownership and civilization cannot co-exist”—up to one hundred thousand Native Americans, from Seminoles in the south to Wyandottes in the north, were removed from their territories east of the Mississippi to be transported, as the 1830 Indians Removal Act directed, to “Indian Territory” around present-day Oklahoma. Fewer than eight thousand remained between the river and the Appalachians, where they were confined to a few reservations, while a swath of territory from Florida to Illinois was made available for purchase.
The process of clearing the land was not confined to the private property empires, however. The most tragic single expulsion during Russia’s expansion occurred in 1771 when more than 150,000 nomadic Kalmyks were driven off the Caspian steppe, and barely one third survived their migration to China’s province of Xinjiang in central Asia. To this could be added the slower clearing of other ethnic minorities, such as Turkic nomads and Siberian Yakuts forced out by the arrival of Russian settlers, and the religious persecution in the nineteenth century that drove one hundred thousand Chechens from the Caucasus and two hundred thousand Muslim Tatars from Crimea to the Ottoman Empire. Many other native peoples were simply enveloped by the imperial command structure, and then at the end of the nineteenth century were assimilated by a conscious policy of Russification aimed at obliterating ethnic differences.
Yet the success of the Afrikaaners of South Africa in fighting off every attempt to absorb them within the British Empire’s propertied ethos, almost the only people to do so, also demonstrated that modernization had its benefits. What distinguished the Afrikaaner way of life after they were settled by the mighty Dutch East India Company around the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century was a near-spiritual belief in living self-sufficiently from the land. Although united by devotion to the fiercely Protestant Dutch Reformed church and by membership of the kommandosor communal defense forces they formed to fight the Xhosa and other native inhabitants whose land they had taken, the Afrikaaners were authentic frontier people owing their possession of the soil to nothing but their self-reliant efforts to build homes and clear ground. Any insoluble disputes were settled by a landdrost or magistrate through whom they also supplied food and any other dues exacted by Company, but their requirement for outside government was minimal.
When farmers arrived from Britain in the early nineteenth century, following their country’s seizure of the Cape in 1806, their need to measure out the ground and own it according to common law collided with the Afrikaaners’ sprawling, barely marked circular tracts of ground measuring about six hundred acres where they raised livestock with slave labor. Faced by demands to pay land taxes and to have their properties properly registered, Afrikaaner frustration mounted and finally boiled over in 1833 when slavery was made illegal throughout the British Empire. To escape civilization and find new grazing, they moved north en masse, their long lines of ox-drawn wagons, scrawny sheep and cattle, and sullen slaves forming the central motif in Afrikaaner legends of the Great Trek.
In his poem “The Voortrekker,” Rudyard Kipling, the British Empire’s poet laureate, paid tribute to their stubborn refusal to be hemmed in by propertied living:
His neighbours’ smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest.
He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed.
He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring,
Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a People and a King.
To clear up the Cape Colony’s haphazard development, the recommendations of the Durham Report for surveys of waste land, minimum prices, responsible government, and increased immigration were introduced in 1844. The prosperity that came in their wake ensured that the British and their hunger for property would continue to pursue the trekkers as they moved into modern Natal, then across the Vaal River into Transvaal. And when gold was found in Transvaal’s Rand Mountains in 1886, the English-speaking Uitlanders and other foreigners who poured in to exploit the discovery were able to build on the existing financial institutions of rural capitalism to raise money for the expensive business of mining. By 1895 there were twenty-three British banks in Transvaal, but only one owned by Afrikaans-speakers. Tensions grew as the newcomers pressed their need for political control in Transvaal’s legislative assembly, the Volksraad, dominated by stock-rearing Boers—the Afrikaans word for farmers. Mounting hostility between expansionist materialism and isolationist austerity led directly to the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899.
The eventual surrender of the Afrikaaners in 1902, after they had inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on the British, also demonstrated the seemingly limitless resources of men and arms commanded by the network of English-speaking, common law, exclusive land ownership societies. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders joined the South Africans, black and white, fighting to spread the propertied pattern of British imperialism.
It was never a world that the Afrikaaners wanted to join. They prided themselves on their white, Dutch, racial separateness, on apartheid. Despite defeat, that narrow certainty enabled them to adapt South Africa’s political structures to their “whites only” form of owning the land, and to retain control of its security forces. Throughout the twentieth century they clung to the self-sufficient ethos of the Great Trek, guaranteeing that they would remain immune to outside ideas and broader values, and that their eventual end would be as isolated, anachronistic, bigoted upholders of apartheid’s racist ideology. Like Britain’s eigtheenth-century landlords before them, the Afrikaaners demonstrated not only that power followed property, but that without redistribution each led on to self-sterilized monopoly.