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Sydney Olivier on Socialism and the Colonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Mohammed Nuri El-Amin
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Extract

Of all the Fabians Sydney Olivier (1859–1943) was the only one who became interested in the extension of Fabian socialism, in one form or another, to the British colonies. One reason for this perhaps is that he was the only one among the first generation of Fabians who was extremely conscious of his mixed origin. “I have,” he once wrote to his wife in 1884, “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time. That is the result, I expect, of my being such a mixture of French, Irish, and Puritan-Saxon blood. I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” In an age when European civilization was believed to be “everything” and everything else “nothing” such a temperament was highly conducive to the entertainment of sympathies toward non-European peoples and lands. A biographer of the Webbs came very close to saying this. “Sydney Olivier,” she remarked, “with his rich background of culture, tinged with a streak that can only be called romantic, perhaps derived from his Latin heredity, was … the voice predominantly of the moral sense.” And as is usual in several such controversies concerning the Fabian Society, the word of Bernard Shaw can never be neglected. To Shaw the French ancestry of Olivier enabled the latter to form an objective view of the British Empire and its role in history and it also helped him to get along quite well with non-English Britons.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 521 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1977

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References

1 In 1882 he entered the Colonial Office, and in 1885 he joined the Fabian Society. During 1890–1891 he acted as colonial secretary, British Honduras, and during 1891–1895 he worked in the South African Department, Colonial Office. In 1895 he was sent to the Leeward Islands as auditorgeneral. During 1895–1896 he was attached to the West India Department at the Colonial Office, and during 1896–1897 he acted as secretary to Royal Commission on the West Indies. During 1899–1904 he was colonial secretary, Jamaica, and during 1904–1907 he worked in the Colonial Office as principal clerk, West Indies and West Africa. During 1907–1913 he was governor of Jamaica, and during 1924–1925 he was secretary of state for India. During 1929–1930 he was chairman of the West India Royal Commission.

He has many publications some of which are referred to below. Those that are not referred to include: The Empire Builder (1905; republished 1927); The Myth of Governor Eyre (1933); Jamaica: The Blessed Island; and an essay entitled “The Moral Basis of Socialism,” in Fabian Essays (1889).

2 Olivier, Margaret, Sydney Olivier: Letters and Selected Writings (London, 1948), p. 45Google Scholar.

3 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb: A Study in Contemporary Biography (London, 1933), p. 30Google Scholar.

4 “This freedom from the Tangle of inhibitions which go to the make-up of a typical English man,” Shaw wrote, “made him as foreign as his name and his Huguenot ancestry, which gave him also the invaluable power of taking an objective view of his employer the British Empire. … It helped him to get on very well with me; for I being Irish, am more a foreigner in England than any man born in Wiltshire could possibly be” (Olivier, Margaret, Olivier: Letters), p. 10Google Scholar.

5 “I read by chance,” he frankly admitted, “an advertisement. … of clerkship starting at £250 a year in the Treasury and Colonial Office. … so I entered the Colonial Office, knowing nothing whatever about the colonies or any kind of official work … [and] I was put into the West Indian Department.” And it can fairly be said that what finally brought him into contact with the colonies was that instinctive Fabian urge for efficiency and social justice which Olivier, unlike Sidney and Beatrice Webb with regard to their similar notion of beneficient bureaucracy, desired to extend to the colonies. “After about eight years in the Office,” thus he recollected, “I found lack of contact with the realities and the people with whose affairs I was dealing becoming rather flat, and with increasing perceptions that most governors were exceedingly stupid and that many things could be much better managed in their administrations by intelligent service, I took the first opportunity that presented itself of getting sent out to a colony. That was at the time an unprecedented proceeding for a Colonial Office junior clerk. It arose out of the peculiar vagaries of a Governor of British Honduras” (ibid., p. 36).

6 Ibid., p. 85.

7 Ibid., p. 15.

8 This is tract no. 7 of the Fabian Society, the authorship of which was attributed (since the tract was published anonymously) to Olivier by Edward Pease, a foundation member of the Society and its general secretary for quite a number of years. In view of the absence of any other claim to it by any other Fabian (so far as the knowledge of the writer goes), and in view of its utmost consistency with Olivier's other arguments in the rest of his works, the writer accepts this attribution of authorship.

9 For a brief, concise and adequate account of this theory, though only taken from the writings of Sidney Webb who, in this very instance, can be taken as a perfect representative of the consensus of economic opinion within the Society, see McBriar, A. M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 37–38Google Scholar.

10 Quoted in McBriar, , Fabian Socialism, p. 121Google Scholar.

11 For more on this see Webb, Beatrice, Our Partnership (London, 1948), p. 188Google Scholar.

12 McBriar, , Fabian Socialism, p. 254Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 124.

14 Olivier's view on this aspect is most typical here. “I do not say,” he remarked, “it [Western civilization] is better than every other civilisation or shut my eyes to its appalling shortcomings and failures: but I think it is an enormously better thing than any culture Africa, outside the Mediterranean and Nilotic area, has produced, and that native Africans recognize this, are attracted by it, profit by it, and, under its stimulus, education and discipline, are advanced in the faculties of humanity” (Olivier, Sydney, The Anatomy of African Misery [London, 1927], pp. 151–152Google Scholar).

15 Fabian Society, Fabianism and the Empire (London, 1900), p. 45Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 31.

17 Olivier, Sydney, White Capital and Coloured Labour, 2nd ed. rev. (London, 1929), p. 11Google Scholar.

18 He pointed out, for instance, “to the determination of the white employers represented by the South African Political Labour Party to take like advantage of their share of the exclusive political power of Europeans, to keep down the native workers, who have no political franchise, in the position of unskilled and low-paid labourers, and to debar them by legislation, as well as by the exclusiveness of their own Trade Unions, from entering skilled occupations or improving their position by combination” (ibid., p. 9).

19 “The average white wage on the Rand (in all grades of employment),” he observed, “is 18s. 7d. per shift. The average coloured wage, including cost of rations and compound expenses, is 2s. 8d. per shift. In mining, the coloured man labours, while the white man, as a rule, directs. Five Kaffirs do the work of handling and running two machine drills under the direction of one white contractor. The wages, food, and compound expenses of the five Kaffirs together amount to less than 15s. 5d. per shift while the contractor receives (average) 30s. The white man's wage, then, for all employments on the Rand, averages seven times those of the black, including rations and housing, and in mining work with machines, done by Kaffirs bossed by white men, the proportion is from ten to one upwards” (ibid., pp. 32–33).

20 Olivier strongly defended the Negro against the charges of laziness, slovenliness, thievishness, sexual incontinence, absence of mechanical habit of industry, absence of a feeling of obligation to be industrious for industriousness' sake and absence of a conception of any essential virtue in labor itself. He attributed all these charges, more or less, to the desire of the whites to exclude the blacks from having their due share in society. And even when Olivier admitted the existence of some of these charges, to a degree, in the preceding generations of the present Negro, he did hasten to add that the latter need not reflect the same traits of personality. As regards the charge that the Negro was not industrious, he asserted that the Negro seemed less industrious only to the white settler who wanted to overwork him for the settler's own selfish interests. Further, he contended, life was generally so easy for the Negro that he was not faced with the acute necessity of having to exert himself in the same way as the white man did in the latter's relatively more difficult conditions. Finally, “work and money are not yet rigidly commensurable in the consciousness of the African. It is this incommensurability of work with money in his mind (a most valuable and hopeful characteristic) that partly accounted for his apparent lack of conscience towards his employer” (ibid., pp. 105–110, see also pp. 69–72).

21 Ibid., p. 9.

22 Ibid., p. 101.

23 Ibid., p. 102.

24 Ibid., p. 27.

25 Olivier, , African Misery, pp. 213–214Google Scholar.

26 “Whether the white man likes it or not,” Olivier argued in an extremely typical remark, “the system of industries, which deals with the coloured man as an independent wage-earner, and in a society in which he has the stimulus of the white man's ideals of education, the coloured man must advance, and he visibly does advance, to a level of understanding and self-reliance in which he will not accept the negrophobist theory of exclusion. Especially will this be the case if the elements of the Christian religion are communicated to the coloured people and the New Testament placed in their hand …” (White Capital and Coloured Labour, p. 36).

27 Olivier, Margaret, Olivier: Letters, p. 12Google Scholar.

28 “Many of the most perceptive travellers of the age [the eighteenth century],” Kiernan observes, “were Frenchmen, whereas Dutchmen and Englishmen in Asia were apt to look at native peoples with boorish contempt or indifference. Frenchmen could look at Asians as interesting foreigners, instead of looking down on them, because France owned no colonies worth mentioning in Asia until the later nineteenth century. This was not unconnected with the fact that in Europe Frenchmen were the leading spirits in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. One feature of it was a willingness to recognize civilisations outside Europe as fellow-members of a human family, equal or even superior to Europe in some of their attainments” (Kiernan, V. G., The Lords of Human Kind [London, 1969], p. 20Google Scholar).

29 We should not forget, however, that, even at that time, there were some thinkers who wanted to make use of whatever data they had about the “primitive” world in order to formulate a comparative method by the help of which human civilization could be compared and contrasted. We can give as instances of this trend Ferguson and the nineteenth-century Scottish enlightenment. Ferguson, writing about the Indians, concludes that “it is in their present condition that we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our own progenitors” (quoted in Burrow, J. W., Evolution and Society: A Study of Victorian Social Theory [Cambridge, 1970], p. 12Google Scholar). In the same vein J. F. McLennan who was on the lookout for “a preface to a general history” enunciates that such a preface “may be compiled from the materials of barbarism. … The first thing to be done is to inform ourselves of the fact relating to the least developed races. … Their condition, as it may today be observed, is truly the most ancient condition of man. It is the lowest and simplest … and … in the science of history old means not old in chronology but in structure. That is the most ancient which lies nearest the beginning of human progress considered as a development” (ibid., pp. 12–13). But though such attempts at getting acquainted with the nature and conditions of the “primitive” world were rife in intellectual circles, they were not influential beyond that limited sphere; and hence they could not have provided Olivier, whose contributions to the field could not be called purely intellectual, with much that would have helped him at the time when he was formulating his views on socialism to theorize about the “primitive” world as well. See also Kiernan, , Lords of Human Kind, pp. 21–22Google Scholar.

30 For the views of Saint-Simon on this particular aspect there is, to my knowledge, no better work in English than Manuel, Frank E., The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1963), pp. 219–237Google Scholar.

31 Quoted in Tucker, Robert C., The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (London, 1970), p. 100Google Scholar.

32 Olivier, Margaret, Olivier: Letters, p. 157Google Scholar.

33 “Part of it,” he continued, “is extreme in its moderation, whilst the other part is moderate in its extremes. There are men in both sections who have grown grey in trying to win for their people some rights of citizenship, and who until the other day, found themselves as far from the realization of their hopes as ever. What wonder that some of them have become soured, and that they and many of the younger men are now advocating a more forward policy” Quoted in Hughes, Emrys, Keir Hardie (London, 1956), p. 156Google Scholar.

34 Thus Z. Brzezinski: “that the Communist world recognizes the intrinsic importance of Africa, with its human and material resources—not to speak of its strategic position—is clear. That it took the Communist leaders some time to perceive its importance, in spite of the traditional Communist emphasis on the underdeveloped nations so well underlined by Lenin's perceptive 1917 pamphlet on imperialism, is not denied by Communist spokesmen. They admit that until the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956 they held rigid and ‘dogmatic’ views concerning this important region, with the result that even serious study of the area was neglected, or at least lacked the necessary sophistication” (Africa and the Communist World [Oxford, 1963], p. 4Google Scholar).

And, in the same vein, Fritz Schatten writes: “The Africa policy of the communists developed! rather late and as a reaction to the genuine success of the movement for independence. The communists had no traditional, practical experience to fall back on, apart from some improvised attempts to exercise influence on the chiefly literary awakening of the coloured peoples in the twenties. Against their lack of practical experience, however, they had a long tradition of theory, ready-made explanations of the phenomenon of ‘colonial revolution’ and theoretical solutions for it” (Communism in Africa [London, 1966], p. 53Google Scholar).

35 On the weakness of the Egyptian movement Laqueur, Walter Z. writes: “The history of Communism in Egypt is … that of a movement rather than a party and the movement consists of many factions, some of which have had a total membership of one” (Communism and Nationalism in the Middle East [London, 1957], p. 31)Google Scholar.

Similarly, on the weakness of the Indian movement Haithcox writes: “Indian communists, however, were unable to take advantage of the upsurge of the nationalist, anticolonialist sentiment that Gandhi had unleashed. Furthermore, the initial advantage that they had secured in the labor movement was soon dissipated. Ordinarily it would have been expected that communist influence would have increased during this turbulent period, but, in fact, after a short period of dynamic growth in 1927–29 communist strength declined precipitously” (Haithcox, John Patrick, Communism and Nationalism in India [Princeton, 1971], p. 144Google Scholar).

36 Pease, E. R., The History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), p. 236Google Scholar.

37 See, for instance, McBriar, , Fabian Socialism, pp. 347–349Google Scholar.

38 Olivier, , White Capital and Coloured Labour, p. 101Google Scholar.