Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain by Catherine Hall (review)

Both Zachary Macaulay and his son, Thomas Babington Macaulay, were ardent reformers, family men, and men of the Empire. Yet their differences in terms of national reform, imperial responsibility, religious belief, and modes of masculinity speak to the shifting generational landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. For the evangelical Christian Zachary, the lifting of the great sin of slavery from the nation’s soul constituted his life’s work. The certainty that guided his public life was matched by inner doubts about his own pride and sinfulness. For Thomas, his public self—as a leading Whig politician, lawgiver to India, and historian of the nation—was what mattered. Although he was rarely troubled by self-doubt, he was emotionally dependent on his mother and sisters, and sought approbation from a stern father whose religion and humanitarian sympathies he deprecated.

Catherine Hall tells the story of father and son with consummate skill. Not only is Macaulay and Son important for understanding imperial Britain, it is a beautifully crafted history. Rather than offering a strictly biographical study, Hall draws upon the two men’s lives and writings in order to explore key themes. While Hall has deployed similar moves in earlier works—one thinks of the prologue to Civilising Subjects (2002), on the imperial career of Edward Eyre—in her new book she looks more deeply at inner lives and emotions as proper subjects of historical study. Home and family are among the book’s key themes. The gender-coded domains of private and public life are shown to be complexly entangled, and laced with psychic investments. Hall explores the deep ambivalence of sibling relationships, particularly the love between Thomas and his sisters Margaret and Hannah, and the sacrifices that he expected from sisters who idolized him but chose to marry the first chance they got—Margaret to the wealthy abolitionist Edward Cropper, and Hannah to the future governor of Madras, Charles Trevelyan. These were losses Thomas felt as if abandoned by lovers. Having never married, in loneliness or sorrow he turned to reading and writing.

The shaping of the British Empire was central to the careers of both father and son. Born in the west Highlands of Scotland, the son of a Calvinist minister, as a young man Zachary spent six years in Jamaica, working as a supervisor on a sugar plantation. In 1789 he returned to Britain and, following a conversion experience, became a member of the extended family of evangelicals settled at Clapham Common. Hall stresses the centrality of home, marriage, and family to evangelical culture, and explains that Clapham represented “a self-conscious attempt to make a new kind of community, an Evangelical colony with a controlled and controllable environment” (56). It was only after having spent nearly a decade in West Africa as an agent of the Sierra Leone Company that Zachary married Selina Mills, a protégée of Hannah More. In 1794 he became governor of the colony that had been established as an experiment in freedom, “a laboratory for the benevolent empire of God,” as well as a testing ground for the principle of free labor (22). But away from home, Zachary confronted an environment and people—neighboring chiefs, free settlers, and “jacobinical” dissenters—that resisted control. The failed hopes of Sierra Leone challenged abolitionists’ conflicted notion of racial equality and their evaluation of the capacities of “the African” for progressive reform. As Hall concludes, Zachary’s belief in the universal human condition and prospects for salvation and civilization for all “rested on an idealized and fantasized fiction of sameness” (49). Nonetheless, Sierra Leone provided the basis for a family fortune made and later lost. Thus while Thomas was raised in wealthy circumstances, his own turn to imperial service was dictated by the need to replenish the family coffers and secure his own financial independence.

Thomas grew up within the abolitionist fold, but as Hall writes, “neither abolition nor Providence … ranked highly in his political lexicon...