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In contrast to the spirit of laissez-faire, the Colonial Office under Gladstone's first government served as a large-scale social engineering agency concerned with the cautious restructuring of volatile societies in the sugar-producing colonies of the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. From the perspective of the Colonial Office civilizing the barbarian made him more governable. There is a revealing paradox in the fact that so much of what Victorian Liberals did in the name of civilizing benighted natives involved active government initiatives in imperial settings. Under the banner of “peace, retrenchment, and reform” nineteenth-century British Liberals advocated cost-cutting and laissez-faire at home and non-expansion abroad. Liberal leaders' public statements in this vein helped set the historiographical stereotype of supposed Gladstonian Liberal “little Englandism” versus a dramatic imperial policy shift toward “forward movement” in the Disraelian Conservative era. Scholarship over the last thirty years has refuted this older view and has stressed the continuity of British imperialism throughout the nineteenth century. However, a careful examination of the details of policy reveals that from 1868–74 the Liberals not only valued the Empire, but were willing to sacrifice their own theories of limited government in order to strengthen the British hold—even on their bankrupt sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Indian oceans. Initiatives in colonial religion, education, health, justice, and labor regulation demonstrate a surprising Liberal bent toward government activism in the non-white Empire. Moreover, the self-conscious and energetic manipulation of such a wide range of policy tools reveals a serious Liberal commitment to empire, which further belies the old notion that from 1868–74, “little Englandism” reached its high point.

Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the “Civilizing Mission” in the Sugar Colonies, 1868–1874