Landing in India in 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay could scarcely fathom its strangeness: women and men who to him looked black and nearly naked; fanged gods bristling with multiple arms; the air so humid every smell seemed to ripen instantly into rot. In the face of such foreignness Macaulay retreated into the familiar, burying himself in European classics, literature and political thought, and deepening his consideration of the English past. When he left India four years later, he took with him the germ of his multi-volume masterpiece, The History of England from the Accession of James II.
Macaulay's History established him as Britain's unofficial historian laureate, and inspired "generations of public schoolboys, historians, politicians, lawmakers and colonial administrators the governing classes as well as autodidacts" with its resonant portrayal of British history as a march of liberty and progress. Indeed, it is partly due to Macaulay that Britain's national history curriculum continues to command public attention. Yet history students who read Macaulay today are most likely to engage with his 1835 "Minute on Indian Education", a treatise infamous for its chauvinistic judgment that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
How did Britain's leading history man embody and embed the prejudices of his times? Catherine Hall sets out to "unearth the racial and imperial thinking in one piece of the historical canon". The foundations of Macaulay's thought, she argues, rested in a family that bound him to empire before he was even born.
Macaulay's father Zachary hailed from a Scottish family of the kind so well represented in the outposts of the late 18th-century British empire. Three brothers spent time in India, several others ended up in the West Indies and west Africa, while Zachary himself struck out at 16 for Jamaica, where he worked for five years as a plantation book-keeper in a notoriously opulent as well as violent slave society. He returned to England in 1789 primed for spiritual and moral conversion. Falling in with the Clapham Sect, Zachary became a devout evangelical and engaged abolitionist. He went on to serve as governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone a settlement of former slaves and free blacks, sponsored by abolitionists and spent the rest of his working life campaigning for the end of slavery in and beyond the British empire.
What did Zachary's career mean for his brilliant eldest son? Tom (as Hall familiarly calls him) grew up in a pious and doting family, with a private life marked by passionate emotional attachments to his sisters Hannah and Margaret, and repeated encounters with cultural difference. Tom's family also prepared him to become a "public man" dedicated to the improvement of his nation and empire. Where Zachary believed that any person could be reformed from within, by spiritual salvation, Tom directed his energies outward, to "the reform of nation and empire, other peoples, not himself". The whiggish image he crafted of Britain as a land of progress, liberty, reason, manly virtue and superior civilisation depended, Hall argues, on the contrasting reality of his female-dominated domestic experience. Not for nothing did one later reader, Sigmund Freud, model his prose on Macaulay's.
Hall is one of the most distinguished historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire working today, and Macaulay and Son offers, at one level, an ideal match of author with subject. She would surely agree with Macaulay that historians write for their times. For him, that meant showing how "the history of England is emphatically the history of progress". For Hall, that means exposing his many blindspots: the way he excluded people from the imagined British community on the basis of gender, class and ethnicity; and entrenched hierarchical ideas of civilisation.
When it comes to narrative style, however, author and subject make an awkward pairing. Macaulay believed historians should reclaim the imaginative realm "appropriated by the historical novelist" that they should "make the past present bring the distant near call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners and garb show us over their houses seat us at their tables rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes". He succeeded brilliantly at writing history for readers of Dickens (whose Dombey and Son Hall deliberately echoes in her title). But readers of Hilary Mantel, say, will likely find Hall hard going. As if in defiance of her subject's literary gifts, Hall consistently skirts his glorious cadences in favour of dry synopses, and hauls in legions of leaden-tongued scholars to bolster her analysis. Only the most patient readers will get a whiff of Macaulay's dinner table (he favoured lobster curry and champagne) or a passing glance at his manners (his habit of reading Thucydides before breakfast left its pages flecked with blood from his barber's razor).
Hall's scholarly prose stands at some odds with her interest in Macaulay's inner life. How much richer a sense might we get of his complex family attachments, or of his "shocking" encounter with India, or of the wellsprings of his personal sense of history, if she quoted more amply from his writings? Maybe she resists Macaulay's verbal seductions because she knows that all his linguistic finery masked an ugly set of prejudices. No, no, Tom, she insists, you've left out women; you're presuming that British civilisation is better than others; you say that everyone is equal, when really you privilege some. But pointing to what a message leaves out can only achieve so much when the medium in which it's delivered has made it so widely attractive.
Ultimately, as Hall rightly notes, Macaulay's distant prejudices may be nearer than we think. Not only do they still crop up in political discourse, notably when it comes to smug assertions about the superiority of western liberal society. They also still inform the writing of history. Surveying the history shelves in a Waterstones offers a chastening look at the degree to which popular history perpetuates restrictive ideas about gender, class and ethnicity. Apparently women primarily write and read about women and the things they do at home and with their families, friends and lovers; while men write and read about men and the things they do with guns, gadgets, money and all-round gusto. Readers of both genders overwhelmingly prefer anything to do with their own nation than anything to do with any other, and more often than not favour the perspective of its ruling class. It's much as Macaulay might have wished.
Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists and the Renewal of the British Empire is published by HarperPress.
