Updated 31 January 2010
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By Dan Byrnes
Note: This essay was written before 1996, after when it became easier to consult genealogical websites on the Internet.
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This bibliographical essay, also concerned with genealogy, helps form a bridge to various aspects of my research over 22 years. This research became rather complicated, since the study of eighteenth and nineteenth century merchants, in a context of world-trade-of-the-day, remains in a state of pre-computerised infancy.
I mention computerised information since in particular, when the computerised IGI is consulted, it becomes noticeable that the family names of the convict contractors under notice here (1786-1867) can be found quite commonly in London parishes... so common, that unless information drawn from the IGI can be suitably annotated (and often it cannot be), individuals with those names, men or women, could be so easily confused with individuals or families under notice here as to provide a dangerous situation. (This situation has not changed with the computerised version of the IGI available on the Internet.)
Otherwise, with the use of bibliographies on CD-ROM, it is easy to derive entirely fresh compilations of information - independently of the tastes of other researchers - by making a bulk download of listed items strictly in terms of persons' names, ship names, place names, or dates. Many new angles for research can be discerned by use of this simple tactic, partly since omissions made by earlier researchers can quickly become more obvious once lists made from a variety of sources are compared.
The computerisation of the IGI, which will be constantly updated, which easily enables the helpful, bulk downloading of possibly useful information, requires the historian to face the fact that the genealogies of noted merchants have not yet been suitably separated from the family histories of other, non-notable people of the same name. The usually useful distinctions made between notables and non-notables tend to an unfortunate blurriness, ironically in a context of what is, technically, continual information update!
This situation may be due to technological innovation, but it presents problems which have not yet been technically formulated in relation to the arts of researching and writing history. Even if they have not used computerised information on individuals and their backgrounds, most historians commenting on business history in the context of British Imperial History (1620-1914) - writing since 1900 to the present - now recognize that in the English speaking world, family linkages were vital to the management of business firms large and small. (A significant historical change in that situation in business and economic life has been registered with Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
From about 1740, notably with Barings, this applies especially to the histories of English banking firms/families which saw members enjoying an elevation to the peerage. There is no reason for the historian to avoid considering genealogical matters which may be of interest or relevance, or which can aid explanation, or refine information on matters which seem causative; and this outlook is common with discussions of the British aristocracy (although some historians regard such information as useful only as an "undercurrent").
Modern computerisation of genealogical information, however, raises historiographical problems which remain theoretical, if not widely recognised as actual. For example, with lesser notables, and in an Australian connection, Semmler's biography of the poet A. B. (Banjo) Paterson claims that the poet's family had some ancestry with the William Paterson who co-founded the Bank of England in the 1690s. Semmler advances no genealogical proof of this. It may or may not prove interesting to find the facts here, but I suspect from my own computerisation of genealogical information on less than 65,000 individuals from 1550 to 1925, that research on these Paterson linkages, alone, would throw up for inspection other names (seen in the context of trading, banking or financial circles, and probably heavily Scottish in character) which would be of some relevance to the foregoing discussions.
Apart from that conjecture, it does seem from much recent historical research that a majority of business histories in the English-speaking world (at least to 1840) are to some extent inseparable from family histories. In that case, one can adopt a fresh approach and search histories on abstract matters (politics, trade) in order to find detail on individuals, which can be then inserted into family histories, which family histories can then be recompiled, and re-inserted into more abstract treatments of historical topics. This is one approach I have used in my research.
Here, a welcome historiographical shift seems to be taking place in regard of British Imperial History. A splendid and probably pioneering article with a useful genealogical approach is Jacob M. Price, `One Family's Empire: The Russell-Lee-Clerk Connection in Maryland, Britain and India, 1707-1857', Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol. 72. 1977., pp. 165-225. This article treats an extended family resident in both American colonies, and London, which was damaged financially and otherwise by the American Revolution. This family regrouped, and then benefited from careers made in India, or in trade with India. This sort of group response fits many historians' by-now typical remarks about Britain's "swing to the East" after the American Revolution.
A list of notable English families engaged in India (or shipping to India) from the 1790s would include descendants of Duncan Campbell the hulks overseer (After 1786, Campbell (probably) bought for his son John a ship, Valentine, which had earlier been present at the official establishment of Penang in 1786). Alexander Dalrymple the hydrographer of the East India Company. The brother of the Bounty mutineer, Fletcher Christian. Capt. James Wilson of the first London Missionary Society missionary ship, Duff. Lord Cornwallis (who lost the American War of Independence). David Scott senior and junior. The career in Malaya of the father, Francis, of Col. William Light of Adelaide, South Australia, should not be forgotten. Prinsep, the convict contractor.
The name
Darvall is seen in India, Darvall becoming a link in the family chain
of
the
Australian bush poet, A. B. Banjo Paterson. Families descended from
Alderman
John Shakespear of London (noted in J. Shakespear, John
Shakespear
of Shadwell and his descendants 1619-1931. Self
published. Newcastle. 1931...
These Shakespears became
linked to the
family of
the novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray, whose father was in India).
Some
Thackerays are noted in the circle of the writer Virginia Woolf (
nee Stephen - Australian Dictionary of Biography
(ADB) entry
for James
Stephen, 1771-1833).
Virginia's mother was named Julia Prinsep Jackson - but it remains difficult to suggest how the name Prinsep arises there. John Palmer, father of John Palmer who worked in the commissary of NSW, whose sister Sophia married Robert Campbell of the Wharf, Sydney. (Robert Campbell's brother John was in India). Henry Lancelot Bigge (1806-1844), listed in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage under Selby-Bigge, in a genealogy also listing Commissioner J. T. Bigge. Members of the family of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who himself spent time in India. The novelist Emily Eden (1797-1869), daughter of William Eden Lord Auckland...
The father of the governor of Western Australia, James Stirling. Capt. George Richardson a friend of the first governor of NSW, Arthur Phillip. William Money had East India Company connections. Members of the Close family listed in L. M. Mowle's genealogies. In NSW, Capt. Austin Forrest who died at Richmond in 1812 (married to Jemima Pitt - ADB entry for Robert Jenkins). From the 1780s, the Larkins family of Blackheath. The Farquhar family which produced the mother of W. S. Davidson. Gabriel Steward (1731-1792), MP and paymaster of marines from 1779 till 1792, the father of W. S. Davidson's second wife Catherine Steward (died 1864), had been 15 years in EICo employ, much of it at St Helena. (Namier/Brooke, History of Parliament, Vol. 2, p. 478; De Falbe, p. 96). What becomes evident is a lack of oversight of the influence of East India Company personnel.
Price's article splendidly treats two of the three chairman of the little-known British Creditors, William Molleson and James Russell. What Price apparently failed to realise was that a third chairman of the British Creditors, Duncan Campbell, who had become the overseer of the Thames prison hulks, had descendants who demonstrated exactly the same response - many found careers in India. And this becomes important.
Here I should say that in 1992-1993, I was provided a grant by the Literature Board of the Australia Council in order to complete research for a biography of Duncan Campbell, and I read Price's article while thus engaged. Meanwhile, I completed work on Duncan Campbell's complicated family history (which can be linked to the tempestuous career of a governor of early Australia, William Bligh).
Using this grant enabled research which helps explain why this bibliography is so extensive. One's respect for Price's work is undiminished, but the fact that Price overlooked Campbell, who as hulks overseer remains deeply embedded in treatments of the first convict transportations to Australia, begins to speak eloquently about a series of silences in history-writing which is sustained by nothing else than the way historians regard their topic boundaries - with too little regard for people whose careers happened to embody what becomes the stuff of history.
It seems, from the points of view of US, English and Australian historians, that the histories of the prosecution and of the aftermaths of the American Revolution, and a subsequent British settling of Australia, are forever to be quarantined from one another - at the considerable expense of overlooking relevant family histories as well as the complaints of the British Creditors.
With the post-revolutionary history of the United States, however, it becomes evident from some treatments [such as Charles F. Hobson, ` The recovery of British debts in the Federal Circuit Court of Virginia, 1790-1797', Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 92, 2, 1984., pp. 176-200.], that the complaints of the British Creditors provided some stimulus to the quicker development of a federally-and-internationally responsible US legal system, which is surely a more abstract topic, that should not be under-rated as such!
If this is so, then the three chairmen of the British Creditors have been denied due recognition? (And Patrick Colquhuon as spokesman for the Scottish Creditors could also have played a role). Taking this as a cue, I had also noticed that in her otherwise excellent treatments of Anglo-American merchant politics, 1720-1776, Olson lost sight of Campbell from 1776, which means that one has a problem in interpreting the comphrehensiveness of her work generally, vis-a-vis Price's article noted above. Price, working independently, made progress beyond Olson's, but because he had not read Anglo-Australian penal history, Price missed on Campbell, whose family history if anything would buttress Price's thesis. Ergo, two competent US historians lost sight of some of their quarry at precisely the point where an Australian historian must begin work, and where English historians interested in social/penal history traditionally lose interest, or lack interest, quite as though "Australia" is down-market.
Here, in historians' surveys of the very birth of the modern world - after the American and French revolutions - something has happened which remains unnoticed, to the detriment of a due notice, in world history, of how Australasia came to world attention - by the settlement of a British convict colony at Sydney in 1788.
This situation remains objectionable, historiographically, and inspecting it convinces one that here, in the longer run, the preferred-to-be-written histories of particular nation states - the United States, the United Kingdom after the American Revolution, and Australia - can, and should, be heavily criticised on the grounds that they have encouraged the suppression of information which might otherwise have seemed unexceptional - family histories.
Here, from my own experience already gained with the computerisation of genealogical information, I find that one could raise many divergent issues. Australian, US, and English historians have all overseen a long-studied separation (1718-1776) of the histories of the Anglo-American tobacco trade and convict transportation to North American colonies, which is just one reason that the British Creditors have gone unstudied. Despite the allegedly extensive range of treatments of English expansionism written since 1610, no overview histories of the Anglo-American tobacco trade 1610-1718 or 1718-1776 have ever been produced, qua maritime or trade histories - unless one counts Robert Brenner's new book, Merchants and Revolution, 1993. (If this had happened in the History of Mathematics, Isaac Newton would never have heard of Euclid or Pythagoras, and Albert Einstein would never have heard of Newton!). The career of the "financier of the American Revolution", Robert Morris, has been inspected (there has been a massive loss of original papers), but one finally feels that the record on his career has not been fully accepted by US historians. Morris' career has been under-exploited by English historians, and completely ignored by Australians, despite his initiation of the United States trade with India and China.
Regarding the post-1783 period, most English and Australian historians have ignored the history of English whaling. Some personalities involved in English whaling from 1770, notably George Hayley, can be connected with the history of the Boston Tea Party. After 1783, if, indeed, Britain did make a "swing to the East" following the American Revolution, the effect of that on family histories - and other histories - has not yet been fully assessed. Due to nationalistic influences in history writing, there is little harmony between US, English and Australians in their treatments of fur-seeking at Nootka Sound, and that entire trade could fruitfully be studied from scratch. If it was restudied, the efforts of Russian fur-seekers could more usefully be addressed as well as the motives for Spanish responses. (If this was done, as in other contexts mentioned here, in any given timeframes, exactly the same population of traders would come under review). Australians have not yet fully assessed the influence of colonists with careers begun in India, who retired to Australia (of whom one can be said to be Caroline Chisholm).
In short, one can conclude (in a context of a rising popularity for family histories) that if business histories achieve further popularity, any related genealogical work would further suggest that the way Imperial History has been written has to date often ignored family history - and family history is but one way - and not even the best-refined way - of referring to actual human behaviour.
I suggest that in the context of British Imperial History, if more business histories were written regarding the period 1780 and 1840, many newly-arising implications would finally cohere into new appreciations. I suggest, after accurate genealogical information has been gained, after the fruit of observations such as these have been re-inserted into more abstract histories, historians will find that genealogical information presents implications which prompt a different historical outlook - an outlook which is person-orientated rather than politically or nationalistically orientated.
For some time in the future, I think, this will become one sort of contribution which computerisation will force on the study of history. Since about the 1960s, historians as book writers have lost the habit of writing informative bibliographical essays. Given my own perhaps unusual attitude to historiography, which has been provoked by findings arising from my interest in computerised historical information, it is broadly in the light of making such a prediction as above that I have presented the bibliography as given above. Computerised sources of information are specified. Books and articles have not been separated, so that it becomes clearer, alphabetically, which writers have pursued their debates, and how far, how closely, in books as well as in articles.
For what one finds, with business history as a guiding preoccupation, is that if some historians feel little choice but to follow family histories - history from below? -and others have little choice, but to follow more abstract preoccupations, both camps will find that eventually - as with the building of the Sydney Harbour bridge - two wings of activity will have to meet precisely in the middle, or the entire effort will have been wasted.
With history-writing, close debates often push historians to finally dwell on personalities, careers, family influences, personal destiny. So in the long run, it will be in the area of close debate that the increasing use of computers may change the way history is approached - and possibly also allow historians to develop a more sensitive attitude to human reactions, motivations and behaviour than their discipline has allowed them in the past.
Finis