Ireland and India: William Cooke Taylor and Percival Barton Lord

William Cooke Taylor (1800-49) and Percival Barton Lord (1808-40) provide interesting micro-studies of Irish involvement with Indian empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. They met at Trinity College, Dublin, in the late 1820s, both clever and ambitious young Protestants from the Blackwater Valley trying to carve out a place for themselves in a threatening world. Taylor, the son of a Youghal businessman, had grown up in the embattled and inbred Protestant community of that town with a strong awareness of the endemic sectarian and economic violence of the East Cork hinterland, and of the commercial class’s resentment of the domination of the town corporation by a self-serving corporate clique upheld by an aristocratic proprietor. His mature writings argue that the answers to these discontents are related; the perennial ‘civil wars of Ireland’ from the Norman conquest to 1798 and the Whiteboys, were due to the dominance of Irish administration by a self-serving aristocratic clique, and once political, religious and landed economic privileges were removed Ireland would be speedily enriched through the application of laissez-faire economics, and reconciled to liberal unionism through the working of a system of interdenominational education underpinned by Anglican latitudinarianism. This approach, strongly influenced by the political economist and Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, was the prism through which he saw British imperial policy. 

 

Taylor entered Trinity College Dublin in 1817, apparently with the intention of studying for the Church of Ireland ministry, for he learned Hebrew (which was to assist him in his later Oriental studies).  He left in 1820 and spent some time as a schoolmaster in Youghal (witnessing the 1821 mini-famine) before returning to Trinity.

 

It was here that he met Lord, a medical student whose father had been chaplain to Kingston College, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork (a home for decayed gentlefolk established by the local landlords, the Earls of Kingston). Together they were the mainstay of a social club called the Benedictine Brethren of Glendalough (punning on the term ‘Benedict’, meaning a bachelor, from the character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing) which went on excursions in the Wicklow mountains.

 

Taylor graduated BA in 1828 and went to London, where he worked as a journalist, becoming one of the principal contributors to the weekly Athenaeum. Lord graduated BA in 1829 and MB in 1832 and went to Edinburgh, where he studied anatomy, gained hospital experience, and wrote a popular textbook on physiology (expressing an underlying Christian-providentialist outlook) which remained in use for some decades. After a brief period in London, where he wrote some articles for the Athenaeum on medical topics, Lord went out to India as a surgeon with the East India Company—partly because this post allowed him to contribute to the financial support of his widowed mother.

 

In his contributions to the Athenaeum and in the textbooks which he produced for London publishers (including a History of Mohammedanism [1834] probably aimed at missionaries but which may also have served as an introduction for aspiring Indian administrators, and a History of India [1840]) Taylor covered a wide range of themes in the urbane manner of a Renaissance humanist and with the hope that the opening up of ‘torpid’ Asia by European activity might enable the fulfilment of the eighteenth-century project of an universal history and the creation of a world civilisation guided by political economy and Broad Church Christianity. Like other British scholars of the period he portrayed Mohammed as a proto-Protestant reformer who, despite his shortcomings, might still be revered when his creed had been purified of its excrescences and absorbed in Anglicanism. He complained that despite her extensive imperial interests, Britain lagged far behind continental countries in the systematic study of Oriental languages:

 


 

‘The intellectual character of nations is one of the most important elements in the formation of their material prosperity; we cannot benefit by the physical wealth of Asia until we obtain some acquaintance with the mind by which that wealth is produced and guarded; the curiosity of the philosopher is added to the anxiety of the merchant, and the same information which enlarges the bounds of scientific knowledge gives guidance and direction to the enterprise.’

 


 

So confident was Taylor of the prospects for the assimilation of Eastern societies into the liberal imperialism of which he dreamed that he held some views that would have been seen s utterly outlandish in the more racialised empire of the later Victorian era. His support for the Opium War as the implementation of Free Trade principles was accompanied by the view that Australia would benefit immensely from large-scale immigration by the ‘moral and industrious’ Chinese. Denouncing the East India Company as ‘a monopolistic vested interest that would destroy all incentives to improvement among a nation far more enterprising than the Hindoos’, he advocated ‘giving the natives a share in the government’ through semi-elected provincial councils.

 

While Taylor theorised about Eastern empire, Lord operated at its cutting edge as a spy-diplomat in Central Asia. In 1837 he accompanied a diplomatic mission to Dost Mohammed Khan, the king of Afghanistan, visited Kunduz (in the far north of Afghanistan) to treat with the emir’s brother, and reported on his observations to the government. In 1838 he was recruited to the British expedition that aimed to depose Dost Mohammed and replace him with his unpopular predecessor Shah Shujah. After the fall of Kabul Lord was sent with an expedition in pursuit of Dost Mohammed (whom he knew by sight) and was killed in a skirmish on 2 November 1840. Although Dost Mohammed surrendered soon afterwards, Lord’s fate prefigured the disastrous outcome of the First Anglo-Afghan War, which saw the British garrison forced to withdraw from Kabul and virtually wiped out as they retreated towards India. After some reprisal expeditions, the British withdrew and allowed the restoration of Dost Mohammed to his throne. Taylor paid tribute to his friend in a lecture to the Asiatic Society (published in the Dublin University Magazine, 1843) and there is a monument to Lord in St George’s Church, Mitchelstown.

 

In the 1840s Taylor was one of the chief propagandists of the Anti-Corn Law League; after the victory of Free Trade, he returned to Ireland as a publicist employed by the lord-lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, with the task of defending Whig famine policy and denouncing the revolutionary activities of the Young Ireland movement. He died of cholera in September 1849 and is buried in Mount Jerome cemetery. In Ireland as in India his well-intentioned liberal imperialism proved excessively optimistic.

 

For further discussion see Patrick Maume ‘The natural history of society: the Orientalism of William Cooke Taylor’ in Robert J. Blyth and Keith Jeffrey (eds.) The British Empire and its Contested Pasts: Historical Studies XXVI (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009) pp76-94 and the Oxford DNB entry on Lord by Gordon Goodwin and HCG Mathew.