King’s College London and the Staffing of Empire

Ellan Lincoln-Hyde is a Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinarity in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities

By the mid-nineteenth century, King’s College London was a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial machinery, training colonial officers, educators, administrators and Christian missionaries for roles across the Empire. Its programmes in military studies, engineering, law, and Oriental languages were explicitly tailored to the demands of educating ‘staff’. In this article, I begin to explore how institutions like King’s steered students into careers that sustained imperial domination. My intention is that this serves as a starting point for a broader inquiry into the complex networks King’s fostered within the British Empire by the early twentieth century.

The Role of King’s in Educating Empire

King’s was not a passive observer of Britain’s imperial expansion; it was an active participant. By the 1850s, the college had positioned itself as a major supplier of personnel for colonial enterprises, most notably the East India Company (EIC). In 1845, the Military Department of King’s College London stated that its intended benefit was for ‘the numerous class of Gentlemen who may be expecting Commission in the Army, or the direct appointment in the Honourable East India Company’s service’.¹ King’s approach was imperialistically utilitarian, serving both the aspirations of its students and the demands of empire. This quotation also underscores the identity of those for whom King’s education and imperial employment was open: British men with the means and background to be considered ‘gentlemen’.

Among King’s significant contributions was the training of colonial officers in Asian languages. Kwan states that King’s ‘occupies a special position in the history of British sinology’ as both a centre for teaching Chinese language and as the British empire’s key seat of training for colonial officers soon to be deployed to ‘the Far East’.² Though not the first to start a Chinese-language training programme in Britain, King’s training schemes were by far the most deeply embedded in the formal recruitment, examination and deployment of colonial officers from Britain until this role transferred to the School of Oriental Studies (later SOAS University of London) in 1916.³ According to Kwan, King’s creation of programmes in Asian languages ‘included a very pragmatic element, which was to fulfil the needs of Britian’s colonial mission in the nineteenth century’. The college’s first Chinese professorship, established in 1846, exemplifies this imperial, professional-staffer focus.

The appointment of Samuel Turner Fearon (c. 1819–1854), a career colonial officer rather than an academic, highlights the practical, rather than purely academic, goals of the programme. The council’s justification for the professorship was revealing: ‘The important political and commercial relations now established between Great Britian and China, and the increased opportunities afforded for the introduction and diffusion amongst the population of that vast Empire of the blessing of a purer Christianity, render it highly desirable that the acquisition of the language and literature of China in this Metropolis [London] should be assisted by the creation and endowment of a Chinese Professorship attached to the establishment of King’s College.’⁵

Fearon’s role, which did not include giving lectures, was chiefly to create what we might today call ‘networking opportunities’ for students.⁶ Such appointments, which emphasised connections over scholarship, did not always work in King’s favour, with the Chinese professorship in question lapsing for several years after Fearon’s brief tenure. This example does, however, emphasise how King’s was dedicated to preparing students as empire staff, sometimes preferencing colonial employment experience over academic accomplishment. From the 1850s to the 1910s in particular, the blending of commerce, governance, and evangelism was emblematic of Britain’s imperial project, with King’s playing a central role in preparing agents for this multifaceted mission.

Case Studies: White Gentlemen Alumni across the Empire

The career paths of King’s alumni illustrate the college’s deep integration with imperial structures. The examples are various, with many showcasing the reciprocity and circular nature of King’s relationship with imperial employees. For instance, Henry Alabaster (1836–1884) was educated at King’s College London and sent to serve the British government in Thailand, working his way up over twenty years to become a special adviser to King Chulalongkorn of Siam (1853–1910). In later life his publications on Buddhism and Law in Siam (Thailand) would become key texts in British universities, possibly including King’s curricula.⁷ Henry Alabaster also sent a significant number of plant samples to Kew Gardens, helping to enlarge their East Asian collections.⁸ Alabaster’s younger brother Chaloner (1838–1898) was also educated at King’s, and in 1855 was made ‘student interpreter in China’ serving British interests throughout the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. In Chaloner Alabaster’s later career he was made Vice-Consul at Shanghai, then Consul General in Wuhan and Canton.⁹ Further information on the influence of these brothers is yet to be thoroughly researched, but it is not only in the realms of conflict and governance that King’s alumni wielded influence.

Though some scholars may argue otherwise, many would agree with my assertion that the staffing of English-speaking Christian missions in China was a colonial endeavour.¹⁰ As mentioned above in the committee minutes regarding the creation of a chair of Chinese studies, at this time King’s meant to spread Christian doctrine though its appointments and programmes. Given King’s identity as an Anglican institution, the line between the evangelising of religion and the proselytising of European imperialism was often blurred. This is particularly so in the case of Samuel Withers Green (1894–1976). Green studied at King’s College London, before further study at Oxford, where he was ordained as a Christian minister. By 1922 he had been dispatched by the London Missionary Society to Griffith College in Hankow (Wuhan), later working for the School of Religion at the recently founded Western-style institution of Yenching University, and then as Warden of the Christian-aligned Morrison Hall, Hong Kong. Over his four decades of working in China, Green moved across British-controlled Chinese territories both as an evangeliser and educator.¹¹ His career highlights how King’s served as a launchpad for individuals whose work reinforced both the spiritual, administrative and educational dimensions of British imperialism.

Patterns of Collection and Endowment

By the early 1900s, King’s had begun to cede some of its imperial functions to newer institutions, most notably the School of Oriental Studies (now SOAS University of London) founded in 1916.¹² King’s transferred part of its vast repository of materials on Asia to SOAS, allowing the latter to take on the language training of colonial and military officers.¹³ That SOAS could be established and offer considerable resources in language and scholarship from its earliest years is in part due to the breadth and depth of the collections supplied to it by King’s which had cultivated and collated knowledge on colonised regions for close to a century. This pattern of transferring large collections of materials between established and emerging colonial repositories was also crucial for the founding of King’s itself, with the ‘Orientalist’ William Marsden (1754–1836) donating his extensive personal collection of manuscripts and published materials to King’s 1835.¹⁴ Marsden had been both an employee of the East India Company in Sumatra and later first secretary of the British Admiralty. One third of his donation was later passed on to the SOAS collections. This practice of collecting, retaining and donating resources was prevalent across University of London affiliated institutions and British education institutions more broadly.

King’s had long served as a hub for cultivating the expertise required to manage and exploit colonised territories, possible embedding within its alumni a worldview aligned with imperial objectives. By passing its collections to SOAS, King’s ensured the perpetuation of this imperial ethos within emerging institutions. The legacy of institutions like King’s and SOAS in shaping colonial governance remains surprisingly under-examined, particularly the role of the University of London as a conduit for imperial ideologies. By embedding colonialist frameworks within academic disciplines and fostering a pipeline of alumni for imperial administration, these institutions contributed to the normalisation of empire as a civilisational mission. Despite growing scholarship on decolonisation, the extent to which students were indoctrinated into a worldview that legitimised domination, extraction, and hierarchy is still insufficiently scrutinised. This gap in understanding allows such histories to linger unchallenged, obscuring the mechanisms by which education served empire.

Challenging King’s Legacy Today

The legacy of King’s imperial past remains in its academic structures, collections, and institutional memory. The question of how to address these legacies has become increasingly salient in contemporary debates about the role of universities in colonialism.¹⁵ One need only look to the recent #RhodesMustFall campaigns in the UK to understand the urgency inspired by these initiatives.¹⁶ . King’s historical role in the British Empire, especially as an education institution located in the heart of the metropolis, typifies how educational institutions can serve as instruments of state power and cultural influence. This raises ethical question for KCL today. For instance, should universities bear responsibility for the careers they direct students toward, particularly when those careers are tied to historical systems of exploitation and domination? Should King’s require students to be aware of the historical relationship between King’s, the military, the East India Company, and the Anglican Church? This is not unprecedently within the University of London established. For instance, degree students of history at SOAS were required to take a course confronting the colonial structures of higher education, Colonial Curricula: Empire and Education at SOAS and Beyond.¹⁷ But it does seem a case of two steps forward, one step back with regards to institutions’ willingness to investigate and communicate their historical complicity in staffing and structuring empire.

In this article I have addressed the personal and community costs borne by the regions to which King’s graduates were sent and from which King’s tutors were drawn. I believe that it is crucial that future scholarship prioritises the impact and trauma suffered by these communities, and I hope that the King’s Past project can be a gateway to this research. King’s and the University of London continue to benefit from the historical exploitation of colonisation. For instance, yet to be assessed at length is the legacy of eugenics research associated with King’s, and whether colonial atrocities were perpetrated by King’s alumni (a suggestion I suspect is likely). Francis Galton (1822–1911), perhaps the pivotal figure in the development of eugenics in Britain, studied medicine at King’s College London and later founded the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics at University College London in 1904, which finally removed his name from its facilities in 2020.¹⁸ Also absent from this analysis of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries are the histories of individuals living under colonisation who sought education at King’s largely because of its resources and connections across the Empire. Notable examples include Indian politician Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) and, possibly (pending further verification), the Trinidadian lawyer and Pan-Africanist theorist Henry Sylvester-Williams (1867–1911).

The privilege of knowledge creation, curation and exclusion – as a direct benefit of the plundering of colonised regions – means that King’s remained a leader and shaper of colonial education far into the twentieth century. It could be argued that the Departments of War Studies, History, and Languages, Literature and Cultures in particular remain direct descendants of colonial staffing power. Perhaps inquiries similar to UCL’s recent 2020 Inquiry into the Research and Teaching of Eugenics at UCL could serve as a model for interrogating King’s role in training and staffing colonial governments, missions, and capitalist enterprises across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁹

Sources

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Alabaster, Henry, The Wheel of the Law: Buddhism, Illustrated from Siamese Sources by the Modern Buddhist, a Life of Buddha, and an Account of the Phrabat (London, 1871).

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_ ‘翻譯與調解衝突：第一次鴉片戰爭的英方 譯者費倫 (Samuel T. Fearon, 1819-1854) - Translation and Resolving Conflict: The First Opium War Interpreter of the British Empire, Samuel T. Fearon (1819-1854)’, Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica 76 (2012), 41-80.

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