Patronage and Politics in the Victorian Empire: The Personal Gove ...

few Europeans. The model is compatible in its terms with the unequal status of leaders of colonial government and those of local social units commanding different resources. An examination of cases soon uncovers further features relevant to a governor's role. Administrators were also brokers between metropolitan authorities—often their patrons and mentors—and local leaders who themselves had clientage networks of their own. Examples are ubiquitous in empires from the New World to India and Asia, Africa and the Pacific. These patron-client relationships developed frequently in crown colonies and protectorates managed by “forms of benevolent tutelage” and in the aftermath of not-so benevolent military interventions. ¹³Typologies of patron-client relations abound in anthropology and political science, though they are not always clear in their widespread denotations. They are less well-developed and applied in imperial studies, and where they are biography is an essential tool of analysis.

Gordon is not the only governor who might have been chosen for such a case study. Apart from Lugard's lieutenants, who as residents governed the emirates of Northern Nigeria, other candidates for revision would be early political officers in the Malay States, governors Sir William MacGregor and Sir H. E. McCallum in the Pacific, Malaya, and Africa, and Sir Hercules Robinson for his pre-Cape governorships, especially his paternalism in Ceylon. With less certainty, the model might also include as case studies Sir Donald Cameron and members of other nationalities such as Governor Wilhelm Solf in German Samoa or (as I have demonstrated elsewhere) Governors Bruat and Lavaud in French Polynesia. ¹⁴A further notable candidate would be Gordon's friend Sir George Grey, written up blandly and uncritically in 1961 and little revised since then. ¹⁵

But Gordon is one of the few who have left such an abundance of private papers, in addition to his official correspondence, with ample evidence of the ways in which he favoured official friends and local leaders and was himself, as an imperial intermediary, often in debt to official and private patrons of his own. As noted previously, Gordon's career had its beginnings in a mid-Victorian empire where preferment through the intervention of friends in high places still prevailed—rather than the civil