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governorship of Ceylon from within the colonial service, beginning with a colonial secretaryship in the Falklands and governorships of Dominica, Honduras, and Trinidad.
Assessment of a Governor
Part of the argument for a reconsideration of Gordon's career in this study, moreover, is that our knowledge of the context of colonial appointments matters for our understanding of his style and techniques of administration. As such, the manner of his selection for colonial service in the early 1860s was not so unusual. What he made of his opportunities for advancement depended mainly on two additional factors which were also contextual: his relations as a client-broker with officials in the colonial office, and, secondly, his relations with his subordinate officials and the leaders of local political hierarchies in the two self-governing colonies he was posted to and, more interestingly, in crown colonies with plural societies.
A Canadian historian whose work has been a standard reference for nearly half a century has covered Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon's life and governorships in considerable detail, but in different terms, in a scholarly biography. 7Since then, reasons for revising some of its judgments have accumulated. From the period of its publication in 1964, the archival materials available for the colonies Gordon administered were already being explored more thoroughly from local sources in addition to the metropolitan ones consulted by Chapman. The focus of these area and regional studies was directed towards understanding colonial and indigenous society within the politics of imperial rule as an essential counterpart to the administrative policies applied under that rule. With this change of emphasis in the historiography, different assessments of a governor's career in crown colonies became possible according to his knowledge of the people he governed and their reactions to him. This has been especially true for Fiji, which is quite central to Gordon's reputation for enlightened and sympathetic management of indigenous society in the Pacific, and for Ceylon, where there has been a critical revision