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of his interaction with his civil service and his use of Sinhalese leaders. Similarly, Gordon's establishment and management of the Western Pacific High Commission are now better evaluated from our knowledge of Melanesian, Samoan, and Tongan societies at the period of his diplomatic and judicial interventions. Historians of Trinidad and Mauritius have also had cause to depart from Chapman's judgments as their interest turned to the politics of land, labour, and local representation in the nineteenth century. At the same time, much more attention has been paid to the influential networks operated by planters, not least within the ranks of the British establishment in those territories. For the self-governing colonies—New Brunswick and New Zealand—there has been a sympathetic awareness of the constitutional limitations to Gordon's influence, as well as a more detailed understanding of his role in a maritime colony that was important for Canadian confederation and of the justness of his appreciation of Maori and settler differences concerning land ownership and occupation in New Zealand. In addition, it has to be noted that Chapman omitted from his concluding section on Gordon's retirement and peerage quite important material about his continued interest in colonial affairs and his interventions in the House of Lords to ensure the continuity of his land policies in Fiji.
Such revisions of historical biographies are not unusual. But Chapman's early claim for Gordon's status in a pantheon of nineteenth-century governors went much further in regarding him as a pioneer of “Indirect Rule”:
The claim of continuity for his “system” under Lugard, moreover, is repeated in the most recent revision of Gordon's entry in the ODNB. More recent work on Grey strongly challenges, however, the idea that