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the governor ruled “indirectly” among the Xhosa in Cape Colony. 9 Moreover, Chapman's claim raises much wider issues about the nature and application of the construct of indirect rule, more usually associated with Lord Lugard, and which has been critically reevaluated since the 1960s. 10
The claim provides a second reason, therefore, for reexamining Gordon's governorships in the context of his ideas on administration and his working relations with his European officials and indigenous intermediaries and institutions. Both sets of officials and local leaders were relevant to the theme of governance through the governed. Efficient and hard-working governors inspired loyalties among their subordinates, even close friendships. 11The use of local intermediaries by a governor to exercise influence over policy could still in the mid-nineteenth century be discretely employed within the politics of a self-governing colony such as New Brunswick, though much less so at a later date in New Zealand. The theme of loyalty and friendship within formal relationships, moreover, transcends prescribed or bureaucratic roles between members of an administrative hierarchy, whether at the level of a European colonial secretariat and its field officers or between such officials and the hierarchy of leaders within local colonial societies.
That observation, which is developed more fully in the review of Gordon's governorships and in the conclusion, provides a third reason for revising his biography as a case study in imperial patron-client relations using a model developed earlier in a comparative survey of relationships between rulers and ruled in Asian, African, and Pacific societies. 12Quite briefly, that model aimed at dispensing with the shorthand of “direct” or “indirect” rule or the stereotype of “collaboration” in favour of exploring the politics of compromise and reciprocity in imperial over-rule worked out between hierarchical leaders of different status groups among the governors and the governed. It used the evidence of preexisting patron-client relations in many, but not all, colonial societies and the continuity of patronage as an informal and widespread mechanism for career advancement within imperial administrations to explain how many colonies were governed without continuous resort to force and by relatively