‘Sometimes the Past is the Present’: Electoral Reforms, the Working Classes, and the British Empire

By rereading the social and racial hierarchies of the British imperial structure through the lens of Reinhart Koselleck’s “layers of time” (Zeitschichten), this paper surveys how the political claims and the enfranchisement of the British working classes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century were viewed by contemporaries of the gentlemanly élite as a feature of degeneration of British civilization. The two prominent members of the Legislative Council of British India, Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Fitzjames Stephen, imagined the British empire as a battlefield of conflicting experiences of temporality that corresponded to differences between social orders. In their writings, the multi-linear and stratified “imperial times” of the colonized and the labouring poor, unavailable to be subsumed and obliterated under the dominant paradigm of modernity, challenged and ultimately undermined the modern progressive notion of history.