Culturepulse ron ramdin special issue 44

History of England was, at the time of publication, one of the most famous books both in England and America. Marcus enlightened me further: ‘Today people think of Lord Macaulay...as an Essayist or a poet, or as historian. And indeed he was all of these. But in the days when he lived (the first half of the 1880s) lots of people wrote essays and poems and Macaulay’s history written late in life covered little more than a fragment of time say about 75 years. It is less well-remembered that Macaulay was, at intervals, as an MP, a Statesman and a Cabinet Minister and that for some years, he was one of the five men who governed British India and reshaped the course of (India’s) history, giving it a common language (English) and a brand new Code of Criminal Law, which is still largely in force to this day...’

Here, I paused to consider the salient and powerful fact that I, a descendant of Indian indentured labourers (‘helots’ of the Empire who were taken on British ‘Coolie’ ships from India to the Caribbean) was now an acknowledged Historian. Indeed I was an Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society who had earned his professional status in Britain. I appraised and appreciated Marcus’s ‘Private’ manuscript, as providing an insider’s valuable historical perspective: ‘Today, thanks to television,’ he wrote, ‘India is thought of as having been “The Jewel in the Crown.” If that is right, then Macaulay in a few short years, helped to make it so.’ Then to my surprise, Marcus added for good measure: ‘Oddly enough he (Macaulay) started on this process not from any high-flown motives, but because he needed money.’ (Emphasis mine) So here it was, the unadorned truth, I thought. Why the need? Because Zachary Macaulay had fallen on hard times.

Fortunately, his son was now well-placed to help. Marcus explained: ‘The chance to do so came by reason of an extraordinary way in which British India was then governed. That is by a weird sort of dual control system which had been instituted in 1784. In Macaulay’s time the East India Company still held sway, now governed by four men - the Governor General and the Governors of the 3 Presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, all Servants of the Company... at a salary of £1,500 a year. He thus became in a sense, one of the “masters” of the Supreme Council of India.’

Thomas Babington Macaulay had undoubtedly made history in India. On his return to England in 1838, he had started to write his widely-read History of England, a ‘Task’ which Marcus stated was ‘to occupy him for every spare hour of the remaining twenty one years of his life. He was, in fact, still at his desk, hard at it, when he died on 28th December 1859.’

But how does any man become a prominent historian? Marcus asked. As I paused again to consider the question, I asked myself: How did I, with my background in Colonial Trinidad, become an Historian? Just posing the question required a leap of the imagination. Nonetheless, my immediate interest was in learning more about Thomas Babington Macaulay’s place in British history. Pursuing this line of inquiry, both as writer and now as an increasingly well-known author, I was thrilled to read more of the insider’s view as to how Macaulay became an historian: 23