Британдық отарлық әкімшісі Чарльз Тревельян

British colonial administrator

Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886) was a British civil servant and colonial administrator. As a young man, he worked with the colonial government in Calcutta, India. He returned to Britain and took up the post of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury. During this time he was responsible for facilitating the government's response to the Great Famine in Ireland. In the late 1850s and 1860s he served there in senior level appointments. Trevelyan was instrumental in the process of reforming the British Civil Service in the 1850s. Today Trevelyan is mostly remembered for his reluctance to disburse direct government food and monetary aid to the Irish during the famine due to his strong belief in laissez faire economics. Trevelyan's defenders say that larger factors than his own acts and beliefs were more central to the problem of the famine and its high mortality.

Descended from an ancient family of Cornwall, he was born in Taunton, Somerset, a son of the Venerable George Trevelyan, then a Cornish clergyman, later Archdeacon of Taunton, the 3rd son of Sir John Trevelyan of Nettlecombe Court in Somerset. His mother was Harriet Neave, a daughter of Sir Richard Neave , Governor of the Bank of England. Much of the wealth of the family derived from the holding of slaves in Grenada.

He was educated at Blundell's School in Devon, at Charterhouse School and then the East India Company College at Haileybury in Hertfordshire. R. A. C. Balfour stated that "his early life was influenced by his parents' membership of the Clapham Sect – a group of sophisticated families noted for their severity of principle as much as for their fervent evangelism." Trevelyan was a student of the economist Thomas Malthus while at Haileybury. His rigid adherence to Malthusian population theory during the Irish famine is often attributed to this formative tutelage.

In 1826, as a young man, Trevelyan joined the East India Company as a writer (clerk) and was posted to the Bengal Civil Service at Delhi, India. There, by a combination of diligence and self discipline together with his outstanding intellectual talents he achieved rapid promotion. He occupied several important and influential positions in various parts of India, but his priggish and often indiscreet behaviour endeared him to few of his colleagues and involved him in almost continual controversy. On return to Britain in 1840 he was appointed as assistant secretary to HM Treasury, and served to 1859, during both the Irish famine and the Highland Potato Famine of 1846–1857 in Scotland. In Ireland, he administered famine relief, whilst in Scotland he was closely associated with the work of the Central Board for Highland Relief. His inaction and personal negative attitude towards the Irish people are widely believed to have slowed relief for the famine. However, he displayed a distinct contrast in his attitude to the Highland Potato Famine; in one letter addressing the situation in Scotland dated 29 April 1846, Trevelyan wrote: Our measures must proceed with as little disturbance as possible of the ordinary course of private trade, which must ever be the chief resource for the subsistence of the people, but, coûte que coûte (at any cost), the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve. Meanwhile, in Ireland a million people starved to death, as the Irish watched with increasing fury as boatloads of homegrown oats and grain departed on schedule from their shores for shipment to England. Food riots erupted in ports such as Youghal, near Cork, where people tried unsuccessfully to confiscate a boatload of oats. At Dungarvan, in County Waterford, British troops were pelted with stones as they shot into the crowd, killing at least two people and wounding several others. British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats. He was cofounder in 1851, with Sir John McNeill, of the Highland and Island Emigration Society which during the Highland Clearances supported an exodus of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1858. Trevelyan was Governor of Madras from 1859 to 1860, and Indian Finance Minister from 1862 to 1865. A reformer of the civil service, he is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Civil Service.

He entered the East India Company's Bengal civil service as a writer in 1826, having displayed from an early age a great proficiency in Asian languages and dialects. On 4 January 1827, Trevelyan was appointed assistant to Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, the commissioner at Delhi, where, during a residence of four years, he was entrusted with the conduct of several important missions. For some time he acted as guardian to the youthful Madhu Singh, the Rajah of Bhurtpore. He also worked to improve the condition of the native population. He abolished the transit duties by which the internal trade of India had long been fettered. For these and other services, he received the special thanks of the governor general in council. Before leaving Delhi, he donated personal funds for construction of a broad street through a new suburb, then in course of erection, which thenceforth became known as Trevelyanpur. In 1831, he moved to Calcutta, and became deputy secretary to the government in the political department. Trevelyan was especially zealous in the cause of education, and in 1835, largely owing to his persistence, government was led to decide in favour of the promulgation of European literature and science among the Indians. An account of the efforts of government, entitled On the Education of the People of India, was published by Trevelyan in 1838. In April 1836, he was nominated secretary to the Sudder board of revenue, an office he had held until his return in January 1838.

On 21 January 1840, he entered on the duties of assistant secretary to Her Majesty's Treasury in London, and discharged the functions of that office for nineteen years. In Ireland, he administered the relief works of 1845–47, when upwards of 734,000 men were employed by the government during the Great Famine. Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845–55). On 27 April 1848, Trevelyan was appointed as a KCB in reward of his services. The Great Famine in Ireland began as a catastrophe of extraordinary magnitude, but its effects were severely worsened by the actions and inactions of the Whig government, headed by Lord John Russell in the crucial years from 1846 to 1852. Many members of the British upper and middle classes believed that the famine was a divine judgment—an act of Providence although these views also existed in the Irish Catholic Church. A leading exponent of the providentialist perspective was Trevelyan, who was chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan later described the famine as "a direct stroke of an all wise and all merciful Providence", one which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil", that evil being Ireland's rural economic system of exploitative landlords and peasants overly dependent on the potato. The famine, he declared, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part and we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain." This mentality of Trevelyan's was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions Historians disagree concerning Trevelyan's responsibility for famine relief policy in Ireland, and what exactly was his role in it. Karen Sonnelitter discusses the subject in her edited collection of primary sources, The Great Irish Famine: A History in Documents. During the Great Famine, specifically 1846, the Whig–Liberal Government held power in Britain, with Trevelyan acting as treasurer. In this position Trevelyan had considerable influence over the parliament's decisions, especially the plans for the relief effort in Ireland. Along with the Whig government, he believed Ireland needed to correct itself and that a laissez faire attitude was the best solution. Though the efforts made by Trevelyan did not produce any permanent remedy to the situation, he believed that if the British Government gave Ireland all that was necessary to survive, the Irish people would come to rely on the British government instead of fixing their problems. In the summer of 1846, Trevelyan ordered the Peelite Relief Programmes, which had been operating since the early years of the famine, to be shut down. This was done on 21 July 1846 by Sir Charles Wood. Trevelyan believed that if the relief continued while a new food crisis was unfolding, the poor would become permanently conditioned to having the state take care of them. After the end of the Peelite Relief Programs, the Whig–Liberal government instituted the Labour Rate Act, which provided aid only to the most severely affected areas of the famine. Trevelyan said in his 9 October 1846 letter to Lord Monteagle that "the government establishments are strained to the utmost to alleviate this great calamity and avert this danger" as was within their power so to do. Trevelyan praised the government and denounced the Irish gentry in his letter, blaming them for the famine. In his letter to Lord Monteagle, Trevelyan identified the gentry with the "defective part of the national character" and chastised them for expecting the government to fix everything, "as if they have themselves no part to perform in this great crisis." Trevelyan likewise supported Irish emigration, saying "We must not complain of what we really want to obtain".

In 1853, Trevelyan proposed the organisation of a new system for hiring of people in the government civil service. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report, signed by himself and Sir Stafford Northcote in November 1853, entitled The Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, laid the foundation for securing the admission of qualified and educated persons into positions that had been dominated by members of aristocratic and influential families who benefitted by personal networks. It was intended to be a merit system.

Anthony Trollope admitted that Trevelyan was the model for Sir Gregory Hardlines in his novel The Three Clerks (1858). Charles Dickens likely based the nepotistic aristocrat Tite Barnacle, a character in his novel Little Dorrit, on Trevelyan. Barnacle controls the "Circumlocution Office", where everything goes round in circles, and nothing ever gets done. The Irish American rock band Black 47, in their song of the same name from their 1992 album Fire of Freedom, refer to Trevelyan, as well as Queen Victoria and Lord Russell, as being among those responsible for the famine. Trevelyan is referred to in the modern Irish folk song "The Fields of Athenry" by Pete St. John, about the Great Irish Famine: "Michael, they have taken you away / because you stole Trevelyan's corn / so the young might see the morn / now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay." Because of Trevelyan's policies, the Irish consider him one of the most detested figures in their history, along with Oliver Cromwell, who conquered the country in the 17th century.