The Model Family

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—as industrial and gentlemanly capitalism, liberalism, evangelicalism, and imperialism transformed Britain—family structures and functions underwent important shifts, though it must be acknowledged that the so-called modern family continued to resemble early modern families in many significant ways.Footnote ¹⁰ “Family” during this period increasingly came to mean the private nuclear family, even though many nuclear families still lived within larger households, which included coresident kin, servants, and lodgers.Footnote ¹¹ Overall, there was a gradual restriction of family functions as other institutions took over its functions of production, education, social control, and welfare. The processes of industrialization and the relentless spread of capitalism had begun to chip away at the household-based economy, but “well into the nineteenth century the family remained the basis for most economic activity.”Footnote ¹² Finally, the related notions of a sexual division of roles and the compartmentalization of lives into public and private spheres, though clearly evident in early modern assumptions about families, started gaining fuller elaboration and more widespread currency at the turn of the nineteenth century. These ideals formed an important part of the prescriptive domestic ideology of the Victorians, which increasingly governed people's assumptions about, if not their actual experiences within, families and family relations.Footnote ¹³

At this particular moment—when family functions seemed to be undergoing dramatic changes and a prescriptive domestic ideology concerning families was becoming increasingly pervasive—Freemasons saw the family as offering a powerful model for their institution. In 1852, the Freemasons' Quarterly Magazine and Review reminded its readers that “the Brethren of our great family can never be uninterested in that which concerns each other.” Such comments were not unusual. In fact, the family, more than any other model or metaphor, served as the primary frame of reference for mid-nineteenth-century Freemasons when they referred to their institution. Freemasons consistently described their institution as being comprised of a set of family-like relationships and borrowed the language of family to convey expectations concerning the behavior of its members. Freemasons' expectations for the brotherhood were thus tied to their assumptions about families and kin-based relations.Footnote ¹⁴

First, Freemasons appropriated the idioms of kinship to organize the various components of the brotherhood. While the individual member was identified as a “brother,” and the institution as a whole was described as a “fraternity,” relations between lodges were typically couched in feminine terms. The metropolitan Grand Lodges of England, Ireland, and Scotland were always known as “mother grand lodges,” with the Grand Lodge of England (which had been founded first, in 1717, and spawned the most subordinate lodges) considered the grand mother of all lodges.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, when a Mason discussed the lodge in which he was initiated, he referred to it as his “mother lodge.” Rudyard Kipling adopted the title “The Mother Lodge” for his most explicitly Masonic poem. Along these lines, a grand lodge or a provincial grand lodge that had warranted a lodge to operate in its jurisdiction identified it as its “daughter lodge.” In referring to one another, daughter lodges (as well as grand lodges) described each other as “sisters.”Footnote ¹⁶

In addition to using the idioms of kinship to organize the brotherhood, Freemasons drew on four key aspects of early Victorian ideology concerning families: loyalty and duty, mutual support, affective bonds, and patriarchal authority. They sought to encourage among the brethren the sense of loyalty and obligation that was typically associated with familial relations in this period. According to Leonore Davidoff, all-male institutions like Freemasonry “demanded from their members particular forms of loyalty and duty to the organization and its practices which are familial in their language and nature.” A Masonic manual from the mid–nineteenth century instructed newly initiated Freemasons to prove their “obedience … by close conformity to our laws and regulations” and urged “a strict observance of the constitution of the Fraternity.” Like close kin, Freemasons were obligated to watch out for one another, to help each other withstand life's vicissitudes. Thus, the manual explained that a Mason should extend the loyalty, duty, and “sentiments of beneficence” he felt toward “those who are bound to him by the ties of kindred” to all members of the brotherhood. In this way Freemasonry ensured “that a Mason, destitute and worthy, may find in every clime a brother, and in every land a home.”Footnote ¹⁷

Just as economic considerations were of utmost concern for families, the transmission of material resources was a significant, if not the primary, concern of Freemasonry. The brotherhood functioned as a kind of global patronage network that helped men find employment and secure promotion. Such functions were traditionally performed by male family members (fathers, uncles, and brothers) and through extended kinship networks. In directing a Mason on how to behave toward a fellow brother, “The Charges of a Free-Mason” commanded that “if he is in want you must relieve him if you can, or else direct him how he may be relieved. You must employ him some days or else recommend him to be employed.” Mutual assistance, or beneficence, according to The Freemasons' Manual, “forms the basis of the Masonic Institution, and Freemasonry has especial regard to the three stages of destitution—infancy, unavoidable misfortune, and extreme old age; for all these, when proved worthy, relief is at hand.”Footnote ¹⁸

By attending to the needs of sick brethren and members' dependents, Masonic lodges actually started taking over some of the functions typically fulfilled by families in earlier times. This Masonic benefit was especially important for Masons who lived and worked in the empire, far from their blood relations in the metropole. Widows and orphans of deceased brethren received members' special attention. During the 1850s, a circular appealed to “all Free-Masons over the Globe” to raise money to support the widow and nine children of an Upper Canadian brother who died in destitution; Masons responded by granting the widow nearly £100. In another typical example of Masonic assistance, the District Grand Lodge of Madras aided one Brother Cottrell of Lodge Friendship no. 423 in Adelaide, South Australia. Cottrell had come to Madras to sell horses but fell ill and ended up in the vagrants' home. Masonic authorities in Madras paid for his passage back to Australia and gave him ten rupees to recover the clothing he had pawned.Footnote ¹⁹

Nineteenth-century Freemasons assumed that their institution, like the family, would see to the material and emotional needs of its members. The domestic ideology of the early Victorians supposed that bonds of affection and love held together family members. It described the family home as an emotional haven from a harsh, foreboding world.Footnote ²⁰ Likewise, the Masonic brethren of the nineteenth century saw love as a central tenet of Masonry. Masons endlessly repeated their mantra of “Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth” in their rituals, symbols, orations, and publications.Footnote ²¹ Addressing Londonderry Freemasons in 1850, John Grant (who had just come from India) expounded on Masonry's “principle of universal love” and its “faith of universal brotherhood.” Noting that neither religion nor politics stood in the way of brotherhood, he remarked that “the Jew, the Gentile, the Nomadic Arab, and the wild Indian” all acknowledged brotherly love as Freemasonry's underlying principle. The following year, as Masons from around the empire flocked to the imperial metropolis to attend the Great Exhibition, the Freemasons' Quarterly Magazine urged readers to welcome “brethren with whom we are linked in one great indissoluble bond, and whose arrival we must hail with the strongest emotions of brotherly love.”Footnote ²²

Finally, Freemasons connected their assumptions about families with their expectations of their brotherhood by emphasizing the authority of a father figure, the lodge master. Early Victorian domestic ideology posited the father (the breadwinner) as the primary authority in the home, though patriarchal control might be mitigated or contested in a variety of ways.Footnote ²³ In Freemasonry, however, the Master's authority could not be challenged. The “Ancient Charges” declared that the Master and his appointed officers “are to be obeyed in their respective stations by all the brethren … with all humility, reverence, love and alacrity.” According to a Masonic lexicon, “The Master's power in his Lodge is absolute. He is the sole decider of all questions of order, so far as the meeting is concerned, nor can any appeal be made from his decision, to the Lodge.”Footnote ²⁴

Though Freemasonry drew on idealized notions of the family, the institution departed from “traditional” families in significant ways. Freemasonry was an unusual kind of family—it was a fraternity that privileged equality and masculine exclusivity. “The Charges” directly referred to the institution as a “brotherhood” and a “fraternity” and identified individual members as “brethren” or “fellows.”Footnote ²⁵ Freemasonry distinguished itself from families at large by assuming the basic equality of all members, though this egalitarianism never compromised the ultimate authority of the Master.Footnote ²⁶ The fraternity, a mid-nineteenth-century handbook explained, “esteems every man the peer of his fellow in nature and rights. Before her altars distinctions vanish, and all men meet on the level. The prince and the peasant stand alike in her presence.” The Master held authority during his tenure, but any member of a lodge who was sufficiently advanced in Freemasonry could be elected Master. According to “The Charges,” “All preferment among Masons is grounded upon real worth and personal merit only … therefore no Master or Warden is chosen by seniority, but for his merit.”Footnote ²⁷ Such a dynamic did not characterize broader family relations in the nineteenth century, when “men clearly retained the upper hand.”Footnote ²⁸

The Masonic fraternity also departed from typical families—in both their idealized and actual forms—by excluding two groups usually seen as critical, if subordinate, members of the family: women and children. Nineteenth-century Freemasons were unequivocal in defining theirs as a sex-specific family. British Masons adamantly defended the masculine integrity of their family when curious observers (men as well as women) began to question the institution's exclusion of women during the mid–nineteenth century. In their statements, and even in their appropriation of the feminine kinship idioms of mother, daughter, and sister, they consistently reaffirmed the fact that they did not need women.Footnote ²⁹ The brotherhood also excluded men under the age of twenty-one. Members of this fraternal family were thus connected to one another on the basis of their shared values, interests, and ideology, rather than on the basis of shared blood.Footnote ³⁰

In the absence of blood ties, Masons and other fraternal groups used rituals to create a sense of community and mutual obligation. Masonic ritual derived primarily from two sources: the craft practices of medieval operative masons' guilds and Judeo-Christian accounts of the building of Solomon's Temple.Footnote ³¹ In the first degree of Masonry, the Entered Apprentice degree, the Master and brethren introduced the initiate into the world of Freemasonry. Partially naked, blindfolded, and constricted by a rope that was tied around his neck, the initiate experienced the mystery of Freemasonry as he learned about its meaning. The ritual conveyed the central “landmarks” of Masonry: the charity brethren demonstrated toward one another and the external world, “the perfect spirit of Equality among the brethren,” and the universality of brotherhood.Footnote ³² The next degree, the Fellow Craft, was even more esoteric in nature, as the initiate learned the secret meanings of geometry and the Great Architect of the Universe. The Craft degrees culminated in the ritual of the Master Mason, which reenacted the murder scene of Hiram Abiff, the master builder of Solomon's Temple, said to have sacrificed his life to protect the secret knowledge of his craft brotherhood.

These allegorical rituals had several functions. They performed a pedagogical role by conveying Masonic principles to initiates and members. Over time, they combined with an elaborate system of handgrips, passwords, and symbols to develop into a lingua franca for Freemasons throughout the world to identify and communicate with one another. Most important for the purposes of family building, they created fraternal bonds among the brethren.Footnote ³³ Masonic ceremonies functioned like a marriage ceremony, another form of ritual that sought to create permanent bonds where blood ties did not exist. As in the exchange of marriage vows, the initial ceremony impressed upon the Entered Apprentice the idea that he was entering into a new set of relationships that demanded a lifelong commitment. By undergoing the subsequent rituals of Fellow Craft and Master Mason, the new member completed the necessary steps in becoming a full-fledged, equal member of a sworn brotherhood. He was now bound to a group of men who pledged to respect, help, and love each other through all circumstances.

Rebellious Adolescents

Freemasons used the family not only as a model for the organization and functioning of their brotherhood but also as a metaphor for explaining Masonic ideology and responding to crises on the imperial periphery. Events in mid-nineteenth-century British North America and India brought these tendencies to the fore. In the British North American context, Freemasonry offers a window onto the complex set of identities that emerged during a period of significant social, cultural, and political change.Footnote ³⁴ Two transatlantic forces drove these changes: first, the great migration flows of the post-1815 period and, second, the increasing integration of the British imperial and British North American economies. The arrival of over a million Britons in British North America between 1815 and 1850 radically transformed the physical landscape of the colonies, especially Upper Canada as it developed from a backwater into a dominant colony. Altering the cultural landscape of the colonies, these migration flows and the spread of British social and political institutions led to the emergence of distinctly British societies, particularly in Upper Canada and the maritime provinces. Finally, the period witnessed important shifts in the political landscape of British North America with anglophone settlers challenging the power of colonial oligarchies and making demands for a degree of autonomy within the extended imperial polity. These political movements culminated in Britain's grant of responsible government to the Canadian colonies in the mid-1840s and initial steps toward confederation in the 1850s.

As they experienced this age of dramatic change, Freemasons perceived themselves as belonging to a series of interrelated families at the local, national, imperial, and international levels. First, they belonged to their local lodge, which was the basic unit of Masonic governance and paralleled the nuclear family. Masons were also part of an extended family that corresponded to the jurisdiction under which their local lodge operated. During the nineteenth century, the English, Irish, Scottish, and ultimately the British North American and Australian colonies each ran a grand lodge that oversaw the activities of members and lodges in its fold and expected loyalty to its jurisdiction. For members of these lodges, the extended family involved a further level of association, the British or imperial Masonic family, which included members in all parts of the empire. Thus, John Dean, a Masonic official in Upper Canada, described Freemasons in the British Isles and British North America as “branches of one common family.”Footnote ³⁵

As is typical of most families, relations within the British Masonic family were not always happy and trouble free, a fact demonstrated by a rebellion that broke out in British North America during the 1850s.Footnote ³⁶ British North American Freemasons had been chafing under British grand lodge administration since the 1820s when they had first become frustrated with their fiscal and administrative dependence on the metropole. In 1845 the Provincial Grand Master of Nova Scotia notified the Grand Lodge of England “that the inattention and neglect with which communications of importance in the Craft under my jurisdiction have been treated for many years is gradually producing a strong feeling of disaffection toward the Parent Grand Lodge.” Upper Canadians also complained that they were being “taxed two-fold” by having to send their dues out of the colony while at the same time looking after needy British immigrants. Their charitable funds thereby depleted, British North American Masons did not have the resources to “follow the noble example set by our parent the United Grand Lodge of England” by establishing an institution for the widows and orphans of Masons.Footnote ³⁷ These Masons felt that their extended familial duties compromised their ability to address the needs of their local families in the Canadian colonies.

One of the ways that Freemasons in British North America and other parts of the empire had attempted to deal with such problems was to play the British grand lodges against one another and thereby take advantage of a kind of Masonic sibling rivalry among them. The three grand lodges had agreed in 1814 to respect one another's jurisdictions at home, but the essentially British arena of the empire, where the boundaries between what was Irish, Scottish, and English were difficult to discern, posed challenges to their entente. Irish and Scottish authorities, who had a more relaxed attitude toward colonial brethren (in the settler colonies as well as India), did not hesitate to challenge the seniority of the Grand Lodge of England. This was certainly the case in British North America. Though the Grand Lodge of England had claimed itself as the Supreme Masonic Authority there, Irish and Scottish lodges had been popping up with increasing regularity since the 1820s (the increase in lodges coincided with the growing numbers of Irish and Scottish migrants to British North America). The grand lodges started competing for members, influence, and control. When the Grand Lodge of England suspended existing lodges or denied warrants for the formation of new ones, disgruntled petitioners often sought Irish warrants. The willingness of Irish authorities to comply with such requests prompted English Masons to complain about “the grievous injury done to the craft by almost indiscriminate issue of warrants from the Grand Lodge of Ireland.”Footnote ³⁸ Grand lodge rivalry could thus work to the benefit of some colonial Masons, but it also added to the level of overall frustration with the confused state of Masonic administration in British North America.

By the 1850s, these frustrations erupted into a full-fledged adolescent rebellion. Masons in Upper Canada asserted that they had grown up and were now capable of governing themselves. Under the leadership of Irish Masons, disaffected Upper Canadians formed the independent Grand Lodge of Canada in 1855. They composed a formal farewell address to the Grand Lodge of England “from which the Masons of Canada, hailing from England, have for so many years been proud to hail, and from which Mother Lodge they now part with feelings of deep regret.”Footnote ³⁹ One by one, Irish, Scottish, and English lodges in the colony pledged allegiance to the new grand lodge, and the Canadians looked across the Atlantic for approval from the parents whose oversight they had just rejected.

The responses of the parent grand lodges in the British Isles varied, but it is clear that Masonic authorities on the other side of the Atlantic also saw it as a family affair. The Grand Lodge of Ireland was the first to recognize the fledgling Grand Lodge of Canada, and it did so graciously on the condition that any lodges or individual members who wished to “retain their present connexion with the Grand Lodge of Ireland” were free to do so. The Grand Lodge of Scotland did not extend immediate recognition, fearing that its lodges in Canada East (Quebec) would be pressured to join the new Grand Lodge, centered in Canada West. It extended its “fraternal wishes” to lodges that had remained loyal and praised the “filial duty of the Daughter Lodges in the Colonies.” Likewise, the Grand Lodge of England also initially rejected the request for recognition. The Grand Master declared: “I cannot contemplate without the deepest concern the separation of so many lodges from the parent body.”Footnote ⁴⁰ But by 1858 both the Scottish and English Grand Lodges decided to follow the lead of the Irish in recognizing the Grand Lodge of Canada. Instrumental in changing metropolitan policy was the English Pro Grand Master, the earl of Carnarvon (future secretary of state for the colonies), who presciently supported recognition on the grounds that it would enable English and Canadian Masons to nurture a closer affective connection with each other as the administrative ties dissolved.

The achievement of fiscal and administrative independence did in fact strengthen British North American Freemasons' sense of belonging to an extended British Masonic family. As with most rebellious adolescents, their ties to their parents remained strong even while they sought to assert their own identities and take control over their own affairs. After all, they had patiently endured three long decades of misadministration and neglect before finally declaring their independence. Once their frustrations were resolved, their sentimental ties remained and in fact strengthened. They explicitly stated that they wanted to remain in the fold of the imperial Masonic family. At the Annual Communication of the Grand Lodge of Canada in 1857, the Grand Master, William Mercer Wilson, assured concerned brethren that the new arrangement would “be the means of ensuring a still warmer feeling of fraternal regard” toward the “parent Lodge” from whom they would “ever proudly assert our descent.”Footnote ⁴¹

This rebellion within the world of British imperial Freemasonry brought to the fore a complex set of identities that were evolving in British North America during a period of widespread change. Historians of Canadian national identity have traditionally presented a teleological interpretation that sees national identity as inevitably developing in stages, growing stronger and stronger in inverse proportion to imperial sentiment.Footnote ⁴² They have thus described national and imperial identities as contradictory. And because many historians have assumed Canadian national and imperial identity to be antithetical, they have focused on the processes of nation building during the years that immediately preceded and followed confederation in 1867 or at the turn of the century (particularly during the South African and First World Wars).Footnote ⁴³ They have been less attuned to the emergence of protonationalist sentiment before the 1860s and the persistence of imperial identity long after that decade.Footnote ⁴⁴

Examining Freemasons' response to the administrative crisis of the 1850s suggests a new interpretation of the history of Canadian national identity within the context of British imperialism. First, Masons involved in the affair were among the first British North Americans to reveal a sense of belonging to a nation they were calling Canada. Members of King Solomon's Lodge complained, for example, that though distressed brethren from England, Scotland, and Ireland claimed assistance “comparatively few, if any, Canadian Brethren have claimed assistance from the Parent Grand Lodge.” Similarly, Lodge no. 286 in York informed the Grand Lodge of Ireland that it had decided to join the Independent Grand Lodge of Canada by explaining: “We regret the severance from our Mother Grand Lodge but at the same time hope that it will not lessen the friendly connexion which has so long subsisted between us[,] and we as Canadian Masons will ever hail and receive you as Brethren and Masons.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way the independence movement demonstrates that some Irish, Scottish, and English settlers had developed a nascent sense of Canadianness at midcentury.

At the same time, their statements evinced a strong sense of belonging to the British Empire, which grew alongside this Canadian identity. Membership in Freemasonry, even after administrative links were severed, helped sharpen this sense of connection to the metropole and its far-flung empire. One of the leaders of the movement, Thomas Harington, told the Grand Lodge of England: “We have thought of England from first to last. We really do look upon the change as one more of letter than of spirit. We have made no sudden wrench, but have glided into our present position, and our English affection remains in strong force.” Canadian Freemasons emphasized their continuing and growing fraternal love for their brethren across the Atlantic. At a public gathering in 1860, a subsequent Grand Master of Canada urged the audience to rejoice in the knowledge “that we form an integral part of that great empire” and to exert themselves “in riveting still more closely the link which binds us to the land of our forefathers” to whom they were already united “in the bonds of affection and interest.” A decade later, the Grand Master of the recently formed Grand Lodge of Quebec used the metaphor of the family to describe how achieving administrative independence enabled Freemasons to maintain their affective ties: “Although by the righteous orderings of God's Providence, children are separated from parents, for the more perfect fulfillment of the chief ends of their existence, yet, thereafter, neither do prudent parents nor dutiful children, have the less, but rather the more, interest in, and love for one another.”Footnote ⁴⁶

For British North American Masons and their brethren across the Atlantic, therefore, the family served as a primary frame of reference before, during, and after the rebellions of the mid–nineteenth century. The use of the metaphor demonstrates that British North American Masons viewed “imperial” and “national” as compatible rather than oppositional spheres. Britishness was a crucial component of Canadian identity. To a great extent, early Canadians, like the Scots, Irish, and Welsh, “negotiated their cultural nationalism in relation to Empire,” as John Mackenzie has recently argued. As he points out, these subnationalisms emerged not in the rejection of empire but in close interaction with it. It is therefore time for historians to heed Phillip Buckner's call to “place the imperial experience back where it belongs, at the centre of nineteenth-century Canadian history.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Family of Man

To conceptualize and describe their institution—as well as the empire and wider world in which they lived—mid-nineteenth-century Freemasons took the family metaphor a step beyond the nuclear (local lodge) and the extended (national-imperial grand lodge) families. Believing that all mankind belonged to one universal family, Freemasons claimed that theirs was a cosmopolitan brotherhood that transcended the religious, political, linguistic, and even racial differences that had, over time, come to divide the human family. According to the English periodical, the Freemasons' Quarterly Review: “There never has yet been an institution calculated in an equal degree with Freemasonry to break down the artificial barriers which caste, creed, priestly ambition, and political rivalry, have created between different classes of the human family.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Masonic ideology taught members that such differences should never stand in the way of fraternity and charity.

Born in the age of the Enlightenment, Masonic ideology remained remarkably constant even as the brotherhood had spread throughout Europe, the British Empire, and the world. Nineteenth-century Masons would have agreed with their eighteenth-century predecessors about the basic tenets of Freemasonry. Professing belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, Masons in both time periods maintained that all men had proceeded from the same common stock and belonged to the same universal human family. The head of English Masonry in India during the 1840s rhetorically suggested: “What is it that has marked the progress of Masonry from first to last? I answer, sympathy with the whole family of man.” Speaking on the value and function of Freemasonry in New South Wales in 1849, Reverend Charles Woodward observed: “Mankind is but one family. Let us, then, cultivate more and more a spirit of Universal Fraternity.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Freemasons demonstrated their ambition to make Freemasonry a universal institution that embraced all members of the human family by defining eligibility for membership in the brotherhood very broadly. The only stated requirement for joining was belief in the existence of a supreme being, described generically as “the Great Architect of the Universe.” In their official statements going back to the 1730s, Freemasons claimed that their fraternity's raison d'être was to serve as “the centre of union, and the means of conciliating true friendship among persons that must have remained at a perpetual distance.” Institutional rules encouraged this goal: “No private Piques or Quarrels must be brought within the Door of the Lodge; far less any Quarrels about Religion or Nations, or State Policy.” As a classic English Masonic text, Preston's Illustrations of Masonry, put it: “Freemasonry is confessedly a latitudinarian—being, Masonically interpreted, a universal—institution” that included properly qualified men of all backgrounds.Footnote ⁵⁰

But just how far did British Freemasons put this cosmopolitan ideal into practice? Although the membership was primarily Protestant by the mid–nineteenth century, the brotherhood had welcomed men of various sects and religions since the eighteenth century. Catholics had regularly sought, and won, admission into the brotherhood. At least one Catholic, Lord Petre, was Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England (in 1772 and 1776). Toward the end of the century the majority of Freemasons in Ireland were Catholics, and the Irish Grand Lodge upheld the rights of Catholics to join by punishing lodges that imposed unofficial religious tests.Footnote ⁵¹ But in the early nineteenth century the religious complexion of the membership began shifting toward Protestantism to such an extent that the English Grand Lodge had to confirm formally that Quakers and Jews were still eligible for membership. In 1819, the English Grand Lodge stated that Quakers could legitimately become Masons since Freemasonry was a brotherhood that “unite[d] men of every Country, Sect and opinion.”Footnote ⁵² In the 1840s, it also defended the admissibility of Jews by cutting off all official communication with the Grand Lodge of Prussia when certain German lodges adopted anti-Semitic admissions policies.Footnote ⁵³

Along with this religious ecumenicalism, the British Masonic family had a tradition of limited racial inclusiveness. The brotherhood had counted among its ranks some Asians, Native Americans, and Africans during the eighteenth century. Even though the numbers of non-European candidates admitted was not statistically significant, the institution itself was prominent and influential within the imperial establishment and just having a reputation for crossing racial boundaries (ideologically if not always in practice) was significant. The first Indian admitted into Freemasonry was Omdat-ul-Omrah, the Muslim Nawab of the Carnatic, who joined in 1775. In marking the occasion two years later, the Grand Lodge of England spent close to £40 on a Masonic apron and a specially bound Book of Constitutions, which they sent to the Nawab in recognition of his joining their fraternity.Footnote ⁵⁴ The same year of the Nawab's initiation, the brethren who met at the Falcon Tavern in London initiated the great Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, into the fraternity.Footnote ⁵⁵ And in 1784 the Grand Lodge of England issued a warrant for Prince Hall and other prominent members of the black community in Boston to set up African Lodge no. 459. Eighteenth-century lodges were unquestionably dominated by white men, but, as these examples demonstrate, British Freemasonry did occasionally make good on its promise of inclusion in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.

Early and mid-nineteenth-century imperial expansion brought an increasing diversity of peoples under the empire's purview, and the imperial sphere became a practical testing ground for Freemasons' commitment to their ideology of universal brotherhood and the unity of the human family. Their role as imperialists typically required them to uphold the “rule of difference,” while their membership in Freemasonry asked them to consider as a brother any man, regardless of his race or religion, who professed to believe in the Great Architect of the Universe. Not surprisingly, as Freemasons came face-to-face with the tremendous diversity of the universal family they championed, they implemented admissions policies—some unstated and some explicit—that excluded undesirable candidates. Thus a tension between the fraternity's inclusive rhetoric and its exclusive practices became increasingly evident and difficult to explain. Conceptualizing not only humankind but also their institution and the empire in terms of the metaphor of the family enabled Freemasons to work out this tension between theory and practice.

Are You My Brother?

Despite all the talk of Freemasonry's universality and the limited inclusiveness of some eighteenth-century lodges, the admission of indigenous candidates never became commonplace. In India, for example, Freemasonry was for all purposes, if not for all intents, an exclusively European institution that flourished among East India Company servants, government officials, the merchant and professional classes, and army officers.Footnote ⁵⁶ Lodges in India admitted Muslims occasionally in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but this met with resistance and never became a noticeable trend.Footnote ⁵⁷ Only in the 1840s did British Masons residing in India begin discussing whether Muslims, Parsis, Hindus, and others should join in significant numbers.

For three decades between 1840 and 1870, Freemasons debated the issue of indigenous admissions in India. As with the Masonic independence movement in British North America, the discussions took place within a dramatically changing political and cultural context. At the beginning of the period, India was in the midst of a prolonged depression due, in large part, to the military and fiscal policies of the Company state. Over time, colonial rule led to the dismantling of indigenous commercial and investment institutions, deindustrialization, and an increasingly peasant-based economy; all of these processes combined with the increasing strength of the colonial state to subordinate India ever further to metropolitan Britain. When the economy began to recover in the 1850s, India was under the highly interventionist administration of Lord Dalhousie (1848–56). Dalhousie centralized and enhanced British power by annexing the Sikh state (1849) and deploying the “doctrine of lapse” to assume control over Satara (1848), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854), and Awadh (1856). He rationalized the revenue administration and reformed the military. His eager attempts to modernize and anglicize Indian society included a renewed commitment to mass education and missionary Christianity, as well as the introduction of transformative technologies: the railways, the telegraph, a postal system, and irrigation works.

The policies of India's mid-nineteenth-century British governors met with a variety of responses from Indians. Most Indians accommodated the new colonial order by adapting their survival strategies and reinventing their traditions in light of British ideas, institutions, and technologies. The British found collaborators among native Indian princes, upper-caste Hindus, the so-called martial communities that had made up the backbone of the Company army, and merchant communities like the Parsis. But British policies, reforms, and cultural arrogance also met with stiff resistance. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a series of military mutinies and civil revolts, which culminated in the great Uprising of 1857. The threatening combination of mutinous soldiers, discontented peasants, and sympathetic landlords put the government into a state of emergency for over a year. Though eventually suppressed, the Uprising dealt the British a profound shock and compelled them to reassess their approach toward their Indian empire.Footnote ⁵⁸ Taking place in the midst of all these developments, the Masonic debate over indigenous admissions therefore serves as an inroad into the shifting attitudes and policies of the British, as well as the responses of Indians to British rule, at midcentury.

Luckily, the historical record has preserved a variety of perspectives—Scottish, English, Irish, and elite Indian—about the admission of indigenous candidates into Freemasonry. On one side of the debate stood a few vocal advocates, British and Indian, who were willing to include any Indian candidate, provided he gain acceptance into a local lodge. In making their case, they drew on the ideology of universal brotherhood and the family metaphor, which were by now commonly associated with Freemasonry. On the other side was the majority of English Masons in India, who did not want to welcome Hindus into their family. They deployed a range of arguments to justify the exclusion of Hindus, and they conveniently avoided the language of brotherhood, except when they explicitly said that they could not imagine accepting the native Hindu as a brother. Yet all the British Masons involved in the controversy shared the perception that Hindus were culturally backward and in need of civilizing, and, especially after 1857, they expressed this opinion in the increasingly racialized discourse of imperialism.

Taking the notion of the universal family of man more seriously than their English brethren, Scottish Masons in Bombay began addressing the question of native participation in 1843. James Burnes, an East India Company medical officer who had arrived in 1821, was instrumental in this development. The Grand Lodge of Scotland had appointed Burnes Provincial Grand Master for Western India in 1836. He explained to a gathering of fellow Masons in 1840 that he was devoted to Masonry not only because it bound together educated Britons in the colonies but also because, for “the natives of this mighty empire,” it could “extend, without awakening religious prejudice, a truer knowledge of the Great Architect of the universe, and more just notions of their duty to each other.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Burnes and his fellow Scottish Masons, it seems, were ready to open Freemasonry's doors to qualified Indians.

However, before they could formulate policies and procedures for native admissions, the actions of a prominent (and persistent) Parsi, Maneckji Cursetji, put the Scottish Masons on the defensive. In 1838, Cursetji became the first Indian appointed assistant collector of customs in Bombay, and he would later, after a successful career in the courts, become the first Indian sheriff of Bombay.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1840 Cursetji sought admission into Burnes's own lodge in Bombay, the prominent Lodge of Perseverance. Rejected but unthwarted, Cursetji attempted to join a lodge in England but once again was blackballed. Finally, in Paris, he found a lodge—La Gloire de L'Univers—that was willing to admit him into the mysteries of Freemasonry.

In 1843 Cursetji returned to Bombay as a Master Mason, only to find the Lodge of Perseverance still unwelcoming. But the fact that he was already initiated put Scottish Masons in Bombay in a bind. They realized that Parsis and others could now find their way into Masonry through a back door. Better to control the process, they reasoned, than passively stand by while others made Masons of Parsi candidates. Thus, in 1843, 27 brethren, including some members of the Lodge of Perseverance, petitioned Burnes to establish a new lodge that would oversee the admission of native members. The Lodge Rising Star of Western India came into being with four Indian founding members, including three Muslims and a Parsi. The most important offices of the lodge, however, remained in the hands of Europeans, with Burnes himself serving as Master and two other prominent Britons as Senior and Junior Warden. It is significant that Parsis, a highly Anglicized community that played a dominant role in the economy and politics of nineteenth-century Bombay, were more readily accepted into Freemasonry than Hindus. The prominent Parsi families of western India had strong financial and political connections to European merchants and civil servants. The Parsi admitted as a founding member of the Lodge Rising Star of Western India, for example, was Ardeshir Cursetji Wadia, the chief engineer of the Bombay dockyard and member of the Wadia shipbuilding family.Footnote ⁶¹

Viewing these activities from their base in Calcutta and motivated by the same sibling rivalry that characterized British Masonic relations in the Canadian colonies, English Masons realized they too had to develop a policy concerning the admission of indigenous candidates. The English Provincial Grand Master of Bengal during the 1840s, John Grant, was equivocal about admitting Indians into Freemasonry. Grant, the apothecary general of the East India Company and resident in India for over twenty-five years, argued that the decision to admit “Musselmans and Hindoos” was the prerogative of the provincial grand lodge rather than the right of individual lodges (which, according to Masonic law, had always had the right to determine their membership without interference from above). But both the actions of the Scottish Masons in Bombay and Masonry's claims to universal brotherhood compelled him to make some concession toward Indians. He agreed to the admission, under the close supervision of the provincial grand lodge, of “well educated and respectable natives and the advancement thereby not only of their moral position but the creation of a stimulus to the acquirement in some measure of an English education.”Footnote ⁶²

Still, the prospect of admitting Indians in great numbers made Grant and his fellow “eminent and influential Masons in Calcutta” very anxious. They turned to the Grand Lodge of England for advice. Responding in 1842, the English Grand Master, Prince Edward Augustus, pronounced: “The Question is one which has occupied [my] attention for many years, and formed a part of [my] Masonic creed; that provided a Man believe in the existence of the … Architect of the Universe, in fraternity, and extends that belief likewise to a state of Rewards and Punishments hereafter; such a person is fully competent to be received as a Brother.” The prince cautioned against the “indiscriminate admission of Mahomedans and Hindoos” and warned Grant to be especially careful about ensuring the solemnity of the initiation ceremony, but he felt that “it is no doubt a great object to impress Brotherly and friendly feelings between Europeans and enlightened Hindoos.” But such an open-ended policy decision caused Grant to recoil. He expressed horror that Hindus and Muslims might join the brotherhood en masse. Grasping for justifications to exclude Hindus specifically, he responded by arguing that properly obligating them was impossible and that the rules of caste precluded them from fraternizing with lower-caste Hindus. “After a residence of 26 years in this country … of all the natives whom I have ever known, two or three fingers would cover the names of those whom I could venture conscientiously to recommend for … Masonry.”Footnote ⁶³ At this point, Grant put the question of native admissions on the back burner, and, in the aftermath of his administration, English Freemasonry in Bengal suffered from a lack of leadership and competition from Scottish Masons in Calcutta.Footnote ⁶⁴

Basically, therefore, during the 1840s, a handful of Indian Muslims and Parsis became a part of the Masonic family, though they had not received the warmest of receptions from British Masons resident in India at the time. The admission of Indians at this point depended on several factors: the candidate's religion and social status, the jurisdiction into which he sought inclusion, sibling rivalry between the jurisdictions, and the attitudes of provincial Masonic leaders. Admission was unlikely, but not impossible (unless, of course, the candidate was a Hindu). But the unrest of the subsequent decade brought these movements to a standstill. In the immediate aftermath of the Uprising of 1857, Masonry in India experienced a downturn, and its leaders pulled back from the limited trend toward inclusiveness evident in the 1840s. The Provincial Grand Lodge of Bengal revived and strictly enforced a bylaw requiring provincial grand masters personally to approve the admission of Indians on a case-by-case basis (Article 55 of the By-Laws of the District Grand Lodge of Bengal).Footnote ⁶⁵

During the early 1860s a series of local events within Masonry (peripheral crises, if you will) forced officials in Bengal and the metropole to examine the growing disjuncture between Masonic claims to universal brotherhood and the exclusionary practices of Freemasons in India.Footnote ⁶⁶ Prosonno Coomar Dutt, a Hindu merchant of Calcutta, challenged the English Masonic establishment in Bengal by boldly claiming the right to admission into the brotherhood. Dutt argued that Article 55, which “debars so many of the human race from an Order which professes to be open to all, and to exclude no man on account of his religion,” was highly objectionable. He petitioned Lodge Courage with Humanity no. 392 for membership. Amenable, its Master sought permission from the Provincial Grand Master, Hugh Sandeman, to initiate him. Sandeman and the provincial grand lodge excluded Dutt by invoking Article 55. He offered the vague explanation that Hindus' inclusion was “not desirable with reference to social conditions.” He did not elaborate. But he did threaten to use his power of veto if any lodge chose to ignore the regulation.Footnote ⁶⁷

Meanwhile, another “Asiatic” candidate, a Muslim prince with support from British Freemasons in Kanpur, was testing English Freemasons' commitment to the doctrine of universal brotherhood. In 1863 Lodge of Harmony no. 483 initiated Said-ud-Dowlah in direct contradiction of Sandeman's orders. Furious, Sandeman suspended two lodge leaders (Master Francis Jordan and Past Master M. O'Mealy) for their “contumacious and rebellious conduct.” The Master of the lodge responded by putting his lodge into abeyance and taking possession of its warrant and books. This action provoked the provincial grand lodge to expel Jordan. Members of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Bengal applauded Sandeman when he threatened to suspend any Mason who challenged his ruling that “the initiation of an Asiatic in this Province without a Dispensation was illegal.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Both cases provoked a great deal of letter writing, posturing, and heated debate over the boundaries of the Masonic family. As they reached Masonic authorities in the metropole, the discussions of the two incidents became intertwined. The objections voiced by Sandeman and members of the provincial grand lodge fell into two categories. First, they argued that Hindus were polytheists who could not become Freemasons because they did not profess belief in a single supreme being. “Hindoos are a race of idolators,” charged Brother Howe, “who worship not only graven images, but a variety of created things and beings, and whose superstitious and idolatrous rites are notorious, and in many instances abominable.” According to Brother Howe and others, since Hindus did not demonstrate faith in “one true God” they could not be trusted, and their admission would compromise the principles and secrets of Freemasonry. English Masons also justified the exclusion of Hindus on the ground that the cultural differences between Hindus and Englishmen were just too great to bridge. Brother Abbott, a twenty-year resident of India, remarked of one of his most steady Indian employees (at the office of the ecclesiastical registrar): “yet he is a Hindoo and I am an Englishman, his tastes are not my tastes, his habits are not my habits, his God is not my God. Without entertaining any animosity, therefore, against Hindoos, I feel that there are few points of sympathy between us, and many points on which we cannot understand each other.” Objectors also pointed out that questions of caste impeded the realization of true brotherhood between Indian and European: “how could [the Hindu] claim the right hand of fellowship with men whom he openly professes to scorn, and whose very touch is regarded by him as so contaminating, as to require ceremonies of ablution to obliterate?”Footnote ⁶⁹

In the face of these opinions (shared by a majority of provincial grand lodge officers), one British voice stood out in support of the admission of Hindus. Charles Piffard, a Calcutta lawyer and active Freemason, implored the brethren to recognize the contradiction between Masonic ideology and the policy of excluding a group on the basis of its race. In making his argument, Piffard reminded the Provincial Grand Lodge of Freemasonry's central ideological pillar, “the great Masonic Doctrine of the Universal Brotherhood of man.” “Our Order is composed of worthy men of many various races,” he continued, “What reason has been given to call upon us to put a brand on one particular race?” He urged them to “hold out the hand of brotherhood” to any eligible Hindu candidates.Footnote ⁷⁰

By 1864 both cases had made their way to the Grand Lodge of England, which readily decided in favor of both Dutt and Jordan and expressed faith in the civilizing, moderating power of Freemasonry. Metropolitan officials upheld the doctrine of universal brotherhood by confirming Masonry's fundamental purpose was “to serve as a meeting ground for men who might otherwise remain at a perpetual distance.” They deemed Article 55 unconstitutional. They argued that Hindus should be admitted into their fraternal family because Freemasonry would help introduce “true religion and enlightenment” and promote “large-hearted charity and brotherhood between man and man.” The Irish Grand Lodge, and, notably, the Viceroy of India Lord Minto, also gave Dutt their immediate and unconditional support. Minto reminded Bengal officials that there was “nothing in either the rules or spirit of Freemasonry which prevents persons who do not profess Christianity from being admitted to the order.”Footnote ⁷¹ Under pressure from these metropolitan directives, Sandeman and the provincial grand lodge were forced to capitulate. Dutt joined Lodge Anchor and Hope in 1872, after nine years of relentless petitioning.

Dutt and other South Asians who joined Freemasonry had forced British Masons to fulfill their institution's claims to cosmopolitan brotherhood. Of course, barriers to South Asians' complete participation in Freemasonry were still at work. Even though Muslims, Parsis, Hindus, and others found their way into lodges, and multiracial lodges were increasingly common, Europeans continued to dominate the majority of lodges in India and elsewhere. While the grand lodges had lifted restrictions barring Hindus' admission, they could not—nor did they ever hope to—control the admissions practices of local lodges, which could still blackball candidates indiscriminately (or discriminately, as was probably often the case). Moreover, the emergence of lodges set up for particular religious or occupational groups (such as Parsi lodges in Bombay and army lodges comprised primarily of officers) ended up reinforcing racial distinctions and compromising Masonry's inclusive, universalist ideology.

Nevertheless, Dutt's initiation marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Freemasonry in India, a period in which it was not unusual to see multiracial lodges and widespread admission of indigenous candidates, regardless of their religion. Of the approximately one hundred lodges at work in India during the early 1870s, at least one-fifth included indigenous members. The Grand Lodge of All Scottish Freemasonry in India and the District Grand Lodges of Bombay, Bengal, and the Punjab had at least one Indian officer in their ranks. When the Lodge Rising Star of Western India met in 1877 to install Brother Rustomjee Merwanjee as Master, the Standard reported that the Masonic hall was crowded with Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, and European brethren, “all happily assembled together for one common object—a social and fraternal band of Brotherhood.”Footnote ⁷²

Empire, Race, Family

Based on events examined here, it is tempting to argue that Freemasons' attitudes toward Indian candidates reflected a widespread trend historians typically associate with the “new imperialism” of the mid- to late-nineteenth centuries: the growing prevalence of racial categorization as a way of understanding difference. Whereas the cosmopolites of the Enlightenment and the abolitionists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had professed belief in the unity and perfectability of mankind,Footnote ⁷³ mid-nineteenth-century observers started dividing mankind into many distinct, polygenetic, hierarchically ordered races. Especially with the emergence of social Darwinism, European attitudes toward indigenous peoples became less humanitarian and hardened into an imperialist ideology infused with assumptions about the rights and duties of superior master races over inferior subject races.Footnote ⁷⁴

Historians of Britain identify the moment of the shift to increasingly racialized assumptions and attitudes quite precisely, during the 1860s, in the aftermath of imperial debacles in India and Jamaica.Footnote ⁷⁵ Catherine Hall has convincingly argued that the debate over Governor Eyre's handling of the Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica (which also coincided with the dramatic rise in popularity of Carlyle's Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question) marked the transition when new forms of overt racism challenged and eventually superseded the “developmental notion of human nature” championed by John S. Mill and the abolitionist generation. Hall explains: “The debate over Eyre marked a moment when two different conceptions of ‘us,’ constructed through two different notions of ‘them,’ were publicly contested. Mill's imagined community was one of potential equality, in which ‘us,’ white Anglo-Saxon men and women, believed in the potential of Jamaican blacks to become like ‘us’ through a process of civilization. Carlyle's imagined community was an hierarchically ordered one in which ‘we’ would always master ‘them.’”Footnote ⁷⁶

Statements by Masons on both sides of the debate over Hindu admissions provide evidence of this broad shift in the way Europeans understood difference and indicate the growing prevalence of racialized discourses. Opponents like Sandeman and Howe justified Hindus' exclusion by referring to the unbridgeable cultural divide between Indians and Europeans, a gap they increasingly described in terms of biological difference. Brother Fenn explained: “We never could know the Asiatic intimately, there was a wide and impassable gulf between us which nothing could bridge over. Men, though of the same blood, were not all alike, the word ‘man’ did not always bear the same signification; there were various races, various ranks and walks in life, and our race differed in every essential point from that of the Asiatic, so that we could never meet as Brothers.” Although making the opposite argument, the United Grand Lodge and Piffard also conceptualized the difference between Indians and Britons in terms of racial categories. They would have agreed with the Grand Master of All Scottish Freemasonry who proclaimed a few years later that Freemasonry, as it penetrated “into the remotest corner of this Indian empire,” would help “raise up the natives of this country to the high level of European civilization and culture, and thus … establish an enduring bridge of sympathy and kind feelings over the gulf which now separates the governed from the governing races.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Dutt himself even used the category of race to argue for Hindus' inclusion, though, unlike the Britons who spoke in terms of multiple races (that should or should not be brought together under Freemasonry), he assumed a unitary human race.

But events in the world of British imperial Freemasonry clearly suggest that the shift from the historical evolutionism of the Enlightenment to a starkly racialized “new imperialism” was neither clear-cut nor complete by the 1860s and 1870s. Freemasons displayed a way of understanding difference that was more complex and subtle than historians of racial ideology have allowed. The Enlightenment language of universal brotherhood remained central to Freemasonry long after it had, according to Hall and others, disappeared from western European ideology.Footnote ⁷⁸ During the high point of the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century, the institution officially maintained, in its rhetoric as well as in its actions, its commitment to the idea of a unitary human race. The Reverend D. C. Moore, in a typical late-nineteenth-century Masonic sermon on brotherly love, proclaimed: “In the common brotherhood of man there is no distinction of race nor lineage. The proudest monarch on his throne, the humblest slave at his compelled labor—the white-skinned European—the Asiatic native of the ‘red earth’ as father Adam—or the ‘swart Ethop’ of the darken hue; all have the same right to claim GOD for their Father, and so comes the lovely, loving truth, ‘all we are brethren.’ ‘We find a brother wher'er we find a man.’” Likewise, the editor of the Masonic Herald, which published its initial issue in 1871, urged readers to support Freemasonry, an institution “sufficient to bind and sustain the entire family of man in one vast chain of fraternity and love.” He continued, “The mission of Masonry is to humanise, civilise and fraternise mankind.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Many British Freemasons thus viewed the “other” as their brother.

Yet does the ideology of Freemasonry—centered as it was on the metaphor of brotherhood and family—provide evidence to support David Cannadine's recent argument that “the British Empire was at least as much (perhaps more?) about the replication of sameness and similarities originating from home as it was about the insistence on difference and dissimilarities originating from overseas?”Footnote ⁸⁰ It is true that the upper-class Indians, particularly the native princes, who joined the brotherhood were precisely the higher-status indigenes on whom Ornamentalism depended. Moreover, Freemasons made an undeniable contribution to the grandeur and spectacle of empire by participating in elaborate imperial ceremonials. Cannadine identifies the Prince of Wales' tour of India in 1876–77 as “the first climax of … this new ‘culture of ornamentation.’”Footnote ⁸¹ The prince was the Grand Master of English Freemasonry at the time of his visit, and he presided over an impressive Masonic ceremony to lay the foundation stone of the new Elphinstone Docks in Bombay. English, Parsi, Muslim, and Hindu Masons were in attendance. The prince congratulated the assembled Masons (in front of a crowd of over ten thousand spectators, including several “Native Chiefs”) on the flourishing condition of Freemasonry in India and their fulfilling the object of their institution—to “unit[e] men of various castes and creeds in the bonds of fraternal brotherhood.” The Provincial Grand Lodge of Bombay and the Grand Lodge of All Scottish Freemasonry in India did not fail to note that “the welcome accession to our fraternity of an ever increasing number of Lodges entirely supported by our loyal and enlightened Parsee, Hindoo, and Mahomedan fellow-subjects … strengthen[ed] … that unswerving allegiance to and veneration for our Rulers and Patrons which have ever distinguished Freemasonry.” In these ways, Masonry did further ornamental strategies of rule.Footnote ⁸²

But Freemasons throughout India had not been able to play as significant a role in the prince's visit as they would have liked. Government officials decided not to allow the prince to meet in public with the Masons of Calcutta and Madras.Footnote ⁸³ Their reasons are not entirely clear. In addition to dealing with the immense logistical difficulties of a royal visit, it seems the authorities were somewhat suspicious of the brotherhood. Comments by the Prince of Wales after the ceremony at the Elphinstone Docks indicate that the other governments of India did not fully appreciate the brotherhood's reputation for upholding order. Catholic clergy in Madras had also recently denounced the brotherhood.Footnote ⁸⁴ Perhaps the fact that Masonry was welcoming not only men from the highest layers of Indian society but also upper-middle-class Indians (merchants, intellectuals, and civil servants) also caused officials concern. And perhaps they were threatened by an ideology that seemed to subvert the racial and cultural differences that underpinned imperial rule.

It is here where taking simultaneous account of the metropole, dependent empire, and a settler colony, as well as bringing domestic, imperial, and postcolonial historiographies into dialogue, proves so illuminating. The comparison with events in British North America demonstrates that differences of race and culture did have a significant effect on whether British Masons accepted colonial Masons as their equals. If Canadian Masons were adolescents whose independence movement assured their passage into adulthood, Indians and others (regardless of their status within their indigenous societies) were younger brethren, children, who were still very much in need of careful upbringing by patriarchal father figures. Relations within the Masonic family therefore paralleled the graded and hierarchical relations of families in general (which social historians have so clearly demonstrated).

Imperial Britons therefore admitted South Asians into their lodges with the understanding that they occupied a subordinate place within the family. Like children who observed their elders, indigenous members could use lodge meetings as opportunities to watch and imitate their betters. British Masons on both sides of the debate concurred that Indians “had not yet acquired a permanency of character, but were in a transition state from a low condition to a more English and Christian standard of civilization and morals.” Even the Hindus' supporters, who claimed to be upholding “the great Masonic Doctrine of the Universal Brotherhood of man,” described, and treated, them like younger brothers who still required extensive tutoring in the arts of civilization. Alluding to the Uprising of 1857, the Grand Lodge of England, which supported the admission of Hindus, inquired rhetorically: “How can western ideas make their way amongst a people whose superstitions so kindle their suspicions, that a greased cartridge may become the cause of a general rebellion? How can a man think of another as his brother, made like himself, after God's image, when to touch him is pollution?” Their answer was through the work of institutions like Freemasonry. Indians already enjoyed English laws and liberties, the Grand Lodge pointed out. Through education and institutions like Freemasonry they would also come “to adopt the faith and manners of Englishmen; until that day arrives, there can be but little hope of friendly intercourse between the dominant and the subject races.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Metropolitan Masons thus argued that their institution, as a meeting ground for men of all backgrounds, could serve as a point of contact between colonizers and colonized and through its teachings help calm racial tensions and educate heathens. In short, lodges could serve as factories for building collaborators, the need for which was especially acute after 1857.Footnote ⁸⁶

To the extent that Freemasons posited indigenous members as their less civilized younger brethren, Masonic ideology offers a version of what Uday Mehta has described as a “liberal strategy of exclusion” (or, perhaps more precisely in this case, a liberal strategy of inclusion.) The doctrines of English liberalism (with its emphasis on individual liberty, private property, and social contract), Mehta argues, actually served as an ideological buttress of imperialism. Liberalism's late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century proponents based their ideology on the Lockean notion of freedom: like parents who retained authority over their children because they had not yet acquired reason, an imperial power like Britain justifiably held sway over childlike indigenes who lacked reason and thus the capacity to enter into consensual political arrangements.Footnote ⁸⁷ British Freemasons—who perceived the global Masonic family not as an institution of equals but one in which some children might grow into adulthood while others remained trapped in childhood—thus drew on the well-established ideas of English liberalism that had long justified imperialism.

In sum, as historians attempt to understand the subtleties of imperial ideology, we must factor both similarity and difference into the equation. After all, that is what the historical actors themselves did. As Thomas Metcalf points out: “Throughout the later nineteenth century, as they constructed their ‘India,’ the British always had to negotiate this disjuncture: between and acknowledgement of similarity, and an insistence upon difference. The task was never to be easy, nor was the result to be a coherent ideology of rule.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Freemasons had to negotiate a disjuncture between their universalist ideology, that taught Britons to acknowledge their basic similarities with their fellow men and brothers, and their duties and assumptions as imperialists, which required them to uphold the rule of difference. Frequent recourse to the metaphor of the family helped them resolve this apparent contradiction: Masonry's familial model had plenty of room for the perpetuation of hierarchies based on racial and cultural differences even as it proclaimed that Britons and indigenous peoples belonged to the same universal family.

By failing to appreciate the ways that assumptions about social ranking interacted with assumptions about race, the idea of “Ornamentalism” therefore oversimplifies British ideologies of rule. Had British Masons really wanted to “eradicate the differences, and … homogenize the heterogeneities of empire,”Footnote ⁸⁹ they would have taken the initiative to welcome indigenous candidates. Had they readily accepted the elements of Masonic ideology that encouraged them to appreciate the fundamental similarities between indigenous peoples and themselves, they would have forgone the two decades of hard-fought debate. Instead, the impetus had come from the Indians themselves.

Upper-class Indians joined the brotherhood for a variety of reasons. Like their Europeans brethren, they were attracted to the intellectual stimulation and spiritual cultivation that Freemasonry afforded.Footnote ⁹⁰ They enjoyed the convivial dinners that followed monthly lodge meetings and the occasional public processions and ceremonies.Footnote ⁹¹ Indigenous members who were engaged in commercial pursuits or who traveled extensively welcomed access to the global network of lodges and brethren. Above all, they embraced the very ideology of sameness that British Masons found so hard to live by. P. M. Wadia described Masonry as “the most wonderful institution on the face of the earth” because it “embodies men of every clime, country, and religion to practise virtue, to learn to fear God and to love their brother man. It does more. It brings the whole human race into one family.”Footnote ⁹² Masonic lodges, the prominent Bombay Mason and prolific Masonic author K. R. Cama pointed out, brought together in bonds of brotherhood not only “the two grand classes, the European and the Native” but also Muslims, Parsis, and Hindus.Footnote ⁹³ P. C. Ghose also celebrated Masonic fraternalism and universalism: “We take as our model, the love and affection which a brother feels for a brother in blood, and extend the same, first to the different members of our Society, and then to the individual members of the universal society of God.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Depending on how members put Masonic ideology to use, it might either act as a glue that helped hold the empire together or as a solvent that eroded the rule of difference upon which imperialism depended. For British Masons who viewed indigenous members as their undercivilized younger brethren, the institution buttressed historicist discourses that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, were European imperialists' “way of saying ‘not yet’” to non-European peoples and keeping them indefinitely stuck in civilization's waiting room.Footnote ⁹⁵ But Freemasonry's new practitioners in India could take Masonic fraternalism to its logical conclusion and, like the Canadians, assert their independence and demand the right to be treated as equals. Freemasonry presented indigenous members with opportunities to interact with and, even more important, to perceive and be perceived by Europeans as their equals, as their brethren. As K. R. Cama observed in 1877, “One of the happy results attained by introducing natives into Masonry has been that of bringing them to closely associate, socially, with their European brethren—I was almost going to say, masters.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Freemasonry, organized as a cosmopolitan family, could serve as an ideological vehicle for demanding freedom and equality, even if it was freedom and equality conceived along European lines.