James Stephen (civil servant)

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Bust of James Stephen

Sir James Stephen (born January 3, 1789 in Lambeth , † September 14, 1859 in Koblenz ) was a British civil servant and historian. He worked from 1836 to 1847 as permanent Undersecretary of the British Colonial Office . He then taught Modern History at the University of Cambridge .

Life

He came in 1789 as the third son of the lawyer and member of parliament James Stephen (1758–1832) and his wife Anne, b. Stent, born in London. His father was a friend of William Wilberforce and like him an opponent of slavery.

Stephen studied from 1806 at Cambridge College Trinity Hall and graduated in 1812 with a Bachelor of Laws . He worked as a lawyer with his own practice and from 1813 took on occasional consulting assignments for the colonial office. In 1825 he moved to a permanent position at the Colonial Office and Board of Trade . In 1833 the British Parliament passed a law that regulated the abolition of slavery in large parts of the British Empire . Stephen, himself an advocate of abolitionism , drafted the draft for this Slavery Abolition Act , an elaborate document with 66 sections, in just two days.

In 1834 Stephen became Assistant to the Undersecretary of State and in 1836 permanent Undersecretary of State to the Colonial Office. For his extensive service in this office, he received contemporary nicknames such as King Stephen and Mr. Over-Secretary Stephen . How much political influence he really had in his position is, however, controversial. Among other things, he is credited with having played a key role in the establishment of a self-reliant government in Canada .

In 1847 Stephen resigned from the Colonial Office for health reasons. From 1849 until the end of his life he was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge . For a short time he also taught history and political economy at the then closed East India College Haileybury (1854 to 1857).

Stephen had been married to Jane Catherine, daughter of clergyman and social reformer John Venn , since 1814 . They had five children, one of whom was writer Leslie Stephen and another was lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen .

Honors

Publications (selection)

  • Essays in ecclesiastical biography. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London 1850.
  • Lectures on the history of France. Harper & Brothers, New York 1852.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stephen, Sir James. In: Frederic Boase: Modern English Biography. Netherton & Worth, Truro 1921.
  2. ^ JE Egerton: Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859) In: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, 1967.
personal data
SURNAME Stephen, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stephen, Sir James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1789
PLACE OF BIRTH Lambeth
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1859
Place of death Koblenz