Home, part 1 - Notes and Records of the Royal Society

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The Royal Society and the Empire. Part 1 311
according to which they could if they wished pay contributions and give bond, and
in return have their names inscribed on the Home List. 12
During the first half of the eighteenth century, foreigners were elected to the
Fellowship in such numbers that, in the 1740s, they represented almost 50% of the
total. 13 Thereafter, controls were gradually introduced that made their election more
difficult. In the process, the category of Foreign Member was formally defined for
the first time. By 1787, the total number of such members was restricted to 100, and
procedures were set in place whereby vacancies were filled once a year from among
candidates who had been nominated during the preceding 12 months. Later, in 1823,
the number of Foreign Members was further restricted to a total of 50, new
members ‘to be put in nomination at a meeting of the Council’ instead of being
proposed at an Ordinary Meeting of the Society. Thereafter the rules governing the
election of Foreign Members remained unchanged for many years. 14
Of particular significance for our purposes here is the fact that these various
restrictions only ever applied to non-resident foreigners, who came to be carefully
distinguished from British subjects resident abroad. The two groups first began to be
treated differently in 1753, when the Statute adopted in 1727 was repealed in favour
of one in which all British subjects, whatever their place of residence, and also non-
British residents of His Majesty’s dominions, were declared liable to pay the joining
fee, whereas foreigners (unless living in British territory) remained exempt. 15 In 1761,
when the first restrictions were imposed on Foreign Membership, they were stated to
apply only to ‘persons residing in Foreign parts, not being subjects of the Crown of
Great Britain’. Finally, in the definitive rules adopted in 1787, the continuing
eligibility for ordinary membership of residents of Britain’s overseas Empire was
made explicit, the new regulations being declared to apply only to persons ‘who are
neither natives nor inhabitants of his Majesty’s dominions’. 16
Ironically, this came just after His Majesty’s dominions had been greatly reduced
by the loss of the American colonies. One American, Dr Arthur Lee (F.R.S. 1766),
felt bound to resign from the Society in 1788 because he no longer ‘from the time of
the establishment of the American Independence’ considered himself a Fellow, and
later in the same year the Society itself formally recognized the new nationality of
citizens of the erstwhile colonial territories by electing one of their number, James
Bowdoin, a Fellow on the Foreign List. 17
Not until after World War II did the definition of ‘foreign’ used by the Society in
this context undergo further alteration. Hence, throughout the heyday of the second
British Empire, in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century,
any inhabitant, whether British subject or not, of any part of the imperial territories,
and any British subject living even beyond the imperial borders, was eligible for
election on the ordinary rather than the Foreign List. A principal concern in this
paper is the way in which this possibility was exploited in practice to maintain and
strengthen the bonds of Empire in the field of science.