Comparing the various phases of the debates about the ten tribes reveals
another aspect of this transformation. Portuguese and Spanish debates were
limited in temporal and spatial terms—and they were not unconnected to
immediate political motives. They were confined to those regions of the
world where the empire was active at any given moment. In the Portuguese
case, the region in question was at the southern boundaries of the ancient
world—from Ethiopia through Arabia to India, where the ten tribes continued
to play their traditional role as a supernatural and unreachable group of people.
In the Spanish case, interest was confined to the colonies in the Americas.^7
In the case of the British Empire, the frame was radically different, and
discussions about the ten tribes eventually encompassed the whole world. As
we have seen, debates within the English context were informed by and fed the
rise of an increasingly acute sense of loss. Here, empire played a crucial role.
The sheer size of the British Empire and, most important, the perception that it
truly was aworldempire, “where the sun does not set,” as the famous cliche ́
had it, made England at once the clearinghouse and crucible for ideas about the
ten tribes, which were spread through its vast information networks. This
corresponds with an observation from the second part of the eighteenth
century: “Britons increasingly thought of their empire in global terms and...
increasingly imagined the world generally, and their empire more specifically,
within a global framework.” British officials were encouraged to “consider the
whole globe.”^8 A sensitive ear can detect the distant echo of Assyrian claims to
the “whole world” that lay beyond the boundaries of their empire. Assyrian
rulers, too, and their admiring listeners—such as the prophet Isaiah—had
thought in terms both of empire and of the whole globe beyond it. The more
the British Empire became global, so too did the possibilities of finding the
ten tribes.
Historian Edward Beasley’s survey of the founders of the Colonial Society—
“the first major pro imperial pressure group,” founded in 1868 —characterizes
its members as the people who invented a “world-historical mission for the
British Empire.” Its founders were all gentlemen from different social strands
across the empire who shared “globe-spanning ideas of the place of the British
Empire in geography and history.”^9 One of the active founders was Sir Henry
Drummond Wolff ( 1830 – 1908 ), son of Joseph Wolff, among the most active
tribes seekers in history. Many of the tribes’ seekers saw a connection between
their individual activities in searching for the tribes and the empire as a whole.
The empire broadened the field for the search, just as searching helped the
expansion of empire.
When, in 1823 , Reginald Heber ( 1783 – 1826 ) was appointed bishop of
Calcutta, he went to visit a friend of his mother, whom he told he was
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