Sir Charles Eliot (1862 – 1931)

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Sir Charles Norton Edgecumbe Eliot, GCMG, PC (8 January 1862 – 16 March 1931) was a British knight diplomat, colonial administrator and botanist. He served as Commissioner of British East Africa in 1900–1904. He was British Ambassador to Japan in 1919–1925.

He was also known as a malacologist and marine biologist. He named the sea slug species Chelidonura varians Eliot, 1903.


Eliot was born in the village of Sibford Gower near Banbury, Oxfordshire, England and educated at Cheltenham College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classical moderations and Greats, as well as winning the Craven, Ireland and Hertford scholarships. Remarkably, he also won the Boden Sanskrit Scholarship and the Houghton Syriac prize. He was a noteworthy linguist, with a full knowledge of 16 languages and conversant in 20 more.

Eliot served in diplomatic posts in Russia (1885), Morocco (1892), Turkey (1893), and Washington, D.C. (1899). He also served as British Commissioner in Samoa, and was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in the New Year honours list 1 January 1900

In 1900, he was appointed commissioner of British East Africa, and on 1 January 1902 he was appointed Commissioner, Commander-in-Chief and Consul-General for the East Africa Protectorate, including the mainland dominions of the Sultan of Zanzibar, and also as British Agent and Consul-General for the island dominions of the Sultan.

In April 1902, the first application for land in British East Africa was made by the East Africa Syndicate – a company in which financiers belonging to the British South Africa Company were interested – which sought a grant of 500 square miles (1,300 km2) sq. m., and this was followed by other applications for considerable areas, a scheme being also propounded for a large Jewish settlement. During 1903 the arrival of hundreds of prospective settlers, chiefly from South Africa, led to the decision to entertain no more applications for large areas of land, especially as questions were raised concerning the preservation for the Maasai of their rights of pasturage. In April 1903, Major Frederick Russell Burnham, the famous American scout and then a Director of the East African Syndicate, sent an expedition consisting of John Weston Brooke, John Charles Blick, Mr. Bittlebank, and Mr. Brown, to assess the mineral wealth of the region. The party, known as the "Four B.'s", travelled from Nairobi via Mount Elgon northwards to the western shores of Lake Rudolph, experiencing plenty of privations from want of water, and of the danger from encounters with the Maasai.

In the carrying out of this policy of colonisation a dispute arose between Eliot and Lord Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary. Lansdowne, believing himself bound by pledges given to the East Africa Syndicate, decided that they should be granted the lease of the 500 square miles (1,300 km2) they had applied for; but after consulting officials of the protectorate then in London, he refused Eliot permission to conclude leases for 50 square miles (130 km2) each to two applicants from South Africa. Eliot thereupon resigned his post, and in a public telegram to the prime minister, dated Mombasa, 21 June 1904, gave as his reason:- "Lord Lansdowne ordered me to refuse grants of land to certain private persons while giving a monopoly of land on unduly advantageous terms to the East Africa Syndicate. I have refused to execute these instructions, which I consider unjust and impolitic." On the day Sir Charles sent this telegram the appointment of Sir Donald William Stewart, the chief commissioner of Ashanti (Ghana), to succeed him was announced.

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Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Sir Charles Eliot, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 106 works in 355 publications in 2 languages and 4,509 library holdings.

This is an incomplete list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
The East Africa Protectorate (1905)
Turkey in Europe (1900) (Named himself "Odysseus")
Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch (1921)
Japanese Buddhism (1935)
A Finnish Grammar (1890)
"Letters from the Far East" (1907)

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Sir Charles Eliot, a famous scholar and linguist of Oxford observed, " A number of Buddhist legends make their appearance in the Apocryphal gospels and are so obviously Indian in character that it can hardly be maintained that they were invented in Palestine or Egypt and spread thence Eastwards."

(source: Hinduism and Buddhism - By Sir Charles Eliot vol. iii (1921), p. 441).