Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales

Abstract

Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales, 1830 – 1850 Kirsten McKenzie The question of bonded labour, whether in the form of slavery or transportation, was amongst the most pressing issues occupying the collective mind of the British empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. These debates were concurrent with the emergence of a bourgeois imperial culture of manners which stressed the importance of personal respectability and domestic morality. If we examine the critiques mounted against slavery at the Cape and transportation to New South Wales in the 1830s we find that they were imbued with the discourses of sexual scandal. Similar objections were voiced against the resumption of transportation to New South Wales and the conversion of the Cape Colony to a penal settlement a decade later. The language of moral transgression which informed everyday social interaction, and which was invoked in private scandals, was also marshalled to promote and resist social change in the political arena. This discussion of the manner in which scandal (especially sexual scandal) became a propagandist tool to discredit the reputations of colonies supported by unfree labour draws on wider research about the place of scandal in constructing social boundaries within the colonial worlds of Cape Town and Sydney in the first half of the nineteenth century. Respectability had concrete implications in daily life for men and women who aspired to inclusion within the ranks of the colonial middle classes. It was a weapon to be wielded in the small politics of everyday life; the social competition whereby each would find their level in the new society. Reputation was equally important at the colony-wide level, and had implications for issues such as assisted emigration, political concessions to self-government, and investment.1 While scandals publicise the transgression of a society’s norms and values, such norms and values are contested features of social life, especially in communities undergoing such rapid social change as Sydney and Cape Town. They are not just, therefore, about the transgression of the culture of manners, but also ‘about the cultivation or assertion of the values or norms themselves’.2 Bonded labour was an especially troubling force in the construction of the bourgeois culture of empire. Tracing the elaboration of a respectable culture in two cities which had to deal with the problem of slavery and convict labour respectively is particularly pertinent to the broader question of white colonial reputation. While the Cape had a far longer history as a Dutch colonial settlement, by the 1830s Cape Town and Sydney belonged to established British colonies. Both, however, were troubled by debates over the impact of bonded labour. The transition to a new kind of society which was deemed worthy of self-government (a key aim of the urban bourgeoisie) was in part dependant upon the transition to a free labour system. Slavery and convict labour tainted the reputations of the Cape and New South Wales in the eyes of the metropole. This had both symbolic and practical effects. Both were used as arguments against giving the colonies representative government. At a deeper level, scandals deriving from the relations between masters and servants compromised white colonial efforts to represent Sydney and Cape Town as respectable communities. The small struggles to define respectability in the colonial setting were writ large in the debates over bonded labour. The trajectory of development in New South Wales and at the Cape was thus as strongly influenced by the emerging definitions of reputation as were the individual fates of their inhabitants. The 1830s saw an unprecedented wave of parliamentary investigation and the reform of diverse aspects of British imperial society, not least in the mother country itself. Although they built upon the achievements of the Tories in the 1820s, it was a trend associated with the ascendancy of the liberal Whigs, whose parliamentary victory in 1830 ushered in a decade heralded by its advocates as the ‘Age of Reform’. The enfranchisement of middle-class men through the Reform Act underlined the new world order which parliament increasingly endorsed. It was the culmination of a gradual process of change from the late eighteenth...