Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Amanda Nettelbeck

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Amanda Nettelbeck Ryan D. Fong (bio) Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Amanda Nettelbeck; pp. vii + 232. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $29.99 paper. Although Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire is the first book that Amanda Nettelbeck has published as a sole author, it builds on the extensive work that she has already done—both as editor and coauthor—on colonial law and violence, particularly within the Australasian context. Indeed, the book in many respects marks an important moment of synthesis of this previous work, as well as a broadening of its scope, in the way that it focuses on policies and discourses of “protection” that developed across the expanding British Empire over the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Nettelbeck covers a great deal of ground and traces how these new legal structures and norms of colonial management were established and how they were implemented in several key settings, including Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Cape Colony, and Canada. To tell this story, Nettelbeck follows a few predominant threads across the book’s six chapters. First and foremost, she tracks the development of protectorate regimes in a number of colonial locations, using copious archival material to construct a narrative that is striking in both its breadth and level of detail. As she makes clear in her introduction, this is not “a history of indigenous [sic] rights as such” but rather “a history of how a discourse of indigenous rights safeguarded in law . . . became reconciled with coercive practices which worked over time to build indigenous colonial subjecthood” (5). As such, Nettelbeck moves between various colonies and the imperial metropole of London, all while marshaling a vast sweep of information to craft a thorough account of Indigenous protectionism and its eventual replacement by other schemes of colonial management. Interwoven with this primary thread, especially in the early chapters, is a careful unpacking of how these new protectionist programs for Indigenous peoples worked alongside the administration of formerly enslaved people and the increasing number of indentured laborers. In the later chapters, the thread that focuses on developments in the Australian context comes to the fore, but even this more specific discussion is given a complex treatment as Nettelbeck accounts for the differences and tensions between colonial offices across the continent, from Western Australia to New South Wales. What emerges from these interweavings is less a comparative study than a meticulous charting of multiple trajectories of legal and political development. Nettelbeck makes a convincing case that these trajectories worked collectively to establish British imperial power, even if their discursive and rhetorical framing sought to couch these policies in benevolent and humanitarian terms. She further shows that the itineraries of these trajectories were hardly uniform. In fact, one of the key takeaways from the book is just how diverse and even contradictory these policies were, especially when looking across different colonial sites and contexts. For readers new to this history, the details can sometimes be dizzying and difficult to parse, but for those more accustomed to navigating the byzantine workings of colonial bureaucracy, Nettelbeck’s book limns these complexities with both admirable care and impressive economy. As with many works that are situated firmly within settler colonial studies, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood is less interested in providing a robust investigation of [End Page 457] Indigenous responses to these polices than it is in articulating their development and enactment by colonial administrators. Chapter 5 provides a welcome exception to this general rule in developing a framework that attends to the “strategic intimacies of Aboriginal protection,” which provides a glimpse into the affective dimensions and dynamics at work for the Indigenous peoples and communities most affected by these policies (139). In the sections on Aboriginal diplomacy, which focus on Woiwurrung leader Billibellary and Ngaiawang leader Tenberry, and on interracial marriage in Western Australia and New Zealand, Nettelbeck provides her most compelling anecdotes of Indigenous agency and negotiation. These examples contrast the overriding...