Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim ed. by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck Philip Steer (bio) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, edited by Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck; pp. xi + 285. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $119.99, $99.99 paper, $79.99 ebook. The growth of comparative scholarship on settler colonialism has been accompanied by methodological divergences over questions of scale and approach. On the one hand, there is what might be called the gargantuan-economic approach of British World scholarship. This is exemplified by James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (2009), which offers a broad-brush model of "explosive colonization" as an explanation of settler expansionism in both the British Empire and the U. S. ([Oxford University Press, 2009] 182). On the other hand, there is the socialnetwork approach of the new imperial history. Associated especially with the work of Antoinette Burton, this approach focuses on transnational webs of culture, gender, and reproduction. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck place their collection of essays, Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, squarely in the latter camp, as part of the effort to "move beyond" the British World [End Page 281] men's club and its whiff of imperial nostalgia (6). As they point out, such approaches have overlooked "the crucial forces of gender, reproduction, and biopolitics that were centrally constitutive of settler colonialism" (14). Instead, their lucid introduction makes the case for a more granular view of the settler frontier, hinging on the concept of "moral economy" as a means of understanding the complexity and messiness of cross-cultural violence and intimacy as foundational to settler states (4). This framework enables a rich and varied series of interventions in a collection structured around three "economies" with considerable overlap: the moral economies of cross-cultural pastoral labor, the emotional economies of cross-cultural domesticity and intimacy, and the economies of colonial knowledge circulation and exchange. As is often the case with edited collections, however, the individual essays strain at the conceptual framework meant to encompass and unify them. In this case, the subtitle's promise of looking "around the Pacific Rim" is somewhat misleading. The Pacific Rim turns out to be virtually synonymous with Australia, and includes the bits of it that face the Indian Ocean; there is some engagement with New Zealand, but Hawai'i and the Pacific coast of North America are notably absent. Is the Pacific Rim even a valid concept in the context of settler colonialism in the long nineteenth century? It is hard to know, because not a single essay employs the term, and it is absent from the index. Even the commitment to the settler colony is brought a little into question by the end, for the final essay awkwardly focuses on the British reception of Arctic explorers' news. These are by no means fatal flaws, and the sheer breadth and complexity of the settler empire make it fiendishly difficult to neatly demarcate the borders of any project. But the strengths of this collection lie less in its insights into processes of transnational exchange and more in the local stories it tells of the particular bodies brought into contact by Empire. The editors stress their goal of asking "what forms of Indigenous agency might be recovered" from the history of emerging settler economies (9). Yet while all of the contributors focus on aspects of cross-cultural encounter and interaction, and many have undertaken deep archival labor, in general Intimacies of Violence still approaches these questions from the perspective of what white people did and felt. Two essays stand out, however, for their galvanizing accounts of the complexities of frontier intimacy. Victoria K. Haskins offers a stunning reconstruction of two white women's experiences of Indigenous "captivity" in colonial Queensland in the 1830s and '40s, counterpoising the "toxic parable" of Eliza Fraser's sensational account of ill treatment with the little-known tale of Barbara Thompson (154). Haskins's painstaking attention to fragmented linguistic and anthropological sources...