Colonial Liberalism Research Articles

Mechanics Institutes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victoria: Racial Difference and Liberalism in the Settler Colony

ABSTRACT In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain, the Victoria mechanics institutes largely failed to deliver technical education to working-class men. However, the men who propelled their proliferation had much wider hopes for their pedagogic function in the settler colony. This article examines how the twin forces of political liberalism and settler colonialism underwrote and shaped mechanics institutes in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Examining the ideas of colonial liberals who propelled their proliferation and the activities that took place within them, it becomes clear that these institutes were imagined to cultivate certain kinds of settler Britons, capable of bearing the freedoms of an emerging settler modernity. At the same time, moreover, they both legitimated and implemented a settler colonial project of dispossession and demographic replacement. Mechanics institutes, I argue, were thus agents of both settler colonial destruction and liberal cultivation.

Njoo Cheong Seng: An Artist in the Fight between Liberalism and Eastern Traditions

As an artist, Njoo Cheong Seng (writer, playwright, film producer, and director) made efforts to respond to colonial discourse through his works and activities from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. His responses manifested in the forms of resistance and counter discourse. This paper seeks to explore the ideas and forms expressed in the counter discourse by Njoo Cheong Seng, an artist of Chinese Indonesian ethnicity. The perspective applied in this research is the postcolonial approach, particularly with regard to the concepts of hybridity and resistance. The deconstructive reading framework interpretation method was applied to determine the opposing relationship between the colonised and the coloniser discourses. The results show that Njoo Cheong Seng supported the movement to restore Chinese characteristics as a form of cultural resistance to the idea of Dutch colonial liberalism. The strategy that he used seemed to support the colonial discourse while simultaneously masking the hybridity that he promoted through ideas such as cultural nationalism. In addition, Njoo Cheong Seng and other similar collective artists developed a strategy that seemed to be of a puritan nature; however, it was, in fact, a simultaneous hybridity that consistently responded to modernity values. Njoo Cheong Seng actually opposed modernity born of liberalism. Essentially, he opposed the concept of the human as the centre of everything, or anthropocentrism.

Comfort and insecurity in the reproduction of settler coloniality

ABSTRACT Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.

Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India,c.1900–1920

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlierThe Indian War of Independence(1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment ofThe Indian War of Independenceand situates it within the political and intellectual context offin de sièclewestern India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

Inquiry mentality and occasional mourning in the settler colonial carceral

ABSTRACTThe settler state is vested in the incarceration of non-white bodies. Yet, the coincidence of settler states and liberal polities also means a consistent concealment of this carceral system within forms of governmentality that represent it as a system of protection or rehabilitation. Forms of settler governmentality silence subjects of colour within and beyond the borders of the settler state even as they enclose, incarcerate and eliminate the very bodies that would enunciate an objection to the transnational networks of dispossession in which the settler state is imbricated. This article addresses how speech is managed and circumscribed within the operations of settler colonial liberalism, by focusing on such forms of speech as protest and government inquiries. It does so through an analysis of recent practices of incarceration – particularly of refugees in off-shore detention and of Aboriginal people in Australian prisons and youth detention centres – and of the modes of speech that resist them in Australia.

Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

ABSTRACTFocusing on the striking instance of colonial New Zealand, this article examines constitutional design for colonies of European settlement, arguing about such design in two key respects. First, this article examines the proposals of so-called ‘colonial reformers’ endeavouring to influence constitutional framing, including how their notions on ‘local self-government’ or ‘municipal government’ were reflected or not, while also illuminating their concepts of how to accommodate indigenous territorial governance and indirect administration of indigenous territories in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Second, recovering traces of these disputes and ways of thought from the archives, and how they were operationalised in grounded constitutional drafting or design, rather than resorting to analysing abstract canonical, high-level texts, such as those of Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill, is ultimately more rewarding for evaluating constitutional emergence and design. It reveals tensions within ‘colonial liberalism’, as characterised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. How putative settler interests informed these metropolitan-Westminster constitutional enactments or not, assessed through cabinet-level discussions, in Colonial Office deliberations on settler agitation, illustrates missteps and failures as well as the particular ways in which diverse features of imperial constitutional design emerged. Examining these points is timely given Linda Colley’s focus on a ‘contagion of constitutions’ in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries.

Colonial Liberalism, Global Neoliberalism, and Education in India

Colonial Liberalism, Global Neoliberalism, and Education in India

Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86

AbstractThis article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules?I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.

In the Name of Reason: Colonial Liberalism and the Government of West Indian Indentureship

AbstractOne year after the first importation of coolie labourers from India to Trinidad in 1845 there were numerous reports of physical, occupational, and psychic abuse perpetrated by planters and estate managers against indentured labourers. This paper presents a genealogical footprint of the tormented existence of these labourers under a system of quasi‐slavery paradoxically at a moment when British colonial governance aimed to reinvent itself via the indentureship scheme, as humanitarian, benevolent and indispensable to the improvement of Indian subjects. Based on the court testimonies of a case concerning planter brutality against coolie, the paper foregrounds a legal‐administrative recalculation and redistribution of the semiotics of disciplinary power in an effort to consolidate the sovereignty of the liberal colonial state.

Official Statistics and the Contemporary Politics of Indigeneity

Critical scholarship on colonisation tells us that official statistics have reflected the perspectives of the colonisers. However, the colonised, in asserting ‘Indigenous rights,’ have begun to use official statistics to advocate policies that will relieve the continuing structural injustice that is colonisation's legacy. This paper examines Aboriginal and Maori intellectuals' efforts to quantify, using official statistics, the ‘unfinished business’ of settler colonial liberalism. Examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners' annual Reports, the paper argues that their quantitative comparisons of Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations highlighted the contested implications of ‘equality.’ Turning to New Zealand, the paper reviews two issues: the appropriate boundary of the ‘Māori population,’ and whether it is possible to measure Māori well-being according to Māori norms. The paper draws on the work of Andrew Sharp to make sense of the difficulties and opportunities that face Indigenous intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand when they operationalise ‘social justice’ in the terms of a comparative statistical archive. The paper argues that there are now two distinct idioms in which to represent the collective Indigenous presence within settler colonial nation-state—one signified by the concept ‘population,’ the other by the concept ‘people.’ The tensions between ‘population’ and ‘people,’ resonating with undecided issues about the claims of Indigenous citizenship upon a liberal policy, are a feature of contemporary Indigenous political discourse.

Equality and Exclusion: the Racial Constitution of Colonial Liberalism

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism.

Introduction: Colonial Liberalism and Western Marxism — Remarx From Melbourne

Introduction: Colonial Liberalism and Western Marxism — Remarx From Melbourne

The Poverty of Liberalism: the First Old Age Pensions in Australia

The two reforms that most contributed to the idea of an antipodean social laboratory at the end of the 19th century were the old age pension and state arbitration of the minimum wage. Both are said to reflect the influence of the new liberalism, buttressed by the emergence of the labour movement into politics. This paper argues that debates on the old age pension at the turn of the 19th century illustrate a more tangled set of liberal trajectories than either a narrative of a unified Deakinite consensus, or of a new liberal importation, would allow. While there was clearly some new liberal influence in how New South Wales debated the pension, in Victoria an older tradition of colonial liberalism — which emphasized self-governance as much as social reform — meant that it was seen as much as a reward for good moral character as a measure to deal with poverty.

Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality’s governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte‐face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.

Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality's governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte‐face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.

Reluctant Voluntaries: Peter and George Brown: The Scottish Disruption and the Politics of Church and State in Canada

This article situates the intellectual development of Peter and George Brown, two Scottish Free Church Presbyterians whose newspapers, the Banner and the Globe, launched in Toronto, upper Canada, during the 1840s made a central contribution to the redefinition of colonial liberalism. Although their starting point was the idea of plural establishment as safeguarding Scottish national traditions, the Browns' radical Scottish Whiggism moved, under the impact of British church-state controversies of the early 1840s, the Scottish Disruption of 1843, and the debate within Upper Canada over the fate of the colonial Clergy Reserves, to a radical position of total disestablishment and religious voluntaryism. This article shows the connections between the Browns' Presbyterianism, their religiously-centred Scottish nationalism, and the effect of their commitment to evangelical antislavery causes, and their espousal of a more democratic British constitutionalism. In the Upper Canadian context, this article illustrates the close links that prevailed between religious radicalism and colonial definitions of political democracy that emerged during the late 1840s.

Modernist narratives, conventional wisdoms, and colonial liberalism: reply to a Straw Man

This article is a response to Macmillan's critique of the author's paper ‘Mobile workers, modernist narratives: a critique of the historiography of transition on the Zambian Copperbelt’.

Book reviews

Book reviews

Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries

Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries

'Good Labor Men': The Hill Government in South Australia, 1930-1933

The task facing the Labor Party in South Australia, elected to office in April 1930, was the unenviable one of having to execute the Premiers' Plan. In August 1931, the Premier, L. L. Hill, and his Parliamentary followers, were expelled from the A.L.P. Kept in office by the support of the Liberal Federation, the Government lasted out its full term to the 1933 State elections, where its candidates, along with those of the official A.L.P., were decimated. The Labor Party did not gain office in South Australia again until 1965. The Hill Government was composed of 'good Labor men', men who could be trusted to administer the affairs of the State according to the 'national interest'. An analysis of its record reveals the limitations on the power of a government, especially one of an allegedly 'left of centre' persuasion. Revealed also are the inadequacies of an A.L.P. uttering the empty cant of its particular brand of socialism. In South Australia, the Labor Party began its existence as a wing of colonial liberalism and, as one well-known Adelaide businessman later pronounced: