Nineteenth-century British Empire Research Articles

Emotional baggage: how objects created family across the nineteenth-century British empire

Emotional baggage: how objects created family across the nineteenth-century British empire

The Stauntons of Galway in China: Irish Catholic networks and the expansion of the British Empire in Asia

AbstractGeorge Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)

Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)

Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)

Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)

Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell

Reviewed by: Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 by Bill Bell Rebecca Nesvet (bio) Bill Bell, Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xx + 271, $45 hardcover. On September 30, 1848, London Chartist leader William Cuffay was convicted for conspiring to levy war in connection with his part in the Chartist demonstration of April 10th at Kennington Common. He was convicted by a jury that, as he insisted, was not of his peers, and he was duly sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land. A year after his trial, prior to his embarkation, Cuffay received from his Chartist comrades a compact one-volume copy of the poems of Lord Byron, inscribed to him with great admiration. When Cuffay read that book in his Tasmanian cell, he may have been reassured that his comrades thought him a hero, that his cause had been right, and that, like the Byron of the radical papers, he might someday be vindicated. The volume now resides at the People's History Museum in Manchester, England, as a key Chartist relic. It shows that the context of reading makes meaning, especially for readers severed from everything they have known. [End Page 474] What such readers make of their reading is the subject of Bill Bell's Crusoe's Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918, an indispensable study in media history twenty years in the making and well worth the wait. The title refers to Robinson Crusoe's salvaged library, "a cultural carapace for the individual against the tyranny of distance" (2–3). Crusoe's library is the most famous modern iteration of a trope that stretches from depictions of St. Jerome in a great deal of fine art to Thomas Selby Cousins's Australian cowherd in the sentimental picture "The Bushman's Dream," published in the Illustrated Sydney News in 1869. Bell's case studies of "hermeneutic castaways," mostly historical but sometimes fictional, demonstrate the icon once embodied by Jerome "becoming enmeshed in a colonial context" (4). Bell is intrigued by the contents and discernible usage of colonial libraries, which "often go unexamined in accounts of" colonial reading (9). In 1998, Bell coined the term "geography of communications" to articulate, as he puts it in Crusoe's Books, "the means by which discourses travel, proliferate, and are adapted across space" (23). By examining the libraries of a few distinct populations—emigrants to Australia, convicts, Scottish expatriates, and British explorers of the poles—Bell reveals that the nineteenth-century British Empire's "increased mobility … had considerable material, hermeneutic, and cultural consequences for the production of the newly inflected cultures that emerged as a result of the readers' encounters with novel situations" (25). Indeed, imperial reading was ultimately not a "monolithic apparatus for the imposition of ideology" (25). Hermeneutic castaways exhibited considerable agency. Bell's history of castaway hermeneutics engages with major theorists of media studies, literacy history, and travel and imperialist writing, including Walter Benjamin, Alberto Manguel, and Mary Louise Pratt, and joins recent studies such as Priti Joshi's magnificent The Empire News (2021) in exploring the global contours of Victorian periodical culture. Crusoe's Books is also well worth reading for the fine details of exile reading cultures that Bell unearths. For instance, in 1870s Melbourne, Cole's Book Arcade stocked over two million titles, including used books. This wealth of reading material signals the role that books played in colonial Australians' mechanisms of self-definition. Crusoe's Books will also help scholars of Victorian periodical literature to explore a neglected aspect of the March of Intellect. Convict literacy rates improved remarkably on board ships to Australia. The firm Chambers, publisher of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, developed a prefabricated library kit for this purpose, and organizations such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge were eager to help Britons supply emigrants with giftbooks. Some previously literate convicts, such as [End Page 475] forgers, contributed to the production of exile periodicals. Some castaways rebelled against the institutions that had exiled them. On Spike Island, Young Ireland leader John Mitchel's contributions to the Jail Journal are "full...

Gauging Historical Forest Surveys: Recalibrating the Legacy of the Brandis Hypsometer

Abstract During the nineteenth century, the European field of forestry was transmitted through expanding colonial empires and networks that sought to inventory and monetize overseas woodlands. Encountering new environments and terrain, the nineteenth century British Empire discovered that existing surveying and enumeration methods were poorly suited for colonized territories. This was particularly true of British India, which spanned from modern-day Pakistan to Myanmar. Designed for European forests, forestry instruments in the nineteenth century performed poorly abroad. With the assistance of Syed Mir Mohsin Hussain, Dietrich Brandis—a German scientist and one of the first Inspectors General of Forests in British India—reconstituted a European hypsometer to address some of these challenges. The collaboration between the two men resulted in the Brandis hypsometer. For the subsequent half century, the hypsometer became a principal forestry device throughout the British Empire and the United States. Despite the widespread adoption of the device, critics challenged the operability and accuracy of the Brandis hypsometer. Using computer-aided design and modern fabrication techniques has allowed for a reexamination of this historic device. The authors’ investigation supports critics’ claims and suggests a degree of nuance for researchers relying on data produced by the device.

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

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

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...

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

Review: <i>Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire</i>, by Amanda Nettelbeck

Scandal and Secrecy in the History of the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

AbstractFor historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.

Authorizing geographical knowledge: John Arrowsmith, mapmaking and the mid nineteenth-century British Empire

This article examines how the prominent mapmaker, engraver and publisher John Arrowsmith (1790–1873) functioned as a geographical authority in the mid nineteenth-century British Empire. Through previously unexamined archival material I analyse Arrowsmith’s close relationship with the Colonial Office and consider his semi-official position as a mapmaker to the British Empire. I analyse Arrowsmith’s cartographic credibility and the power of maps through a case study focusing on Australind, a private colonization venture targeted at Western Australia in 1840. I analyse the ‘social life’ of a map Arrowsmith supplied for the Western Australian Company largely based on explorer George Grey’s information by examining its contested epistemological status in the Australian colonies. Using literature on trust, authority and the social histories of maps, this article highlights the mutability and spatial contingency of the power of maps and their makers in imperial and colonial knowledge-making. By studying the map’s shifting position in the processes of truth-making in the metropolis and the Australian colonies I contribute to growing literature on the processual nature of maps. Importantly, I demonstrate how maps like Arrowsmith’s not only contributed to the popular imagination of empire at home but were documents of indirect agency as the British invaded and explored different parts of the world.

Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, Amanda Nettelbeck (2019)

Review of: Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, Amanda Nettelbeck (2019) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 232 pp., ISBN 978 1 10847 175 6 (hbk), £75.00

Cultures of Sex, Laws of Difference: Age of Consent Law and the Forging of a Fraternal Contract on the Margins of the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction and sexual respectability, which were the grounds for imagining difference amongst imperial populations only recently assembled under colonial jurisdiction. Age of consent laws arose out of these contingencies rather than out of any concern with a liberal politics of social reform. Consequently, colonial age of consent laws governing white settlers bore only superficial resemblance to metropolitan legislative reforms such as age of consent laws. Instead, the Natal state's practices of law-making recognized three discrete and divergent moral economies of sex in the colonial laws governing white settler citizens, Native law which governed the lives of Africans and the consolidated body of laws governing Indian immigrants. In this young colony, not only did ‘age of consent’ laws have to be newly made, but they were conceived separately and contained by ‘colonial law’, ‘Native custom’ and ‘Indian custom’. The sexuality of young white woman was coded in colonial rape laws and used to draw lines of civilizational difference between settler citizens and their Others. For these others, relating sex to exceptional marriage customs excluded from legal codes of civilized common practice was how the state worked to assert difference.

Procedural reform in the nineteenth century British Empire: the failure of Barron Field in Gibraltar

In 1831 Barron Field, first judge of the new Supreme Court of Gibraltar, drafted rules for his new court. Field was one of a cohort of colonial judges in this period who were encouraged by the Colonial Office to undertake significant reforms to civil procedure. In the main, this produced innovation, leading to reforms not yet possible in England. Field’s reforms were judged an exception. He was the only judge in this period whose reforms were not accepted by the Colonial Office. However, his failure gives insight into the kinds of improvements that the Colonial Office hoped to achieve, and hence into the project of nineteenth-century procedural reform more broadly. Moreover, tracing the filiations of Field’s reforms potentially enables us to follow the movement of procedural forms between colonies administering civil law and common law, providing a means though which to bring reforms in these systems into a single field.

Providential Empire? The Established Church of England and the Nineteenth-Century British Empire in India

In the early nineteenth century, many in Britain believed that their conquests in India had a providential purpose, and that imperial Britain had been called by God to Christianize India through an alliance of Church and empire. In 1813, parliament not only opened India to missionary activity, but also provided India with an established Church, which was largely supported by Indian taxation and formed part of the established Church of England. Many hoped that this union of Church and empire would communicate to India the benefits of England's diocesan and parochial structures, with a settled pastorate, parish churches and schools, and a Christian gentry. As the century progressed, the established Church was steadily enlarged, with a growing number of bishoprics, churches, schools, colleges, missionaries and clergy. But it had only limited success in gaining converts, and many Indians viewed it as a form of colonization. From the 1870s, it was increasingly clear that imperial India would not become Christian. Some began reconceptualizing the providential purpose behind the Indian empire, suggesting that the purpose might be to promote dialogue and understanding between the religions of the East and West, or, through the selfless service of missionaries, to promote moral reform movements in Hinduism and Islam.

Protecting Slaves and Aborigines

The historiography on protection in the nineteenth-century British Empire often assumes that British humanitarians were the progenitors of protection schemes. In contrast, this article argues that the position of Protector or Guardian for slaves and Indigenous peoples in the British Empire drew on Spanish, Dutch, and French legal precedents. The legal protections and slave codes operative in these European colonies are compared to British colonial territories, where there was no imperial slave code and no clear status of slaves at common law. Drawing on debates in the House of Commons, Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry, and the published work of abolitionists and anti-slavery societies, the article examines how the pressure for amelioration in the British Empire coincided with the acquisition of new colonies that offered ready-made models for slave protection. British reformers combined their calls for greater protection for slaves with their extant knowledge of European protective regimes.

Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Alan Lester and Fae Dussart

Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Alan Lester and Fae Dussart

Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon, by Barry Gough

Barry Gough’s stated object in writing this book was to re-connect imperial and naval history, to remind readers that the nineteenth-century British Empire depended entirely on naval power. It takes its title from a celebrated, not to say hackneyed, phrase, the meaning of which still bears reflection. The reference is of course to the Pax Romana, and ‘pax’ in this context does not exactly mean ‘peace’ in the common sense of friendly relations between different nations. This is the legal sense of the Latin word, the ‘King’s Peace’ of medieval England, close in meaning to our modern English ‘rule of law’: it refers to the internal good order of a jurisdiction subject to a common legal system, not the external relations of one country with another. It would have been worth the author considering to what extent the nineteenth-century British Empire really was a ‘Queen’s Peace’, and whether this peace extended over the sea in any meaningful sense. It would have helped to give some definition to an otherwise sprawling, and even invertebrate, survey. This is neither a narrative history nor a work of analysis but a tour of the British Empire, roughly arranged by region, in which the author rambles genially around the subject reflecting on things which catch his interest. At times, he becomes quite lyrical about the pleasures of seapower: ‘The sailors lived in a world of danger and a world of enchantment ... Flying fish, penguins, iguanas and sealions all had describable characteristics of delight, and then there were the natural wonders, such as erupting volcanoes, tsunamis, a fire in the rigging during the storm known as St. Elmo’s Fire and, perhaps the greatest entertainment, rounding Cape Horn in the highest seas and the worst weather’. Your reviewer was reminded of his childhood copy of The Wonder Book of the Navy without the coloured engravings (though Gough has some good monochrome illustrations). Themes do not very clearly emerge, but the author’s friendly, indeed admiring, attitude towards the British imperial project (‘one of the most remarkable and indeed promising experiments in the history of nations and international affairs’) certainly does. He is not entirely uncritical, recognising that naval officers ‘could be both high-handed and high-minded’, but he is usually ready to credit the British government at least with the right intentions. This is not a study driven by theory, still less by ideology. The cultural turn is not turned here; post-modernism and post-colonialism are not present; we meet some post-captains but definitely no subalterns. Or perhaps there is one, for in a sensitive passage Gough reflects on the impact of British power as it appeared to the Indians of the coastal islands of British Columbia. He sees the loss as well as the gain, but there is nothing here of the tone of prim disapproval which is obligatory in some modern studies of the British Empire, and no anguished contortions to appease the spirit of political correctness. Readers will find this depressing or refreshing according to taste.

Entangled Patriarchies: Sex, Gender and Relationality in the Forging of Natal: A Paper Presented in Critical Tribute to Jeff Guy

The arguments presented here are offered in critical appraisal of Guy's contribution to the scholarship of colonial Natal and are informed by two primary concerns: the first is a politics of producing desegregated historiography, and the second is the need for local historical studies to relate to areas of wider scholarly concern, in this instance relating Shepstonian politics to liberalism and the nineteenth-century British Empire. Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal (2013) is Jeff Guy's magnum opus and a meticulously researched and richly detailed book. Guy's finely considered archival narrative builds a vision of a colony forged out of the local contingencies of Native administration centred around Shepstone's mediations of power. In this telling, it is out of the struggles between the powerful Shepstone; a small, fractious settler elite – his friends and enemies; and an intricate network of chiefly authorities that Natal is made. It is clear from this tome, as it is in his considerable body of earlier work, that Guy was not one to countenance theoretical generalisations about Shepstone's Natal. It is the contention of this essay that Guy's writing of this history of the colony is, at best, a history in part, and that connections and generalisations beyond these groups and beyond the colony are political and scholarly imperatives. In addressing this, I will draw on instances of my own research on race, sex, marriage and state-making to demonstrate the necessity of, and the possibilities for, a broader, more complex telling of the history of colonial Natal.

Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire