Settler Empire Research Articles

Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850–1940

At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians.

Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood

In the Australian colonies — as in Canada and New Zealand — understandings of manliness forged on the frontiers of settlement were woven into political manhood, and thus the quest for colonial self-government. The full meanings of racial conquest and the frontier for Australian definitions of masculinity are a rich topic still to be properly understood. There is a line of argument in recent work on nineteenth-century Britain that men became less violent over the early and middle decades of the century, partly because violence became less acceptable as manly behaviour. This paper explores the writings of two men, Henry S. Chapman (1803–1881) and Thomas Murray-Prior (1819–1892), who had reason to know how frontier violence was built into colonial culture and politics. The evidence of the frontier has significant implications for understanding the meanings of political maturation in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, including how manhood was reconfigured through political enfranchisement and vice versa, in Australia and the wider settler empire.

The Sin of the Settler: The 1835-36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire

The Sin of the Settler: The 1835-36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire