British settler discourse and the circuits of empire

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 24-48

  Lester, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0042758748     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.24     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. This article is very much a provisional foray into a longer research project which is intended to culminate in the publication of a book provisionally entitled Citizens, Colonies and Slaves: the Geographies of Colonial Discourse.
2. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860, London and New York, 1991, p. 5.
3. I owe this particular formulation to David Lambert.
4. For a fuller exposition of these contests, see Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain, London and New York, 2001.
5. Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy; or Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements, London, 1830, p. 7.
6. BPP, 1836-7/1968, p. iii.
7. This fear of the national character being tarnished was, perhaps, most pronounced with reference to Australia, where local humanitarians lamented that the Aboriginal population was being decimated by arbitrary and wholesale acts of murder. See Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, St Leonards, 1998, pp. 35-45.
8. BPP, 1836-7/1968, pp. 76, 57.
9. I have attempted to delineate an early nineteenth-century British humanitarian discourse of colonialism more fully in Alan Lester, 'Obtaining the "Due Observance of Justice": the Geographies of Colonial Humanitarianism', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, pp. 277-93.
10. See also Andrew Porter, 'Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism', in The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter, Oxford, 1999, pp. 198-221, which recognizes debates over the administration of India as well as over the slave trade as important antecedents for early nineteenth-century humanitarianism. For the subsequent development of the British humanitarian complex
11. see R. Mitcham, 'Geographies of Global Humanitarianism: the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society, 1884-1933', unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2001.
12. BPP, 1836-7/1968, pp. 10-11.
13. Quoted in G. R. Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, 1783-1850, London, 1951, pp. 292-3.
14. Manning Clark, A History of Australia, abridged by M. Cathcart, London, 1993, p. 201.
15. Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, pp. 291-3. In New South Wales, the protectors' role was to be played by the Commissioners of Crown Lands, and from 1842, fifteen per cent of the revenue from land sales was to be spent on the 'protection' and 'civilization' of Aborigines. George Robinson, the man responsible for supervising the ejection of Van Dieman's Land's remaining Aborigines to Flinders Island, became the chief protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District. For an account of humanitarianism in Australia during this period, see Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts.
16. Wakefield's principle of systematic colonization was that land should be bought at a low price by the colonial administration and sold to capitalists at a higher price, with the proceeds going towards a free passage for labourers. Thus, land, capital and labour would be present in the correct proportions. To ensure that labourers stayed in employment rather than themselves buying land (as had happened in the Cape, for instance), land prices would be kept high by releasing land only guardedly on to the market. To 'protect' the Maori, in New Zealand, Wakefield's company proposed that ten per cent of the land that had been bought would be kept aside for their exclusive use. These reserves would be 'rendered valuable' by colonization, since they would have a monetary value attached to them within a commercial colonial system and would thus become an exclusively Maori-controlled capital asset.
17. Shortly after the Treaty of Waitangi, which covered the North Island, the British government proclaimed sovereignty over the South Island in an attempt to constrain settlers at Port Nicholson who had elected their own council and appointed Colonel Wakefield (brother of Edward Gibbon) president. They had proceeded to enact their own laws and appoint their own magistrates. While the government sought to contain the private sale of Maori land, the New Zealand Company was also settling Britons at Port Nicholson (Wellington), New Plymouth, Wanganui and Nelson: Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship.
18. Catherine Hall, 'Imperial man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies, 1833-66', in The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. Bill Schwarz, London, 1996, p. 147.
19. NENZC, 12 March 1842.
20. Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, p. 337.
21. It subsequently became apparent that, in the face of continued Xhosa resistance, British troops would not be able to effect the expulsion of the Xhosa from the new 'province'. Thus D'Urban was obliged to reformulate his plans and propose the forced 'civilization' of the Xhosa within the province. Philip actually came out in favour of a continued British administration in the province, but not in the militaristic terms envisaged by local settlers and officials. By then, though, the Aborigines Committee members had already made up their minds to advise the return of the territory to independent Xhosa rule: Lester, Imperial Networks.
22. SMH, 18 April 1831.
23. NENZC, 12 March 1842.
24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991, p. 26.
25. See also Lester, 'Reformulating Identities: British Settlers in Early Nineteenth Century South Africa', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23:4, 1998, pp. 515-31;
26. Jack Greene, 'Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study', in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, Princeton, pp. 213-66;
27. and Andrew Bank, 'Liberals and Their Enemies: Racial Ideology at the Cape of Good Hope, 1820-1850', unpublished PhD, Cambridge University, 1995.
28. SMH, 5 March 1838.
29. SMH, 18 April 1831.
30. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
31. Each newspaper claimed at times to represent the most progressive and the best improved British colonial settlement, and each was concerned very materially with the promotion of its colony as the most attractive site for further immigration and for the investment of metropolitan capital. Within each colony, there were further regional rivalries, again with the attraction of emigrants and capital often in mind.
32. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
33. The Times, 23 Sept. 1834, extracted in SMH 26 March 1835.
34. SMH, 8 March 1838.
35. SMH, 19 March 1838.
36. SMH, 4 June 1838.
37. Lester, Imperial Networks, pp. 34-5, 57-8. In objecting to Ordinance 50, the eastern Cape's settlers' were careful to distance themselves from the pro-slavery discourse that had tainted the West Indies planters. as patriotic Britons, they had to proclaim a general antislavery stance. Nevertheless, as one settler lamented, '[t]he very laudable exertions to suppress the slave trade, have induced a feeling of pity and commiseration for the swarthy nations of Africa, in which the Kafirs, unfortunately for themselves and us, have largely participated
38. John Mitford Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selection From Important Papers, Grahamstown, 1864, p. 141. The settlers of New Zealand and New South Wales had less difficulty in distancing themselves from a practice that had never been legal in their colonies.
39. SMH, 3 Nov. 1836
40. SMH, 4 Jan. 1838.
41. SMH, 29 Jan. 1838.
42. SMH, 3 Nov. 1836
43. One of the most outspoken of the Cape humanitarians, who continued to campaign vigorously both within the anti-slavery movement and on behalf of the Xhosa upon his return to Britain, and who testified before the Aborigines Committee, was the poet Thomas Pringle, who was also former editor of the Whig Edinburgh Review. Whilst in the colony, he had joined with John Fairbairn in a campaign for freedom of the colonial press, which pitted both men against the High Tory Governor, Lord Charles Somerset. See Thomas Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, London, 1834.
44. SMH, 29 Jan. 1838.
45. SMH, 8 March 1845
46. SMH, 29 Jan. 1838.
47. SMH, 1 March 1838.
48. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
49. As previous note.
50. As I have indicated, this does not mean to say that missionaries and other humanitarians refrained from speaking for indigenous peoples. One of the most profound ways in which they did so, from this period onwards, was by producing ethnographies that designated and 'fixed' ethnic categories. These categories often bore little relation to the fluid identities that the missionaries were encountering and endeavouring to comprehend. See, for example, Patrick Harries, 'Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: the Emergence of Ethnicity Among the Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa' and Terence Ranger, 'Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: the Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe', both in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail, London and Berkeley, 1989, pp. 82-117 and 118-51
51. and Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: the Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854, Harlow, 2001.
52. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
53. As previous note.
54. See Lester, Imperial Networks.
55. NENZC, 16 Dec. 1843.
56. As previous note.
57. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
58. NENZC, 16 Dec. 1843.
59. For a discussion of the ways that humanitarians attempted to render parts of the West Indies aberrant during the preceding slavery debate, and an analysis of the planters' response, see David Lambert, 'White Identities and the Slavery Controversy in Barbados, 1780-1834', unpublished PhD, University of Cambridge, 2002.
60. SMH, 3 May 1838.
61. Bowker, Speeches, Letters, pp. 2, 7.
62. Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
63. SMH, 29 Jan. 1835.
64. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Baltimore and London, 1992;
65. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, Cambridge, 1992
66. and Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867, Cambridge, 2002.
67. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960, London, 1982.
68. Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, pp. 294-5, 292, 312.
69. Mellor, British Imperial Trusteeship, p. 352.
70. For discourse concerning the former slaves, see Andrew Bank, 'Losing Faith in the Civilizing Mission: the Premature Decline of Humanitarian Liberalism at the Cape, 1840-60', in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, London, 1999, p. 374.
71. See C. H. Grisbrook, Letter Pending on the Kafir Question, Grahamstown, 1846.
72. See Lester, Imperial Networks.
73. The term 'war of representation' is Catherine Hall's. See her 'William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject', in Empire and Others, ed. Daunton and Halpern, pp. 303-24.
74. For an overview, see Eric Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain 1783-1870, second edn London, 1996.
75. T. Kirk, 'Self-government and Self-defence in South Africa: the Inter-relations Between British and Cape Politics, 1846-1854', D. Phil thesis, Oxford University, 1972, pp. 151, 57.
76. Mirroring Fairbairn's concerns over class, in New Zealand, the editor of the Nelson Examiner commented that if lower-class emigrants 'showed a pride in their own station and designation as the labouring class they would impress us with a greater idea of their independence than by endeavouring to assume a station of nominal gentility, which can only appear ridiculous in the eyes of those who know its value': NENZC, 9 Dec. 1843. In New South Wales, 'respectable settlers' were, as Manning Clark puts it, 'quite determined that the institutions of the free should never come under the control of Chartists, radicals and levellers': Clark, A History of Australia, p. 214.
77. The fall of the Whig administration in Britain, in 1841, in particular helped settlers to feel that their arguments were carrying more weight 'at home'. On trans-imperial associations between class, race and gender, and their reformulation in the mid nineteenth century more generally
78. see Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, N. C., 1995.
79. In the same issue, the New Zealand editor went on to deploy Carlyle's domestic, antidemocratic arguments against the humanitarian conception of Maori land rights. Carlyle had written in reference to Chartism that 'Rights, you will everywhere find to be properly articulated mights'. The Nelson Examiner, quoting this doctrine of the 'greatest thinker of our age', went on to argue that 'The right to use [land] best, shown by the power to take and keep it, is the only real right. This was the right of the Saxons to England - of the English to North America, New Holland, India - of the Spaniards to South America': Supplement to the NENZC, 23 Dec. 1843.
80. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class; Civilising Subjects. News of the various uprisings and wars of the mid nineteenth-century empire, including further Cape frontier wars, the Indian 'Mutiny' and the New Zealand wars, accounts of which were consumed voraciously by the metropolitan reading public, had a similar effect. See Lester, Imperial Networks, pp. 159-65.
81. Southern Cross, 1863
82. quoted in James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Montreal, 1989, p. 328.
83. Quoted in Hall, 'Imperial Man', p. 162.
84. Later in the nineteenth century, of course, colonial nationalist movements themselves would construct these settler societies as not British in a variety of ways. But at this point in time, there was consensus among settlers that ties with Britain and Britishness were paramount.