Suchergebnisse

Empire, Kinship and Violence traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Elizabeth Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Elizabeth Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.

Thomas Pringle, a Scottish settler at the Cape Colony and later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in England, was both a settler in territory recently conquered from the Xhosa and an advocate against violence on Eastern Cape borderlands. This article examines both aspects of his career in the 1820s and early 1830s, and asks how they relate to one another. While working to put accounts of abuse into trans-imperial circulation, Pringle was caught up in the structures of settler colonialism at the Cape, including militarization and the quest for African labour. The evidence he provided was nonetheless politically significant. The article places Pringle's work in the context of a larger history of the development of human rights and their interaction with both humanitarianism and colonialism. The article further asks what difference, if any, Pringle's Scottishness made to his own sense of identity, political activity and views of colonialism.

This article argues that the genealogy of a politics of non-violence might usefully consider the promotion of moral imperialism as a precursor that in turn highlights the structural difficulties of a truly non-violent humanitarianism. In the imperial case studies examined from colonial borderlands in the British empire from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, humanitarian intervention tended to be about working out how to manage violence, or the threat of violence, most appropriately. This in turn helps explain tight linkages between early nineteenth century philanthropy and colonialism, not least the transition from abolition to interventionist arguments. On colonial frontiers states were themselves violent, or at least always potentially violent. Therefore those who saw themselves as philanthropists or as humanitarian were often forced, sometimes reluctantly but more usually with conviction, into the position that empire should be made sufficiently moral to deserve a monopoly of violence. For Indigenous groups (and individuals) this often meant that they ultimately had to choose sides and thus a particular form of violence, rather than to escape from violence altogether. At the same time, international humanitarians, notably missionaries and abolitionists, often struggled with how overtly they should work within colonial structures and were often under pressure to serve as unofficial colonial bureaucracies. It is thus helpful to trouble somewhat the implicit paradigm of triangular relationships between individual agents of violence, individual victims of violence, and humanitarians who sought to protect the victims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though there are important ways in which this was also true. Such "moral imperialism" not infrequently placed pressure on colonized men, in particular, to choose one form of violence over another, rather than to have the luxury of eschewing violence that was more readily available to the white humanitarian.

Twenty-six authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds look at the vexed, traumatic intersections of the histories of slavery and of sexuality. They argue that such intersections mattered profoundly and, indeed, that slavery cannot be understood without adequate attention to sexuality.