Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Deuteronomy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

Deuteronomy portrays itself as Moses's speech at the edge of the promised land. This article examines the book's attitudes towards the other within this rhetorical setting by concentrating on the indigenous peoples, also in contrast to those outside the land of Israel. It is pointed out that the ideology of Deuteronomy is very exclusive, and its treatment of indigenous peoples compatible with ideologies that accompany genocides and conquests. Mitigating such exclusive thinking can serve as a model for human interactions today, and this would also seem to be compatible with the overall thinking of the New Testament canonical documents.     

Lord Salisbury,Mr. Chamberlain and South Africa, 1895–9

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the idea of Greater Britain, of the unity of the Anglo-Saxon colonies and the ‘mother country’, became a topic of considerable interest and controversy amongst the metropolitan intellectual and political elite. This article examines the roles played by the monarchy in the debates. Queen Victoria, as both idea and institution, assumed two central functions. First, it was argued that the institution of the monarchy, stretching back over centuries, could supply an anchor of permanence and constitutional fidelity in a redesigned global polity. This would reassure critics of such schemes that their fears about fundamental transformation were unfounded; that a thread of historical continuity ran through the proposals. Secondly, Victoria – or at least an idealised representation of her – acted as the linchpin for a sense of global national identity. The prestige and admiration that she (and the institution of the monarchy itself) generated, it was contended, bound the distant peoples of her realm in close communion. Moreover, the way in which she was sometimes represented in imperial debate harked back to (while modifying) an older civic humanist language of ‘patriot kingship’.     

Unfinished family business. Algernon Sidney’s arguments with Henry Hammond,Sir William Temple,Henry Sidney,Charles II,and the public executioner

Recent work about the life and thought of the republican Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) has emphasised the formative importance of the history, intellectual culture and personal matrix of the Sidney family. This essay underlines the richness of that context by casting new light on a series of key, previously undiscussed themes. These include Sidney’s lifelong relationship with the diplomat Sir William Temple and his family; the origin of his pioneering contribution to restoration resistance theory in an argument with Henry Hammond, one-time rector at Penshurst Place; the extent to which the European diplomatic contest which helped determine England’s political direction between 1679 and 1689 may be understood as a squabble between siblings; and the domestic and family circumstances attending Algernon’s arrest and execution for treason in 1683.