Nationalism or ‘Tribalism’: The Evolution of Cape Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract. This article seeks to explore the evolution of the ethnic consciousness of the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony at an initial and crucial stage. The colonial Cape Afrikaners are treated as a core community, distinguished from Afrikaner communities in other states in South Africa. It is argued that their collective consciousness was shaped primarily by their core colonial experience rather than by their ethnocultural commonality with the other diaspora Afrikaner communities. Having been socialised into the British colonial state, they have evolved a collective consciousness premised on neither ethnic self-determination nor ethnic exclusiveness. Correspondingly, their political outlook incorporated both British imperialism and Cape white multi-culturalism. They were mobilised ethnically to secure their share in the spoils of the British colonial state rather than to attain ethno-nationalist goals.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

Fish and fishing in colonial New South Wales: new evidence from the Quadrant site in Sydney

Abstract

Excavations at the Quadrant site in Sydney uncovered remains of 19th-century working-class houses and industrial areas including a collection of fish remains. The spatial distribution of bones of northern hemisphere ling and salmonids across house lots suggests these fish were commonly eaten. Little previous research on fish remains from post-1788 Australian sites has been reported and the study has wider research significance to Australasian archaeozoology. Documents indicate that some 19th-century British settlers preferred fish imported from Europe to local species. This study provides new insights into diet, economy and class in early colonial Sydney.     

‘The Laws of his Own Country’: Defamation,Banishment and the Problem of Legal Pluralism in the 1820s Cape Colony

In 1824 the Cape colony was rocked by three criminal libel trials brought by the colonial administration against settlers who had criticised its officials. To further silence their critics, a recently established colonial newspaper was suppressed and an order banishing its editor was issued by executive decree without judicial process. While these actions are well known to historians of South Africa, the important legal and constitutional issues they raised have not been properly recognised. In tracking the controversy that these trials unleashed in London, Cape Town and other colonial localities, this article argues that these events must be situated within a broader crisis of legal pluralism playing out within the British Empire. The confusion between English and Dutch law highlighted by these cases and their aftermath reveals constitutional debates that underscore the deep contingency of conquest law at a highly unstable legal and political moment. The political disputes inspired by these actions demonstrate that conflicts between variants of European law need to be more clearly recognised as instrumental to the strengthened implementation of British imperial legal hierarchies in colonial localities through the 1820s and 1830s.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.     

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

Masculinity, ‘race’, and family in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early nineteenth century

Much of British imperial society in the early nineteenth century was characterised by a reformulated sensibility of manliness and family. Integral to this sensibility was the notion of men's responsibility for dependants. However, the story of Charles Wightman Sievwright, appointed as Assistant Protector of Aborigines in colonial New South Wales, serves to demonstrate that a man's duty of care for very different, racialised kinds of dependants could be emphasised in conflicting ways by British settlers on the one side and by humanitarians on the other, under conditions of colonial expansion. Sievwright's story also encourages more explicit attention to both the tensions and the mutual intrusions between men's public and private roles within colonial society. Sievwright's own efforts as an active, humanitarian man in the political life of the New South Wales frontier were scandalously undermined by his failure to perform the role expected of him in his domestic, familial relations.     

‘Poor Gordon’: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Masculine Sentimentality

The popularity of the British‐born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler‐colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon – to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler‐colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn‐of‐the‐century era.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

‘Hong Kong is my Home’: The 1940 Evacuation and Hong Kong-Britons

Who were the Hong Kong British, and where did they live? This question sat at the heart of anguished and angry debates prompted by the colonial government’s edict in June 1940 ordering the evacuation to Australia of all women and children of ‘pure European descent’. In this article, I focus on thematic strands in the debate on Hong Kong British identity, such as race, class, legal domicile, reputation and migration, to explore the complex character of such British communities outside the Dominions. This article aims to characterise what it meant to be British in the wider empire, and deepen our understanding about the place of such communities in the picture of colonial migration.     

Rules for Cultural Radicals

Abstract: This article explores the various forms of “social skill”, what we call “rules for cultural radicals”, that the Amber Film and Photography Collective (and primarily its founder and leading visionary, Murray Martin) used to create and sustain an egalitarian arts organization and oppositional cultural movement in the Northeast of England. The collective represented a radical challenge to the world of British filmmaking, featuring innovative practices of cultural work, non‐commodified forms of cultural economy and a commitment to a democratic culture. These “rules” constituted innovative forms of strategic action—visionary leadership, improvisation, risk taking, brokerage—that helped create a durable collective identity and networks of solidarity. We explore the extent to which Amber's “rules” are prefigurative of contemporary forms of cultural activism and radical artistic practice.     

Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain

Abstract

This article examines Indian humanitarian help for Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on aid initiatives by the Indian national movement, which were embedded in the larger quest for independence from British colonial rule. By creating their own humanitarian programme in favour of Republican Spain, Indian nationalists dissociated themselves from Britain’s foreign policy and tried to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for themselves. The article also explores Indian participation in transnational networks of Left solidarity. Established to generate political and humanitarian support for Republican Spain, Indian actors concurrently utilized these networks to enhance their status in the international community and to advance their own end of an independent state.     

Unearthing Barrow Island’s Past: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial-Era Exploitation,Northwest Australia

The “modern world” of recent centuries is characterized by colonialism and imperialism, greater instances of cultural encounter and competition, increasing global connectivity, and the enhanced movement of resources and people especially for their labor (Falk 1991; Orser 1996). Northwest Australia provides important insight into these elements of modernity, as a region where the capitalist production of resources for international markets followed British colonization and relied on forms of non-European labor, both Indigenous Australian and Asian. This paper describes Barrow Island in the Northwest Australian maritime desert where archaeological research at recently discovered historic settlements indicates the deliberate translocation of Aboriginal people to the island presumably by white pearlers. The sites provide new information regarding commercial extractive industries, particularly the colonial pearl fisheries and their multicultural and exploitative nature.     

Political prayer and the dignity of labour: Botswana's workers' movement

The article draws on recent fieldwork to explore the intersection between class and Christian faith in the collective worldview of African labour unions in Botswana. Workers across different churches appeal to a Christian God whom they believe supports their struggle for dignity and a living wage. It is this axiomatic faith that underpins the spiritual interpretation of worker vocation and worker solidarity. Moreover, in Botswana, unlike in some neighbouring African countries, no contradiction is perceived between workers' left‐wing, socialist leanings and their Christian faith. Workers' identities are equally intertwined in their affiliation to their churches and to the labour movement in Botswana. Above all, I argue, following E.P. Thompson and other historians of early British and American labour movements, that the sanctification of labour dignifies for manual workers their physical labour, despite their lack of formal education.     

The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain‐based anarchists in the Age of Empire

This paper discusses the relationship between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British‐based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English‐speaking anarchist–communist networks at the time and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide community of anarchist activists, mostly exiled, who resided in London at that time. Extending current interdisciplinary literature on transnational anarchism, we argue that anarchist views of nations, while rejecting the novel notion of the nation‐state, were associated with anti‐colonial struggles and with republican anti‐monarchical and egalitarian notions. Based on primary sources, we discuss the intersections between these Britain‐based anarchists and anti‐colonial Irish radicals, by engaging both with their writings and their international networks of solidarity, thus exploring the complex intermingling of anarchism, anti‐colonialism, and republicanism.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.