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BREAKING BRITANNIA'S BOUNDS? LAW, SETTLERS, AND SPACE IN BRITAIN'S IMPERIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2012

ZOË LAIDLAW
ZOË LAIDLAW*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
*
Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EXzoe.laidlaw@rhul.ac.uk
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Abstract

Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire's impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’ experience. This article critically reviews recent interventions, which extend and challenge these approaches by seeking new ways to juxtapose the macro with the micro, and balance the exceptional with the quotidian; by adopting a more transnational (or global) approach to colonialism; and by rethinking the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘colonizer’. Collectively, these works question the traditional frameworks within which both colonialism and the British empire have been understood. In conclusion, the article considers their impact on the vibrant field of Britain's colonial legal history.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 807 - 830
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank the editors and anonymous referees of this journal, Alan Lester and Catherine Hall, as well as participants in the ‘New imperial histories’ seminar at Royal Holloway, University of London, for their comments on this article.

References

1 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961), trans. Constance Farrington as The wretched of the earth (New York, NY, 1963); Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978).

2 See, e.g., Lambert, David and Lester, Alan, eds., Colonial lives across the British empire: imperial careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar. This new emphasis contrasts with an older scholarship which held that ‘the influence of one colony on another’ was ‘always relevant, but only occasionally decisive’: Ward, J. M., Colonial self-government: the British experience. 1759–1856 (London and Basingstoke, 1976), p. vii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 For an introduction to the ‘British world’, see Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, eds., The British world: culture, diaspora and identity (London, 2003)Google Scholar. Among the best of this work, see, e.g., Potter, Simon, News and the British world: the emergence of a British press system, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Magee, Gary B. and Thompson, Andrew S., Empire and globalisation: networks of people, goods and capital in the British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Ibid., pp. 9, 221.

9 Ibid., p. 557.

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11 Ibid., p. 222.

12 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Introduction: histories, empires, modernities’, in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A new imperial history: culture, identity and modernity in Britain and the empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 1. See also Hall, Catherine, ed., Cultures of empire: a reader – colonizers in Britain and the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar; Hall, Catherine, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women and imperial culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)Google Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, At the heart of the empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA, 1998)Google Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, Empire in question: reading, writing, and teaching British imperialism (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louis, Wm Roger, ed., The Oxford history of the British empire (5 vols., Oxford, 1998–9)Google Scholar.

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29 Benjamin L. Berger, Hamar Foster, and A. R. Buck, ‘Introduction: does law matter? The new colonial legal history’, in Foster, Berger, and Buck, eds., Grand experiment, pp. 3–4, 7–8.

30 Lambert and Lester, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

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35 This complements recent reappraisals of Atlantic Studies: Greene, Jack P., ed., Exclusionary empire: English liberty overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D., eds., Atlantic history: a critical reappraisal (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar; Michael A. McDonnell, ‘Paths not yet taken, voices not yet heard: rethinking Atlantic history’, in Curthoys and Lake, eds., Connected worlds, pp. 45–61; Gabaccia, Donna, ‘A long Atlantic in a wider world’, Atlantic Studies, 1 (2004), pp. 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 Lambert and Lester, eds., Colonial lives.

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45 Benton, Search for sovereignty, p. 3.

46 Ibid., p. 16.

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48 Belich, Replenishing, p. 23.

49 Veracini, Lorenzo, Settler colonialism: a theoretical overview (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, e.g., Ford's argument that settlers deployed ‘local governmental power to defend the anomalous legal status of indigenous peoples’ against the federal/imperial assertion of territorial sovereignty, Settler sovereignty, ch. 5.

50 Wolfe, Patrick, Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Wolfe, Patrick, ‘Land, labour, and difference: elementary structures of race’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), pp. 866–905CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Ford, Settler sovereignty, p. 190.

52 Veracini, Settler colonialism, pp. 5, 23.

53 Ibid., p. 3.

54 Kolsky, Colonial justice, pp. 5, 44.

55 Here, she follows Alan Karras: Benton, Search for sovereignty, p. 9, n. 15.

56 John Darwin, ‘Orphans of empire’, in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers and expatriates: Britons over the seas (Oxford, 2010), pp. 332–4.

57 Ford, Settler sovereignty, ch. 4.

58 Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 200; Kolsky, Colonial justice, pp. 72–3; McKenzie, Swindler's progress, pp. 204–10.

59 Ford, Settler sovereignty, p. 5.

60 Belich, Replenishing, pp. 58–70, 126–7, 557–9.

61 Wiener, Empire on trial, pp. 5–6; Berger, Foster, and Buck, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8.

62 Burton, ‘Getting outside the global’.

63 Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, ‘Introduction: settler colonialism: a concept and its uses’, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, eds., Settler colonialism in the twentieth century (New York, NY, and Abingdon, 2005), pp. 1–20.

64 Although, notably, no contributor could be found for the Caribbean. Robert Bickers, ‘Introduction: Britains and Britons over the seas’, in Bickers, ed., Settlers and expatriates, pp. 11–12.

65 Bickers, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–17, passim.

66 Canada and Australia (but not, as yet, South Africa or New Zealand) have their own individual volumes within the Companion Series: Schreuder, Deryck and Ward, Stuart, eds., Australia's empire (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar, and Buckner, Philip, ed., Canada and the British empire (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

67 Bickers, ed., Settlers and expatriates; Harper, Marjory and Constantine, Stephen, Migration and empire (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Veracini, Settler colonialism, pp. 15, 121–2.

69 See, e.g., Nijhar, Preeti, Law and imperialism: criminality and constitution in colonial India and Victorian England (London, 2009)Google Scholar; Hickford, Mark, Lords of the land: indigenous property rights and the jurisprudence of empire (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Ian Hunter and Shaunnagh Dorsett, ‘Introduction’, in Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, eds., Law and politics in British colonial thought: transpositions of empire (New York, NY, 2010), pp. 1–8.

71 See, e.g., Kostal, R. W., A jurisprudence of power: Victorian empire and the rule of law (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar; Jennifer Pitts, ‘Boundaries of Victorian international law’, in Duncan Bell, ed., Victorian visions of global order: empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 67–88.

72 David Washbrook, ‘India 1818–1860: two faces of colonialism’, in Porter, ed., The nineteenth century, p. 407.

73 ‘The single most important exemplar of the claimed beneficence of the empire was its system of laws’: Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 1.

74 Washbrook, ‘India 1818–1860’, p. 407. Tilak is quoted in Kolsky, Colonial justice, p. 4. As Wiener writes: there was an ‘endemic tension between everyday racial inequality evident throughout the empire and the deep-rooted liberal premises of the criminal law that extended everywhere in that empire’, Empire on trial, p. x.

75 John McLaren, ‘Afterword: looking from the past into the future’, in Foster, Berger, and Buck, eds., Grand experiment, p. 274.

76 Kolsky, Colonial justice, p. 13.

77 Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago, IL, 1999)Google Scholar; Pitts, ‘Boundaries of Victorian international law’; Karuna Mantena, ‘The crisis of liberal imperialism’, in Bell, ed., Victorian visions, pp. 113–35.

78 Emphasis in original. Kolsky, Colonial justice, p. 35.

79 Ibid., p. 16.

80 Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 5, see also pp. x, 19.

81 Ibid., pp. 2–4.

82 Ibid., p. 2.

83 Ibid., p. 70.

84 Kolsky, Colonial justice, pp. 29–30, 35–8, 59, 69.

85 Ibid., pp. 15–16, 20–2, 29, 36–41, 173, 187.

86 Ibid., p. 187.

87 Ibid., pp. 20–2. Wiener's work on British soldiers charged with interracial homicide in India underlines this point: Empire on trial, pp. 173–6.

88 E.g., the inquiries from the 1810s through to the 1833 Charter Renewal Act. Kolsky, Colonial justice, pp. 59–63.

89 Mantena, ‘Crisis of liberal imperialism’, p. 131.

90 Kolsky, Colonial justice, pp. 81, 84.

91 Ibid., p. 13.

92 Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 6.

93 Ibid., p. 9.

94 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 45, 48.

95 Ibid., p. 53.

96 E.g., in relation to India and Kenya, see ibid., pp. 189, 209.

97 Kolsky, Colonial justice, ch. 4; Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 169.

98 Wiener, Empire on trial, p. 101.

99 Ford, Settler sovereignty, pp. 127–8.

100 See, e.g., McHugh, Paul, Aboriginal societies and the common law: a history of sovereignty, status and self-determination (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hickford, Lords of the land; Dorsett and Hunter, eds., Law and politics; Belmessous, Saliha, Native claims: indigenous law against empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford and New York, NY, 2012)Google Scholar.

101 Ian Holloway, Simon Bronitt and John Williams, ‘Rhetoric, reason, and the rule of Law in early colonial New South Wales’, in Foster, Berger, and Buck, eds., Grand experiment, pp. 79–80.

102 Berger, Foster, and Buck, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–12.

103 See, e.g., the connected and comparative investigation of the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 in England and the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India in Nijhar, Law and imperialism.

104 Barry Wright, ‘Libel and the colonial administration of justice in Upper Canada and New South Wales, c. 1825–30’, in Foster, Berger, and Buck, eds., Grand experiment, pp. 20–4; Jim Philips and Philip Girard, ‘Courts, communities, and communication: the Nova Scotia Supreme Court on circuit, 1816–50’, in ibid., p. 120. McLaren, John, Dewigged, bothered, and bewildered: British colonial judges on trial, 1800–1900 (Toronto, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Wright, ‘Libel’, pp. 15–37; Stefan Petrow, ‘Moving in an “eccentric orbit”: the independence of Judge Algernon Sidney Montagu in Van Diemen's Land, 1833–47’, in Foster, Berger, and Buck, eds., Grand experiment, pp. 156–75.

106 Promislow, ‘One chief, two chiefs’.

107 Ford, Settler sovereignty, p. 26.

108 Ibid., p. 86.

109 Benton, Search for sovereignty, p. 292.

110 Ford, Settler sovereignty, p. 2. In this conflation, settlers asserted that ‘sovereignty was a territorial measure of authority to be performed through the trial and punishment of every person who transgressed settler law in settler territory’.

111 Benton, Law and colonial cultures, p. 12.