Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism

Kirsty Reid was a senior lecturer in history at the University of Bristol, UK, for many years. In 2011 she moved home to the north of Scotland and became part of the team at the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She now lives and works in northern Scotland. Her research has primarily focused on convict transportation and unfree labour within the British Empire. She is the author of Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007) and co-editor with Fiona Paisley of Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (London, 2014). Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian at Griffith University, Australia. She works on progressive debates concerning the reform of settler colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Her recent books are The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra, 2012) and Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu, 2009). Her current projects include a study of internationalism in the Pacific and Australian public opinion, and anti-slavery discourse and settler colonialism in interwar Australia.

"This wide-ranging collection explores the creation of colonial archives, their extent and limitations, and their use and misuse. It offers revealing case studies, as well as important theoretical and methodological insights for practitioners of the history of empire, from undergraduate students to senior scholars."Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney, Australia"Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley’s provocative collection explores the myriad links between colonial archives, knowledge, and power. These essays transform the archive from a source for history into a historical subject of its own, revealing the many ways archives shaped – and continue to shape – the contours of empire and its legacies. Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism should be required reading for anyone who studies the history of empire."J. P. Daughton, Stanford University, USA

• List of figuresList of contributorsIntroductionKirsty Reid and Fiona PaisleyPART I1 – Democratising the photographic archiveJane Lydon2 – Archival detours: sourcing colonial historyPenny Edwards3 – Decolonizing the archives: a transnational perspectiveVictoria HaskinsPART II4 – Archiving Algeria: power, violence and secrecyAbdelmajid Hannoum5 – Colonial knowledge and subaltern voices: the case of an official enquiry in mid-nineteenth-century JavaG. Roger Knight6 – Making people countable: analyzing paper trails and the imperial censusAlexandra WidmerPART III7 – Institutional case files: insanity’s archiveCatharine Coleborne8 – Gender, geopolitics and gaps in the records: women glimpsed in the military archivesVera Mackie9 – Entanglement of oral sources and colonial recordsMaria Nugent10 – Living empireFiona PaisleyIndex