Fae Dussart - Böcker

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, ‘the domestic servant’ was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested.Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, ‘the domestic servant’ was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested.Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

This edited collection engages with the work of the eminent historian Catherine Hall and her influence on the development of recent British Historiography. Over her career Hall has had a pivotal impact on a number of historiographical and disciplinary fields including British History, Colonial, Imperial and Postcolonial Studies, Gender History, Geography, Education, and Museum Studies. In analysing and responding to her work this volume makes a critical intervention into these inter-disciplinary fields.Providing a distinctive intellectual history of Hall's work and its impact, as well as an accessible route into a range of historiographical and interdisciplinary areas, the essays in this volume bring together leading scholars in the field of critical colonial studies to tackle unanswered questions raised by Hall's work and expand on them. Exploring themes such as masculinity, history writing, historical geography and histories of the home as well as tracing Hall's intellectual trajectory and its relationship to shifting historiographical debates, Troubling the Island Story offers a clear and accessible insight into the changing shape of British historiography over the last forty years.

This book explores debates about East India Company colonialism that took place on the lecture circuits of Britain, in the meeting houses of Calcutta, and at the Mughal court in Delhi in the late 1830s and 1840s. In the decades that followed the Emancipation Act (1833) British abolitionists and colonial philanthropists turned their attention to conditions across the empire, sometimes collaborating with colonised groups to challenge the impositions and iniquities of British colonial rule and sometimes prescribing their own vision of how an imperial relationship should look.This book uses the travels, experiences, and activism of anti-slavery lecturer and East India reformer George Thompson as a starting point for a wider exploration and reassessment of the ways in which Company rule in India was challenged in the decades before the Indian Uprising of 1857. An important organiser in the campaign for East India reform as the main spokesperson for the Aborigines Protection Society and a champion of the causes of Indian rulers such as Pratap Singh and Bahadur Shah Zafar, Thompson was also a flawed character. As a paid agent, he was remunerated for his activism and accusations of pecuniary self-interest were never far away. His story therefore offers important insights into the limitations of early anti-colonial sentiment, and the problems of cosmopolitan collaboration in colonial contexts. By exploring early Victorian debates about India’s commercial potential, role in the imperial labour market, and place within an increasingly interconnected post-emancipation empire, the book seeks to contextualise evolving ideas regarding Britain’s humanitarian responsibilities towards her ‘fellow subjects in the East’, and how these connected with, and were superseded by, nascent forms of Indian anti-colonialism, political protest, and civic activism.

In the early 20th century, women across the British Isles united to fight for the right to vote, for fair pay and good working conditions, and for an end to war, but what did this unity look like across the colonial border between Ireland and England? This book offers a fresh perspective on the history of empire and feminism by exploring the changing nature of political solidarity between English and Irish feminists, socialists, and pacifists during the first two decades of the twentieth century.Demonstrating how Ireland offered English women a space in which to act upon their patriotic duty as ‘mothers’ of empire in order to alleviate the degraded status of their ‘colonial sisters’, Geraghty shows how this imperial feminism was an integral part of English women’s demand for political freedoms. Their political ideologies, shaped during a time of heightened imperial loyalties, did not disappear with the gaining of partial franchise in 1918, but remained a pervasive part of their politics and impacted the ways in which they engaged with the Irish struggle for independence and Irish women’s political emancipation. Imperial Feminists exposes the difficulties of building and maintaining grassroots feminist and socialist solidarities at a time of heightened imperial loyalties and changing internationalist politics.

This book paints a detailed picture of how anti-colonial publishing operated from the very heart of the British Empire in the middle of the 20th century. Pointing to the vibrant interconnections between anti-colonial and Pan-African activists in Britain, it engages with their personal politics, political thought, and global links to recast how we think about both publishing and anti-colonialism at this time. It engages with activists on their own terms through a book history approach, one that takes seriously the printed manifestations of anti-colonial thought, and views printing and publishing as political activism.Assessing various forms of Pan-African writing, from pamphlets and journals to novels and works of anthropology, this book unpacks how different activists ‘did’ their politics, and what these politics were. Delving into the literary works that supported and maintained British Pan-African activism, Writing Against Empire highlights the central and crucial role of written texts to this movement. Unpicking the links between different thinkers and their works, and analysing how such a wealth of anti-colonial writers could operate within the very core of empire, Bowman gets to the heart of anti-colonial action in 20th-century Britain, and the centrality of print to this struggle.