Protecting Slaves and Aborigines

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Twomey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Common Law ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Commissions Of Inquiry ◽  
British Colonial

The historiography on protection in the nineteenth-century British Empire often assumes that British humanitarians were the progenitors of protection schemes. In contrast, this article argues that the position of Protector or Guardian for slaves and Indigenous peoples in the British Empire drew on Spanish, Dutch, and French legal precedents. The legal protections and slave codes operative in these European colonies are compared to British colonial territories, where there was no imperial slave code and no clear status of slaves at common law. Drawing on debates in the House of Commons, Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry, and the published work of abolitionists and anti-slavery societies, the article examines how the pressure for amelioration in the British Empire coincided with the acquisition of new colonies that offered ready-made models for slave protection. British reformers combined their calls for greater protection for slaves with their extant knowledge of European protective regimes.

Gladstone and Jamaica

1959 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Knaplund
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Clear Statement

Early in his political life the famous British statesman, W. E. Gladstone, had close contact with colonial problems. His maiden speech in the House of Commons, June 3, 1833, was a defense of his father against charges that slaves were mistreated on the Gladstone plantations in Demerara; his first government post was that of Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the Colonies; before the end of the 1830's he had served on many committees which studied questions relating to the colonies; and in 1846 he was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. In 1835 and again in 1849 he drafted pamphlets on the British colonial empire; by mid-nineteenth century he was a leading advocate of colonial self-government; and his speech “Our Colonies” at Chester, November 12, 1855 (published as a pamphlet), was a clear statement of his creed that “ freedom and voluntaryism ” should govern the relationship between Britain and the overseas portions of the British Empire. While in later years noncolonial issues received most of his attention, he never abandoned his faith in freedom as the basic remedy for intra-imperial problems. In the closing years of his political career he fought magnificently but vainly to apply that principle of freedom (which had stilled colonial discontent) to the age-old Irish question.

IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY CROSBIE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Irish People ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Exchange ◽  
Geological Research ◽  
Colonial Science

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Auerbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Many ◽  
At Home

Beginning with George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days and its portrait of the boredom and lethargy that characterized British colonial life in the 1930s, the introduction poses the question of when and why the British Empire became so monotonous and melancholy. It presents the book’s main argument: that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment. It provides an overview of boredom’s historical and psychological origins, and summarizes the chapters that follow. It asserts that the empire came to be constructed as a place of adventure, opportunity, and picturesque beauty not so much because British men and women were seeking to escape from boredom at home, as has often been surmised, but because the empire lacked these very features.

Traditions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaunnagh Dorsett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Contact Points ◽  
Aboriginal Law

This chapter examines legal encounters and legal relations between Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand and the British Empire. It looks at court decisions as a source of historical material in order to suggest two contact points between jurisdictions through which to think about indigenous laws and settler laws. It focuses on only two instances of contact: the colonial and the present. In many ways this choice reproduces ongoing gaps in tracing and thinking about legal encounters with Aboriginal law in Australia and, to a lesser extent, in New Zealand. Scholarship on legal encounter has tended to be centred on the colonial period to the detriment of the later nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century. The chapter looks at the ways in which colonial and modern law engaged/s with aboriginal law from the perspective of the colonizer, not the colonized.

scholarly journals Lux et Tenebris? Coloniality and Anglican Missions in Argentine Patagonia in the Nineteenth Century

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Hugo Córdova Córdova Quero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
World System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Argentine Patagonia ◽  
Capitalist World

Within the modern capitalist World-System, Missionary work was mostly developed through the connubiality with colonial powers. The missionary work of the Anglican Church is no exception. This article centers on the missionary enterprise carried out in Argentine Patagonia in the nineteenth century. Missionaries’ reports carefully narrated that venture. However, the language and the notions underlying the missionary work’s narration reveal the dominion of colonial ideologies that imbued how religious agents constructed alterity. Connecting the missionaries’ worldview with the political context and expansion of the British Empire allows us to unfold the complex intersections of religious, ethnic, racial, and geopolitical discourses that traverse the lives of indigenous peoples in South America.

scholarly journals “What will they say in England?”: violence, anxiety, and the press in nineteenth century New Zealand and Vancouver Island

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton Scott Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Vancouver Island ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
The Press ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
British Colonies

Contemporary British imperial historiography argues that during the late 1850s/early 1860s antagonistic racial discourses became increasingly popular across the British Empire. According to this interpretation, escalating colonial violence and Darwinian racial discourses marginalized the humanitarian tenet that Indigenous peoples could achieve a measure of British civilization. During this same period the British colonies of New Zealand and Vancouver Island featured anxiety related to the threat of indigenous violence. But while New Zealand and Vancouver Island featured remarkable parallels in their colonial development, differing local conditions and relationships to the British metropole contributed to divergent reactions within local press to the threat of indigenous violence. This paper focuses on representative newspapers from New Zealand’s and Vancouver Island’s capital cities. An analysis of Auckland’s Southern Crossand Victoria’s British Colonist provides an opportunity to highlight the effects of colonists’ anxiety, the local resiliency of humanitarian discourses, and the influence metropolitan connections played in the formation of editorial perspectives.

scholarly journals Empire, War and Nation: Heritage Management Perspectives from Canada and Malta

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 4-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tunbridge
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Military History ◽  
Heritage Management ◽  
National Identities ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Management Issues

This article offers recent insights on contested heritage from Canada and Malta. These contrasting geographical extremes span a range of heritage dissonances but share a common historical identity as successor states to the British Empire, entailing familiar postcolonial heritage equivocations. Dissonances between colonial and indigenous heritage meanings are discussed. The principal focus of the paper is the Empire at war, as an issue of heritage management in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and in Malta; comparative insights are generated with resonance for other imperial successor states such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. In Ottawa the National Capital Commission is engaged in a delicate management of heritage evolution from the imperial past to the multicultural present, involving adjustment and diversification of heritage meanings in which the indigenous peoples and Canada's wartime/military history figure prominently. Malta's time-depth generates an embarrassment of heritage resources, necessitating choices as it moves from 'blue' seacoast to 'grey' heritage tourism; while earlier eras are favoured, the British imperial and military heritage is inescapable, especially the heroic shared defence of 1940-3, generating management issues over recency, postcoloniality, the naval legacy and the problem of marketing to the former enemy populations. Questions of whose heritage, using which resources of what period, for whose benefit and how managed, elicit a different range of answers in the two cases: British colonial heritage is too diverse to be value-generalised, and there is no single, immutable colonial template for postcolonial identity. However, the particular legacy of the Empire at war is notably formative in the evolution of succeeding national identities.

Policing the British Empire on the Bund: The Origin of the Sikh Police Unit in Shanghai

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Cao Yin
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Modern Shanghai

Red-turbaned Sikh policemen have long been viewed as symbols of the cosmopolitan feature of modern Shanghai. However, the origin of the Sikh police unit in the Shanghai Municipal Police has not been seriously investigated. This article argues that the circulation of police officers, policing knowledge, and information in the British colonial network and the circulation of the idea of taking Hong Kong as the reference point amongst Shanghailanders from the 1850s to the 1880s played important role in the establishment of the Sikh police force in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, by highlighting the translocal connections and interactions amongst British colonies and settlements, this study tries to break the metropole-colony binary in imperial history studies.

Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Biopolitics in the British Empire, 1890–1902

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clark
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Personal Rights

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document