scholarly journals Violent Trajectories: A Cultural History of the Enfield Rifle in the British Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel M. Thompson

<p>This thesis explores the material, cultural, and political significance of the Enfield rifle in the British Empire from c. 1850 to 1870. Unravelling the weapon’s links with imperial ideology and violence, it argues that the Enfield helped to produce discourses of race, gender, and civilisation during this era. Furthermore, it contends that these discourses shaped the ways in which Britons viewed the Enfield and influenced how they saw themselves. The rifle is best known for its well-chronicled role in the 1857 Indian Rebellion, where it was central to British narratives of the conflict. While acknowledging the Indian context, this thesis aims to draw the Enfield deeper into debates about British imperial culture, comparing the rifle’s physical and discursive influence across a range of imperial spaces.  The Enfield rifle was one of the most important weapons of the nineteenth century. The product of a revolution in rifle technology, it amazed the British public and military with its accuracy and range. The weapon’s invention prompted the introduction of large scale factory production techniques in Britain. It also stimulated a massive rethinking of military tactics and was a central component of the militarisation of British society during the 1850s and 1860s. The Enfield then had extensive use in conflicts including the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the New Zealand Wars, and the American Civil War. It also found a home in the burgeoning Volunteer Movement in Britain and New Zealand.  Through its use in these arenas, the Enfield had a considerable physical impact on the British Empire, but it had even greater discursive significance. During the 1850s and 1860s, discussions about the Enfield’s invention, production, and usage promoted ideas of rationality, modern science, and individualism. After the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the rifle came to epitomise British technological might and racial ‘superiority’ in the minds of Victorians. The Volunteer Force, established in 1859, embraced the Enfield as its weapon of choice and conceived of it as a weapon that embodied the Force’s values of skill, education and respectability. In the New Zealand Wars however, the rifle failed to bring the decisive victories many settlers expected, and they began to disparage the weapon as a result. Nevertheless, the Enfield was still deeply implicated in the contested process of colonisation in New Zealand. Ultimately, the Enfield’s role in these events transformed the weapon into a deeply raced and gendered object.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel M. Thompson

<p>This thesis explores the material, cultural, and political significance of the Enfield rifle in the British Empire from c. 1850 to 1870. Unravelling the weapon’s links with imperial ideology and violence, it argues that the Enfield helped to produce discourses of race, gender, and civilisation during this era. Furthermore, it contends that these discourses shaped the ways in which Britons viewed the Enfield and influenced how they saw themselves. The rifle is best known for its well-chronicled role in the 1857 Indian Rebellion, where it was central to British narratives of the conflict. While acknowledging the Indian context, this thesis aims to draw the Enfield deeper into debates about British imperial culture, comparing the rifle’s physical and discursive influence across a range of imperial spaces.  The Enfield rifle was one of the most important weapons of the nineteenth century. The product of a revolution in rifle technology, it amazed the British public and military with its accuracy and range. The weapon’s invention prompted the introduction of large scale factory production techniques in Britain. It also stimulated a massive rethinking of military tactics and was a central component of the militarisation of British society during the 1850s and 1860s. The Enfield then had extensive use in conflicts including the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the New Zealand Wars, and the American Civil War. It also found a home in the burgeoning Volunteer Movement in Britain and New Zealand.  Through its use in these arenas, the Enfield had a considerable physical impact on the British Empire, but it had even greater discursive significance. During the 1850s and 1860s, discussions about the Enfield’s invention, production, and usage promoted ideas of rationality, modern science, and individualism. After the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the rifle came to epitomise British technological might and racial ‘superiority’ in the minds of Victorians. The Volunteer Force, established in 1859, embraced the Enfield as its weapon of choice and conceived of it as a weapon that embodied the Force’s values of skill, education and respectability. In the New Zealand Wars however, the rifle failed to bring the decisive victories many settlers expected, and they began to disparage the weapon as a result. Nevertheless, the Enfield was still deeply implicated in the contested process of colonisation in New Zealand. Ultimately, the Enfield’s role in these events transformed the weapon into a deeply raced and gendered object.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-203
Author(s):  
Roy Jones ◽  
Tod Jones

In the speech in which the phrase ‘land fit for heroes’ was coined, Lloyd George proclaimed ‘(l)et us make victory the motive power to link the old land up in such measure that it will be nearer the sunshine than ever before … it will lift those who have been living in the dark places to a plateau where they will get the rays of the sun’. This speech conflated the issues of the ‘debt of honour’ and the provision of land to those who had served. These ideals had ramifications throughout the British Empire. Here we proffer two Antipodean examples: the national Soldier Settlement Scheme in New Zealand and the Imperial Group Settlement of British migrants in Western Australia and, specifically, the fate and the legacy of a Group of Gaelic speaking Outer Hebrideans who relocated to a site which is now in the outer fringes of metropolitan Perth.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Febria ◽  
Maggie Bayfield ◽  
Kathryn E. Collins ◽  
Hayley S. Devlin ◽  
Brandon C. Goeller ◽  
...  

In Aotearoa New Zealand, agricultural land-use intensification and decline in freshwater ecosystem integrity pose complex challenges for science and society. Despite riparian management programmes across the country, there is frustration over a lack in widespread uptake, upfront financial costs, possible loss in income, obstructive legislation and delays in ecological recovery. Thus, social, economic and institutional barriers exist when implementing and assessing agricultural freshwater restoration. Partnerships are essential to overcome such barriers by identifying and promoting co-benefits that result in amplifying individual efforts among stakeholder groups into coordinated, large-scale change. Here, we describe how initial progress by a sole farming family at the Silverstream in the Canterbury region, South Island, New Zealand, was used as a catalyst for change by the Canterbury Waterway Rehabilitation Experiment, a university-led restoration research project. Partners included farmers, researchers, government, industry, treaty partners (Indigenous rights-holders) and practitioners. Local capacity and capability was strengthened with practitioner groups, schools and the wider community. With partnerships in place, co-benefits included lowered costs involved with large-scale actions (e.g., earth moving), reduced pressure on individual farmers to undertake large-scale change (e.g., increased participation and engagement), while also legitimising the social contracts for farmers, scientists, government and industry to engage in farming and freshwater management. We describe contributions and benefits generated from the project and describe iterative actions that together built trust, leveraged and aligned opportunities. These actions were scaled from a single farm to multiple catchments nationally.


Author(s):  
Patricia O'Brien

This is a biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, the Sāmoan nationalist leader who fought New Zealand, the British Empire and the League of Nations between the world wars. It is a richly layered history that weaves a personal and Pacific history with one that illuminates the global crisis of empire after World War One. Ta’isi’s story weaves Sweden with deep histories of Sāmoa that in the late nineteenth century became deeply inflected with colonial machinations of Germany, Britain, New Zealand and the U. S.. After Sāmoa was made a mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, the workings and aspirations of that newly minted form of world government came to bear on the island nation and Ta’isi and his fellow Sāmoan tested the League’s powers through their relentless non-violent campaign for justice. Ta’isi was Sāmoa’s leading businessman who was blamed for the on-going agitation in Sāmoa; for his trouble he was subjected to two periods of exile, humiliation and a concerted campaign intent on his financial ruin. Using many new sources, this book tells Ta’isi’s untold story, providing fresh and intriguing new aspects to the global story of indigenous resistance in the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Bain Attwood

This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generation Australians—challenged this triumphant nationalist story of self-realization as they embraced social and cultural history and their emphases on the differences of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. There is one area in which historical writing in New Zealand and Australia has undoubtedly been distinctive, at least in terms of its public impact; namely, that concerning the pasts of the indigenous peoples. The chapter then looks at the historiography of aboriginal–settler relations in Australia and New Zealand.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212110246
Author(s):  
Walid Habbas ◽  
Yael Berda

This article delves into the everyday dynamics of colonial rule to outline a novel way of understanding colonized–colonizer interactions. It conceives colonial management as a social field in which both the colonized and colonizers negotiate and exchange resources, despite their decidedly unequal positions within a racial hierarchy. Drawing their example from the West Bank, the authors argue that a Palestinian economic elite has proactively participated in the co-production of the colonial management of spatial mobility, a central component of Israeli colonial rule. The study employs interviews and document analysis to investigate how the nexus between Palestine’s commercial-logistical needs and Israel’s security complex induced large-scale Palestinian producers to exert agency and reorder commercial mobility. The authors describe and explain the evolution of a ‘Door-to-Door’ logistical arrangement, in which large-scale Palestinian traders participate in extending Israeli’s system of spatial control in exchange for facilitating logistical mobility. This horizontal social encounter that entails pay-offs is conditioned, but not fully determined, by vertical relations of domination and subordination.


2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Catherine Kitson

Sooty shearwaters (tītī, muttonbird, Puffinus griseus) are highly abundant migratory seabirds, which return to breeding colonies in New Zealand. The Rakiura Māori annual chick harvest on islands adjacent to Rakiura (Stewart Island), is one of the last large-scale customary uses of native wildlife in New Zealand. This study aimed to establish whether the rate at which muttonbirders can extract chicks from their breeding burrows indicates population trends of sooty shearwaters. Harvest rates increased slightly with increasing chick densities on Putauhinu Island. Birders' harvest rates vary in their sensitivities to changing chick density. Therefore a monitoring panel requires careful screening to ensure that harvest rates of the birders selected are sensitive to chick density, and represents a cross-section of different islands. Though harvest rates can provide only a general index of population change, it can provide an inexpensive and feasible way to measure population trends. Detecting trends is the first step to assessing the long-term sustainability of the harvest.


Author(s):  
Carla Houkamau ◽  
Petar Milojev ◽  
Lara Greaves ◽  
Kiri Dell ◽  
Chris G Sibley ◽  
...  

AbstractLongitudinal studies into the relationship between affect (positive or negative feelings) towards one’s own ethnic group and wellbeing are rare, particularly for Indigenous peoples. In this paper, we test the longitudinal effects of in-group warmth (a measure of ethnic identity affect) and ethnic identity centrality on three wellbeing measures for New Zealand Māori: life satisfaction (LS), self-esteem (SE), and personal wellbeing (PW). Longitudinal panel data collected from Māori (N = 3803) aged 18 or over throughout seven annual assessments (2009–2015) in the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study were analyzed using latent trajectory models with structured residuals to examine cross-lagged within-person effects. Higher in-group warmth towards Māori predicted increases in all three wellbeing measures, even more strongly than ethnic identity centrality. Bi-directionally, PW and SE predicted increased in-group warmth, and SE predicted ethnic identification. Further, in sample-level (between-person) trends, LS and PW rose, but ethnic identity centrality interestingly declined over time. This is the first large-scale longitudinal study showing a strong relationship between positive affect towards one’s Indigenous ethnic group and wellbeing. Efforts at cultural recovery and restoration have been a deliberate protective response to colonization, but among Māori, enculturation and access to traditional cultural knowledge varies widely. The data reported here underline the role of ethnic identity affect as an important dimension of wellbeing and call for continued research into the role of this dimension of ethnic identity for Indigenous peoples.


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