Post-Postcolonialism

While the first encounters between the fields of imperial history and
postcolonial studies were characterised by conflict, mutual
misunderstanding and plain bafflement (see Part 1, week 10), these
engagements had become increasingly productive from the mid-1990s,
and the study of imperialism was enriched by perspectives drawn from
Subaltern Studies, feminist histories and other disciplines, such as
anthropology. This session will discuss the consequent rise of the ‘new
imperial history’ in the noughties, which sought to explore themes of
identity, culture and power through a particular emphasis on the
‘networks’ and ‘webs’ that made up modern empires. Drawing, in part, on
the work of historical geographers, this was part of the wider ‘spatial turn’
across history and wider the humanities that has characterised the last
couple of decades.

Essential Reading
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), esp. pp 23-66.
 Morant Bay riot (October 1865) – Edward John Eyre, governor, established a
tyrannical martial law on the island resulting in many deaths
o Subsequently replaced by John Stuart Mill – who saw Jamaicans as British, as
it was part of the empire
o ‘British subjects had been denied their right to the rule of law. Jamaica was
part of the British empire, it peoples were British subjects.’ (25)
o However this did not last long, after constant lobbying from Eyre, ‘a
considerable body of opinion had concluded that black people were,
essentially different from whites, and thus could not expect the same rights.
British subjects across the empire were not all the same.’ (25)
 Concept of identity was raised – what does it Englishness entail? – us versus them,
the self and the other!

Australia
 1830s: support for the anti-slavery movement was strong by ‘respectable English
middle-class men’ (27)
o ‘True manliness was derived not from property and inheritance, but from real
religion … and encompassed a belief in individual integrity and freedom from
subjection to the will of another.’ (25)
o Essentially, the ‘vulnerability of manhood was repressed in the fictions of
integrity and independence – whether in the marketplace, the political arena
or the home’
o Empire was enshrined in this mentality of bravado – the loss of the Americas
fostered a newfound economic fortitude – ‘eighteenth century mercantilists,
had hope to fit colonial possessions, in to a system that would benefit both
colony and mother country.’ (28)
 o Systematic colonisation and the development of responsible government in
the white settler colonies were seen as essential to the prosperity of Britain
and Empire (28)
o Edward Gibbon theorised the above point – looking to solve Britain’s
overpopulation problem through the emigration of people to Australia. Thus,
transforming ‘a waste country into a profitable and civilised extension of
Britain, with its class hierarchy firmly in place’
o Gibbon’s work was antithetical to Malthusians – arguing for emigration to
usher in an iron age reformation to Australia
o Settlement of South Australia began in 1836 and grew to 15000 by 1840
o Plans for New South Wales began formulating in 1837
o Between 1830 and 1850, 125000 new emigrants settled in the old convict
colonies, while 60,000 went to Western Australia and South Australia – as
result of this process, the white population exceeded the black fot the first
time
o The web of connections established in the first encounters between the
European and the ‘new world’, and later richly elaborated in the popular
fictions of African conquest, were spun for Australia too (38)
o The introduction of sheep farming, profitable for colonists, was a disaster for
Aboriginal people, resulting in the destruction of the traditional hunting
environment (39)
 Aboriginal resistance to the invasion was considerable, but the
combination of guns, the ravages of new diseases and the destruction
of the traditional means of survival resulted in the death of tens of
thousands
 For many of the settlers it became a self-fulfilling orthodoxy that the
Aborigines were doomed to extinction
o Eyre’s diary entries are a testament to colonial narratives – ‘thrilling
adventures’ with the ‘construction of his Aboriginal subject [being] codified
into a more clearly paternalistic story’ (40)
o Settlement meant dispossession. The Aborigines had become ‘strangers in
their own land’ subject to summary violence from settlers, while the law
offered no protection (41)
o Eyre’s tone changed – ‘his ethnographic portrait had a quite different tone
from his earlier writing. He had become the colonial administrator.’ (41)
o Eyre had progressed to view their culture as ‘different from and inferior to
that of English; the proper response to this was to make it genuinely possible
for them to be come like us.’ (41)
o Because ‘Englishmen have been ready to come forward to protect the weak
or oppressed; English mean must make the Aborigines into dependents’, But
the Native was constructed as victim only as long as (he/she) was docile and
compliant. (41)
o Collective white narrative to incorporate the helpless Aborigines in to their
ideology
New Zealand

David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial spaces, imperial
subjects’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds) Colonial Lives Across
the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1-31.