Place

Because of their indeterminate fixing of spatial frameworks, some critics have argued that networked analyses are more about space than place. This tends to be because they associate space with mobility and specific places with stasis.

However, any division between things that move through networks and things that remain static is problematic, and places are defined no more authentically by stasis than by mobility. In any sophisticated networked account, specific places are seen as rich and complex intersections of components with varying trajectories and mobilities. Much of the move towards a networked view of space has been propelled precisely by the desire to capture that elusive bundle of characteristics that define specific places.

We can begin by redefining what we mean by immobility. If we take a long view, there is actually no such thing. As Massey points out, even those characteristics of any given place that are most immutable, such as mountains, hills, lakes and rivers, are temporally limited assemblages of mobile components.⁵² Going beyond Heraclitus’ supposed observation that ‘no man ever steps in the same river twice’, we can observe that in the longer term it is not only the moving body of water that renders a river, for example, a dynamic entity, but also the course of its channel as sediment is eroded and deposited in ever-shifting patterns (this is to let alone the point that the ‘man’ himself will have changed between immersions). Massey is driven to make this point about the mutability of both human society and what we conventionally see as geographical context partly to fulfil a desire to bridge the disciplinary divide between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geographies. However, the point that all of the characteristics of place are comprised of mobilities of one kind or another, even if they may be imperceptible to the inhabitants at any given time, has relevance to historians of the imperial world too.

Let us take imperial cities as an example of specific places. Fredric Jameson used the example of London to highlight the disjuncture between individual experience of place and the energies, forces and movements that had created it:

The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies... in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.⁵³

It is the derivation of these seemingly God-given ‘structural coordinates’ of place that Felix Driver and David Gilbert’s Imperial Cities seeks to explain.⁵⁴ This edited collection examines not only the built, architectural form that historians often take as an unexamined backdrop to events, but also activities conducted in relation to that form that are just as much a part of the character of place. They include displays, ceremonies, exhibitions, engineering, clothing and gardening. Driver and Gilbert ‘illuminate some of the ways in which empire made a difference “at home”: in the streets, offices and homes of Europeans themselves’.⁵⁵ But what distinguished their approach was an understanding that

the identities of urban places, as much as those of individuals or nations, are multiple and complex; they are formed and reformed through networks of relationships across space and time. In this perspective, a place is less an origin than a meeting point; the city as a whole becomes less a centre than a crossroads.⁵⁶

The extrinsic spatial network and the intrinsic character of place thus become inseparable. In the case of London, ‘there was always a number of [imperial] sites rather than a single pivot, each reflecting a rather different version of empire’.⁵⁷ This observation, about the peculiar character of a place—London—which became the locus of ‘metropolitan rule’, brings us back to the point raised briefly above: even in networked histories which seek to transcend the division between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, many scholars find it hard to avoid the language of spatial supremacy.

It is easy, even within the ‘new imperial history’, simply to substitute the words ‘metropole’ for core and ‘colony’ for periphery without analysing what these constructs tell us about spatial unevenness. Here, I think we need to be more careful to draw a distinction between a desire to critique Western epistemological dominance on the one hand, and the recognition of historically and geographically uneven distributions of power on the other. The former involves the eradication of taken for granted core—periphery binaries as part of a move to decolonise knowledge and understanding of the world (as the ‘new imperial history’ seeks to do in undermining an insular island story of Britain). The latter entails more precise empirical attention to how locales and power have been and are interrelated such that social privilege accrues at certain sites and marginalisation at others.

Exploring the relationship between power and place empirically means, in part, identifying the different kinds of imperial power located at different sites within a place like London—how administrative rule and policy-making were concentrated at the Colonial Office in Downing Street, how missionary and humanitarian lobbying was conducted at Exeter Hall (the building in The Strand used for religious and philanthropic rallies), the various mission society headquarters or intimate spaces like the tea tables of genteel women conducting a West Indian sugar boycott; and how magnates like Cecil Rhodes networked to realise imperial projects at clubs like the Athenaeum, for example. We should therefore see ‘The metropolis... as a heterogeneous but material space’, in which imperial and anti-imperial activities ‘shape, and are shaped by, the locations in which they take place... The imperial city, in other words, had a geography which mattered’.⁵⁸

One positive move that we can make towards disaggregating our notions of core and periphery, or metropole and colony, then, is to appreciate the complex heterogeneity of ‘metropolitan’ space.

Places within any metropolitan space, designated at a variety of scales, can be seen as relating to one another in various dynamic ways as well as to other places across the globe. The same, of course, goes for particular colonial places. Mark McKenna’s powerful Looking for Blackfella’s Point, for example, begins with an arc of bush beside a river in south-eastern New South Wales, but from there the gaze pans out to the history of the colony that was created and the Aboriginal society that was devastated within that colony, and from there to the history of Australia and its debates about national reconciliation.⁵⁹

Despite McKenna’s study, the incorporation of indigenous and other ‘subaltern’ human perspectives, knowledges, experiences and epistemologies remains perhaps the greatest challenge to spatially informed accounts of empire.⁶⁰ Both the ‘new imperial history’ and recent networked accounts of empire, as we have seen, are far from post-colonial in their sites of production, publication, consumption and range of reference. As Daniel Clayton notes, the problem of bringing ‘western and native evidence together in ways that bridge the intersubjective spaces of contact’ without subordinating these ‘other voices’ to secular western academic discourse ‘remains intractable’.⁶¹

In particular, from the perspective of this chapter, it is the challenge to appreciate much more about the spatialities of the pre-colonial and colonised societies with which Europeans engaged, as they forced their patchworks of sovereignty into ‘new’ places that were very old, that is most pressing. It is striking how little sustained empirical work has so far regarded indigenous spatial relations as just as significant a starting point for analysis as forcibly imposed European ones.⁶² Working both with and against the available sources, we need to see invading settlers and imperial sojourners conjoining with indigenous peoples and immigrants from elsewhere to form new assemblages of people, organisms, materials, places and landscapes.⁶³ We need to appreciate that colonial places and societies became distinct through those very juxtapositions, encounters and accommodations, while remaining interrelated components of the larger-scale assemblage that was empire.

And we need to recognise that violent interventions continue today to create beneficiaries and victims whose varying mobilities, and whose locations within heterogeneous places, both ‘metropolitan’ and ‘colonial’, condition their experiences.⁶⁴

Notes

1 This chapter is a more concise variant of A. Lester, ‘Spatial Concepts and the Historical Geographies of British Colonialism’, in A. Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories: Studies in Imperialism (100th edn) (Manchester, 2013) pp. 118-142. I am grateful to Andrew Thompson and Manchester University Press for allowing me to reproduce sections of that publication here.

2 F. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987), quoted by R. Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester, 2006), p. 6; A. Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham and London, 2011), pp. 14-15.

3 F. Driver, ‘Colony and Metropole: Locating the Victorians Session Commentary’, unpublished paper (Imperial College London, July 2001). My thanks to Felix Driver for allowing me to use this. For a review of core-periphery distinctions in imperial history, see David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,

2006), pp. 1-31.

4 D. Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty-Dumpty be put together again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1984), pp. 18-19.

5 J.M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester, 1986), p. 2, p. i.

6 F. Driver, ‘Imperial History: In Series and in Parallel’, Contribution to a roundtable discussion on Studies in Imperialism after Twenty Years, unpublished paper (University of Southampton,

2004), p. 5. Thanks to Felix Driver again for a copy.

7 S. Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London and New York, 2010).

8 See F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and London, 1997), pp. 1-58; Burton, Empire in Question, pp. 1-26; K. Wilson,The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003); K. Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660--1840 (Cambridge, 2004).

9 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago, 2002); E.W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978).

10 C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London, 1992); Hall, Civilising Subjects; Wilson, A New Imperial History; A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture (Chapel Hill, 1994); S. Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1990), pp. 111-119.

11 D. Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 39 (1995), p. 186.

12 F. Driver and R. Samuel, ‘Rethinking the Idea of Place’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 39 (1995), p. vi.

13 B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought About Empire (Oxford, 2004), back cover.

14 C. Hall and S. Rose (eds), At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006), back cover.

15 A. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain From the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005), back cover.

16 D. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 (Manchester, 2005), p. 216.

17 Hall, Civilising Subjects, pp. 1-22; Burton, Empire in Question, p. 15.

18 The ‘British World' initiative provides an exception to this metropolitan focus, focussing on the settler colonies/Dominions. See C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003); and P. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005).

19 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).

20 J. Evans, P. Grimshaw, D. Philips and S. Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s-1910 (Manchester, 2003).

21 See also L. Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester, 2001).

22 G. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford and New York, 1981); J. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982).

23 Cell, The Highest Stage; Fredrickson, White Supremacy, for example, compared with D. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (London, 1985); R.A. Hill and G.A. Pirio, ‘“Africa for the Africans”: The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920-1940', in S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London and New York, 1987), pp. 209-253 and M. Nicol, A Good-Looking Corpse (London, 1990); R. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (London and New York, 1994); J. Campbell, Songs of fion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995). See also M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). Fredrickson's later Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the Unites States and South Africa (Oxford and New York, 1995), while remaining largely comparative, does acknowledge more explicitly the actual connections between the two spaces and movements.

24 G. Whitlock, ‘A “White-Souled State”: Across the “South” With Lady Barker', in K. Darian- Smith, L. Gunner and S. Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Afiica and Australia (London, 1996), p. 68, citing Robert Wilson.

25 D. Massey, For Space (London, 1995).

26 T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2002).

27 The following is a brief summary of some of the work published in Lester, Imperial Networks; Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire', History Workshop Journal, Vol. 54 (2002), pp. 27-50; and Alan Lester, ‘Missionaries and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century', in N. Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), pp. 64-85.

28 See A. Curthoys, ‘We've Just Started Making National Histories and You Want Us to Stop Already?' in A. Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, NC, 2003), pp. 70-89.

29 The reason for the less intensive coverage of British North American affairs was the separate maritime circuit conditioned by sail and then steam technology. In the early part of my period British ships would sail to the Southern Hemispheric colonies via Rio de Janeiro to follow the trade winds. There was frequent traffic around the Cape of Good Hope between the Southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans and well-traversed routes connecting the British colonies in Australasia and southern Africa. The Canadas and Britain were linked by largely separate maritime circuits traversing the North Atlantic. News travelled along these circuits. For the ways in which imperial sovereignty itself was linked to similar narrow channels of connection, see the discussion in L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, 2010).

30 For the purpose of brevity these struggles are portrayed here in rather stark, binary terms. In fact most individuals negotiated attitudes at various points along a spectrum between the most oppositional humanitarian and settler viewpoints. See Lester, Imperial Networks, pp. 4-5.

31 David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (London and New York, 1991), p. 5.

32 Glenelg to Gipps, 31 Jan. 1838, in M. Cannon M. (ed.), Historical Records of Victoria, Vol. 2B (Melbourne, 1983), pp. 373-375.

33 SMH, 3 May 1838. See also J.M. Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selection From Important Papers (Grahamstown, 1864), pp. 2, 7.

34 SMH, 29 Jan. 1838.

35 SMH, 3 Nov. 1836.

36 Implicitly, Australia was no longer in such a deplorable state because its own ‘alien race' had already been nearly eradicated. See R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880--1939 (Melbourne, 1997).

37 Southern Cross, 1863, quoted in James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Montreal, 1989), p. 328.

38 Quoted in Hall, ‘Imperial Man', p. 162.

39 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, p. 39. It also allows for the analysis of multiple nodal points beyond the rather static category of the British metropole, as in Thomas Metcalf s recent analysis of British India as a sub-imperial metropole dominating an Indian Ocean arena: T. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, I860--1920 (Berkeley, 2007).

40 See, for example, Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815--45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005); R. Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester, 2006); K. Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009); G.B. Magee and A.S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850--1914 (Cambridge, 2010).

41 Kate O'Malley, for example, ‘reveals an extraordinary set of connections among the personnel of Irish and Indian nationalism'. Focussing on shared experiences, techniques (boycott, for example), methods of agitation, the use of publications and the press, and the encouragement of joint IrishIndian organisations, O'Malley indicates the paradoxical ways in which activists who sought new national states actually conducted their struggle through trans-‘national' networks. J. MacKenzie, ‘General Editor's Introduction', in K. O'Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919-64 (Manchester, 2008), p. x.

42 See D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006).

43 R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 156; E. Elbourne, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Imperial Networks in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Politics of Knowledge', in Buckner and Francis (eds), Rediscovering, pp. 59-86; L. Paterson, Colonial Discourses:Nuipepa Maori 1855-1863 (Dunedin, 2006).

44 Ward, Networks of Empire; C. Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, 2012).

45 For a valiant effort to track an individual ‘subaltern' who appeared only once and fleetingly in the colonial archive, see C. Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine (New York, 1996).

46 See, for example, R. Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, Colonialism, 1900-1949 (Manchester, 1999).

47 J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford, 2009).

48 Z. Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia's bounds? Law, Settlers and Space in Britain's Imperial Historiography', Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (2012), pp. 807-830. See also L. Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

49 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

50 C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004); J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge, 2009). Belich also does this. See also A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002) and A. Burton, ‘Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History', History Workshop Journal, Vol. 64 (2007), pp. 323-328.

51 N. Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest (London, 2012).

52 Massey, For Space.

53 F. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping', in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, 1988), p. 349, quoted in Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire, p. 11.

54 F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, 1999).

55 F. Driver and D. Gilbert, ‘Imperial Cities: Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories', in Driver and Gilbert, Imperial Cities, p. 3.

56 Ibid., p. 5.

57 Ibid., p. 14.

58 Ibid., p. 15; M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680--1780 (New York, 1998); J. Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, 2001).

59 M. McKenna, Looking for Blackfella's Point: An Australian History of Place (Sydney, 2002).

60 Ballantyne, ‘The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography', The Historical Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2010), pp. 451-452.

61 D. Clayton, ‘Imperial Geographies', in J. Duncan, N. Johnson and R. Schein (eds), Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford, 2004), p. 460.

62 Although, in addition to McKenna, Looking for Blackfella's Point, see B. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Singapore, 1996).

63 For an excellent examination of the sources in colonial studies and what can be done with them, see A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009).

64 D. Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford, 2004).

Place

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