Space

The conventional way of escaping the confines of a singular spatial unit in order to gain broader perspective in the writing of history has been the comparative method. Julie Evans et al., for example, tell the story of the betrayal of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ during the nineteenth century through the parallel histories of racial exclusion from the franchise in each of the British settler colonies.²⁰ Unless the discrete spaces of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had been brought into a common narrative, the trans-imperial scale and nature of that betrayal, and the way in which it was experienced and dealt with by multiple indigenous societies, could never have been appreciated.²¹ To give a further example, comparative histories of modern racial segregation in South Africa and the southern states of the USA have helped historians of these separate spatial units to identify certain capitalist labour practices, popular racial discourses and governmental strategies for reconciling the two, which on the one hand transcended, and on the other, in the case of the USA, fragmented the nation-state.²²

But there is another way of linking two or more places, and that is to examine the causative connections between them.

Comparative, rather than inter-connected, histories tend to adopt a view of space and place that has recently been critiqued by Massey. In this view, places are seen as discrete, bounded entities, like billiard balls placed upon a table, which represents space as a whole.²⁵ The ‘table’ is an analytically discrete entity from the specific places—the ‘billiard balls’—ranged upon it. Within Massey’s more relative conception of space and place, the distinction between ‘billiard ball’ and ‘table’, between place and space, becomes blurred. Specific places are seen as emergent from the very same mobilities and relations that constitute space in general. Networked approaches have been one way in which this more relative conception of space and place has infiltrated imperial history. The network, as both a descriptive and an analytical device, allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from individual people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the laboratory, to agglomerations such as towns, cities and regions, to countries. The phenomena that the historian is interested in can be seen as constituted by flows of capital, movements of people, objects or organisms, and the communication of ideas in textual or visual form, between these nodes, via the physical and imaginative routes connecting them.²⁶

An example of networked analyses, drawn from my own work over the last ten years, concerns the ways in which ideas and associated practices of Britishness, racial difference and humanitarianism were created and moved along circuits connecting the settler colo­nies of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to one another and to Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁷ These Southern Hemispheric countries emerged from a set of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial enterprises ranging from the establishment of convict penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania), through the inheritance of a Dutch East India Company-administered territory in the Cape Colony (later part of South Africa), to the planned emigration of settlers who would be free of the ‘convict taint’, in South Australia, the Swan River Colony (later Western Australia) and New Zealand.

Each of these countries has its own historiographical tradition, dating largely from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to trace their ‘birth’ as nation-states.²⁸ In these separate national histories, the British Empire features as something like the table in Massey’s analogy—a stage upon which each settler/national community performed its own story culminating in the modern nation-state. My own appreciation of the aspects of their pasts that these teleological narratives obscured first came about as a result of reading The Graham's Town Journal (GTJ), a newspaper founded by a former London printer on the remote eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1830, seemingly as parochial a publication as it is possible to imagine.

I read the GTJ in an attempt to understand the ways in which British settlers in this particular colonial region engaged with and represented the Xhosa people who had long inhabited the lands onto which they were encroaching. Initially, I filtered out of my consciousness all of those editorials, news items and letters to the editor that concerned events outside the eastern Cape. However, at a certain point it struck me, first, that there was an awful lot of this ‘extraneous’ material for a parochial community newspaper, and, secondly, that it had a pattern that was quite fundamental to the way that this colonising community of emigrant Britons saw themselves and their new place in the world.

One of the primary drivers of that conversation was the critique of settler activities ela­borated by British humanitarians. Because of this critique emigrants constructing new lives for themselves and their families in the colonies, like slave-owners before them, were forced to discuss and define the ways in which they, as respectable Britons, were distinguished from colonised others, specifying the forms of behaviour that Britons could legitimately adopt in relation to those others. The struggles between settlers and humanitarians, played out across rival networks of communication linking the colonies to each other and to Britain, were thus struggles over the nature of Britishness itself.³⁰

The eighteenth-century campaign against the slave trade had put into place many of the trans-imperial connections that would be inherited by nineteenth-century humanitarians. The London-based Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade had mobilised an uneven trans-Atlantic network of missionaries, evangelical reformers and concerned, mainly middle-class Britons, through books, pamphlets, prints and artefacts.³¹ Humanitar­ians worried about the plight of indigenous peoples on the frontiers of empire redeployed and extended this network.

This humanitarian discourse of Britishness abroad was given its most coherent expression in the report written by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines in 1837. With its recommendations that settlers be prevented from seizing land without compensation, that some conquered land be restored to indigenous people and that Pro­tectors of Aborigines be appointed to shield them from ‘cruelty, oppression and injustice’ and from ‘encroachments upon their property’, the Committee represented a serious challenge to settler communities.³² Settlers in Australia, the Cape and New Zealand were outraged. To conceive of the British settlers being agents of oppression was described in New South Wales as ‘a libel upon the English character, which Englishmen should not submit to without remonstrance’. The Sydney Morning Heralds (SMH) editor railed that ‘The prevailing canting humbug which always attributes the butcherings of savages to European settlers is almost beyond bearing’.³³

In response to the networks of humanitarian concern that had tainted their metropo­litan counterparts' view of them, settlers set about constructing their own networks, manifest above all in their circulating newspaper traffic. These were designed and destined to legitimate colonial violence and the dispossession of indigenous peoples to Britons back ‘home'; justify continued metropolitan support for colonial expansion and undermine humanist arguments for essential human equality. The coordination of settlers in the Cape and New South Wales around the 1834—1835 Cape Frontier War demon­strates some of the dynamism of these trans-imperial settler networks.

These inter-colonial campaigns against humanitarian interference, it seems, were intrinsic to the ways in which settler communities defined themselves as Britons legitimately entitled to seize indigenous peoples land because of their innate superiority to those peoples. But the implications of this consensus went beyond even these communities multiple locations. The representations orchestrated by the settler press network had sig­nificant effects at the ‘heart ’ of empire too. Through extracts of their newspapers carried in metropolitan newspapers like The Times, through books published in Britain and, more elusively for the historian but perhaps more powerfully still, through letters and visits to family and friends ‘at home ’, settler communities in the mid-nineteenth century highlighted the supposed ‘failure ’ of the humanitarian civilising mission in Britain and ascribed that failure to the irredeemable limitations of native peoples.

In 1865 Commander Bedford Pim presented a paper to the Anthropological Society. It was testament to the increasingly successful dissemination of the discourse that had long been articulated, initially by planters and their allies in defence of slavery, and latterly, more successfully, by the settler press. Pim asserted that ‘The principles on which alien and dissimilar races ought to be governed, is [sic] not yet understood by our rulers. Jamaica is not the only proof of this: the state of St Vincent, Antigua, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, to say nothing of India, attests that “how to govern alien races” has yet to be learnt’.³⁶ The lesson that Pim believed had yet to be learnt was one that both the New Zealand Southern Cross and the GTJ had been preaching:

We have dealt with... natives... upon a principle radically wrong. We have con­ceded them rights and privileges which nature has refused to ratify... The [native] is now known to us as what he is, and not as missionaries and philanthropists were willing to believe him... a man ignorant and savage, loving darkness and anarchy; hating light and order... bloodthirsty, cruel, ungrateful, treacherous.³⁷

Pim concluded, ‘Let us take the negro as we find him, as God designed him, not a white man, or the equal of a white man’.³⁸ It was via a trans-imperial conversation, conducted through contested humanitarian and settler networks, I would argue, that Britons came to see themselves as the means for the diffusion, forcibly if needs be, of an appropriate form of civilisation among ‘inferior races’ around the world. The image of webs or networks is central to such an argument because, as Tony Ballantyne puts it, this ‘captures the inte­grative nature of... cultural traffic, the ways imperial institutions and structures connected disparate points in space into a complex mesh’.³⁹

Such networked analysis is particularly challenging. Developing a multi-sited study involves an awful lot of reading, first to comprehend the historiographies of each place which, after many decades of nation-bound history writing tend to lack cross-referencing, and then to track the webs of correspondence across separate state archives. The mobility required of the researcher means that it can be prohibitive at certain stages of an academic career. Nevertheless, the approach has been followed by a number of other historians to great effect, helping to recast our understanding of interconnected imperial worlds.⁴⁰

Most of these studies are sensitive to the particular character of each of the colonial societies that they place into relation, and most seek to decentre Britain or Europe itself somewhat from their narrative of inter-colonial connectivity.⁴¹ Yet most are still forced to recognise the heightened significance, even within the most extensive imperial networks, of metropolitan British or other European places. This can render an escape from the spatial language of core and periphery often more a linguistic than a substantive shift—a point that I will return to below when I consider the writing of place in imperial history.

Related to this spatial dominance is the issue of subaltern access to trans-imperial networks. Until recently networked analyses have tended to privilege the most empowered subjects of empire—those able to write the texts which circulated around maritime and then telegraphic and aerial circuits; those able to travel to London to testify before Select Committees; those able to pursue a career in colonial governance that took them from one colonial site to another, carrying the lessons of ‘how to govern savage races’ with them.⁴² A few recent works have started to show that ‘subaltern’ subjects too followed (or were forced to take) certain trajectories across empire, both physically and imaginatively. In the mid­nineteenth century indigenous peoples interacted with the newspaper networks of British settlers, sometimes directly through publication of a press in their own language, or more often indirectly, as with the Kat River Khoisan’s rebellious response to the De Zjrid Afrikaans agitation for a return of the pre-Ordinance 50 vagrancy laws during the late 1840s.⁴³ More expansively, Kerry Ward and Clare Anderson have recently told the stories of convicts forced into exile across the Indian Ocean circuits of the Dutch and English East India Companies.⁴⁴ Despite these meticulously researched attempts to recover the experiences of subaltern groups within networked colonial worlds, however, the problem of one-sided archival traces remains. The most sustained works rely upon subaltern individuals being caught up in webs of governmental surveillance, as a result of which their movements and signs of their resistance were recorded—hence the preponderance of convicts. What the existence and power of trans-imperial projects, discourses and networks meant for those subaltern individuals who were never entrapped within such governmental archives remains elusive.⁴⁵

Networked accounts, whether they focus on elite or subaltern subjects of empire, highlight the insights that can be gleaned from tracing causative connections wherever they lead one within an imperial frame. The question of where to follow such trajectories and where to leave off the pursuit, however, remains indeterminate. Not all of the trajectories of people, ideas, objects and organisms constituting imperial domains traversed only formally imperial spaces. We might think of empires as containers of particularly dense webs of communicative technologies, patterns of mobility, and politics of domination. But as we have long known, these technologies, patterns and politics spill beyond imperial containers. They also enabled the incorporation of regions of China, the ‘Middle East’ and Latin America within an informal empire that was considerably more expansive than Britain’s formal domain.⁴⁶

Leaving aside the precise geographies of formal and informal empire at any one time, a rather different spatial expansion and re-orientation of networked imperial studies has recently been developed through the concept of an ‘Anglo-world’. Perhaps the most influ­ential book here has been James Belich’s, which adds the (British) Settler Revolution to the French, American and Industrial Revolutions as one of the most profound transformations to have shaped the modern world.⁴⁷ As Zoe Laidlaw puts it, ‘By switching his frame of reference from “imperialism” or “colonialism” to “settlerism”, Belich makes a persuasive case for bringing the independent United States back into explanations for and taxonomies of European settler-colonialism’.⁴⁸ That case is strengthened by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, who demonstrate that the conversation on how to uphold white privilege in the face of indigenous economic advancement and Asian migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was conducted not just between and among the settler colonies and Britain, but also with interlocutors in the USA.⁴⁹ Beyond both the expanded frame of the formal-plus-informal empire, and the re-oriented framework of the Anglo-world, Christo­pher Bayly and John Darwin have made sustained interventions (re)locating the history of the British Empire alongside other European empires, and all set within the broadest context of global transformations between the early modern period and the late twentieth century.⁵⁰ Their work, alongside the more populist writings of Niall Ferguson, has been informed, at least in part, by the current geopolitical agenda of gauging how the ‘Great Divide’ between the West and China was first established and has now been bridged.⁵¹

What is perhaps most striking about these various ways of conceiving the proper framework and scale for imperial history is that historians are yet to settle on an appropriate methodological description. Each of the terms currently in use is inadequate in some way. The term ‘transnational’ fails to deal with pre-national territorial entities and mobilities within empire, while ‘trans-imperial’ conceptually hinders the tracking of trajectories beyond empire, for instance to and from the USA. ‘World history’ or ‘global history’ have different connotations and traditions. ‘Inter-connected’ history, or perhaps ‘networked’ history provide the most useful cover-all, but for many they lack the kind of spatial delimitation that is necessary at least for a starting point.