Alan Lester

Geographies of colonial philanthropy

Through an examination of the material and imaginative geographies of colonial philanthropy in parts of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century, this paper advocates a more nuanced conception of the heterogeneity of colonial discourse. At the same time, it elaborates a networked conceptualization of empire. Particular attention is paid to the moralities of closeness, distance and connection, the spatial politics of knowledge, and the spatial and temporal translation of the trope of ‘slavery’ within philanthropic discourse. The paper raises colonial philanthropy as an object of inquiry that has relevance for contemporary globalized humanitarianism as well as for cross-cultural tension within former imperial sites.

Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas

This article provides an introductory overview of themes raised in this special edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. We suggest that, while recent work such as Michael Barnetts Empire of Humanity has begun to explore the history of western humanitarianism, academic researchers can do more to address the intricate framework of relations between humanitarianism and empire, and that the history of humanitarianism can usefully be viewed as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging trans-imperial, international and transnational approaches. We set the papers in this collection within the wider historiography of nineteenth and twentieth century humanitarianism, and outline how the humanitarian ‘impulse’ intersected with debates around anti-slavery, colonial administration and the protection of indigenous peoples. We also outline the ways in which twentieth-century international ‘networks of concern’ engaged with, and built upon, the discourses of imperial humanitarianism. Finally, we briefly consider the benefits of a ‘transnational’ approach in sketching the history of empire and humanitarianism.

Obtaining the 'due observance of justice': the geographies of colonial humanitarianism?

Within the context of contemporary discussion over geography and developmental ethics, this paper examines part of the genealogy of a modern British sense of responsibility for the plight of distant strangers. The frame of reference for this sense, known as humanitarianism, was first cast overseas through debates over the slave trade in the late 18th century, and its remit was further extended as a result of the contested processes of colonial settlement in the 1820s and 1830s. This geographically expansive discourse is analysed through a study of two exemplary statements of humane intervention: the Aborigines Committee (1835–37), and the military Court of Enquiry into the death of the African Xhosa King Hintsa (1836). Each demonstrated a new-found concern for the fate of colonised individuals. They established that the sufferings of distant others were inextricably connected to the everyday privileges enjoyed by Britons. However, they also formulated prescriptive principles targeted not only at the relief of suffering, but at the moral and material improvement of distant subjects—principles which continue to inform more recent debates over global ethics.

Personifying Colonial Governance: George Arthur and the Transition from Humanitarian to Development Discourse

During the early nineteenth century, a number of seemingly antithetical developments shaped the British Empire and the wider world, among them evangelical humanism, antislavery and emancipation, the invasion of indigenous peoples’ lands by waves of British settlers, the rapid expansion of the settler colonies, and the consolidation of British rule and designs for the redevelopment of India. Against this backdrop, this article draws attention to significant shifts in the nature of humane governance and opens up a theoretical intersection among life geography, colonial discourse analysis, and assemblage theory. It focuses on the career in British colonial governance of George Arthur, successively Aide de Camp in Jersey, Quarter Master General in Jamaica, Superintendent of Honduras, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemens Land, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, and Governor of the Bombay Presidency. Situating Arthur as an individual component within emergent colonial governmental assemblages, I examine the ways in which an individual like Arthur could effect and be affected by shifts in humanitarian and governmental discourse and practice. The geographies of Arthurs entanglements in colonial discourses were paramount in affecting the nature and extent of his capacity to effect reformulation of those discourses. Arthurs personal performances and expressions of colonial government in different sites of empire and through specific episodes of contestation assisted in the deterritorialization of certain kinds of colonial governmentality and the reterritorialization of others. As Arthur moved from the West Indies to Van Diemens Land to Upper Canada to India, so his person discernibly effected shifts from ameliorative through conservative humanitarian to developmental forms of imperial governance.

From colonization to democracy : a new historical geography of South Africa

From Colonisation to Democracy traces the development of modern South African society, establishing the geographical and historical context in which adaptation has occurred. Alan Lester identifies and explains the most important historical continuities in South Africa which have shaped present society. These include social groupings and their stratification, political institutions, the patterns of human geography, economic structure and external links and influences.

Introduction: Historical Geographies of Southern Africa

This special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies arises out of a symposium on the historical geographies of modern southern Africa held at the University of Sussex, UK, in April 2002. The intention behind the symposium was to the examine the particular tradition of historical geography developed in South Africa in recent decades and to explore ways in which that tradition has already been, and can be further, ‘opened out’, so as to include new interdisciplinary perspectives, previously hidden representations, more globally ‘networked’ accounts of social and cultural formation and, not least, studies of the southern African region as a whole. From being a relatively discrete sub-discipline, with its own (always contested) epistemology and methodology during much of the twentieth century, historical geography has become much more of an interdisciplinary enterprise over the last two decades. Not only has it merged to a great extent with other branches of geography; it has also intersected in various ways with work being conducted under the remit of other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This shift towards dissolution of traditional sub-disciplinary and disciplinary boundaries is not simply the result of historical geographers increasingly buying into the epistemologies and methodologies of other disciplinary fields. It is also partly the result of a spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities as a whole, which has seen scholars who claim different disciplinary affiliations moving into the traditional ‘terrain’ of historical geography. The language of ‘spatiality’, ‘mobility’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, ‘core’ and ‘margin’, incorporating prognostic terms such as ‘hidden spaces’ and more aspirational terms such as ‘third space’, has now become firmly entrenched in the work of many historians, sociologists, literary critics and anthropologists, among others. It has been impossible for historical geographers not to engage in some way with such new work. Often, that engagement has

Masculinity 'race', and family in the colonies: protecting Aboriginies in the early nineteehth century

Much of British imperial society in the early nineteenth century was characterised by a reformulated sensibility of manliness and family. Integral to this sensibility was the notion of mens responsibility for dependants. However, the story of Charles Wightman Sievwright, appointed as Assistant Protector of Aborigines in colonial New South Wales, serves to demonstrate that a mans duty of care for very different, racialised kinds of dependants could be emphasised in conflicting ways by British settlers on the one side and by humanitarians on the other, under conditions of colonial expansion. Sievwrights story also encourages more explicit attention to both the tensions and the mutual intrusions between mens public and private roles within colonial society. Sievwrights own efforts as an active, humanitarian man in the political life of the New South Wales frontier were scandalously undermined by his failure to perform the role expected of him in his domestic, familial relations.

Colonial settlers and the metropole: racial discourse in the early 19th-century Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand

The ways that British settlers in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, particularly those engaged in the extension of commercial sheep farming, constructed a certain discourse of colonialism during the first half of the 19th century are discussed. It is argued that this discourse was formulated, at least in part, in opposition to that of humanitarians within each colony and in Britain, who challenged settler capitalist practices on the fringes of Britains expanding empire. Representations of a civilizing impact on the landscape were one component of the new racialized understandings and identities that settlers at each site constructed in their defence. Through attention to three colonial sites and their relations with each other and with the metropole, it is aimed to highlight the ways in which discourses of colonial landscapes and their inhabitants travelled across an imperial terrain.

The margins of order: strategies of segregation on the eastern Cape frontier, 1806‐c. 1850

This paper draws attention to the inconsistent development of segregationist strategies on the eastern Cape frontier during the nineteenth century. It argues that the primary thrust of official segregationist strategy shifted throughout the century in response to Xhosa resistance, the material demands of colonists and competing discourses surrounding ‘the Xhosa’. A periodisation is developed around three broad phases. In the first, the colonial state attempted the complete economic and cultural exclusion of Xhosas from the colonial margins. In the second, spanning the period in which overt Rarabe Xhosa resistance was finally crushed, attempts to maintain spatial separation between colonists and Xhosa were tempered by efforts to modify Xhosa culture in order to render Xhosas more amenable to the colonial presence. Spatial exclusion was accompanied by degrees of attempted cultural inclusion. The intensity and scope of these efforts, however, shifted in accordance with changing frontier conditions. In a thir...

The East India Company and the natural world

The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company, on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and as far off as New Zealand, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors – drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.