Kate Fullagar

Popular contests over empire in the eighteenth century: the extended version

Abstract In the last 20 years, scholars have established that the Empire mattered more to ‘ordinary’ eighteenth-century Britons ‘at home’ than once assumed. They still disagree, however, about when popular imperial consciousness first arose and what it looked like. A study of the popular responses to various visits by indigenous people from the empire to Britain through the eighteenth century suggests that an imperial consciousness emerged as early as the 1710s. Moreover, this article contends that such a consciousness was always ambivalent, containing as much anxiety about empire as it did celebration. The article addresses work particularly by Kathleen Wilson, Bob Harris, Jack Greene, and J. G. A. Pocock. This article has been peer reviewed.

Endeavouring Banks: Exploring collections from the Endeavour voyage 1768–1771

League of Nations Union. He and his friends, such as Moore and Webb, encouraged Prime Minister S.M. Bruce to take an active role in the liberal international institution. Two questions arise from this, namely how could liberalism as found in the arguments of the proand anti-conscriptionists have produced such bitter divisions during the war years, and why did the Labor ‘antis’ take such little interest in the League and the peace of the world. The remaining four chapters vary in their relevance and quality. Perhaps the most impressive is Ross McKibbin’s thoughtful comparison of the British and Australian attitudes to the issue of conscription as products of differing social, political and economic circumstances.

Modern British history from the Antipodes

This article has been peer reviewed.

Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives

This books ends with Len Collard and Dave Palmer discussing indigenous terms for ideal approaches to history-making. The Noongar’s sense of kanya and the Kimberley people’s notion of good liyarn promise, they suggest, the best results for fresh thinking and new knowledges. Without kanya or with poor liyarn, historians run the risk of making ‘mistakes’ or getting ‘confused’. On the whole, the near-dozen historians who contributed to Indigenous Intermediaries seem to have conducted their research with the right kind of spirit. The book is the selected proceedings of a 2013 conference, published in affordable paperback and, more importantly, in a free online format by the always accessible ANU Press. Its aim is to advance the history of the exploratory expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by turning fresh attention and analysis to the indigenous intermediaries who were involved in them. The Introduction usefully surveys recent literature on both ‘go-betweens’ and ‘middle ground’ scenarios, situating this collection across both fields. It claims to include the latter field because the process of ‘teasing out’ the ‘presence’ and ‘agency’ of indigenous intermediaries involves more than just ‘trowels’ – as one of the authors nicely puts it. The act of recovery sometimes needs to add context, rather than just remove dirt, in order to grasp the meaning and contribution of indigenous traces in exploration. While the Introduction’s discussion of methodological approach is admirably nuanced, the editors shy from ever defining precisely who they mean by indigenous or by explorer. The following chapters suggest that indigenous peoples are non-Europeans who confront European empires – a somewhat vague notion that will in future scholarship surely demand more refinement. The implied definition of explorer is a European, usually male, usually focused on territorial discovery, and usually backed by official or elite authority. The chapters that suggest the best deployment of kanya are those by Felix Driver, Maria Nugent, Tiffany Shellam, and Harriet Parsons. Driver offers several illuminating case studies, the most interesting from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society. Curating these for a 2009 exhibition, Driver realised that recovering indigenous intermediaries involves more than just flinging back shrouds: the history of indigenous actors in explorer activities is in many ways permanently fragmented, and a recovery process need not pretend that these fragments can one day add up to the mirror images of the explorers themselves. Driver advocates instead both adding to the fragments with extra knowledges of indigenous culture as well as suggesting the ultimately fragmented state of explorer history, too. Both Nugent and Shellam offer good examples of how to walk Driver’s suggested ‘fine line between... salvage biography and critical history’ (25).Nugentdelves into the fragments on Jacky Jacky who accompanied E. B. Kennedy’s 1848 expedition to Cape York, while Shellam surveys the traces of Bungaree and those of two Nyungar men in early nineteenth-century maritime expeditions. Both reveal complicated indigenous histories reverberating around European exploration, though both also remainwaryof overstating the accessibility of indigenous agency. Interestingly, the chapter jointly written by Catherine Bishop and Richard White seems determinedly unwary of such dangers, refuting at several junctures the invisible quality of indigenous presence in explorer accounts and arguing instead that the archives suggest much genuine affection between participants and even in some instances (as in naming practices) a sense of explorer celebration of

From Pawns to Players: Rewriting the Lives of Three Indigenous Go-Betweens

In the London summer of 1762, Lord Egremont, the Secretary of State in charge of Britain’s overseas colonies, welcomed the latest arrival of an indigenous diplomat to the imperial metropolis. The Cherokee warrior, Ostenaco, had travelled to London to meet King George III, ostensibly to seal a peace treaty just signed between the British and the Cherokee back in the Appalachians. Egremont was a gracious host and ensured that Ostenaco would, during his two-month stay, ‘want for nothing’.1 To the governor of Virginia who had arranged his trip, however, Egremont was less warm. ‘You rightly observe’, he wrote to Governor Fauquier, ‘that such visitors are always troublesome’.2