Tony Ballantyne

Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past

BOOK OVERVIEW These essays offer an in-depth and critical analysis of the complex nature and impact of empire building. Webs of Empire centres around the principal argument that colonisation and imperialism was more than a flow of influence from London to the colonies, and was rather a ‘complex mesh of flows, exchanges and engagements that linked New Zealand to other colonies as well as to Britain, the heart of the empire’. This work also offers an analysis of New Zealand’s colonial past and engages with the historiography and craft of the historian. These are new perspectives on New Zealand’s national story and pointed reference that New Zealand history is more than just Māori and Pākehā relations. Ballantyne also discusses the role historians have played in the development of national identity, for example the entrenchment of the view that New Zealand is bicultural. He responds by outlining the influence that other ethnic groups, such as Indian immigrants, have had on the development of the New Zealand landscape.

THE CHANGING SHAPE OF THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY

This historiographical review assesses recent studies of the development of the modern British empire. It appraises works that explore the transformation of the empire, its changing cultural pattern, and the forces that radically reshaped the empire during the twentieth century. I argue that within the clear shift towards cultural interpretations of the imperial past, three main areas of analytical concern have taken shape: the importance of information and knowledge in empire building, the centrality of cultural difference within imperial social formations, and the place of imperial networks and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the operation of the empire. The review suggests that the relationships between the economic and cultural domains of empire require close examination and that historians of empire must remain attentive to the weight and significance of pre-colonial structures and mentalities in moulding the shape of colonial political and cultural terrains.

Paper, Pen, and Print: The Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge Order

Knowledge has become a central problematic in recent work on cross-cultural encounters and the processes of empire building. In an array of contexts—from Spanish America to colonial South Africa, from Ireland to occupied Egypt, the American West to British India—anthropologists and historians have highlighted the ways in which “colonial knowledge” facilitated trade, the extraction of rent and taxes, conversion, and outright conquest. This scholarship has demonstrated how these new forms of understanding produced on imperial frontiers facilitated the actual extension of sovereignty and the consolidation of colonial authority: for Tzvetan Todorov, Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks alike, colonialism was a “conquest of knowledge.” Scholarship on empire building in the Americas has placed special emphasis on the place of literacy in the dynamics of conquest. Walter Mignolo in particular has argued that European understandings of the power of literacy encouraged Spaniards in the New World to discount the value of indigenous graphic systems and disparage Mesoamerican languages as untruthful, unreliable, and products of the Devil. For Mignolo, the dark side of the new knowledge orders born out of the Renaissance was a new interweaving of literacy, knowledge, and colonization in a new cultural order he dubs “coloniality.” In the North American literature, too, literacy has been seen as a crucial element in imperial intrusion and conquest. James Axtell, for example, has argued “The conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice. The victors wrote their way to the New World and inscribed themselves on its maps.”

Mobility, empire, colonisation

This article examines the role of mobility in the operation of modern maritime empires and identifies some of the particular ways in which mobility was constituted as a ‘problem’ in debates over colonisation. After briefly mapping a range of ways in which different forms of mobility underwrote the processes of empire, the article turns to the colony of Otago. It sketches how arguments about the meaning of different types of movement played out in a specific colonial location where tensions over fixity and mobility stood at the heart of struggles over the meaning of both ‘empire’ and ‘community’. This article has been peer-reviewed.

The Emergence of Aryanism: Company Orientalism, Colonial Governance and Imperial Ethnology

Over the last decade, historians have increasingly identified the mid-eighteenth century as a period in which both the British empire and British identities underwent rapid redefinition. Popular imperialism and strident nationalism are no longer seen as the sui generis products of the Victorian age, as recent research has delineated increasingly aggressive imperial ideologies articulated by Britons from the conclusion of the Seven Years War through to the Age of Reform.1 As the American crisis plunged Britain’s Atlantic empire into disarray, the British state constructed new regimes of domestic surveillance and consolidated its authority on the ‘Celtic fringes’ (especially in the wake of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland), while commerce and conquest added a host of new territories to the empire.2 Eager for new markets and resources, agents of empire expanded British commercial influence and political authority in Asia and the Pacific: the East India Company emerged as a South Asian territorial power in 1765 and increasingly consolidated its influence in South-East Asia following its acquisition of Penang in 1786, and James Cook led three voyages into the Pacific between 1768 and 1779, enabling the foundation of a new colony in Australia in 1788.

Introduction: Aryanism and the Webs of Empire

Eric Wolf’s insistence that historical writing should unravel the ‘bundles of relationships’ that constituted the past underpins this study of the complex networks that constituted the British empire. Wolf’s quotation continues to resonate today as, despite increasing calls for transnational and global histories, most historical writing continues to treat nations, cultures and societies as abstract and bounded entities. Despite the work of historians on long distance trade, the integration of Eurasia (or in Marshall Hodgson’s formulation Afro-Eurasia), and capitalism over the longue duree, most history continues to be organized on the basis of a fixed geographical referent generally congruent with a modern nation-state.2 This study moves away from a narrow focus on one nation or civilization, instead conceiving of the British empire as a ‘bundle of relationships’ that brought disparate regions, communities and individuals into contact through systems of mobility and exchange. It does not dispense with the nation-state altogether, for India, New Zealand and the United Kingdom remain prominent throughout, but rather re-imagines these nations as dynamic and diverse communities constantly being remade by the migration, trade and international conflict born out of British imperialism.

Print, Literacy and the Recasting of Maori Identities

Thus far, this study has charted the emergence of Indocentric frame-works for the analysis of Polynesian, but especially Maori, culture and history. As we have seen, complex webs of correspondence and emerging patterns of institutional exchange spanned disparate parts of the British empire (and reached out into other imperial and institutional knowledge systems), integrating scholars in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Asia, the Malay peninsula, the Pacific islands and Australasia into new interpretative communities. I have particularly stressed the prominence of the Christian converts, scribal elites and other ‘native experts’ who shaped, contested and reinterpreted this thickening archive of ethnological material.

Conclusion: Knowledge, Empire, Globalization

This study has demonstrated the centrality of Aryanism in British imperial culture, not only in British India, but also in South-East Asia, the Pacific and Britain itself. Within the British empire in the long nineteenth century Aryanism became a crucial heuristic device in colonial politics, popular journalism and imperial ethnology. Sir William Jones’s ethnological essays, which insisted on a common cultural genealogy shared by Indians and Europeans, did not locate European origins in a ‘harmless and distant’ Orient as Said suggests: rather it fundamentally unsettled divisions between Europe and Asia, Britain and India, colonizer and colonized. The Aryan idea was both powerful and troubling. It seemed to unlock the broad sweep of universal history (and the place of the British empire within that grand narrative), but also caused much anxiety. What cultural bonds did Britons and Indians (or Polynesians) really share? If these ties of kinship were substantial, on what basis could imperial authority be constructed? The divergent visions of the Aryan theory examined in this study and the intensity of the debates that surrounded this notion reflected the moral and political weight of these questions.

Indocentrism on the New Zealand Frontier: Geographies of Race, Empire and Nation

This chapter examines a series of cultural connections and intellectual exchanges between India and the Pacific that have been elided by historians of empire as well as being neglected within the historiography of individual colonies. From the early nineteenth century, Orientalist learning played a central role in the development of Pacific studies, providing comparative evidence, analytical frameworks and methodological insights that were embraced by scholar-administrators and ethnographers in the Pacific. While at a general level, this engagement with Orientalism reflected the cultural authority that the work of Jones, Prichard or Max Muller enjoyed, more specifically, however, it was a powerful ‘imagined geography’ borne out of European imperialism.

Systematizing Religion: from Tahiti to the Tat Khalsa

So far this study has focused on the relationship between race and language within debates over Aryanism, tracing the rise of Company Orientalism, the dissemination of ethnological models from British India throughout the empire, and the ways in which Aryanism reshaped a range of colonial identities, ideologies and institutions. In this chapter, my analysis shifts to focus on ‘religion’, a key but often neglected problematic within histories of colonialism. Colonial governments exercised authority over communities whose cosmologies and ritual traditions were at sharp variance with the Protestant traditions that many Britons hoped to transplant to the frontiers of empire. Here I argue that the reality of cultural difference within the empire not only worked to invest the category of ‘religion’ with particular salience, but that it also transformed European understandings of the very meaning of ‘religion’. British imperial expansion in the later eighteenth century provided vast amounts of fresh evidence about non-Christian cultures and new testing-grounds for European theories about the nature of religion. The extension of British mercantile and missionary activity into the Pacific and the hinterlands of the great South Asian port cities brought the informal and formal servants of empire into contact with a range of ‘new’, and often challenging, beliefs and practices.