Writing Transnational History 9781474263986, 9781474263993, 9781474264020, 9781474264013

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Writing Transnational History

WRITING HISTORY The Writing History series publishes accessible overviews of particular fields in history, focusing on the practical application of theory in historical writing. Books in the series succinctly explain central concepts to demonstrate the ways in which they have informed effective historical writing. They analyse key historical texts and their producers within their institutional arrangement, and as part of a wider social discourse. The series’ holistic approach means students benefit from an enhanced understanding of how to negotiate the contours of successful historical writing. Series editors: Stefan Berger (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany), Heiko Feldner (Cardiff University, UK) and Kevin Passmore (Cardiff University, UK) Published: Writing History (second edition), edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore Writing Medieval History, edited by Nancy F. Partner Writing Early Modern History, edited by Garthine Walker Writing Contemporary History, edited by Robert Gildea and Anne Simonin Writing Gender History (second edition), Laura Lee Downs Writing Postcolonial History, Rochona Majumdar Writing the Holocaust, edited by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Daniel Langton Writing the History of Memory, edited by Stefan Berger and Bill Niven Writing Material Culture History, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello Forthcoming: Writing History (third edition), edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore Writing Queer History, Matt Cook Writing the History of Nationalism, Stefan Berger and Eric Storm

Writing Transnational History Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully

Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 26 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover images: [left] © Carlos G. Lopez/Getty Images; [right] © AlexSava/Getty Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6398-6 PB: 978-1-4742-6399-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6401-3 eBook: 978-1-4742-6400-6 Series: Writing History Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Table of Contents

Introduction  1 1 Unfree Circuits and the Making of the Transnational  35 2 Oceanic and Settler Colonial British Worlds  65 3 Living the Transnational  95 4 Technologies and Economies of Rule  121 5 Internationalism and Cosmopolitanisms  153 Conclusions  189 Bibliography  201 Index  234

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Introduction

This book is about transnational history and its relationship to the politics of knowledge, the operations of power and the lived experiences of settlers and colonizers, the enslaved and the colonized mostly in the Anglophone world. It moves from the transatlantic to the Indian Oceanic and Pacific, from settler worlds to the formations of anti-colonial and Dominion nation states and from materiality and embodiment in the translocal and intercolonial to the transnational concerns of humanitarianism and cosmopolitanisms. Gaining momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s, transnational history has emerged since as a field contributing in important ways to decentring the nation and the state as the natural foci of historical experience and historical enquiry. It has brought greater attention to the significance of the circulation of people, goods, technology and culture in the making of modernity. And, as a result, it has become a popular approach among historians working outside of the scope and scale of national or imperial history and beyond the lifeworlds of national and imperial subjects. A number of recent surveys have set out the genealogy of transnational history. In our contribution to discussion about the field, we are most concerned with new works that have engaged with the paradigm of transnational history as well as those which, if not explicitly labelled ‘transnational’, have been at the forefront in creating a dynamic field of transnational scholarship. Leading in this capacity, we argue, have been new, transnationally informed historiographies of the Black Atlantic and feminist and comparative scholarship on and from the settler colonies. We are interested in how they have contributed to the capacity of transnational histories to open up historical inquiry to greater critical perspective. In the following pages, we are less concerned, therefore, with identifying what is or is not transnational history than with tracing the transnational effects of a range of new fields of historical inquiry. Among those we consider

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in the following chapters are critical histories of empire, US but also British exceptionalism, transnationalism and transnational lives, gender and empire, labour, slavery and comparative settler studies, histories of technology and internationalism. As experts in Atlantic, Pacific and Commonwealth history, our focus is on the Anglophone world. The vast historical reach of the British Empire as a space of governance provides an important space to study transnational history, especially given the surfeit of archival records, and the circulation of people within it, both through voluntary movements and through forced enslavement and indenture. We join with historians who have insisted upon the importance of acknowledging perspective and of the historian locating herself in relationship to her subject matter. In this respect, we approach transnational history in part as a commitment to document the lives lived in the interstices of nations and power. And we look for inspiration in scholarship that engages with transnationalisms created and experienced by indigenous people or the enslaved, migrants and others. In the process of movement from one place to another, they created trans-communities not captured by ‘nations’ or empires. Collectively, they were shaped by (perhaps distant) homelands and so occupied a complex relationship with European forms of modernity. Much has already been written about ‘the transnational’. In addition to early works modelling the transnational as historical frame (of which we discuss many in the following pages), scholars have written surveys of the field. Notable among them are those offered by two leaders in the field: Pierre Yves Saunier et al., The Dictionary of Transnational History (2009), Saunier, Transnational History: Theory and History (2013) and Iriye, Global and Transnational History (2013). These surveys which we will discuss below, have helped to lay out the field of transnational history. And while this book draws on the insights of these volumes and other work, among our key starting points is the role that feminist scholars and feminist historians, particularly of the British Empire, have played in pioneering the transnational focus beyond the nation from the 1970s. Here one should acknowledge the pioneering feminist work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which simultaneously walked over and through the idea of the nation in its insistence on speaking to the multiple identities of being American and Mexican, of living in the borderlands of the national imaginary and of crossing disciplines, in its bringing together of prose and poetry, writing in both English and Spanish.1 In 1980, Raymond Grew pointed to the fact that historians of women’s history were already deeply engaged with comparative history.2 Angela Woollacott has argued that feminist

Introduction

research has changed the historiography and understanding of empire by taking gender seriously as a category of analysis.3 The 1990s alone saw the publication of works such as Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History, which connected British feminists to their imperial location with specific reference to India4; the publication of the influential article by Caren Caplan on ‘outlaw genres and transnational subjects’5; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Caplan’s Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Practices (1994),6 which deliberately put into conversation work concerning the Global South with those in the Global North.7 Transnational history since the 1990s has built on feminist and postcolonial reformulations of nation, empire and self. Among Australian feminist historians who have made significant contributions to this longer trajectory, in a collection published in 2006 Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys explain that transnational history fundamentally ‘seeks to understand ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries’.8 Writing this kind of transnational history could be no more pertinent than in our present. In the 2010s, the status of humanitarian refugees has been revived as an issue, while the right to asylum has come under attack in many quarters including in the Pacific region.9 Histories of post-war migration in the last century have found new resonance with our present as global responses to the rights of stateless peoples. They have highlighted the historical tensions between forms of mobility, forced or free, and the policing of European national borders.10 In our book we see the contribution of transnational history as a methodological commitment to critical historical practice. This practice aims to attend to power, not least in the construction of the archives, and underlines the need for critical epistemology. These are issues we take up explicitly in Chapter 3 and return to in the conclusion but that appear throughout our book. Embodiment, space and lived experience inherent to these agendas, histories of the Black Atlantic broadly conceived, transnational history on settler colonialisms (such as the Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States) and attention to biography and life histories – each has revealed the lived experiences of and negotiations with or rejections of domination. The unevenness of imperial, colonial and national authority over indigenous peoples points also to the co-productions of the identities and concepts of imperial, settler and ‘native’ that had very real implications for indigenous communities, lands, languages, families and, ultimately, survival. These questions are among key topics discussed in the following pages.

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Transnational history is, not surprisingly, a composite not only of feminist and postcolonial scholarship but a range of methodological and conceptual practices. Critical imperial and settler colonial studies, new global history and entangled history or histoire croisée, feminist and postcolonial approaches to the history of human rights have all contributed to what has become known as the transnational turn. They have lent critical purpose to the ‘trans’ in transnational – which, if read literally, indicates no other intention than to work across national limits.11 But as cultural, gender and postcolonial and minority histories have helped us to realise, as well as reframe national histories the transnational may reveal a plethora of marginalized spaces and subjectivities previously overlooked or unknown, including those of marginalized women, the enslaved or convicted and the poor. Such work has entailed new kinds of archival questions, new regionalisms and periodizations, epistemological interventions and innovative analyses as discussed throughout our book and particularly in Chapters 1 and 3. In Chapter 2, we discuss further the ways in which empire cuts across nationalism and nation-formation, and in Chapter 5, we discuss how internationalism was a parallel if also dissonant site of identification and potential belonging. Histories concerned with the frame of settler colonialism have proved a powerfully critical thread benefiting transnational history and histories of transnationalism by providing new understandings of the interconnections between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan spaces and histories. Transnational historians now do more than defamiliarize subjects, places and events in dominant historical narratives. They have demonstrated that working with spaces and scales beyond national and imperial borders and boundaries can reveal more about the fractured and uneven nature of authoritative historical events. For example, analysing imperial authority entails considering both the horrors of enslavement and the ways in which enslaved people asserted agency, as well as an awareness of the porousness of periodization, regionalism and territoriality. By replacing centre–periphery models with those based on circulation and interaction, as well as uncovering genealogies of continuity and discontinuity rather than structure or origin, otherwise invisible transnationalisms materialize. As Tony Ballantyne has argued, only by pursuing the ‘webs’ of empire in both vertical and horizontal planes, we can understand the structure of empire as an entangled, dynamic and constantly shifting entity rather than an independent force.12 Nostalgia for national history is sometimes raised by those concerned by its apparent lesser status in transnational studies. Through his work on labour history in global context, Marcel Van der Linden has argued, however, that the

Introduction

issue for historians is not so much the status of national history but what kinds of ‘methodological nationalism’ were embedded within the modern discipline of History as it emerged alongside nations in the late nineteenth century.13 This disciplinary effect has been felt locally, nationally, regionally and globally and in our chosen subjects of study. In At the Heart of Empire, Antoinette Burton advises that we need ‘to work counter intuitively about manifestations of globality’14 in order to bring into our range of vision the everyday effects of the legacies of imperialism and nationalism as well as of imperial and national history upon our lives today and in our work as historians on the past. Recognizing this complex relationship constitutes a form of transnational thinking in its own right. It reminds us that our relationship to the past is shaped by what we think we know of our own present. From the 1970s, historians in and of Britain sought to bring greater attention to the flawed relationship between history and memory, a complex teleology inflected by the historical formations of imperial and colonial subjectivities but also by the presence of empire in the culture and society of metropolitan life.15 Remembering the past has been powerfully instructive in various settler colonial societies. During the era of Truth and Reconciliation, communities sought to reckon with past and present violence through formal truth commissions, as in South Africa, and in a range of more diffuse processes focused on memory work and recognition.16 For historians working in educational institutions, ample evidence can be seen of the continuing effects of these histories in the present-day hierarchies of whiteness in universities themselves. In the next section, we offer a brief overview through snapshots of the emergence of transnational history. We do this to set the stage for the growing engagement with the transnational turn from the 2000s, raising questions about what its popularity indicates about the state of history today and where recent concerns about its mainstream status and growing ascendancy (questions returned to in the conclusion) may lead our discussion in the following chapters.

Transnational history becomes a field The immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of new global relationships moving beyond the containment of the Cold War and the rise of a neoliberal framework with its emphasis on markets and global

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trade – these historical events all provided impetus for the emergence of the discrete field of transnational history in the 1990s as several disciplines along with history aimed to decentre contemporary understandings of the world as a one comprised only of nations. Key features of this body of scholarship have been the concentration on circuits and flows of movement, both technology and people, within a globalized and interconnected world, working with concepts such as hybridity and culture transfer.17 As we noted at the outset, Pierre-Yves Saunier is a leading scholar of transnational history. He identifies work in sociology on globalization; the study of immigration in anthropology and sociology; the theorizing of transnational; and the field of international relations as key nodal points in the emerging focus on the transnational in this period. Akira Iriye argues in Global and Transnational History that historians fell ‘behind history’ (since globalization had been underway since the 1960s at least) but caught up in the 1990s.18 As these examples illustrate, much of the early transnational historiography was primarily concerned with the relationship between the nation and the global. At the same time, it outlined the possibility of new approaches beyond the nation. Ian Tyrrell says that ‘the idea of a self-conscious agenda called transnational history first came into being, linked to a specific research program’ in 1989–1991. Though ‘closely associated with an article [he] wrote in the American Historical Review (1991), [Tyrrell states that] the idea had been suggested in a narrower form in 1989 by Iriye who argued for an examination not just of nationalism but of “internationalism” and suggested the study of an explicitly “transnational cultural history” to complement purely national developments’.19 Traditionally, as Thomas Adam states, transnational history has been ‘foremost about recovering history as a universal project’.20 But the limits to that project are many. In their introduction to The Dictionary of Transnational History published in 2009, editors Iriye and Saunier note that the transnational is only one approach among a variety of global, connected and entangled approaches that share broadly the same agenda of looking beyond the nation. In their view, the term ‘transnational’ has proven sufficiently general to encourage dialogue between them.21 For Saunier (2013), the transnational approach is connected to other big picture historical approaches such as global and world history, but is also applicable to ‘all spaces, scales and topics’.22 Transnational history is thus one of various disciplines and fields such as world, imperial and national histories that work with scales and temporalities larger than and smaller than the national.23 Matthew Connelly argues for the combination of international, transnational, world and global history in order to best ‘contribute to a new way of understanding

Introduction

the world’.24 He is critical of the totalizing concept of ‘world history’ that tries to tell the ‘history of everybody and everything’ but he argues for the value of ‘studies that instead tracked encounters and exchanges of all kinds – including exploration, commodities, contagion, and material culture’.25 Nevertheless, much transnational history has been concerned with the last two hundred to two hundred and fifty years, since the era of the socalled democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century.26 Transnational scholars writing on American and European history have worked to demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the nation and to focus on global flows and connections and thus see space as an important analytic to transnational history.27 Transnational historians in the majority undoubtedly focus on an era which witnessed the rise of the nation state, not least in order to show precisely how historically bounded the nation is as a concept. They urge scholars to move beyond the parochialism of history training in the twentieth century. Writing of the efficacy of this limited time frame, Iriye and Saunier endorse the usefulness of a transnational approach to the modern period, which from the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the rise of nationalism. Of this historical period, they write: We are interested in links and flows, and want to track people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies. Among the units that were thus crossed, consolidated or subverted in the modern age, first and foremost were the national ones, if only because our work addresses the moment, roughly from the middle of the 19th century until nowadays, when nations came to be seen and empowered as the main frames for the political, cultural, economic and social life of human beings.28

One obvious problem with this historical periodization of transnational history with the rise of nationalism is the risk of reiterating the trajectory of the transnational out of European international history. The comparison of nations in this way can work to normalize the idea that nationalism is the future of all peoples and societies. Such a reinscription effectively closes down scrutiny of the historical formation of nations and their relationship to transnationalism.29 This kind of transnational history, we would argue, still privileges the formal circuits of European power even as it seeks to move beyond them. And we have sought out for our book the kinds of transnational histories that study people across the structures by which they organized their lives, the nation being one (in many cases, a dominant one) among them.30 Thus transnational history, Saunier states, is ‘not written against or without

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nations, but simultaneously pays attention to what lives against, between and through them’.31 As Saunier also suggests, the focus on flows and circulations and mobilities ‘puts great strain’ on the nation as the key organizing principle of modernity precisely because transnational history shows the significance of other relationships such as the village, the family and the personal that interacted alongside individual or collective identifications with nationalism or imperialism.32 One of the critical questions for transnational historians is, therefore, how to foreground the operations, negotiations and resistances of power that shaped the lives of their transnational subjects. And this is a critical question since, as Micol Siegel observed in 2005, ‘interest in transnational approaches to history now reaches from the most radical to the most orthodox branches of the profession’.33 Similarly, transnational history has a critical relationship to world history. In his article ‘The Rise of Global and Transnational History’ published in 2013, Iriye notes the role of transnational history in displacing the kinds of ‘world’ history taught since the late nineteenth century, in which a progressive narrative about Europe and the English-speaking world appeared to represent history itself. Instead, global and transnational historians proposed a new approach aiming to desconstruct the nation while recognizing its historical power. Informed by critical imperial histories, these new transnational and global histories increasingly replaced ‘Western Civilization’ and ‘World History’ courses in schools and universities that rehearsed notions of ‘the West versus the rest’.34 The study and teaching of world histories highlighted comparisons and connections, as well as distinctions and disconnections between and beyond nations. Furthermore, by drawing attention to the imperial ambitions of settler colonial nations themselves, comparative transnational history has also helped to fracture resilient progressive narratives of ‘empire-to-decolonization’ or ‘settler colony-to-nationhood’. Relocating nationalist or imperialist histories in transnational and comparative mode has revealed the similar or different imperial ambitions of one nation to another. The example of US history was of particular importance in situating the transnational approach to history, where ideas of uniquely progressive nationhood deflected attention from American settler colonialism and US imperialism.35 In looking beyond the nation, transnational history has made a broader reckoning with processes such as migration, migration flows, technology and ideas such as human rights. A new lexicon has accompanied such foci, as we will see in this book, from ‘[n]etworks’ and ‘hybridity’ to ‘diasporas’, among others.36 These key metaphors and methodologies are needed in order

Introduction

to write history that no longer relies on linear or singular narrativizations, including of the nation.37 Saunier reflects that the field of transnational history has provided a methodology that reactivates national history by asserting its transnational formation. Transnational history has been sufficiently established to now have its own annual journal: The Yearbook of Transnational History. As Thomas Adam says in the introduction to the first volume, ‘instead of researching and writing the history of particular phenomena within the confines of any given nation state, the paradigm of transnational history encourages historians to follow trends, events, and people in all directions that they went’.38 And historians have certainly done this: a Google search in August 2018 for ‘transnational history’ pulled up some 212,000 results; a Google Scholar search some 14,400.

US and European genealogies of transnational history In an early discussion of the transnational turn in US historiography appearing in American Historical Review in 1991, Ian Tyrrell considered the then comparative approaches being mobilized as a corrective to American exceptionalism. In an article titled ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’ he concluded that the United States would remain the foundational unit of analysis until the nation was recognized more fully as a historical artefact. Without this realization, he feared that frontier violence against indigenous peoples would remain veiled and American nationformation would continue to be valorized as a noble and benign process, and as one leading to the establishment of a supposedly unique democracy in world history. Tyrrell wrote that neither comparative nor ‘international’ perspectives (here prefacing the transnational) had yet been able to ‘transcend the boundaries of [exceptionalist] nationalist historiography’. Tyrrell argued that for this to take place, ‘national perspectives’ would need to become ‘historicised and relativised’ beyond the comparative international frameworks of US historiography.39 This desired outcome would only be achieved through developing a new ‘historiographical project organised in terms of a simultaneous consideration of differing geographical scales – the local, the national, and the transnational’.40

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A little over ten years later, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Prasenjit Duara concluded that efforts at reading history for large-scale movements and worldly mind-sets were still falling short. Concerned also with national exceptionalism but in this case in relation to imperial rule, Duara pointed to European traditions in the Annales School and in Marxist history that focused on worker solidarities or community-formations and mindscapes but ‘rarely attended to the myriad subtle ties between linear history and the nation-state’.41 Reflecting on his own training in these approaches, Duara concluded that they remained trapped in progressive national temporal and spatial frames, meaning that he and other students had not been encouraged to ‘question what makes the nation the community that empirically defines history and political identity. Even less [did] we acquire the means to explore the time-space vectors that construct the nation as an object of inquiry’.42 For Duara, the continuing domination of the nation in modern historiography had resulted in a lack of critical investigation of the ‘principal means of claiming sovereignty in the emerging system of nationstates’ based on the ‘three-way relationship between a people, a territory, and a history’.43 Thus, it remained the case that those historical subjects who enjoyed the privileges of national sovereignty were also those considered to have had the ‘right’ to conquer and colonize those without the same privileges, a teleological version of ‘history’ that effectively excluded the colonized from ‘reconstituting themselves as nations to enter history and join the narrative of progress and modernity’.44 This realization led Duara to investigate in his own work the ‘relatively weak links in the ideological hegemony of nationalism’ especially along frontiers and in zones of contact.45 Thus space should be understood not as a ‘container of history’ but as itself a product of history.46 Furthermore, when viewed comparatively it became evident that ‘spaces can divide and join histories’.47 The implications for our present are manifold, he advised, given that ‘modern territorial boundaries are illusory means of keeping histories apart’.48 This fact requires us to work across boundaries in order to show how they have been authorized and naturalized.49 Whether by studying conflict and cooperation proclaimed in the name of ‘the nation’ or the exclusions and inclusions of individuals or groups from the national community, transnational historians have set out to understand the production and maintenance of not only nations but the very imperial and national frameworks through which subjectivities have been formed. In European genealogies, the transnational is often said to have its roots in sociologically informed ‘transfer studies’ focusing on the experience of migration. Transfer studies was in turn influenced by the interest in large

Introduction

social forces and collectivities promoted by (neo)Marxist historiography and by the Annales School with its interest in mentalités or lifeworlds, rather than structures. In their preface for Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, the editors Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka argue that the transnational turn combines comparative and entangled history approaches. Comparative history concerned with similarities and differences between regions, economies, cultures and nation states when combined with entangled histories has produced historical research focused on ‘transfer, interconnection, and mutual influences across boundaries’ at the ‘limits of national history’.50 In French and German historiographies influenced by postcolonialism, transnationalism and globalization, entangled and comparative histories overlap perhaps most productively in studies of migration concerned with transnationalism and cultural transfer. Haupt and Kocka state that the tensions produced by their productive combination can make apparent new historical particularities and defamiliarize one’s own discipline. Without this upsetting of the usual and the assumed, established narratives return unexamined and periodizations that see Europe as the active agent in relation to other places on the map are reinscribed. Against the dominant narrative that the Industrial Revolution occurred first in Britain and was only later taken up in other parts of the world, for example, transnational studies show that industrialization in Britain emerged in tandem with colonization and in many cases was driven by it.51 Reflecting on the interrelationship between the global and the local in transnational history, Haupt and Kocka point to the power of individualized cases as objects of investigation with the potential to ‘[shatter] continuities and [interrupt] the flow of a narrative’.52 They function, therefore, as ‘exemplary cases of a general phenomenon’ that otherwise might become abstracted under the weight of the vastness of the topic under investigation.53 Case studies provide the historian with the capacity to return anew to compare and contrast.54 Attention to individuals and bodies on the ground reminds us that beyond studying literal movement and mobility, transnational histories concern those who did not travel, or who did not identify with or seek to transcend the nation but were impacted by its transnational effects in myriad ways in what have been called translocal spaces (discussed in more detail in the course of this book). Cultural history has been a key influence in interrogating historical studies of structures, institutions and processes through symbolic forms, cultural practices, values and meaning.55 Similarly, entangled histories have been concerned with ‘the deeply asymmetrical but entangled relationship between

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colonial powers and colonies, between metropolis and periphery, between West and other parts of the world’.56 Such histories have emphasized ‘the connections, the continuity, the belonging-together, the hybridity of observable spaces or analytical units’ rather than distinguishing them in absolute terms.57 Another pertinent theme in European historiography taking place alongside debate about the transnational in relation to Anglo-American history has been the entanglements of intersecting (croisée) histories. In an article on histoire croisée, Werner and Zimmerman commend connected or shared histories approaches that (as we saw above) emerged from European ‘transfer studies’. They argue for the ‘historicization of both objects and categories of analysis’ in order to reconsider ‘the way history can combine empirical and reflexive concerns into a dynamic and flexible approach’.58 In their view, histoire croisée epitomizes this ‘relational’ approach because it sets out to examine ‘the links between various historically constituted formations’.59 They arrived at histoire croisée through comparative methods and ‘transfer studies’ by which each had returned to established histories in order to find ‘buried’ realities that had been overlooked within them.60 Adopting a croisée methodology, they wrote, enabled them to move beyond reframing existing histories by applying an additional layer of enquiry that recognizes ‘a multiplicity of possible viewpoints and the divergences resulting from the languages, terminologies, categorizations and conceptualizations, traditions, and disciplinary usages’.61 Thus ‘[i]n contrast to the mere restitution of an “already there”, histoire croisée places emphasis on what, in a self-reflexive process, can be generative of meaning’.62 In this sense, histoire croisée contributes in important ways to new (we would argue, transnational) trends in ‘comparative approaches, transfers, and more generally, socio-cultural interactions’.63 It thereby makes it possible to apprehend entirely new phenomena using renewed frameworks of analysis ‘through a threefold process of historicization: through the object, the categories of analysis, and the relationships between researcher and object. This methodology thus provides a toolbox that, over and beyond the historical sciences, can be applied across a number of other disciplines that combine past and present perspectives’.64

The transnational present Historians have sought to understand their own worlds through studying the past. This present mode of thinking about the past has drawn from developments in other disciplines such as sociological and cultural

Introduction

studies of globalization and modernity in the present day. New kinds of transnational history enabled by interdisciplinarity have revealed historical interconnections between ‘history’ and other disciplines especially anthropology, sociology and political theory, and literary studies.65 Saunier has argued, for example, that from the nineteenth-century sociology has provided early models for transnational modes of inquiry leading to International Relations and has been influential more recently in shaping new ideas about ‘culture’. The combination of cultural and transnational studies saw the establishment of the Center for Transcultural Studies at the University of Chicago in 1986, leading to the re-emergence of migration studies in which the gendered social and cultural experiences of migrating were foregrounded. According to Saunier, following the lead of anthropologists and sociologists who set out to understand societies and cultures within and beyond national borders through studying responses to globalization, in the 1990s ‘[m]odern historians caught the transnational wind in a general climate where “globalization” was the key buzzword’.66 Conversely, adopting transnational frameworks has precipitated a range of historical fields generating new momentum. For example, along with new comparative imperial and colonial histories, regional frameworks have emerged emphasizing co-production and interconnection between nation and the temporal formation of regions as defined geographic spaces.67 Perhaps one of the key issues facing the transnational historian is how to delineate new historical periodizations and narrativizations. As well as defamiliarizing recognizable pasts and returning us anew to well-used archives and oft-trodden pathways, the transnational turn has produced histories that raise profound questions about what stands for history and who are its historical actors. Following Van der Linden’s warning about the resilience of methodological nationalism, we argue in the following pages that transnational history requires us to reflect on the ways in which empire has been and continues to be mobilized in claims of national exceptionalism. The resilience of this historical effect is evidence of what Antoinette Burton has argued in The Trouble with Empire are the supposed solidities and virtues of empire and nation rehearsed in progressive and teleological readings of the past. Burton advises that the resistances and agencies of those colonized or otherwise caught up in the oppressive forces of colonization must always be our starting point in our historical investigation.68 The nation has been a normative experience for only some of the world’s populations, given vast numbers among them having been locked out of membership in the nation by virtue of their sexuality, gender and/or race, or have found the concept of

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the nation irrelevant to their lives and communities in complex relationship to those histories of colonization and decolonization, or ongoing settlement, swirling around them. These kinds of transnational histories were reflected in the first online ‘Conversation’ forum in 2006 that chose as its topic ‘Transnational History’. On the basis that transnational history, ‘like other innovative approaches to history, is in danger of becoming merely a buzzword’, several leading historians working in the field reflect on the overlap between global and imperial and colonial history that had contributed to the success of the transnational turn. The forum begins by considering whether US transnational history had focused mostly on US overseas empire and not sufficiently on the internal colonization intrinsic to the United States as a settler colony. One of the participants, C.A. Bayly, declares that transnational history has been most productive in the ‘study of diasporas, social and political, which cross national boundaries’ but he is concerned that its interest in the nation might limit the transnational intervention given ‘large parts of the globe were not dominated by nations so much as empires, city-states, diasporas’.69 This concern has continued to be a tension within the transnational approach. Another participant, Patricia Seed, adds that she sees the popularity of the term reflecting the fact that it has allowed historians to ‘address situations in the past that were analogous to the ones we experience in the present’.70 In migration history, the ‘transnational dimension has led historians to examine the impact and reason for migration at both the point of departure and that of arrival’, and to think as well about the return of migrants to countries of origin, the recognition of which having been led by historians of slavery and slave trades (as we see in Chapters 1 and 3). Moreover, the comparative element within transnational history operates not only between two locations but between the past and present, which ‘implies a comparison between the contemporary movement of groups, goods, technology, or people across national borders and the transit of similar or related objects or people in an earlier time’.71 In her contribution, Isabel Hofmeyr endorses transnational history for its capacity to ‘[open] up broader analytical possibilities for understanding the complex linkages, networks and actors in the global South’. On the question of the national in transnational, Hofmeyr suggests that by thinking about the ‘biography of the term … [in comparison] to the career of the rubric “postcolonial”’, it is possible to see that transnational approaches have been likewise mobilized in order to investigate ‘the cultural meanings of geopolitical processes in a world shaped by imperial forces’.72 She adds that,

Introduction

therefore, ‘the focus on mobility and movement is more than a theme in transnational history, but is in itself a methodology’.73 Since emerging in the 1990s, the transnationalizing of history had become increasingly mainstream. In his contribution to the roundtable conversation, Matthew Connelly concludes that transnational history became in the interim a kind of ‘brand … that some invoke … when doing very conventional kinds of scholarship’.74 By contrast, he calls for its ongoing reinvigoration as a critical intervention into the writing of history. How else, he asks, will it be possible to develop a ‘new understanding of the world’ of the sort necessary to ‘explain[ing] the growing challenges to state sovereignty, or the rise of international and nongovernmental organisations, or the global response to inherently transnational phenomena, such as migration and environmental change’?75 Undoubtedly, the popular status of transnational history has much to do with the forces of globalization and transnationalism experienced today. This evident parallel between the present and the history transnational historians write requires sustained critical attention, asking that we become strangers in our own worlds as well as in those that came before us. We will have more to say in this book about the ‘peripheral’ vision required to undertake this kind of estrangement. The term is drawn from Scully’s commentary in her work on Sara Baartman (discussed further in Chapter 3).76 Similarly, Frederick Cooper has written about his interest in ‘framing’: ‘how [when] unposable questions come to be asked … angles of vision change’.77 And Patricia Clavin has likened to honeycombs the minority spaces that counter-intuitive subjects occupy. Not bounded by networks, moreover, these unexpected and unlikely porous spaces are what ‘sustains and gives shape to the identities of nation-states, and geographical spaces’.78 In addition, the emergence of translocal and transcultural history has brought new emphasis to the incongruities and ruptures that transnational history’s focus on webs and mobility may underestimate. Thinking beyond the lifeworlds of metropolitan subjects has led, for example, to transnational colonial histories from below and from the margins concerned with a range of transnationalisms experienced by individuals and collectivities excluded from the kinds of worldly citizenship enjoyed by white middle– class colonizers and settlers. For such marginalized or minority subjects and groups, being mobile often entailed dislocation within colonial or national boundaries, their mobility marked by cruelty and suffering rather than the pleasures of cosmopolitanism.

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These alternative transnational histories bring into question the degrees of agency available to those who did not write their own histories, who became mobile subjects through being removed from their lands and communities or who journeyed far from them but against their will. As we return to in Chapter 5, by the early twentieth century the histories of slavery and colonization, Jim Crow in the United States or apartheid in South Africa, had inspired a range of transnationally informed and read publications by such Pan-African and African American activists as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey.79 More recently, historians are also situating African American history in a transnational frame: Carol Anderson has shown that in contrast to earlier understandings, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, in fact had longstanding engagement with Africa. In her Set the World on Fire, Keisha Blain documents the contributions of African American women to black nationalism and internationalism in the interwar years.80 As indicated by John Maynard’s reflection on Aboriginal activism in 1920s Australia for The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, these two realms – the PanAfrican and the Indigenous – have sometimes interacted transnationally.81 In the settler colonies, indigenous women and men often made political use of the effects of transnationalism by mobilizing international rights discourses or by seeking to claim international humanitarian networks as allies against discriminatory policies and domestic forms of injustice. Scholarship spanning historical domains previously assumed to be quite distinct epitomizes the capacity of the transnational to excavate hitherto obscured histories of engagement and mutual influence. But at the same time, it can bring into greater focus their limits and disjunctures. Jonathan Hyslop warns against a tendency in transnational histories to see webs of exchange rather than their obstruction and thus of replacing national narratives with equally progressive transnational ones. He points in particular to those histories of decolonization in which ‘the nation’ can (re)appear as a necessary source of liberation from imperial rule. Assuming nationalism to be the desired outcome of anti-colonial activism risks reinscribing the idea that ‘the nation’ stands for ‘progress’: ‘[W]e should not assume that anti-colonial nationalism was a normative, universally present, and pervasive force throughout the colonial period.’82 Rather, decolonization was an ‘uneven practice’ carried out variously in the diverse ‘actions of the colonized’.83 The transnational turn has also impacted upon the history of humanitarianism and internationalism. Rob Skinner and Alan Lester

Introduction

argue that ‘that the history of humanitarianism can usefully be viewed as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging transimperial, international and transnational approaches’.84 Glenda Sluga has argued that while the twentieth century was the century of emboldened nationalism, it was also the century of internationalism, that imaginative ‘realism’ stimulating the creation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations.85 This analysis accords with Samuel Moyn’s argument of the very recent origins of human rights, not in the eighteenth-century revolutions but rather in the context of the 1940s.86 Finding antecedents for this post-war rights agenda in the interwar years, recent studies have addressed the League of Nations both as a transnational phenomenon and as an innovative institution.87 In her introduction to Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the Wars, Patricia Clavin points out that the term ‘transnational’ emerged alongside the rise of modern international organization associated with the League of Nations after the First World War. From the 1970s, unprecedented levels of interconnection between the peoples and nations of the world contributed to a growing orientation towards transnational scholarship that sought to understand and compare global concepts and create new histories beyond national boundaries. During this same time, international relations scholars aimed to bring more focus to exchanges between non-government organizations exceeding those transacted at the inter-national level. Echoing others discussed in this Introduction, Clavin argues that ‘The “nation” does not stand in opposition to transnationalism as a bordercrossing understanding of the latter term implies, but rather is an essential element in shaping the phenomenon’.88 Given the two modes of relation and inquiry are intrinsically intertwined, she writes that new histories of interwar internationalism have been concerned increasingly with ‘transnational encounter[s] … [that] tell us as much about the national contexts which condition and inscribe them as they do about the work they seek to reshape’.89 Clavin adds that histories of cultural contact, economics and internationalism have always been transnational, and so the essentially cross-border nature of these histories has been able to be brought to the fore through transnational approaches. Looking to the transnationalisms of internationalists has opened up new understandings of the fluid, multiple and contradictory ways in which internationalism has been carried out beyond intergovernmental or international interactions.90 While welcoming the transnational investigation of nation-formations in international context, Clavin warns equally against assuming that the proliferation

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of international organizations and encounters during the first half of the twentieth century led to a more connected world. She contends, as we do, that transnational history must also investigate the evident breaks and gaps between networks, their dying off and their replacement.91 Other research has shown that international exchanges were important likewise in the formations of immigration restrictions in the White Nations designed to protect a specific version of national identity. Similarly, Marilyn Lake has documented the racialized notions of advancement and whiteness shared by Australia, South Africa and the United States.92

Transnational history at the limits Some scholars of globalization have declared the transnational framework insufficient to grasp the complex worlds they uncover. In her work on migration and the United Nations, Emma Rothschild is interested in individuals’ movements across borders or their presence in port cities where many were documented by authorities on behalf of nation states. Some of their correspondence with home found its way into official archives, helping to create histories and memories of their existence. But Rothschild argues that these subjects exist beyond the national and transnational frame, their stories indicating instead that ‘the commemorations of large-scale migrations are sites of memory without location’.93 Aiming to reflect the diversity of globalization and connection that she has termed ‘long-distance’ rather than transnational, in this way Rothschild aims to better represent ‘relations across nations, in the sense of the multitude of other connections between individuals and groups in different nations, whether of migration, commerce, investment, culture, travel, science, infection, or romance’.94 In her view, the transnational does ‘not convey the extent of connections between societies’ or of exchanges that ‘were “transnational” only in that they can be located in the atlases of long-subsequent nations’.95 One response to this complexity comes from the critical analyses of states as much as nations. States have been a feature of historical research in feminist, anti-colonial and migration histories. As Dirk Hoerder points to in his contribution to Haupt and Kocka, ‘Migration historiography is acutely aware of the nation state concept’s internal contradiction: the state was to treat inhabitants as equal before the law, but the concept of nation privileged one cultural group over all others and implied inequality of other-cultured

Introduction

minorities and migrants.’96 Transnational spaces have been often hidden or masked by the explicit or implicit effects of state formation that operated insidiously alongside or other to the mythic, foundational narratives of the nation. State formations point also to the historical investments and the material implications embedded within the racial formations at the heart of European states. For Madeline Y. Hsu, in her investigation of the migrant experiences of Asian Americans, the dominant narrative of US history proclaims its inclusive intentions while in reality being highly exclusionary. In her view, transnationalism offers a useful methodology deployed in Asian American Studies against that narrative. But she adds that aiming to recognize Asians both as actual migrants and as the exemplars of otherness mobilized in nationalist narratives has required more than deconstructing the national narrative. It has called upon historians to uncover the symbolic and actual roles performed by Asians in the defining and enforcing of racial and cultural boundaries in America, including how their presence rearticulated those racial and physical borders by claiming inclusion within the legal and institutional manifestations of the very borders. Hsu concludes that this doubling effect has illustrated how deeply embedded has been the binaristic othering of Asians/Orientals within America’s nation-building processes.97 For Hsu, and we concur, transnational history underlines the intimate inter-constructions of subjectivity, space and power fundamental to the nation-state. Thus, as Hsu contends, the transnational approach offers a productive way to ‘place migration and migrants – with their complicated sets of negotiations, multilayered realities, and multi-directional orientations – at the centre of our discussion’.98 This approach enables historians to ‘carve out the conceptual spaces’ in and through which migrants live their lives despite obstacles placed in their paths by national borders. But while acknowledging the work of scholars seeking to ‘evoke the multifluidity and multi-situatedness of their lives’, in her study Hsu seeks to emphasize also the very real limits of mobility.99 Other criticisms have concerned the risk of transnational approaches to direct attention away from violence and discontinuity experienced in transnational lives. More than just tracing circulation, transnational history has to be concerned not only with connected, entangled and shared histories but with the violence that marks their limits. When reflecting on his own complex formations as a man from Jamaica living in Britain, the cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall has written about the experience of becoming one of those ‘familiar strangers’ from the former colonies whose lives reflected the ‘entanglement’ first theorized

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by the West Indian intellectual, Eduard Glissant.100 At the same time, Hall worried that entanglement did not capture the presence of violence or that a lack of entanglement might equally be formative.101 In their contribution to the volume Comparative and Transnational History, Monica Juneja and Magrit Pernau are critical also of the capacity of the ‘transnational’ to provide historians with the skills they need to engage with the diversity of voices uncovered by their studies. They are concerned by what they see as the Eurocentric nature of much work in migration studies which they declare only pays ‘lip service’ to being otherwise.102 They argue that the analysis of comparative or entangled histories faced the ‘problems of language and discursivity … [that] are indispensable to any engagement with multiple cultural contexts’.103 They call for a new kind of transculturally comparative research that would depart from the colonized–colonizer dyad. For others, the task has been to write history that produces pasts that will be usable in the present. In his introduction to Rethinking American History in a Global Age, editor Thomas Bender makes his own case for a ‘serious conversation between the historical experience of the present and the histories available of the past’.104 The task of the transnational historian, he states, is to write history that explicitly seeks to ‘rethink [the nation’s] … nature and its relations to alternative solidarities and social connections’.105 This task is particularly pressing given the present ‘heightened awareness of both transnational connections and particularistic solidarities, to explore those stories of our past, those experiences at scales other than the nation, that have been forgotten, that have been obscured by the emphasis upon the centrality of the nation in daily life and in historiography’.106 In the case of American history, Bender agrees with the tenacity of the kinds of national origin stories we have noted above and of their continuing legacies in contemporary national myths of foundation inscribing specific kinds of teleological notions of time and space. In these foundational stories, the accomplishment of nationhood acted to legitimize the violence on which it was built. Displacing these myths of origin or progress would allow new ways of thinking about temporality to emerge. Thus ‘[a] history liberated from origins would … historicise the axis of time itself, emphasising structure, transformation, and relations’.107 Without engaging in these acts of liberation, traditional comparative histories cannot ‘explore causal links between the two national experiences being compared’.108 In order to ‘respatialise’ our ‘historical narrative [and] … liberate us from the enclosure of the nation’, we need to ‘imagine a spectrum of social scales, both larger and smaller than the nation and not excluding the nation’.109 We should

Introduction

aim to investigate, therefore, not ‘inert points on a scalar axis, but as social worlds interacting with one another and thus providing multiple contexts for lives, institutions, and ideas’.110 In this way, ‘coexisting histories’ can be woven together that would recognize the diversity of ‘timescales’ in which individuals lived in different presents.111 Finally, then, the ‘historian needs to be a cosmopolitan’ in the sense that they need to see their own history as strange and unfamiliar.112 But, he warns, the aim is not to create more inclusive histories, more of the same. The uncovering of ‘transnationalisms previously overlooked’ should not mean embracing globalization over nationalism.113 This would lead us back to the blindness, complicity and triumphalism that according to Bender are the ‘consequences of unregulated capitalism’.114 The transnational history we explore and interrogate in this book is explicitly concerned with scale and temporality. Firstly, we have argued that transnational history brings greater focus to both national and larger and smaller entities by setting out to investigate their intersecting formations particularly in the context of imperialism and colonization. Secondly, we have noted that not all transnationalisms are shaped by becoming, being or wanting to be national. We have emphasized the need to be cognizant of the dangers of projecting new kinds of progressive narratives into transnational studies, allowing, for example, the nation to (re)appear the assumed agenda of anti-colonialism. And we endorse transnational histories that focus on intimacies and bodies as an antidote to global or large-scale histories which can tend to empty out the materiality of historical discourses, veiling over their actual effects on the ground (including violence), as well as their unevenness and partiality. In their introduction to a special issue of The International History Review in 2011, Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel agree with the scholars included in this Introduction that transnational has become an ‘explicit’ approach since the 1990s because of increasing globalization today. And they point to a desire for an ordering narrative that does not replicate rejected grand narratives. This rejection, they write, has led to a healthy degree of ‘suspicion’ towards ‘monocausal and unilinear macro-explanations’ and, in its place, a turn to transnational history for its ‘undogmatic’ explanatory model: its vagueness being part of its virtue. And they found the popularity of transnational history is reflected in the fact that the student body is itself more transnational than ever before. While these features did not mean overlooking the vast migrations that have shaped world history over the past two centuries at least, nonetheless technologies of exchange and

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transportation that have become vastly more rapid in recent times have led inevitably to more ‘entangled’ worlds.115 Therefore, the challenge for historians, they argue, is how to work at one and the same time across several ‘spatial levels’ that move from the local and individual to the national and supranational and back again.116 As they note, transnational historians often zoom into the local and individual in order to narrativize and humanize their transnational tales. And in the process, they uncover minor or margin spaces and places in which alternative transnationalisms take place in myriad, often ephemeral, forms. They agree that Clavin’s notion of myriad ‘honeycombs’ has been useful in capturing a sense of the porousness of historical change and effect.117 Finally, they remind us that while ‘transnational history is first and foremost a perspective, not a clearly defined method ….[i]t is a change of perspective … which eventually appeals to new methods of analysis’.118 And so they advise that attending to scale – to the ways in which macro effects are played out through the individual and at the local – is the exciting challenge for the transnational historian. An added benefit of the scale and scope of transnational projects is that scholars often need to work collaboratively across disciplines and fields of study119 – and through sharing their knowledge of archives, we would add. As the following outline indicates, the chapters in our book have been designed with the aim of providing readers with useful examples of how these ‘choices’ and connections have been made by leading transnational historians in a range of fields.

Outline of the book Chapter 1 specifically addresses African/Atlantic and Indian Oceanic histories of forced mobility, be it through the slave trade, slavery or indentured labour. The chapter surveys early debates about the meanings of enslavement, which surfaced comparative analyses and transnational experiences. It examines the literature on the transatlantic slave trade and the movement from a focus on demographics to one more attuned to the experiences of enslaved people, framed by Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. This chapter also examines the transnational story of crops, with a particular focus on the debates around Judith Carney’s Black Rice and the legacy of African culture/s in the Americas. The discussion then pivots to the Indian Ocean and the concept of networks in the shaping of transnational discussions

Introduction

about slavery and indenture in that region. We examine the transatlantic roots and contributions of enslaved and other activists to the abolition of slavery through a discussion of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause. The newer transnational historiography of slave emancipation and indentured labour in the nineteenth century highlights gender as a key category of analysis and, as Catherine Hall has shown in Civilising Subjects, focuses on the connections between metropolitan Britain and its slaveholding colonies. The chapter ends with a new work by Ana Lucia Araujo on the transnational history of reparations. Chapter 2 focuses on the transnational turn in critical imperial and settler colonial histories profoundly shaped by the webs of empire that horizontally and vertically criss-cross the globe. It investigates the influences of indigenous histories, cultural geography and ‘histories from below’ in remapping imperial and colonial history in relation to transnational Pacific and comparative settler colonial histories. And especially it considers how oceanic histories not only have reframed world history, and suggest the translocal as their scale, but also have returned historians to national archives with new questions. The chapter considers the challenge by Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper in their influential book Tensions of Empire that metropolitan and colonial worlds be studied along the one continuum, before turning to the ways in which that challenge was deployed in a critical engagement with the idea of British World history. We investigate the response to British World conferences by Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre in their collection Britishness Abroad. Following some further consideration of the impacts of oceanic histories in opening up the British World’s intervention to larger, global connections, we turn to the notable reading of racialized masculinities and nationalisms by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds in their study of interconnections between turn-of-the-century Australian and American history titled Drawing the Global Color Line. The theme of racial theories and racializations of urban space is illustrated in the work of Penelope Edmonds who has applied cultural geography in her comparative study of colonial Vancouver and Melbourne, Urbanising Frontiers, a study that amply illustrates the potential of comparative history in transnational mode to reveal new ways of understanding the similar but also different articulations of colonization in particular locales. Chapter 3 draws from recent studies of transnational subjects/lives, in order to investigate counter-histories and reverse trajectories of colonized, enslaved or otherwise unequal or coerced individuals. In particular, this

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chapter focuses on the turn to biography of people, and of extended families, which authors have reinvigorated as a way of lifting up the lived experience of individuals whose lives were constrained by enslavement, forced migration or racism more broadly in the Black Atlantic. We start with the reappraisal of the life of Olaudah Equiano, by Vincent Carretta, as an entry point into the two vectors that have shaped transnational biographical writing in the 2000s. We argue that on the one hand, historians have found new evidence that has changed the conventional narratives of people such as Equiano and Sara Baartman. On the other hand, we argue that the most incisive biographies also all wrestle with epistemology and method in their search to find approaches that help best narrate the lives of people such as Rebecca Protten, Sara Baartman, Eunice Connolly and James Church Vaughan. We use the term ‘heterography’ as a frame for the way that historians, including Sensbach, Hodes, Crais and Scully, and Lindsay, have wrestled with the epistemological challenges created by the incompleteness and politics of the archival record as it pertains to the lives of people who helped form the Black Atlantic. Chapter 4 concerns the impact of transnational histories on the study of technologies of colonial rule. We show how these have ranged from investigations of technological power and census gathering in the role of knowledge production essential to colonial rule to new work in histories of natural science, medicine, health and population management. And we see how industrialized systems of transport and communication provided the means for colonial administration and the circulation of objects and workers around the empire, but also for the circuitry of ideas that had impacts across colonies and in anti-colonial movements as well as myriad expressions of resistance in everyday exchanges. We examine the analysis of Bernard Cohn regarding the modalities of colonial rule that included an ethnographic colonial gaze on which colonial administrations relied. As Zoe Laidlaw, Alan Lester and others have shown, colonial officials moved between colonies as much as from metropole to colonial outposts. Writing of the role of census in colonial administrations, Roger Knight points to the inherent fallibility of the information they contained despite their importance in shaping colonial rule. We learn from Tony Ballantyne about the role of this flawed information in the formation of the larger imperial archive, and from Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton of the central role played by transport and communication systems in not only the formation of knowledge but its dispersal within and beyond empire. The chapter then moves into the twentieth century to consider the connection

Introduction

between bodies and the social body raised in the work of Matthew Connolly on population and of Alison Bashford on racial hygiene. We will see how Cecilia Morgan and Warwick Anderson have variously considered the ways in which the politics of whiteness became embedded within modern social science and welfarism, while Margo Canady and Philippa Levine draw our attention to the pivotal role of sexuality, gender and the management of sex in transnational and colonial history. The chapter concludes with the social sciences and postcolonial subjects in post-Second World War Britain, studied by Nadine Attewell and Jordanna Bailkin. Chapter 5 considers the role of transnationalism in histories of internationalism and critics of empire including among settler colonial rights networks. It provides an overview of the emergence of new histories of internationalism influenced by critical imperial history, transnational lives/biographical approaches and transnational histories of ideas through the scholarship of Glenda Sluga, Davide Rodogno and others. Transnationalizing international history has led to new studies of how individuals have understood themselves via collective identities beyond or in contradistinction to nation states or colonies, whether by becoming internationally minded or self-consciously ‘cosmopolitan’ and being ‘at home in the empire’, or by becoming active in international networks. These historians have opened up institutional histories of internationalism to the investigation of intersecting webs of influence and mobilization in which anti-colonialism and liberal imperial cosmopolitanisms were in dialogue. In this chapter we follow the lead of GA Hopkins in asking what cosmopolitan or worldly thinking might mean in the context of empire and colonization. In their study of US and British imperial worlds, Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann argue for always approaching the interrelated questions of internationalism, transnationalism and imperialism through the lenses of gender, sexuality and race. We consider the role of sexuality and gender in the administration of empire through Philippa Levine’s investigation of the international policing of prostitution and venereal disease. In terms of the role of humanitarianism in colonialism, the chapter considers how protection has been investigated across settler colonies, illustrated by Amanda Nettelbeck and others. The argument made is that cosmopolitanism and humanitarianism were implicated within imperial world views and applied in colonial settings often to the detriment of colonized peoples, but yet they contained within them degrees of internal critique. The chapter turns next to the contradictory nature of anti-slavery politics as explicated in the work of Kevin Grant. Of the transnationalizing

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of women’s international history, we see that Clare Midgley and others have argued for the investigation of imperial feminist politics within and beyond British imperial history. Writing of Anglo-American responses to a sensational account of Indian women’s lives, Mrinalini Sinha shows how transnational communities of concern formed that included African American organizations in the United States and Indian women’s networks in India. The chapter considers a number of key studies of alternative black and indigenous cosmopolitanisms before concluding with Connected Worlds edited by Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys in which they read Australian, black, Pacific and US history in transnational mode. The conclusion considers the future of transnationalism in studies of the translocal, which seek to create a new mediation between concepts of ‘home’ and ‘away’, the notion of the cosmopolitan and the meanings of history. And it addresses emerging concerns about the rise of digitization and its effect on transnational history through a consideration of Laura Putnam’s 2016 intervention, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable’.120

Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Suzanne Persard and Eleanor Morecroft, our research assistants, who contributed greatly to the project, and to Antoinette Burton for kindly commenting on an early draft.

Notes 1. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1st edn (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 2. Raymond Grew, ‘The Comparative Weakness of American History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 1 (1985): 87–101, cited in Margot Canaday, ‘Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn: An Introduction’, American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1251. 3. Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Gender and History) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1; Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75. 4. Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Introduction

5. Caren Kaplan, ‘Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Subjects’, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 115–38. 6. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 7. See also Richa Nagar, ‘Footloose Researchers, “Traveling” Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis’, Gender, Place and Culture 9, no. 2 (2002): 179–86. 8. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), 5. 9. For the historical context of Australia’s ‘Pacific Strategy’ established in 2012 of processing asylum seekers offshore, see Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History (Carlton: Black Inc., 2015). 10. On post-Second World War campaigns within and beyond Europe concerning migration and refugees, see, for example, Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: WW Norton, 2016); Joy Damousi, ‘Building “Healthy Happy Family Units”: Aileen Fitzpatrick and Reuniting Children Separated by the Greek Civil War with Their Families in Australia, 1949–1954’, History of the Family 22, no. 4 (2017): 466–84; and Melanie Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–2014 (Sydney, Australia: HarperCollins, 2014). 11. Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, ‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis’, American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 625–48. And Sophie-Jung H. Kim, Alastair McClure, and Joseph McQuade, ‘Making and Unmaking the Nation in World History: Introduction’, History Compass 15, no. 2 (2017): 1–9. 12. Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), 16–17. See also Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 13. Marcel Van der Linden, ‘Labour History: The Old, the New, and the Global’, African Studies 66, no. 2–3 (2007): 169–80. Siegel argues that comparative cross-national history is a subject rather than a method since it compares and contrasts concepts such as race in ways that lift them out of their context. Written in 2005, this trenchant analysis of the historiography of comparative race studies in Brazil and the United States predates some of the more nuanced recent transnational history with its focus on genealogies and epistemology; Micol Siegel, ‘Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn’, Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62.

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14. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 727. 15. See, for example, Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Memories of Empire) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 16. On the former, see Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the latter, Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 17. ‘Limits of Two Approaches’, Traversea 1 (2011): 46–59. See Matthias Middell, ‘Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik’, Comparativ 10, no. 1 (2000): 7–41. 18. Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2013). 19. Ian Tyrrell, ‘What Is Transnational History’? https://iantyrrell.wordpress. com/what-is-transnational-history/. 20. Thomas Adam, ‘Transnational History: A Program for Research, Publishing, and Teaching’, The Yearbook of Transnational History 1 (2018): 2. 21. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xvii. 22. Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History: Theory and History, 2013 edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12. 23. Ibid., 14–15. For another consideration of the differences and overlapping concerns of transnational, comparative and global history, also see Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), chapter one. 24. Ibid., 8. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Iriye and Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary, xvii. See also Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–23; and Durba Ghosh, ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’, American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 772–93. 27. Key works, though this is far from an exhaustive work, include Ian Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’,

Introduction

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991); Michael Adas, ‘From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History’, The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1692–720; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Akira Iriye, Global Interdependence: The World after 1945 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). On space, see Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History’, The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573–58. Thomas Adam, Buying Respectability Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009). On transnational histories of women, gender and sexuality and theoretical considerations of the transnational, see particularly Judith P. Zinsser, ‘Women’s History, World History, and the Construction of New Narratives’, Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 3 (2000): 196–206; Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, eds., ‘Thinking Sexuality Transnationally’, special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 439–449; and Donna Gabaccia, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). For an overview of gendered approaches in transnational history, see Merry E. Weisner-Hanks, ‘Crossing Borders in Transnational History’, Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 357–79. A. Iriye and P. Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Springer, 2016), xviii, Introduction. We are grateful to Antoinette Burton for her observation about the limits of this early version of transnational history. Saunier, Transnational History, 2. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 10. Siegel, ‘Beyond Compare’, 62. Iriye, Global and Transnational History, 10. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Saunier, Transnational History, 14. Struck, Ferris, and Revel, ‘Introduction’, 573–84. http://www.fdupress.org/transnational-history-annual-journal/ Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism’, 1033.

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40. Ibid. See also Michael McGerr, ‘The Price of the “New Transnational History”’, American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1056–67; and Ian Tyrrell, ‘Ian Tyrrell Responds’, American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1068–72; Matthew Pratt Guterl, ‘Comment: The Futures of Transnational History’, American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (2013): 130–39. Also, Tyrrell, ‘Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice’, Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 453–74. 41. Prasenjit Duara, ‘Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories’, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 25. 42. Ibid., 25–26. 43. Ibid., 27. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 32. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 43. 50. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Preface’, in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), vii. 51. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History’, in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 8. 52. Ibid., 14. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 17. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. Ibid. 58. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30. 59. Ibid., 31. 60. Ibid., 32. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid.

Introduction

65. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‘Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to American Studies Association, November 12, 2004’, American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 17–57. 66. Saunier, Transnational History, 29. 67. For example, Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Crossings in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Matt K. Matsuda, ‘The Pacific’, The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 758–80; and David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 68. Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. See also Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds., World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global: 1870–1945 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2012). 69. C. A. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 3. 70. Ibid., 4. 71. Ibid., 4 (italics in original). 72. Ibid., 5. 73. Ibid., 5. 74. Matthew Connelly in Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, 1447. 75. Ibid., 1447–8. 76. Pamela Scully, ‘Peripheral Visions: Heterography and Writing the Transnational Life of Sara Baartman’, in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 27–40. 77. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 35. 78. Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 421. 79. For example, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scotsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 80. Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

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81. John Maynard, ‘Marcus Garvey’, in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 437. See also John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); and Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012). 82. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Comparative Historical Sociology and Transnational History: Response to Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 613. 83. Ibid. 84. Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 729. 85. Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 1st edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 86. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 87. Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1091–117; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 88. Patricia Clavin, ‘Introduction: Conceptualising Internationalism between the World Wars’, in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 3. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 4. 91. Ibid., 6–7; and Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, 424. 92. Marilyn Lake, ‘White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project’, Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 122 (2003): 346–63. 93. Emma Rothschild, ‘The Archives of Universal History’, Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 383–4. 94. Ibid., 383. 95. Ibid., 384. 96. Dirk Hoerder, ‘Losing National Identity or Gaining Transcultural Competence: Changing Approaches to Migration History’, in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 255.

Introduction

  97. Madeline Y. Hsu, ‘Transnationalism and Asian-American Studies as a Migration-Centred Project’, Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 2 (2008): 185–97.   98. Ibid., 187.   99. Ibid., 191. 100. Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, ed. Bill Schwarz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 82. 101. Ibid. 102. Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau, ‘Lost in Translation? Transcending Boundaries in Comparative History’, in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. HeinzGerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 107. 103. Ibid., 108. 104. Thomas Bender, ‘Introduction: Historians, the Nation and Plenitude of Narratives’, in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 1. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 1–2. 107. Ibid., 6. 108. Ibid., 8. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 9–10. 112. Ibid., 11. 113. Ibid., 12. 114. Ibid., 10. 115. Struck, Ferris, and Revel, ‘Introduction’, 575. 116. Ibid., 576. 117. Ibid., 577. 118. Ibid., 578. 119. Ibid., 579. 120. Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402.

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1 Unfree Circuits and the Making of the Transnational

Introduction In documenting the historiography of the transnational, we include both those historiographies which explicitly position themselves as contributing to that conversation and those which map transnational history by their very subject matter. This chapter focuses on the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean through the theme of transnational history as a history of mass circulation and the local co-joined by webs of empire that, as Tony Ballantyne has argued, operated both horizontally and vertically crisscrossing the globe. The following chapter will focus on the contributions of the New British history and its instantiation in Australasia. In the process of investigating a cross section of studies, we ask whose stories are told and why, as well as what might be lost in focusing on movement rather than location, positionality, power and hierarchy. The scholarship on the violence of enslavement and forced migration and how people sought to imagine and put in place lives free of such violence, as well as the forced mobilization of people across oceans in service of the labour demands of empires and capital, shape the historiography of the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean. This literature has helped create new intellectual grids for understanding the transnational: Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic argued that African diasporic cultures centred modernity precisely because of their experience of violence and labour. Slavery was not antithetical to modernity or a bad feature of it: it was the centre of modernity. The Black Atlantic is a ‘nontraditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable and asymmetrical cultural ensemble’.1 C.L.R. James declared that slaves were

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the first modern people, suggesting that they were the first proletariat.2 And Emma Christopher regards Derek Walcott’s phrase ‘the sea is history’ as a key moment in conceptualizing the site in which ‘much transnational history was lived’.3 The contribution of this literature to transnational history includes focusing on how the forced movement of people across the world shaped economy and society and understanding mobility as constitutive of a transnational world. This conceptualization of transnational history frames the transnational as both a story and analysis of broad swathes of movement across the oceans, not just as an expansion beyond the nation – as US historiography has traditionally approached the subject. The chapter discusses the early theorizing and histories of slavery in both African historiography and emerging transnational foci on plantation economies and slavery in the Atlantic World; the transnational historiography of food, concentrating on Carney’s Black Rice; and the transnational historiography of the Indian Ocean, with its focus on networks of people and knowledge in Kerry Ward’s Networks of Empire and Clare Anderson’s work on convict labour. Manisha Sinha’s book, The Slave’s Cause, argues for the centrality of black transnational activism to anti-slavery, challenging the Atlantic-centring of much of the work on slave trades, enslavement and forced labour. We follow Margot Canaday’s helpful conceptualization of transnational history not as a subject but as a method or a way of seeing … that method seems to consist of at least two major propositions. First, historians should cultivate a certain flexibility about following important questions wherever they go. Sometimes questions will not exceed national boundaries … And sometimes important transnational questions will not be about movement at all, as in Mary Renda’s trenchant observation that any fixed location may be itself saturated with transnational relationships.4

Early transnational conceptualizations of the slave trade and slavery The histories of the slave trade, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans thus have always been transnational, given that these processes involved the forced movement of people from one area, region or

Making of the Transnational

continent to another. In comparison, the historiography of slave societies has focused more on the local or national contexts. Histories of slavery have contributed, however, to a much more complex understanding of the concept of slavery itself by exploring the wide range of categories of enslavement and bondage across the world. Key works from the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to a meta-analysis of enslavement and to the specific, though contested, understandings of slavery in transnational frames. A classic point of comparison in the 1970s through 1990s was to compare different forms of slave systems and the kinds of resistance that they facilitated. Brazil, conceptualized as a vicious and large plantation system, facilitated slave revolts; in the United States, a paternalistic system of enslavement rendered collective resistance rare and costly.5 Whether discussed explicitly as transnational history or not, this historiography crucially engaged questions of mobility, culture and violence in different regional contexts, thus pushing historians to consider those factors that might be considered intrinsic to conditions of subjection and those that are closely tied to local context. The transatlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history6 and has thus remained the focus of scholarly attention for many years. As Paton and Scully note, there were many Atlantic worlds made through the ‘reiterative tracing of multiple and overlapping routes of communication and trade, and in particular by slavery and the slave trades’.7 Paton and Scully also observe that the ‘expansion of slavery in West and West Central Africa involved the “Atlanticization” of people who never themselves crossed the ocean’.8 The Atlantic World was the centre for some of the earliest scholarship which transcended the national and continues to be transnational in as much as it considers both sides of the ocean and analyses linkages between different societies. Eric Williams, West Indian historian and the first prime minister of Trinidad, pioneered the foundation of European industrialization as wholly dependent upon the transatlantic slave trade. Williams’s analysis underscored the role of the economic impact of modern industrial capitalism – rather than benevolent British abolitionists – ultimately resulting in the abolition of slavery.9 In the United States, the Atlantic seminar in the history department of the Johns Hopkins University was instrumental in creating the field of Atlantic History. Philip Curtin, in a series of books from 1972 through to the 1990s, established a rich vein of scholarship that considered the economic impact of the slave trade and articulated the rise of the ‘plantation complex’, a political economy based on large-scale enslavement.10

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In 1969, Curtin published his landmark book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. The book was transnational to the extent that it covered both the Portuguese, Spanish, French and English trades, and the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Curtin estimated that some ten million Africans crossed into a state of slavery in the Americas. This lowered significantly, the earlier estimate by Kuczynski in 1936 that some 14,650,000 people arrived in the Americas.11 In the 1980s, the interest in numbers continued, with demographically oriented studies of the trade by David Eltis, Inikori and Rawley, with the latter two arguing that Curtin’s figures were too low.12 In 1982, Lovejoy agreed with Curtin’s general estimate of imports and also estimated that 11,968,000 people were exported from Africa.13 More recent research finds that some twelve and half million Africans were forced onto ships to be transported to the Americas as slaves, with at least ten million arriving in the Americas.14 Scholarship on slavery has been shaped in a transnational frame by both an appreciation of the compelling similarities of enslavement and the ways that enslaved people experienced the institution in specific contexts. Earlier scholarship on slavery was less transnational than transhistorical. David Brion Davis was a pioneering contributor: in 1966, he published The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, noting that it was only in the late eighteenth century that European and American white intellectuals came to see slavery as indeed a problem. Paul Lovejoy’s magnum opus, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa published first in 1983 and with a third edition in 2012, created a transnational, continentally bound analysis of enslavement in Africa. His analysis contributed to an increasingly nuanced understanding of the varieties of enslavement in Africa and of its growing importance in various societies, so that in the nineteenth century it ‘had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy’.15 Miers and Kopytoff argued that in much of Africa, there were varying degrees of freedom and that slavery was generally far from the totalizing experience of American slavery. While not explicitly transnational, the analysis hinged on an explicit comparison with an understanding of slavery in the Americas as deeply brutal and alienating. In their 1979 book, Miers and Kopytoff argued that the concept of ‘rights in persons’, which gave corporate entities lineages rights over particular people partly determined by matrilineal or patrilineal patterns, meant that slavery on the continent entailed a different bundle of concepts of ownership than that which prevailed in European and thus Euro-American societies. Slaves could be acquired through war, trade, pawning or adoption, with the

Making of the Transnational

enslaved individual starting out as a marginal outsider to the community but with the possibility of being drawn closely into it: in some cases, by even marrying the slaveholder. For Miers and Kopytoff, the crucial distinction was that in Africa to be free of ties meant to be alone and alienated; to be tied through kinship obligations was to be absorbed into society.16 Frederick Cooper’s rejoinder was that this exploration of incorporation was all very good and well as long as one examined slavery from the point of view of the slaveholder: for the enslaved, belonging was always contingent, a marginality encoded even into the articles of incorporation. As Cooper stated, ‘[e]ven where slaves were readily assimilated, they suffered a devastating cultural subordination: their loss of their ancestry’.17 The 1980s also saw an emerging conceptual focus wrestling with the nature of slavery as a structure of domination and the centrality of slavery to Western culture and capitalism. This work exemplifies the benefits of a frame far wider than the nationalist historiography that dominated historical scholarship. In 1985, Orlando Patterson, notably a sociologist rather than an historian, contributed a wide-ranging analysis of ancient, Atlantic and modern slavery. Patterson sought to define the essential features of slavery across time, arguing that the signal feature of enslavement was the experience of ‘social death’, the various mechanisms by which an individual was severed from society and forced into a pathological relationship with the master. He argued that the state of slavery was unique in the brutality of the exercise of power by the slaveholder; in the fact that an individual was made powerless with respect to another individual – was made a ‘human surrogate’ of the owner (even if that owner was part of a collective temple, etc.); and, finally, that the slave was alienated from their natal home.18 This sense of slavery as deathly has been a powerful interpretative schema for many scholars into the 2000s.19 In particular, Saidiya Hartman powerfully deployed the concept of ‘fungibility’ to inform the subject position of the black body under captivity as a commodity – since to be ‘stripped’ of one’s humanity, one must first be recognized as human.20 Vincent Brown details how scholars have also rejected the idea of social alienation or emphasized resistance. Cooper regards the concept of social death as an ‘agentless abstraction’, and Laurent Dubois and Alejandro de la Fuente have shown in detail the ways in which far from succumbing to social alienation, enslaved people asserted their resilience and social connections.21 In The Many Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker employ the trope of the Herculean mythical hydra to demonstrate transnational resistance waged by enslaved populations against empire.22

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In 1993, Paul Gilroy almost single-handedly created a new field, with his landmark book, The Black Atlantic, while building on earlier work on resistance and identities in enslaved communities. As early as 1938, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins demonstrated the connections between the French Revolutionary ideas of rights and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution in Haiti.23 As historians have shown, as slavery was consolidated in the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so mobilization against it grew. Emerging concepts of political rights mobilized resistance from Haiti to Jamaica to the Cape Colony. Slaves resisted enslavement through everyday resistance as well as outright rebellion.24 In Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Catherine Hall chronicles the significance of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 to incite an internal crisis within the British Empire. Following a ruthless response to the slave rebellion in Morant Bay, Jamaica, by British Governor Edward John Eyre, British politicians, intellectuals and abolitionists decried the ‘savage brutal bloodthirsty of the innocent with the guilty’, precipitating debates about the relationship between metropole and colony, British subjecthood and notions of freedom.25 More recently, Nigel Worden has demonstrated that enslaved participants in the 1808 revolt in the Cape Colony were inspired by the French Revolution and by Toussaint L’Ouverture, dressing up in ‘a blue jacket turned up with red, white Chinese linen trousers … two golden and two silver epaulets besides some feathers for his hat. This was exactly the uniform worn by the Haitian slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture as shown in a print of the time’.26 Gilroy notes that at the end of the eighteenth century, a quarter of the British Navy was made up of Africans, which oriented them strongly to ideas of liberty, but one could argue that it was the horrors of slavery that was the impulse for ideas of freedom and the navy one site for collective consciousness.27 Gilroy argued that the slave trade helped produce enslaved subjectivities that were and are doubled and diasporic and that echoed across places from Jamaica to England. Despite his emphasis on the creation of racial and transnational identities, as Masilela has pointed out, Gilroy did not dedicate much scholarly focus on Africa.28 Simon Gikandi has critiqued Gilroy’s privileging of African Americans as the ‘quintessential figure of black modernity’ while excluding Africans from discourse on the modern,29 while feminist scholars like Samantha Pinto have noted Gilroy’s ‘near silence on women’s writing and cultural expressions’.30 However, the paradigm of a Black Atlantic, united by histories of oppression, resistance and cultural affiliations, serves as a frame to understand both the history of slave resistance

Making of the Transnational

and the emerging scholarship from the 1990s and particularly in the new millennium on these questions; and it remains an important frame for more recent work also, as we shall see in Sinha’s new book The Slave’s Cause. In this regard, the 2000s inaugurated a turn to a framing of transnational history, which foregrounded an intersectional analysis of race and gender as constituting important categories of analysis to understand the experiences of people whose lives were shaped through slavery and forced migration. In Transnational Feminism in the United States, Leela Fernandes problematizes this surge of interest in transnational feminism as a site historically located within US-based paradigms of knowledge production and imperial power. Fernandes cautions of the risks of transnational feminism to replicate sites of difference while naturalizing frames that resort to dominant paradigms reinscribing the minoritarian category of ‘other’.31 Angela Woollacott argues in her analysis of Catherine Hall’s landmark Civilizing Subjects that this approach also shapes postcolonial transnational historiography by turning away from large universal themes that animate world history and rather more towards ‘a concern with the contingencies and specificities of historical change’ and an ‘emphasis on cultural interconstitution as well as economic interdependence’.32 We see in the discussion that follows how the nation disappears and the focus on mobilities of people, crops and cultures animates the literature even as concern with the local is also evident.

Transnational Atlantic histories We now are beginning to have a better understanding of the impact of the Middle Passage on both Africa and the Americas. Voyages: The Slave Trade Database by David Eltis and his colleagues has collated a vast archive to enable a better quantitative understanding of the slave trade. The database is a collection of the records of slaving expeditions and includes names of shipowners and ship captains. The names of the millions of people who endured the Middle Passage are not recorded there. ‘It does contain, however, the African names of and personal information about 67,004 captives who were found on board slave vessels detained by naval cruisers attempting to suppress the slave trade in the nineteenth century.’33 Recent works which have embedded their analysis in a transnational understanding of the trade, with a focus on the interconnections between Africa and the Americas, include Heywood and Nwojeki.34

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In his 2010 book From Africa to Brazil, Walter Hawthorne animates the concept of the ‘Early Modern Atlantic’ as an analytic which emphasizes the contributions of people from Africa and of African descent to the building of that world. Citing Eltis and Richardson, Hawthorne notes that before 1820, three-quarters of the people coming to the Americas came from Africa, which also shows the striking importance of the slave trade in the founding of the Americas.35 In particular, Hawthorne makes the case for a transnational lens or a lens which looks beyond political boundaries to focus on the practices which created one zone: the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa and Amazonia comprised ‘one unit – one region that stretched across the ocean’.36 The legal frame has also been a key lens for understanding slavery in both national and comparative frames.37 Rebecca Scott who expanded her expertise from her first landmark book on Cuba to include Louisiana and St. Domingue is perhaps the clearest proponent of this transnational approach38; her co-authored study of a family across these sites will be examined in the following chapter. Neither Slave Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel by Edlie L. Wong examines claims by enslaved people against the United States and Great Britain.39 In The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (2012) Joseph Miller, an expert on Angola and the slave trade, returns to the questions with which Davis engaged: primarily how do we understand slavery, or ‘slaving’ in Miller’s terms, outside of the humanitarian perspectives of the present. Miller argues against seeing slavery as a static form of ‘institution’ but rather argues for seeing it fundamentally as a response to historical contingencies.40 The book concentrates on the impulses that led communities and societies to practise slavery. As Paul Lovejoy argues, the book ‘is really a study of slavery as a problem for those who enslaved others, and not about the slaves themselves’.41 Slavery looks one way if one attends primarily to the interests of slaveholders (in Miller’s conception as a struggle of competition and access to resources) – it looks far different if one attends primarily to the enslaved and the champions of abolition. Since the late 2000s, this historiography focusing on the experience of the enslaved has become ever more explicitly engaged with questions of gender. Historians have contributed a much-needed gendered analytic to transnational histories by examining women’s experiences and the significance of gender ideologies in the shaping of communities around the Atlantic, in the era of early colonial conquest and during the slave trade. In Laboring Women, Jennifer Morgan demonstrated that a potent entwining of European racial and gendered ideologies drawn from interactions

Making of the Transnational

on the West African coast profoundly shaped the emergence of colonial slavery in the United States and the Caribbean.42 Pamela Scully argued, in ‘Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World’, that the trope of the supplicant native woman who welcomed European men on to the shores of Central America, Southern Africa and North America helped consolidate colonial rule on both sides of the Atlantic.43 Such cultural mythologies of racial and gendered harmony as the foundation of colonial societies silenced the violence of conquest in the official national imaginary: for example, the many renditions of Pocahontas in literature, film and history. These narratives also silenced a central paradox of these encounters: the connections of indigenous women to chiefly families equipped them with the knowledge and networks to act as mediators between indigenous groups and European agents while increasing their vulnerability to violence and subjugation by both Europeans and indigenous communities.44

People, culture and crops as transnational Atlantic history Not only people crossed the oceans or forged transnational communities on the shores of the Atlantic; plants accompanied forced migrations. Classic examples of this historiography, which traces the spread of plants and commodities in transnational circuits of forced labour and industrialization, include Sweetness and Power and Routes. In Sweetness and Power, Mintz traces the history of sugar as a key crop of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, fuelling the British industrial revolution and transforming the status of sugar from a luxury item to its everyday consumption as a key ingredient of the English working-class diet.45 Again, while not framed explicitly as a work of transnational history, Mintz’s book can be seen as a pioneering example of the genre in its attention to the circulation of people and goods, and to communities across the Atlantic. In 1997, anthropologist James Clifford contributed to the concept of mobilities and the significance of connected transnational worlds in his book Routes. In contrast to the ‘in situ’ approach then favoured by his discipline, Clifford argued for attention to ‘traveling cultures’ which establish the transcultural as a significant thread of the transnational.46

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Judith Carney’s 2001 book Black Rice reignited a historiographical debate about cultural sedimentation in transnational history and the place of crops in the history of mobility.47 Black Rice’s focus on both West Africa and the Americas creates a frame for transnational history by drawing together people, cultures and crops into a new conversation that echoes their entanglement in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. As Carney outlines, earlier versions of this approach, exemplified by the work of Melville Herskovits, focused on the degree to which enslaved Africans and people of African descent were able to reproduce their culture in the new conditions of enslavement and alienation in the Americas or whether cultural adaption was the more accurate frame. Carney redirects this argument by drawing on work by Peter Wood (Black Majority, 1974) and Littlefield (Rice and Slaves, 1981) to make an economic case for cultural practice, arguing that enslaved Africans in fact helped create an agricultural revolution in the United States by bringing with them their expertise in rice cultivation: ‘The development of rice culture marked not simply the movement of a crop across the Atlantic but also the transfer of an entire cultural system, from production to consumption.’48 Carney’s book, like others which focus on crops, such as Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, also widens our understanding of mobility in transnational history. Carney notes the Columbian exchange includes ‘not only the seeds that transferred throughout the Atlantic basin but the cropping systems as well. People and plants together migrated as a result of European global expansion’.49 Black Rice starts with a chapter on ‘Encounters’ between European sailors (first the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, then the Dutch) and societies on the West African coast, particularly around the coast of present-day Senegal to Liberia. Carney argues that in contrast to conventional European accounts which saw the Portuguese bringing rice to West Africa, primary sources show that West African rice cultivation was already well entrenched when the Portuguese arrived.50 The irrigation systems of the mangrove swamps were documented by a Luso-African trader in 1594, as Carney points out ‘almost a century before the colonization of South Carolina where similar systems would eventually predominate’.51 Major features of rice production in West Africa included the gender division of labour and the rotation of land every season from rice production to cattle grazing. Evidence from early sources such as alBakri (1068) Ibn Battuta (fourteenth century) and Leo Africanus (1511), as well as the work of French botanist Roland Porteres in the 1930s, showed that rice was cultivated in West Africa independent of other

Making of the Transnational

lineages in Asia. However, racism still impeded the implications of such findings.52 From the 1970s, ultimately it was established that cultivation of glaberrima rice was evident ‘along the middle Niger in Mali some two thousand years ago’.53 Carney provides great detail about the cultivation of rice in terms of land use, gendered division of labour and the development of techniques to manage both floodplains near the coasts and drier conditions on the edge of the Sahara. The crux of Carney’s argument is that ‘this assemblage of techniques and practices was to resurface in a radically different manner with slavery in the Americas, providing its bearers a means to negotiate the circumstances of bondage across the Middle Passage’.54 With the enslavement in the Americas, African rice cultivation emerged also in enslaved and escaped communities from Brazil to North America. Maroon communities, quilombo, in Brazil planted rice as did maroon communities in the Guianas.55 Carney shows that rice cultivation using techniques developed in West Africa soon became entrenched in South Carolina. The labour of enslaved Africans propelled rice cultivation in the region, with over sixty million pounds being exported before the revolution.56 Carney argues that only Africans had the knowledge of rice cultivation in the wetlands, the classic ecosystem of the low country; the Europeans who settled in the area had no such expertise. She cites an earlier history by Peter Wood, who concluded that rice cultivation in the region probably had African origins.57 Carney acknowledges that the historical documentation makes it difficult to prove a direct line from cultivation in West Africa to South Carolina given slaveholders’ disdain for recording African knowledge and the fragmentary records. To make her case, she therefore argues for a different historical methodology which reorients the focus from labour and seeds towards an understanding of the knowledge systems and cultural frames of rice cultivation. This perspective, Carney argues, ‘reveals dynamics of agrarian diffusion, innovation, and the origins of specific agricultural practices that promote historical recovery’.58 Carney argues that given that tidal rice cultivation only existed in Asia and Africa at the time of the colonial settlement of South Carolina, it is highly likely that enslaved Africans brought their ‘indigenous knowledge system’ to the colony.59 And it was women, in South Carolina – as in West Africa – who Carney argues were the expert practitioners of sowing in tidal rice cultivation. She demonstrates that rice cultivation was a gendered crop

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significantly dependent upon women’s labour. Attesting to the gendered cultivation of rice, Carney notes that in Senegambia, the Serer people put a mortar and pestle on women’s graves.60 While a gendered division of labour in rice cultivation, as in other agricultural societies, pertained everywhere in West Africa, different locales created different allocations. In mangrove cultivation, women transplanted seeds and men prepared the ground. Women subsequently hoed the ground around the growing crop and collected the rice for sale.61 ‘Rice sales were (also) frequently brokered with female traders.’62 Unlike in the coastal areas described above, in much of the Mande-speaking areas of West Africa, women exercised significant control of rice production and claimed rights to part of the harvest.63 Carney argues that the association of African women with rice culture ‘embodied specialized forms of knowledge that would make a significant contribution to rice history in the Americas’.64 She argues for African women’s input through the continuation of a division of labour with women largely doing the sowing, to similar forms of milling (with mortar and pestle), basket weaving and cooking.65 ‘This history of rice in the Americas provides one means to re-envision the agency of slaves in the making of the Atlantic World.’66 Carney’s book has generated much debate with the most critical intervention by David Eltis, Philip Morgan and David Richardson in 2007.67 Drawing on their comprehensive African Slave Trade Database, which has information on some 36,000 slave trade ships,68 the authors counter the black rice thesis. They argue that the Africans who were enslaved across the Americas at the time rice cultivation developed were from areas unfamiliar with rice cultivation and that the ruling planter class was more important in structuring the rice culture. In 2010, the American Historical Review hosted an Exchange on ‘The Question of “Black Rice”’. Scholars were divided: S. Max Edelson69 criticized Carney’s reliance on the idea of a whole system and group of people moving en masse with an impermeable culture intact.70 Edelson wrote that ‘[m]oving beyond “black rice” means setting aside specific one-to-one correspondences between source and destination regions to describe the character of New World cultures’.71 Walter Hawthorne and Gwendolyn Hall72 argue for the salience of the black rice thesis. Hawthorne suggests that the disagreement stems in part as to what constitutes historical evidence – Carney relying on a geographical interpretation while Eltis, Morgan and Richardson prefer hard data. But Hawthorne also shows that at least the Portuguese slave trade data

Making of the Transnational

provides evidence of people being enslaved from rice-producing regions of West Africa.73 Hall also states that the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database is flawed and fails to capture the complexity of labour and culture in the Americas. Hawthorne’s From Africa to Brazil provides a nuanced answer to the Black Rice thesis. He argues that rice culture as practised in the Maranhao state was ‘creolized’.74 That is, Hawthorne proposes that rice cultivation resulted from inputs of people from multiple corners of the Atlantic World and was not transplanted intact from West Africa. The evolving consensus seems to be moving towards a subtler understanding of the development of rice culture with appreciation for both the long durée of cultural and economic borrowings across the lines of Africa/Americas/ enslaved/enslavers.75 A transnational focus thus now is a key part of the literature on the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic World. In her 2007 Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie Smallwood renews Saidiya Hartman’s attention to the horrors of the Middle Passage and the archive of slavery as a ‘death sentence, a tomb’.76 Authors focus on the contributions of Africans to the making of the Americas whether through the endurance of African cultural practices, the significance of religion to resistance or agricultural expertise. James Sweet’s Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese (2003) shows the endurance of cultural practices from Central Africa in Brazil, in particular arguing that religious practices were a vehicle for resistance to enslavement. Michael Gomes, Linda Heywood and John Thornton have also emphasized the contribution of Central Africans to making of the Atlantic World.77 David Wheat’s Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640, argues most recently that Luso-African creoles served as key mediators in the Caribbean because of the long history of interaction in West Africa and Cape Verde.78 The transnational history of the African diaspora has tended to look to the Americas as the fulcrum of engagement. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza argued in 2013 that we have to ‘de-atlanticize and de-Americanize the histories of African diasporas’.79 Zeleza argues too that the very notion of Africa is in part an imagined place, an invention akin to ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’, with its roots in descriptions by Europeans, but is also a continent. He also notes the challenges of thinking about diaspora when even the concept of Africa is bifurcated between sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa.80 In this regard, turning to the histories of the Indian Ocean opens up conversations between historiographies of these oceans and contributes to a trans-nationalizing of transnational scholarship.

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Pivoting to the Indian Ocean In 2007, in ‘The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean’, Isabel Hofmeyr, one of the contributors to the 2006 landmark conversation about transnational history in the American Historical Review, pivoted the historical and literary focus on the Atlantic slave trade as the vector for understanding the modern world to a consideration of how the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds participated in the emergence of transnationalism. This is a significant redirection, supported by growing historical attention to the dimensions of the Indian Ocean slave trade, which dominated the slave trade and other forms of forced migration in the nineteenth century. The Atlantic slave trade peaked in 1780s and 1790s; in the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean transported over 80 per cent of enslaved people, reaching its height in the 1840s. The Indian Ocean was also a source of many people sent to the Americas as slaves: some 543,000 people from southeast Africa were taken to the Americas between 1624 and 1860.81 Hofmeyr situates the Anglophone Black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and Africa together to reframe the literary imagination of South African literature and subsequently enables the reconceptualization of the landscape of transnational historiography. Hofmeyr argues that Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) helped to pioneer the Atlantic as a ‘site of transnational black modernity neither African nor American, Caribbean or British, but a complex translation of these various traditions into something new’.82 Referencing scholarship by Mphahlele, Couzens, Peterson, Driver, Nixon, Titlestad and Campbell, Hofmeyr recognizes the role of South Africa as very much part of the transnational history of the Black Atlantic through the work of leaders such as Sol Plaatje, author of the famous Native Life in South Africa; organizations such as the American Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in South Africa; and in the Harlem Renaissance literary parallels to Sophiatown. Hofmeyr then moves to consider the Indian Ocean, drawing on Sugata Bose’s argument that the Indian Ocean is an ‘interregional arena’ of trading systems that linked both the large empires of Europe, and the United States, and the coasts of Africa, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.83 This ocean thus becomes a place to rethink the meanings of enslavement, dominated by the Atlantic historiography; who constitutes a settler; and how we think about race and diaspora.84 Hofmeyr lays out a number of themes that animate the historiography of the region: long-distance trade, the movement of capital and labour, war,

Making of the Transnational

colonial rule and resistance movements, and port cities. Key ingredients of these trade networks included Islam and Arabic, which facilitated trade across the Indian Ocean from the eighth century. European nations arrived from the late fifteenth century, including the Portuguese, then the Dutch and the British. Hofmeyr identifies the themes of ‘Islands’ and ‘People and Passages’ as areas of greatest relevance to South African literary studies.85 Such themes include slavery and indenture and overlap also with the concerns of transnational history more broadly, as we will see below. Braudel’s much earlier work had shown the significance of cross-cultural trading networks and trade in the building of Europe and other scholars also used this concept.86 ‘Official’ transnational historiography has traditionally privileged the role of the nation, focusing on widening existing concepts such as the Cold War, or the American Civil War, or religious experience. Yet, historians working outside of an official transnational frame in fields of slave trade studies, slavery and other forms of forced labour have provided some of the most forceful examples of a transnational perspective. James Francis Warren’s 1985 masterpiece, The Sulu Zone 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, is a classic example. Focusing on the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Warren explores trade and society in the Sulu and Celebes Seas of Southeast Asia. Examining the emerging economic and labour ties between the Taosug elites and their dependents and the Chinese tea trade in the context of British imperialism using the then dominant concepts of core and periphery, Warren argues that ‘A “zone,” like that of the Sulu Sultanate, was not just a “spatial” site of economic, cross-cultural and symbolic contact’. Warren proposes that ‘such a “zone” was both a meeting ground as well as an arena of potential antagonism and conflict in which peoples geographically and historically separated came into contact with one another and often established ongoing relations’.87 Heather Sutherland argues that the Sulu region created many opportunities for inventive and proactive negotiations, proposing a distinctly more dynamic system of interrelations compared to Warren’s conceptual schema.88 The idea of networks has received increasing attention in Indian Ocean transnational history.89 In her study of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Networks of Empire (2009), Ward argues that the concept of networks and circulation of people, products and ideas is a means to understand the evolution of VOC empire and a way of connecting histories across the Indian Ocean. The VOC originated a massive transnational matrix: over the course of its history from 1602 to 1799, it transported almost a million people from Europe

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to Asia, and in 1750, at its peak, it employed over 35,000 people, not including indigenous people who were not documented in this figure.90 Ward’s book is a landmark book of transnational history in its use of archives in Indonesia, South Africa and Europe, resulting from her willingness to research in different languages, geographical locales and sorts of archives thus showing ‘how a close understanding of Asian history casts new light on the Dutch colonial Cape’.91 Similar to Fernandes’s criticism of the transnational, Ward resists the notion of ‘transnational history’ in part because it has historically been seen so tied to the nation. She challenges ‘the claim that national sovereignty originated in the sixteenth century European state system and instead [claims] that imperial sovereignty in the case of the [VOC] preceded the unification of the Netherlands as a sovereign state. So, empires shaped nations and not the other way around’.92 Her study of the VOC is not transnational in the classic sense: while it involves different places, it is not about different nations in the ways envisaged by Tyrrell et al. However, it does very much embrace Seed’s sense of transnational history’s contribution as being able ‘to follow people (wherever they moved)’ as well as Hofmeyr’s argument that the ‘key claim of any transnational approach is its central concern with movements, flows, and circulation, not simply as a theme or motif but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavor [sic] itself ’.93 Ward’s focus on the networks that sustained and created an empire across various areas of the Indian Ocean shows both the growing significance of the sea in studies of transnational history and the benefits of a broad analysis. Ward productively demonstrates the importance of such a wide transnational focus for understanding the history of commerce and forced migration. She argues for the multiple meanings of networks as grids of intelligibility and as a mechanism for the organization of the VOC’s farflung holdings around the Indian Ocean. In particular, Ward moves beyond thinking of networks only as the connective tissue of trade, bureaucracy and people (both in people and by people). She argues that we also need to think of how the VOC created and learned from networks of knowledge – that is, grids of intelligibility – to manage their far-flung empire. Just looking at the VOC’s own production of knowledge networks, one sees ‘laws and ordinances, correspondence, minutes of meetings, reports, criminal and civil legal records, personnel registers, accounts, inventories, drawings, and maps all developed from trade networks’.94 In an appreciative review article, Clare Anderson praises Ward for her skilful conjoining of meta- and microanalysis, her introduction of the concept of penal labour into the history of bondage in the Indian Ocean, and draws attention to the implications of

Making of the Transnational

Ward’s argument of ‘the historiographical invisibility of inter-colonial penal transportation’ within a ‘liberal colonial fantasy’ of abolishing slavery while replacing it with other forms of labour, apprenticed, indentured or free.95

Transnational abolitions and emancipation Manisha Sinha’s 2016 The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition reflects a new transnational focus for studies of anti-slavery and abolition, and is in particular a marker of a new attention to calls for the long history of radical transatlantic activism.96 In 2012, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History devoted a special issue to Humanitarianism and Empire, locating these concepts within wider debates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries centred on anti-slavery activism and indigenous people’ rights.97 Rob Skinner and Alan Lester concluded that transnational approach to empire and humanitarianism arguing that ‘humanitarian movements could undermine the boundaries of the nation state’.98 (We return to anti-slavery and humanitarianism in Chapter 5.) Sinha pulls the story of American abolition and African American agency into the same frame as abolitionist struggles in Haiti, West Africa and England. In contrast to convention, she argues that the abolition movement was not a bourgeois movement, but a radical one. Although the abolition movement was led by both whites and African Americans, Sinha identifies the latter as central to its radical centre. Antislavery writers and activists over time created a revolutionary abolitionist tradition. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement enjoined a critique of slavery with criticism of international capitalism and the rights of labouring people.99 It was also an interracial movement joining abolitionists in England with those in Haiti and the United States. Abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld created a radical language of non-racial citizenship and tactics that were precursors to later civil rights struggles. Sinha centres African Americans in the account and documents a transnational story of abolition dating from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, including the United States, Haiti, Britain, Liberia and Sierra Leone in her narrative.100 Above all, she argues that the abolitionist movement is part of the long story of the struggle for racial equality and justice; one might say she gives us a prehistory of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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As she details, the ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 inaugurated a new struggle to end slavery itself. By the 1840s, as many authors have shown, the campaign to abolish slavery was truly transnational, with societies being formed across the United States and the United Kingdom.101 In the United Kingdom, the creation of the Anti-Slavery Reporter ensured that news of abolition was carried far and wide, with over a thousand antislavery societies formed by the 1830s.102 In the states, similar activism rose; the Quaker societies launched the Free Produce Society, which supported shops selling goods produced only by free labour. Women’s activism was central to the movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Lucretia Mott and others formed women’s only free produce associations in the United States. By 1833, there were seventy-three female anti-slavery societies in England advocating boycotts of goods produced by slave labour and petitioning parliament for abolition.103 In Empire, Race, and the Politics of Anti-Caste (2013), Caroline Bressey demonstrates the transnational role of the abolitionist movement through the biography of anti-slavery activist Catherine Impey. She founded the periodical AntiCaste in 1888 to condemn racism transnationally, inviting anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells to England in 1893. Sinha contributes to the history of women’s activism by attending to the work of black activists: for example, the working-class black women who started the self-help society Daughters of Africa in Philadelphia. Writers such as Maria Stewart, whose Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality was published by Garrison in 1831, emerged as a key voice in the abolition movement. The ‘great and mighty men of America’ may ‘kill, tyrannize, and oppress’, but they could not match the ‘fearless and undaunted spirits of the Africans Forever’. Stewart declared, ‘WE CLAIM OUR RIGHTS.’104 The long nineteenth century saw the slow end of slavery across much of the world, driven by the radical contributions of the Haitian revolution, by the emergence of a post-revolutionary Britain keen to show its moral standing in the world, as argued by Christopher Brown, and by the everyday struggles of enslaved people on the ground.105 The 1830s and beyond witnessed emancipations and abolitions across the British, French and Dutch Caribbean as well as the British slaveholding colonies such as the Cape Colony at the tip of Africa. Brazil finally followed in 1888. Formal systems of slavery across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans were slowly replaced by an array of statutes. Coerced labour of various forms continued through the century including contract labour, penal transportation and indentured servitude.106

Making of the Transnational

The exact freedom or unfreedom created by these categories is difficult to parse. Sutherland demonstrates that in nineteenth-century Sulewesi, Indonesia, it was unclear to Dutch and other officials whether they were witnessing the persistence of forms of slavery, sharecropping or debt peonage. Similarly, in the Sulu zone, the status of Banyaga (slaves) was also opaque: some had been captured in war, others had fallen into debt and some had been allocated as slaves after court adjudication.107 Slavery was abolished in China only in 1910. The consolidation of the power of the former slaveholding classes in the Caribbean, the United States and the settler colony of the Cape, South Africa, replaced the momentary promise of emancipation. Across the Atlantic World, former slaveholders sought substitutes for the labour of their former slaves. In the British Caribbean, people from the Indian subcontinent were brought to work as indentured labourers. Brazil turned rather to European immigration as a way to replace slave labour.108 In general, however, the two major forms of forced labour emerging after abolition were indentured labour from China and India in much of the Americas and penal slavery and convict transportation in the Antipodes.

Indenture In the 1990s, historians turned their attention to focusing on this history of forced migration, paying attention to the experiences of the indentured. Some two million people became indentured labourers with over one million Indians being transported before the ending of this practice in 1914.109 Madhavi Kale demonstrates that with regard to indentured labour in the British Caribbean, the Indian government made women being allowed to go to Trinidad and British Guiana a condition of their agreement to the indenture system; women were indentured in the Caribbean at disproportionate rates: they comprised between a fifth and a quarter of Indians recruited.110 In Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947, Patricia Mohammed identifies this severe gender balance, in addition to a plantation economy of rum and greater sexual freedom exercised by women, as contributing factors to gender-based violence experienced by Indian women during and after indentureship.111 David Northrup’s magisterial study Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922, documented the indentured labour trade from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands in the aftermath of the

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ending of slavery. He argues, in contrast to Hugh Tinker, who had written an earlier book on Indian indentured labour, that the experience of most indentured workers was more similar to the lot of ‘“free” migrants of the same era than with victims of the slave trade’.112 The term ‘free migrants’ is misleading: in the historical narrative Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur notes that British recruiters abducted and misled Indians into indenture.113 Northrup also documents the growing demands for indentured labour, the places from which people were drawn, the voyages themselves, the nature of the indentures and the experiences of migrants. In 2000, Clare Anderson published her book on Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853.114 While focused on Mauritius primarily, this work demonstrates the intrinsic transnational engagement of much of this historiography involving colonial administrators and planters in Mauritius, British officials in India who wanted to remove political prisoners from particular areas and the Indian workers themselves who travelled from the subcontinent across the Indian Ocean. Anderson also argues that separating out indentured labour and convict labour into different streams of historiography underestimates the degree to which these categories overlapped in practice. Timothy Coates notes that the Portuguese circulated both the convicted and orphans across various realms of their empire from Lisbon to India, Goa and Macau, sending convicts continued from Portugal to Angola up to 1932.115 Paisley has written of the ways in which anti-slavery and liberal humanitarian debates about indenture extended to Pacific history through the issue of Indian indentured labour in Fiji.116 The Pacific features in Chapter 2. Historians are ever more writing the history of emancipation and the post-emancipation in transnational focus. In 2002, for example, Rebecca J. Scott, Thomas C. Holt, Frederick Cooper and Aims McGuiness published Societies after Slavery, a selected annotated bibliography of printed sources from societies in the Americas, the Caribbean and the Africa, which followed their study Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies.117 Catherine Hall’s magisterial Civilising Subjects, of the same year, demonstrated that a transnational focus was essential to the study of both metropole and colony. Putting Birmingham and Jamaica into the same frame, Hall tells the story of missionary work as a way of understanding the relationships between culture, identity and Britishness more broadly. Hall chronicles the efforts of missionaries such as William Bibb to proselytize to freed people became caught in the contradictions of support for freed people’s agency with an insistence that freedom’s culture

Making of the Transnational

echo that of metropolitan Britain. By the 1840s, missionaries’ dashed hopes of establishing a version of England in the post-emancipation landscape of Jamaica came to uphold racist views about freed people that they had formerly rejected.118 Scully and Paton’s Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005) sought to situate processes and struggles of emancipation in a wider context, arguing that emancipation was a gendered process which defined labour, gender itself, as well as the terms of freedom, be it in the Cape Colony, the Caribbean or Louisiana. In The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), Edward Rugemer examines the connections between the US South and the Caribbean arguing that the impact of close trading ties, evangelical Protestantism (Methodist and Baptist) and the power of the press, which covered the Haitian revolution and slave insurrections in Barbados, Demerara and Jamaica, loomed over debates within the United States and ultimately caused divisions that led to the Civil War.119 More recently, Anne Eller’s We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom demonstrates the embrocation of the struggles for emancipation in the Dominican Republic with wider movements across the Caribbean.120 Finally, the transnational focus has been most recently taken up in Ana Lucia Araujo’s Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. Like Sinha, who brings together formerly disparate archives and forms of protest to create a narrative of abolition, Araujo sees in slave resistance as well as petitions, and formal pamphlets and movements for reparations, a longer story of demands by enslaved people and their descendants for redress of the torture and disempowerment visited by slavery. While she is less sanguine than Sinha about the revolutionary impulse of early abolitionists,121 she does document the long struggle by African Americans to receive recognition of slavery’s harm. In so doing, Araujo surveys the experience of the enslaved and then free in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and the United States, presenting a transnational history of struggles for repair. She argues that the nature of calls for redress was deeply shaped by the political economy of slavery in each region and of emancipation. In Haiti, Haitians had to compensate France and the slaveholding class for the loss of the wealth after the Haitian revolution; Haiti is the only former slaveholding society responsible for economic reparations. In other areas, the government compensated the slaveholders – as was done in the British and French Caribbean. Araujo creatively links the binary arc of movements to return to Africa with struggles to realize citizenship in the United States and in Britain as part of the same history of demands for redress. The individual struggles of enslaved people in the

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Black Atlantic are the concern of Chapter 3, which turns to a consideration of biography and life history in transnational historiography.

Notes 1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), cited in Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 34. 2. C. L. R. James, 1962, The CLR James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 296–7. 3. Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), 77. See also Berhnard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004). 4. Here, Margot Canaday says, ‘This was a remark that Renda made from the audience at the roundtable discussion “Excavating Transnationalisms: A Model for Feminist Collaboration” at the Berkshire Conference in Minneapolis, June 14, 2008.’ Canaday, ‘Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn’, 1250–7. 5. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1978); Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). For an explicitly comparative study, see George Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 6. David Eltis, ‘A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, 2007, http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays (accessed 4 December 2017). 7. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 4. 8. Ibid. 9. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1994). 10. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Making of the Transnational

11. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 5. 12. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); J. E. Inikori, Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (New York: Africana PubCo, 1982); James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, 1st edn (New York: Norton, 1981). 13. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis’, Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 477. 14. The Slave Trade Database. For a survey of the effects of the slave trade on Africa and focus on demography of the slave trade, see Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 15. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 16. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979). 17. Frederick Cooper, ‘The Problem of Slavery in African Studies’, The Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 124. 18. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 19. For example, David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 20. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6, 25. 21. Vincent Brown. ‘Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery’, The American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1231–49. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 17; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited’, Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 339–69. 22. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000). 23. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938). 24. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).

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25. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 25, 408. 26. Nigel Worden, ‘How a Slave from Mauritius Led a Revolt in Cape Town’, South African History Online, 30 March 2016, http://www.sahistory.org. za/archive/how-slave-mauritius-led-rebellion-cape-town-nigel-wordenground-30-march-2016 (accessed 4 February 2018). 27. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 14. I am grateful to Suzanne Persard for this point. 28. Cited in Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives’, Social Dynamics 33, no. 2 (2007): 6. 29. Simon Gikandi, ‘Afterword: Outside the Black Atlantic’, Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 241–4. 30. Samantha Pinto, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 6. 31. Leela Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 3–5, 27. 32. Angela Woollacott, ‘Postcolonial Histories and Catherine Hall’s “Civilising Subjects”’, in Connected Worlds: History in Trans-National Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), 63–4. Hall, Civilising Subjects. 33. David Eltis, ‘Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Sources and Methods’, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2010, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/understanding-db/methodology-1 (accessed 4 December 2017). 34. Linda Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 35. Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. See Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, ‘Comparative Studies of Law, Slavery and Race in the Americas’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6 (2010): 469–85. 38. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 39. Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

Making of the Transnational

40. Joseph Calder Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 4. 41. Paul E. Lovejoy and Joseph C. Miller, ‘The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach’, The American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (2013): 148–9. 42. See also Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, Volume One: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 43. Pamela Scully, ‘Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005), https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/192187. 44. Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 33, 36. Ward argues that the ‘sea-borne’ population of the early modern European empires from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries was ‘overwhelmingly male’. [33] Men moved across the seas as sailors, artisans, convicts, forced migrants, company officials, exiles and slaves. The Portuguese trading empire traversed both the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans, and there, Ward argues, women made up an important number of forced or ‘unfree’ migrants coming from both Portugal and its colonies. 45. Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). 46. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 47. Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 48. Ibid., 2. 49. Ibid., 6. 50. Ibid., 15. 51. Ibid., 18. 52. Ibid., 35–36. 53. Ibid., 39. 54. Ibid., 68. 55. Ibid., 77. 56. Ibid., 78. 57. Ibid., 80. 58. Ibid., 81. 59. Ibid., 104. 60. Ibid., 31. 61. Ibid., 18–23.

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 112–13. Ibid., 168. David Eltis, ‘Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History’, American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1329–58. Emory University, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2013, http:// www.slavevoyages.org/ (accessed 15 February 2018). S. Max Edelson, ‘Beyond “Black Rice”: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture’, The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 125–35. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 135. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ‘African and Africans in the African Diaspora: The Uses of Relational Databases’, The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 136–50. Walter Hawthorne, ‘From “Black Rice” to “Brown”: Rethinking the History of Risiculture in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic’, The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 154. Ibid., 163. For a slightly different perspective, see Daniela Bleichmar, Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), which analyses the visual archive produced by the history of Spanish botanical expeditions in the sixteenthcentury-Spanish Empire. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Citation is to Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the Americas; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘African Diasporas: Toward a Global History’, African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 5. In this regard, he takes Patrick Manning to task for only looking at subSaharan in his The African Diaspora (2009).

Making of the Transnational

81. Jane Hooper and David Eltis, ‘The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery’, Slavery and Abolition 34, no. 3 (2013): 353–75. 82. Hofmeyr, ‘The Black Atlantic’, 5. 83. Ibid., 6. 84. Ibid., 17–18. 85. Ibid., 9. 86. Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le Monde Mediterraneen à l’Epoque de Philippe II, 5th edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 1982), I, 206–7; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation Materielle et Capitalisme, Vol. I: Les jeux de l’echange (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979); Jacob van Kalveren, The Dutch Colonial System in the East Indies (Rotterdam: Gordon Press, 1953). 87. James Warren, ‘The Global Economy and the Sulu Zone: Connections, Commodities and Culture’, Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World 3 (2011), http://www.eacrh.net/ojs/ index.php/crossroads/article/view/12/vol3_warren_html (accessed 20 February 2018). 88. Heather Sutherland, ‘Review: The Sulu Zone Revisited’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2004): 150. 89. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Roxani Eleni Margariti, Aden & the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port, 1st edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 90. Ward, Networks of Empire, 50. 91. Kerry Ward, ‘Review of Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company’, International Journal of Maritime History 21, no. 1 (2009): 336. 92. Kerry Ward, ‘Transnationalism and Maritime History’ (paper presented at the Symposium on Transnationalism, Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice University, Houston, USA, April 2011). 93. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, 1444. 94. Ward, Networks of Empire, 64. 95. Clare Anderson, ‘Review of Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company’, International Journal of Maritime History 21, no. 1 (2009): 301. 96. Seymour Drescher’s Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Perspective from 1987 placed the British abolitionist movement in comparative perspective but did not explicitly frame a transnational study. For a consideration of transnationalism, see Huw T. David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century: Transatlantic Activism and the Anti‐Slavery Movement’, Global Networks 7, no. 3 (2007): 367–82.

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  97. Emily Baughan and Bronwen Everill, eds., ‘Special Issue: Empire and Humanitarianism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012).   98. Skinner and Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire’, 742.   99. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 339. Sinha’s attention to the transnational dimensions of abolition is focused on a recent turn towards situating US slavery within international capitalism. See Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014). 100. See Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), on the connection between the Haitian revolution and Cuban struggles for freedom around the Haitian revolution. 101. Clare Midgley’s 1992 study Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns (London and New York: Routledge) showed the significance of women’s activism across the UK in moving the movement from a call for the end of the slave trade to a call for abolition itself. 102. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 178. 103. Ibid., 179. 104. Ibid., 267. 105. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 106. See Pamela Scully and Kerry Ward, ‘Gender and Coerced Labor’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4, AD 1804–AD 2016, ed. David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and David Richardson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 107. Sutherland ‘The Sulu Zone Revisited’, 151 and ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade in South Sulawesi: 1660s–1800s’, in Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid and Jennifer Brewster (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 263–85. 108. Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 115. 109. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Clare Anderson, ‘Unfree Labour and Its Discontents: Transportation from Mauritius to Australia, 1825–1845’, Australian Studies 13, no. 1 (1998): 120. 110. Madhavi Kale, ‘Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836–1885’, in

Making of the Transnational

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, ed. Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 72–92. Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, xiv. Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius 1815–53 (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Fiona Paisley, ‘Sexuality, Nationalism, and “Race”: Humanitarian Debate about Indian Indenture in Fiji, 1910–18’, Labour History, no. 113 (2017): 183–207. And on earlier British convict transportation to the Australian colonies, intersecting with Indian Oceanic, American and Indigenous histories, see Casandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony 1839–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); and Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, eds., Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). Frederick Cooper, Thomas Cleveland Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Rebecca J. Scott, Thomas C. Holt, Frederick Cooper, and Aims McGuiness, eds., Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, South Africa, and the British West Indies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). See Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) comparing Haiti and Jamaica; Camilla Cowling’s Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janiero (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Cowling compares Cuba and Brazil employing a comparative methodology to examine emancipation as a gendered project. Hall, Civilising Subjects. Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). See also Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) and Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic

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Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). See Brian Schoen, ‘Book Reviews’, The Journal of Southern History 77, no. 1 (2011): 121–6, for a review of these three books. 120. Anne Eller, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 121. Araujo, Reparations, 7.

2 Oceanic and Settler Colonial British Worlds

The previous chapter pointed to the intersecting histories of imperialism including those of British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires from the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we turn specifically to the AngloAmerican world that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. And we do so in order to investigate how intersecting forms of imperialism and colonization have become fruitful ways to think transnationally about empire and its relationship to settler colonial nationalisms. North America, Australia and New Zealand each had economic and social interests in territorial expansion into the Pacific and sought through them to promote their zones of political influence. For Australia and New Zealand in the first decades of the twentieth century, these ambitions expressed also the desire for increased autonomy from Britain and saw their stronger engagement with Asia and the United States. And secondly, we consider the parallel rise of oceanic histories, also a theme of the previous chapter, in reframing regionalism and world history in new ways, often through gesturing not to the transnational but to the translocal. While port cities and non-national sites of transnational exchange are, we agree, crucial to understanding globalization as a circuit rather than a top-down process, in the following, we argue also for the critical role of thinking through the nation, particularly as seen in settler colonial historiographies, in the transnationalization of histories of colonial-metropolitan and intercolonial interaction. Comparative histories of settler colonies in the Anglo-American world have brought into greater consideration the early twentieth-century emergence of a white community of nations. These nations were connected by their British heritage yet sought separate authority in the emerging changing

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world order.1 While the question of independence from empire demanded by anti-colonialists and nationalists in India and elsewhere in these same years was largely put on hold, the autonomy of Dominions within the socalled British Commonwealth gained traction. In Australia, nationhood at the turn of the century had been proclaimed not least on the basis of the nation’s asserted right and responsibility to administer to its own ‘native’ population. But already by the late nineteenth century, trade and defence relations were emerging with the United States. And following the First World War, through their membership in the League of Nations, Australia and the Dominions became increasingly involved in the supposed modernizing of empire represented by the Mandates System under which ex-German colonies were internationally administered including by Australia itself.2 Intercolonial and transnationally informed comparative studies of settler colonialism emerging during the 2000s have contributed to the further disruption of old-style centre–periphery models of empire. These innovative studies have pursued the uneven lines of influence circulating around metropole and colonial worlds and beyond, many being specifically concerned with the shifting terrains of ‘race’ involved in shaping them. In Connected World: History in Transnational Perspective, editors Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake drew together elements from whiteness studies, Indigenous History, settler colonialism and British World history in their celebration of the capacity of transnational history to ‘trace connections between people, ideas and political movements … [otherwise] lost to vision when a firmly national framework is in place’.3 In 2009, in the introduction to their edited collection titled Re-Orienting Whiteness Australian historians Leigh Boucher, Katherine Ellinghaus and Jane Carey argued conversely for the importance of putting colonial and settler colonial ‘back’ into critical whiteness studies.4 Similarly interested in working transnationally across the fields of imperial, colonial and settler histories, Zoe Laidlaw called for new analyses of ‘race’ politics and indigenous agencies. She has shown how concern for indigenous rights informed numbers of metropolitan humanitarians in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and contributed to intercolonial and international perspectives on the reform of settler colonialism and thus of imperial affairs more generally.5 In the following, the historical formations and critiques of whiteness in the settler colonies will be one of our key concerns. The transnational history of settler colonialism has contributed markedly, we argue, to our understanding of the diversity of white colonial subjects, as it underlines the physical proximity of colonizing subjects to the indigenous peoples

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whose lands they occupied. This locatedness and relationality have helped to complicate the conservative narrative operating in some transnational history that ideas as well as people travelled simply outwards from empire and through the colonial world, a trajectory that produced the conditions for decolonization as though local conditions were a mere by-product of empire. But it was relations on the ground and the resistances and agencies met there that were productive of change. Violence as much as exchange – rupture as much as contact – were driving forces. As Indigenous History has demonstrated, while empire may have been proclaimed an ameliorative project of ‘civilizing’, ultimately it was exploitation – sometimes openly genocidal – that provided the means by which economic, political, social and even humanitarian goals were achieved. Ironically, furthermore, indigenous knowledge and labour as well as land and resources were the material bases (as James Belich has identified) that fuelled the settler colonial explosion which in turn underwrote the emergence of the modern British empire.6

Settler empires New work on the United States as an empire has also contributed to this growing awareness of the role of settlerism in transnational history. As we noted in the Introduction, in the early 1990s Ian Tyrrell’s early efforts to apply comparative or international (transnational) frameworks in the deconstruction of exceptionalism in American history seemed as yet unsuccessful. On the other hand, Michael Adas in 2001 sets out to nuance Tyrrell’s diagnosis in two ways. Firstly, Adas questions the necessary assumption that American exceptionalism was yet unchallenged, given the range of comparative and transnational studies of American society and culture that in his opinion were under-estimated. Secondly, Adas rejects the assumption underlying much of the debate ensuing from Tyrrell’s declaration that exceptionalism can be equated with isolationism. Adas asserts that, in reality, US governments and policies from the outset engaged with other places, peoples and cultures – if mostly to denigrate and seek to control them. American exceptionalism was consolidated, he concludes, not through isolation but through a myriad of ‘self-laudatory contrasts’ with Asia and Europe as well as with indigenous societies within its borders.7 Rather than a belated addition to American national history, therefore, US

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imperialism in the twentieth-century Pacific represents an extension of the self-consciously Christianizing world view inherent to the idea of Manifest Destiny. Seeing similar links between settler colonialism and imperial ambitions in other places in the world, Adas regards America’s foundations as a settler colony located in a sense of national right being directed outwards in a range of racializing views and behaviours towards various peoples and territory in the Pacific including in Hawai’i, Haiti and the Philippines. Drawing on the very kinds of transnational settler comparison we argue for as well, and by reading these alongside the new critical histories of empire, Adas concludes: Much of what nineteenth-century Americans thought, said, and wrote about the Indians of the American frontiers was shared, often with remarkably little variation, with the settler societies of the other neo-Europes, which were just as deeply committed to subduing their own indigenous populations.8

Moreover, when viewed in comparison with the history of colonialism more broadly, Adas finds little of exception in America’s imperial ambitions. Since its earliest days, Adas points out, the ‘Anglo-American settler version of the civilizing mission bore striking resemblances to similar projects’ in other parts of the world, such as those of the British, French and Portuguese in Africa, South America and Oceania.9 Also struck by these similarities, in an article titled ‘On the American Empire from a British Imperial Perspective’, another historian of whiteness and modernity Dane Kennedy states: ‘To speak of the United States as an empire is to engage of necessity in comparative historical analysis.’10 And, as we will see later in this chapter, Australian historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds locate the efforts of United States and Australia to establish their own empires in the Pacific alongside those of the European powers from which they had emerged. In the process each nation developed its own (but transnationally interconnected) version of white nationalism. Rather than exceptionalism, these studies point to the intersections of comparable ideologies. Many historians working on and from the settler colonial world seem to have been rather less concerned by the question of American exceptionalism. Reflecting on his background as a historian of South Africa, Jonathan Hyslop has commented that the idea of the ‘United States as a uniquely virtuous power’ appeared to him always ‘inherently implausible’.11 And as we noted in the Introduction, feminist and postcolonial scholars have long interrogated who speaks for and through the nation. They have aimed to name and thus defamiliarize the ubiquity of middle-class masculine whiteness (and the

Oceanic and Settler Colonial British Worlds

significance of whiteness to their female counterparts) situated at the heart of empire as well as of settler nationalisms. While pointing to the historicity of national identities like exceptionalism, Hyslop emphasized also that subjectivities are multiple and unstable. And he called upon transnational historians to be critical of official sources, advising that ‘[t]he adoption of transnational modes of thinking about history … shak[es] up our understanding of the stability of the [historical] units to be analysed’.12 Invested also in questioning received narratives or archives, the emergence of transnational approaches has been crucially influenced by histories from the margins, from below and of the minority. According to Elleke Boehmer, these lesser histories are essentially minor in that they resist being told or simply cannot be heard by canonical history.13 In her account of Indian women writing from London about home and nation in late colonial India, Antoinette Burton underlined also the significance of seeking out alternative expressions of modernity and transnational forms of subjectivity that were important to shaping colonial history, even if they are often occluded. She argued that if we are to recognize what it means to be subject to as well as a subject of colonization, then we must question who counts as a historical actor and what counts as a historical archive. Hierarchies of gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and other intersectionalities typically relegate ‘women’ and ‘natives’ to the margins of official history, or they may be found in what have been seen as lesser forms of history, those of the domestic or personal. As a result, the significance of myriad mid-rank or minor historical figures to national and world history has been underestimated or entirely overlooked.14 Settler colonial histories are particularly powerful in disrupting the teleological drive of empire to decolonization that contributes to the silencing of minority histories. By critically questioning empire’s claim to authority over other places and peoples, transnational histories of settler colonialism have helped to uncover more about the lives of those living under the fractured, partial and uneven authority of colonial rule. In the process, they have contributed to the project of revealing also the formations of white settler (and colonial) subjects. These subjects have been revealed as not singular entities but complex assemblages of identity formed in specific locales and in relationship to colonized others. By attending to circuitries and deterritorializations, moreover, transnational colonial histories have shown that settler worlds were profoundly impactful in the formations of metropolitan imperial cultures. They have uncovered the particularities of empire as they were articulated in diverse colonial and imperial locales.15

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As we discuss variously in this book, a methodological question for transnational historians is how to attend to a range of such complexities at once. This imperative has led to considerable discussion among key historians of empire. Thinking about the role of colonial encounters in the production of imperial relations, in Tensions of Empire (2007) Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper conclude that imperial and colonial worlds operate on a continuum or along the same plane. Their starting point is that ‘Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself.’ From there, they propose the study of the ‘contingency of metropolitan-colonial connections and its consequences for patterns of imperial rule’.16 Contingency in this context refers to the oftencontradictory ways in which colonization has been carried out in relatively ad hoc fashion on the ground and in response to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples. Given that ‘Europe’ literally came into being through these highly interactive colonial contexts, they point to the rights agendas predicting the French Revolution that were mobilized by slave revolts and the Black Jacobins movement emerging in Saint-Domingue and Haiti in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This movement exemplifies in their mind the need to investigate an ‘expanded version of citizenship in European empires … [that] raised profound questions about the universality of citizenship and civil rights within Europe’.17 As this example illustrates, they argue, the abiding problem of imperial legitimacy ‘was present [in the colonies] from the start’.18 People living under colonization spoke back directly to empire’s claims to civilized modernity sometimes in ways that have been documented, but their everyday expressions have been rarely captured in the archive. By reading across national histories previously considered distant in geographical and temporal terms from the metropolitan ‘centre’, transnational comparative histories have begun to reveal a great deal about the circulation within and between colonies of enlightenment concepts like ‘rights’ and ‘justice’ that were characteristically mobilized in defence of colonial rule. Other languages important to colonial modernity included those of ascribing tradition and backwardness to local peoples and settlement and progress to whiteness. When combined with Indigenous History as a field of inquiry, the critical analysis of these conceptual frameworks has contributed to the unsettling of histories of ‘settlement’, locating them simultaneously in local and global frame as being shaped by resistance or by negotiation with indigenous peoples. And other populations also contributed to this shifting landscape of relationship. As we saw in Chapter 1, diverse populations

Oceanic and Settler Colonial British Worlds

beyond the dyad of European settler and indigenous have contributed to the formation of transnational worlds. Among incoming populations in the settler colonies, for example, were numbers of colonized peoples from other settler and crown colonies, as well as convicts and the transported, the indentured and formerly enslaved, and also various free or migrant peoples. According to Stoler and Cooper, in order to study the complex dynamics of relations on the ground and in relation to other colonies, we must locate metropole and colony in a ‘single analytic field’.19

Unsettling British worlds Clearly, the scope of research entailed in undertaking intercolonial research can be daunting. The transnational study of the Anglo-American world identified above by Adas has in many ways been made possible by exchanges between transnational communities of historians. The formation of British World history network at the end of the 1990s is one example of efforts to enhance dialogue between scholars – in this case – working on Britain and the former Dominions. With Britishness as its central trope, the network set out to build on the work of leading historians of gender and empire such as Catherine Hall, whose book White Male and Middle Class (1992), as we saw in the previous chapter, was groundbreaking for its incisive account of the co-productions of Englishness in colonial and metropolitan worlds.20 Key works following Hall have produced comparative settler colonial histories of masculinity and whiteness.21 In the 2000s this network convened a series of British World conferences held in Cape Town (2002), Calgary (2003), Melbourne (2004) and Auckland (2005). Organized by changing international committees, each sought to bring together scholars working on all aspects of the former British Commonwealth. In 2008 the growth of a transnational British historiography saw the creation of the journal Britain and the World under the auspices of the British Scholar Society, which has continued to organize similar conferences on Britain and the World.22 But as we noted in the Introduction, the very fact of the national in transnational raises important questions about how far transnational history breaks with national narratives and periodizations. Such could be the limits of the British World phenomenon, with participants themselves asking whether focusing on mobility within the British world effectively returned to centre stage a range of white

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elite subjects. Was less attention being given to non-white and non-elite subjects either forced to become mobile or who simply stayed in one place? And what did foregrounding their experiences instead mean for the efficacy of the British World as a concept? This problematic was apparent early on, being acknowledged (if somewhat obliquely) in the introduction of Rediscovering the British World, a collection based on papers from the Calgary conference held in 2003. The editors, Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, opened their comments by critically framing the concept of Greater Britain as it was imagined by Charles Dilke at the turn of the twentieth century. They then turned to the important question of inclusivity and breadth at conferences, noting that the organizers in Calgary had aimed to broaden the remit of that year’s conference by actively seeking more scholarship on ‘non-British minorities’ and on the ‘issues of gender, race and ethnicity throughout the wider British world’.23 By the time of the Melbourne conference in the following year, questions were being raised even more clearly about imperial mapping and periodization. In their collection titled Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, editors Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre discussed how far transnational approaches have succeeded in opening up the British World to greater interrogation.24 They concluded, overall, that the substantial insights and the methodological and conceptual sophistications that settler colonial scholarship has brought to the transnationalization of British world history has yet to be sufficiently realized. As a result, the understanding of how imperial worlds have been profoundly shaped in economic, cultural and social terms by colonial and settler societies remained still limited. The editors expressed enthusiasm for current ‘historical practice with its emphasis on transnationalism, postcolonialism and indigeneity’ that informs British world historians for whom the ‘British world is no longer an object of loyalty with familiar features and common points of reference; it is something they discover in their own settings’.25 But settler colonialism had much still to offer the study of decolonization that by the late nineteenth century was being routinely deferred at the same time as settler colonial worlds saw no prospect of an ‘end’. As Patrick Wolfe has pointed out (they remind us), settler colonization is not an event but a process that continues quite literally in the here and now.26 An important feature of the transnationalization of the history of colonialism has been wrought through settler studies. They underline ‘contingency’ within the history of British (de)colonization, as much ad

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hoc, contradictory and brutal, as planned or rational. Where once imperial history focused on exploration, settlement and governance, Darian-Smith and her co-editors commended the new British World history for setting out to investigate the ‘diverse operation and adjustment of transported British institutions, and the complex interactions between coloniser and colonised’.27 But if enthusiastic about these prospects, they remained concerned that the metropole holds sway over the scale and scope of historical investigation. In their opinion, the British World intervention was yet to be fully realized not least because the many insights offered by transnationally informed settler colonial histories were only ‘begrudgingly acknowledged’. This is even though ideas from the work of Edward Said on orientalism brought a welcome deconstruction of ‘various forms of knowledge, including medicine, law, public administration, anthropology and history, whereby the coloniser constructed images of non-Western societies that validated the imperial project’. And even though beyond orientalism, there had emerged many complex interrogations of resistance and agency among those peoples living under colonization or expressed by Europeans critical of colonial rule. Building on the critical focus these postcolonial approaches had brought to transnational approaches, settler colonial histories may yet contribute further to our understanding of the ‘resistance to empire as well as the subtle forms of domination it imposed even on those who rejected Europe’s civilising mission’.28 Darian-Smith and her co-editors commend also the influence of cultural history upon transnational histories of public and popular culture concerned with ‘imperial artefacts’ such as food, dress, museum exhibitions and advertising.29 They endorse the capacity of these studies to reveal the myriad social and cultural as well as economic impacts of the colonial worlds on the British world, further illustrating the unevenness of imperial patriotism in diverse colonial worlds. While they underline also the capacity of settler colonial histories to enhance such understandings of ‘the uneven complex, changeable relations of Britons with their Empire’.30 Moreover, they advise, the settler colonial turn in transnational history has been able to contribute unique critical perspectives upon the notion that all ‘colonists were colonisers’ equally implicated in the ‘imperial project of domination’. Even more complexity will flow from the growing interest in the ‘markers of difference’ in settler worlds. For one thing, the supposedly benign intentions of empire were crucial in legitimating white elites who in the Dominions sought to represent themselves as co-creators of ‘progressive new “British societies” where the economic and social inequalities of “old Britain” would

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be replaced by a spirit of egalitarian opportunity’.31 Thus even those among them who were involved in murderous acts against indigenous populations were committed to a covert culture of violence. Settler colonial histories have also extended the study of white women in empire, bringing much-needed critical attention to their ambiguous position in relation to indigenous women who were very differently positioned as female subjects in the project of colonization.32 When seen in transnational comparison informed by indigenous perspectives, remarkable similarities and differences are revealed between settler regimes including in the range of violences that might be framed as humanitarian even as ‘the imperial goal of bringing the supposed benefits of civilization and law to first nations peoples faltered in the face of alternative indigenous cultural understandings’.33 Reflecting on the British World phenomenon from the perspective of New Zealand history, in her contribution to the above volume Katie Pickles identifies what she calls ‘the cringe’ within the British world community. In her view, turning away from a metropolitan centre has produced, ironically, a resurgence of national history in the settler colonies. This reinvestment in the national has led in turn, Pickles argues, to a parochialism that can work against transnational collaboration. Often historians from elsewhere are viewed with suspicion for their ‘raiding’ of local archives, she advises, and for their supposed temerity in writing about subjects that should belong, as it were, to historians living and working within the nation. Accordingly, within the British World Pickles sees a self-inflicted marginalization of scholarship by historians of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a kind of replication of Dominion insecurity and self-doubt about the imperial past.34 In the next section, we return to the theme begun in the previous chapter concerning oceanic transnational history. In the following we consider the role of oceans in facilitating the gendered, embodied, relational and spatialized articulations of whiteness on which imperial and settler nations have been forged. Of crucial significance to the new oceanic histories has been writing the histories of Pacific peoples living within them and not only along the rim in Australia, Japan, New Zealand or the United States. These same approaches may be applied to other oceanic worlds in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Recognizing oceans themselves as historical constructions, rather than as inert spaces, has been instrumental in reshaping not only our accounts of empire but the diversity of transnationalisms that moved within and across them. (The myriad populations of enslaved, sailors, convicts and indentured criss-crossing the Atlantic are discussed in Chapter 1. The voyages of indigenous subjects to Europe in the aftermaths of

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colonization are investigated in Chapter 3.) Towards the end of this chapter, we consider translocal as a concept that underlines the importance of ports as productive sites or points of intersection for webs and flows. Bringing together diverse populations in close proximity, port cities have proved particularly vibrant locales for research.35 As we will see, informed by these kinds of methodological challenges, the comparative approach has been also revitalized, including through the work of historians of nineteenth-century gender and feminism who have studied the overlapping political agendas of women across racial, social and cultural hierarchies.36 We return to networks of progressive and humanitarian concern and the historical formations of cosmopolitan transnationalisms in Chapter 5.

Oceanic histories as methodology In their introduction to the first edition of The British Atlantic (2002), editors David Armitage and Michael Braddick describe the British Atlantic as one entity among many emerging in the Atlantic World. From the viewpoint of this larger temporal and spatial scale: [by the 1500s] Indians and Africans and European settlers, traders, and migrants encountered foreign and exotic societies and were forced to come to terms with challenging physical and social environments. In doing so they reinvented themselves, and contributed to the reinvention both of the societies they encountered and that of their home cultures.37

In this dynamic milieu, ‘[o]ne such community was that of the British Atlantic world’ from which ‘[w]ithin its limits an empire took shape’. Through this perspective, the British Atlantic world is not an ‘arbitrary creation of historical scholarship but corresponds to real networks of social, political, and economic connection in the past’. And it has to be studied on two levels at once by ‘learning both what was general and what was particular by placing differing local historical experiences in a larger, comparative, context’.38 Armitage and Braddick see ‘a complex of evolving connections’ that is not so much a product of physical geography (although obviously that has been an influential factor) but the expression of a historical space produced through those very connections.39 As we argued in Chapter 1, the oceanic has become a valuable framework for writing new kinds of transnational history. Much work is yet to be done

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in fulfilling its potential to disrupt assumed regionalisms and temporalities. In the opening line of his chapter for the same collection, titled ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, Armitage exclaims: ‘We are all Atlanticists now.’40 But somewhat sardonically so, as in his view, the popularity of the transnational approach has seen it too often mobilized without the necessary rethinking of methodology, the outcome being a reinscription of conservative historical narratives. According to Armitage, writing new Atlantic history requires an understanding of its formations as equally transnational, international and national or regional. Furthermore, these three interacting Atlantics should be compared with other oceanic histories taking shape contiguously. Necessarily difficult to define because of its fluid borders, the Atlantic offers nonetheless ‘a field that links national histories, facilitates comparisons between them, and opens up new areas of study or gives greater focus to better-established modes of inquiry’.41 The same can be said of other oceanic worlds. In their collection Oceanic Histories, editors Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford and David Armitage bring together new work on the Indian, Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic and Southern Oceans, as well as the Sea of Japan, Korea’s East Sea, the Baltic, Red and South China Seas, in a ‘wideranging’ rather than ‘comprehensive’ project with a ‘historiographic objective’ to chart ‘how histories and geographies as modes of knowledge became linked to the sea and its relation to land over the longue duree’.42 By investigating these ‘longer genealogies’,43 they argue that it is possible to allow for a ‘recalibration of influence, and resurrection of alternative aspirations’ that emerged and were subsumed by ‘the historical geo-politics of a globe increasingly connected by large waterways and the exchange and commerce they facilitated’.44 The editors prefer the term ‘translocal’ to ‘transnational’ in their efforts to capture this fluidity without being limited to the rise of nation states in this larger story. While the national in transnational may be seen to limit the scope of oceanic histories’ potential to see the long view, nonetheless the oceanic turn has played an important part in the transnational historian’s return to the nation with new questions and perspectives. In roundtable on the Oceanic Histories collection discussed above, Clare Anderson reprises David Armitage’s much-quoted 2002 exclamation we are all Atlantic historians now by asking in the era of oceanic histories, ‘Are we all oceanic historians now?’45 Perhaps so, but for many historians a central purpose remains to relocate national history and, for that matter, world history in a larger and profoundly destabilizing frame. As Ian Tyrrell noted in a 2007 article, entitled ‘Looking Eastward: Pacific and Global Perspectives on American History in

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the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, new kinds of Pacific histories began to emerge also in the 2000s. Historians of the transnational Pacific sought to situate US history in a more thoroughly regional and thence also global context.46 Pacific regional history informed by the transnational turn has been productive in reframing a range of national histories around the Pacific including that of Australia. In a 2013 article in Australian Historical Studies, the Australian historian Frank Bongiorno acknowledges as much when he also reprises Armitage’s declaration, this time commenting that ‘we’re all transnational historians now’. Not least, Bongiorno is reflecting upon the implacable logic of oceanic perspectives for an island nation like Australia. Writing from a continent located between two oceans and with historical connections to a third, naturally he endorses the capacity of oceanic histories to blur the boundaries not only between Pacific nations and imperial metropoles but also between national territory and colonial and regional interests. By their very nature, oceanic histories cannot be reduced to discrete national frameworks; for this exact reason, states Bongiorno, they ‘allow us to see how nation-states have actually been constituted by transnational flows, rather than treating the national and the transnational as in a perpetual tug-of-war’.47 Thinking through the Pacific has inspired new scholarship that engages with indigenous knowledges and temporalities. In their edited collection, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning towards the Transpacific (2015), Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease take the oceanic turn further. They acknowledge the profound impacts of Hawai’i indigenous scholarship in histories of the Pacific Ocean that think transnationally beyond the discrete histories of land masses located within it. Along with postcolonial literary studies, and influenced by Bernard Smith’s work on art, culture and modernity, the editors in their introduction state that indigenous scholarship has inspired what they describe as a ‘transpacific turn’.48 In ‘Our Sea of Islands’ published in 1994, Epeli Hau’ofa made a compelling argument for a holistic approach that would recognize the ‘criss-crossing’ of an ‘ocean that had been boundless for ages before Captain Cook’s apotheosis’.49 Recognition of Indigenous History requires rescaling the Pacific temporally in order to recognize that oceans, like continents, have themselves came into being through being charted and traversed first by indigenous peoples long before Europeans arrived. Indigenous History asserts the role of pre-European as well as post-contact histories in shaping oceanic worlds, bringing to life that which has been previously considered empty, inert or ahistorical on the imperial map.50

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Many of these same insights have been applied to historicizing whiteness. Informed by oceanic approaches and the radical reframing of British World history they have wrought, in an article titled ‘A British Sea’ Tamsin Pietsch sets out to investigate the part played by oceanic space in shaping white masculinity. Pietsch argues that by studying the variety of ‘Pacifics’ experienced by Europeans it is possible to grasp not only fluidity and mobility but also ‘the progressive way in which individuals [have] constantly sought to order the world around them’. In pursuing this contrary effect, she follows the mental journey of a nineteenth-century Scottish ship’s surgeon as he voyages into the Southern Oceans. Applying a transnational mode of inquiry to her subject and to the oceanic space within and through which he moves, Pietsch finds him to be deeply imbued with spatial and temporal concepts, [his] notion of himself as a part of a diffuse British community that he saw as responsible for advancing modern civilization was his way of making sense of the immensity of a world he experienced as both liberating and unsettling.51

New imperial histories that have established the importance of sexuality and identity in the formations of imperial worlds whether ‘at home’ and away inspired Pietsch. Not least she points to the work of the renowned historian of Britishness, John MacKenzie, who aimed to show how ‘the empire was central to the cultural, economic, and political life of people in Britain’.52 As we have argued already in this chapter, Pietsch makes the case for extending this approach to metropolitan worlds by engaging it more fully with transnational scholarship in the former settler colonies. She notes that in their introduction to the 2006 edited volume, At Home with the Empire, Catherine Hall and Sonja Rose declare that British history ‘has to be transnational’.53 For Pietsch, this objective requires historians to understand the ways in which various actors sought to capture and direct the forces of globalization … then they need to think not just about arrivals and departures, not just about offshore and on, but about seas journeys themselves as shifting spaces in which people of all descriptions developed ideas that helped them navigate the contours of a rapidly changing world.54

This important point underlines the multiple meanings of mobility encapsulated in Moving Subjects, the title of a collection edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton. In its pages, they set out to think not only about bodies moving through space and time but also about their capacity to adapt and change in relation to those others with whom they come into contact, and in some cases to share degrees of proximity and intimacy.55

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Moving subjects can never be entirely managed by colonial officials nor, indeed, by historians, given the affective and embodied worlds they occupied. But once given a central place in the writing of transnational, inter-imperial or global history, they illustrate the contradictory and uneven effects of colonial rule. Settler colonial national histories provide a remarkably productive perspective on this complexity as they continue into the present. By the interwar years, middle-class white women travelling to England became a requisite visit Home for family and cultural reasons. And yet the experience caused many to reflect on what it was to be Australian and white, British but not English, a colonial and a colonist. Travelling beyond Australia offered new ways to be modern women in the world that, according to Angela Woollacott or Anne Rees in her study of white Australian women’s professional and personal opportunities in North America, illustrates how settler colonial whiteness refracted in gendered ways the racialized formations of modernity.56

Reframing national histories Transnational oceanic, British World and comparative settler histories have inspired a renewed interrogation of national historiographies. They have reenergized histories of the nation by destabilizing and thus defamiliarizing official and formal historical narratives. As Burton has argued in Thinking with and through the Nation, the nation remains a powerful lens through which to engage in ‘untangling – and hopefully retangling in productive ways – empire, nation, race, colony and globe’.57 Transnational ways of viewing national historiographies have provided new insight into the formations of settler nationhood. The implications of this return to the national have been far reaching. For example, in their 2008 book, Drawing the Global Colour Line, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds employ US and Australian archives in order to investigate hitherto overlooked exchanges between settler elites and government representatives about settler nationhood concerning immigration restriction. Racialist ideas about nationalism and nationality were formative to their world views and indicative also of their responses to internal racial hierarchies. Leading historians of Australian gender and race relations, Lake and Reynolds begin by reflecting on the insights of the African American historian and commentator, W.E.B. Du Bois. Writing in

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1903 about the transnational circulation of a virulent politics of whiteness, DuBois predicted a coming century wrought by white hostility towards race equality then being demanded by many of the colonized and formerly enslaved around the world. Du Bois was among the first, the authors argue, to identify ‘a new, modern, phenomenon’ within the longer history of postEnlightenment colour consciousness, that of the embattled White Man.58 Through the lens of Du Bois’s insightful analysis, Lake and Reynolds set out to investigate the parameters of a shared whiteness politics circulating between a range of political leaders and commentators within and across Australasia, the United States, South Africa and Canada. These men became key figures in promoting a language and sentiment of global white brotherhood during the early twentieth century. They sought to remedy what they considered to be the flawed idea of the multiracial nationalism. And they aimed at the same time to limit the spread of anti-colonial and rights politics that called for race equality globally. A key to writing these kinds of transnational studies has been the willingness of historians to immerse themselves in national archives and national narratives in other places – in this case, in the United States. Such immersion offers unique opportunity to look back at one’s own national history with new eyes. Marilyn Lake writes of the startling experience of sitting in the New York Public Library in Washington and seeing ‘Australia’ from a distance. By placing national history in trans-Pacific context rather than as simply a part of the British world, it became possible to ‘see the distinctiveness and significance of Australian history and the need to better explain it’.59 In order to investigate the circulation of key texts, politics and policies about whiteness shared transnationally between the United States, Britain and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, Lake and Reynolds used official records and private papers held in several national archives. They were engaged in a lengthy comparative and transnational investigation that reveals interconnected landscapes of whiteness. They show that white men leaders in the new settler nations advocated immigration restriction in the name of democracy, while black intellectuals like Du Bois in the United States and M.K. Gandhi in India called for modernity based on equity. In the same era, meanwhile, mobility became a ‘right’ of male citizens in a global community of white nations. These interpersonal and conceptual interconnections between imperial and settler transnationalisms figured as an essential component in the rise of modern settler nation states.60

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At the same time as the right to freedom of movement was being enjoyed by the settler subjects of the white nations, restrictions of movement were applied to non-white subjects. These included nationals seeking to immigrate into the United States or the White Dominions of the British Commonwealth from, for example, Japan and China whose claims to equal status on the world stage were rejected by the League of Nations in 1919. Australia’s representative played a key role in that decision. This attitude was enshrined already in the immigration restrictive policies enjoyed by British Dominions including Australia and New Zealand, seeking to protect the future of (white) nation states in the name of (world) democracy. Such restrictions and their implications for global race relations did not go unopposed, and not only by black and anti-colonial political movements. As Lake and Reynolds note, the British Colonial Office criticized Australia for its application of immigration restrictions against Indian British subjects. And Margaret Allen shows how significant numbers of Indians in Australia campaigned actively for their own rights and against the status quo, being informed by transnational rights politics including those articulated by Indian activists in India and from London.61 While eventually lifting restrictions against Indian subjects, more broadly successive federal governments in Australia remained determined to manage their own immigration policies in the name of being relatively autonomous as a white nation within the British Commonwealth. Its leaders formed alliances across the Pacific with the United States, while a determinedly White Australia enjoyed separate representation in international fora such as the League. Lake and Reynolds add, furthermore, that support for immigration restriction in the white men’s countries often cut across political affiliation and class. Thus, in 1870s, Australian trade unions campaigned also for restriction in the employment of Chinese labour in Australia.62

Binaries, space and temporality Transnational, comparative and oceanic approaches have been especially useful in deconstructing binaries like white and non-white, ‘native’ and European, colonial and settler or ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’. They have illustrated their partiality, mutuality and contingency. A notable example of this fruitful approach to the transnational history of whiteness is found in the work of Warwick Anderson. In his 2006 book The Cultivation of Whiteness, Anderson

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investigates the production of whiteness in relation to land, landscape and indigeneity within Australia and across the broader Australasia Pacific. He reflects on their circulations within and across the blurred boundaries between the national and the regional that from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Australia promote itself as a southern regional power.63 As Pietsch also illustrated in her study of a Scottish doctor in the Southern Oceans and Lake and Reynolds of the various racial hierarchies interpolated in settler nationalism, transnational history has revealed the moral as well as spatial dimensions of colonial space and time. Cultural history and feminist history have pointed to the ways in which white male ‘English’ subjects have long been represented as though unmarked figures. Their authority as the agents of modern British Empire has been largely assumed. In the introduction of her 2004 collection A New Imperial History, however, Kathleen Wilson points to the profound changes in imperial history during the 1990s that were brought about by feminist and cultural studies. Such studies were interested in ‘the politics of affiliation and everyday life in and through representation’. Pointing also to the role of a transnational perspective in this process of change, Wilson notes that feminist and cultural studies scholars have helped to show how the local and the global have been inextricably intertwined in the ‘contending agendas’ of various subjects, including metropolitan and local rulers, traders, creole, indigenous and enslaved, that since 1492 were involved a dynamic history of struggle and exchange over ‘the meanings of Englishness, liberty and slavery’.64 Likewise, feminist transnational approaches emphasizing the complexity of cultural politics that have brought into question what the centre or the peripheries of empire might mean and for whom. And they have done so not only in a geographical sense but also in terms of the gendered, raced and moralizing hierarchies that have marked the landscape of colonization. Wilson advises that ‘we need to remind ourselves that the enduring fiction of moral as well as geographical separateness’ between colonizers and settlers and local peoples has been fundamental to civilizing narratives of empire and in the ‘conflation of geographic distance with temporality and nationality’. She continues: As new studies are emphasising, English law and administrative regulations in British domains, although frequently a source of conflict, also aimed at maintaining the boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, creating discrepant definitions of legal and national subjects and keeping the less savory aspects of imperial rule (concubinage, mixed-race progeny, violence, and other forms of ‘degeneracy’) hidden from metropolitan view.65

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Inevitably, of course, efforts at maintaining any moral distance between colony and metropole was never fully realized. (The impossibility of hiding conditions in the settler colonies from metropolitan view will be discussed further in Chapter 5.) Interactions between the local and the global have been studied in relation to the formations of imperial-colonial power in Africa, for example,66 or through investigating official colonial exchanges with indigenous leaders to reveal the inherent hybridity of imperial systems of rule.67 The technologies and economies of power entwined within these exchanges are discussed further in the next chapter. While categories and binaries may be analysed, historically bodies and individuals have experienced their effects. As Sara Ahmed reminds us in Queer Phenomenology, the critical analysis of representation is not sufficient unless it is coupled with attention to embodiment. The fact of materiality and embodiment provides an important counterpoint to the generalizations of discourse analysis. Ahmed describes instead ‘a space of contact between cultures that is also where bodies encounter other bodies’. She insists, moreover, that bodies as well as cultures, indigenous and incoming, become involved, therefore, in ongoing processes of co-formation. Ahmed writes that it is not peoples that ‘come into contact to create a hybrid from the mixture of pure forms’. But rather, ‘embodied “cultures” come to be lived as having a certain shape, or even a skin, as the effect of such contact’.68 This emphasis on the embodied spatializations within transnational histories has inspired the historian of urban frontiers, Penny Edmonds, to comment in an article titled ‘White Spaces? Racialised Geographies’: ‘If whiteness is a strategy of authority rather than authentic or essential, then it may well be constructed spatially.’69 Such an approach to space requires that we rethink also our approach to the archives particularly in relation to indigenous histories and knowledges. In her book Urbanising Frontiers, Edmonds writes that in order to ‘reIndigenize understandings of the settler-colonial city’ she undertook a ‘critical counter-colonial reading of traditional archives’. Her aim was to combine that counter reading with attention to otherwise ‘neglected’ indigenous archives and voices.70 In her resulting book, Edmonds compares the indigenous policy and experiences of colonization in two settler colonies in order to focus not on the ‘colonial frontier’ (imagined as temporally and geographically ‘distant’) but on what she describes as urbanizing frontiers. In this way, her work illustrates the value of cultural geography to creating new kinds of transnational comparison that can reveal the differently localized effects of similar settler colonial assumptions about ‘race’, land and civilization.

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By investigating the ‘processes, both internal and external’, that shaped both sides of the Pacific, Edmonds uncovers the transnational circulations not simply of white people but of whiteness. And she describes the parallel desires between settlers within each colony to regulate at the same time what it meant to be and live as indigenous. That doubled regulation was achieved in part by defining space as either ‘settled’ and for whites or assigning it to ‘natives’ at the same time as restricting the immigration of other nonwhites into the white population. Edmonds finds that during the nineteenth century, Melbourne in Victoria and Victoria on Vancouver Island became white spaces through the effects of erasures and exclusions both literal and figurative. These interpolated processes required forms of forgetting in order to authorize whiteness that was actually comprised of sets of uneven and contingent relations enacted distinctly and incrementally (and well as incompletely) in each city. Their comparison reveals the self-proclaimed programmatic, rational, measured nature of empire to be unstable, incomplete and unpredictable. It was created in piecemeal fashion through ‘transcultural sites in which Britain’s narrative identity was confounded and subverted … offset and at times destabilized by the particular unruly refractions and subversions of colonialism at the local level’.71

Translocal histories from below The value of thinking translocally continues to offer new insights into the historically diverse formations of global power relations. Building on his important contribution to critical imperial and transnational history through the metaphor of ‘webs’ of power and influence, Tony Ballantyne makes a powerful case for translocal and transcultural approaches in an article titled ‘On Place, Space and Mobility’. Here he extends the webs metaphor to encompass entanglements at the local. By working with and through these entanglements, he writes, ‘we might think of places as knot-like conjunctures where the ceaseless small-scale mobilities of life in the location interlocked into the more extensive networks that enabled the regular movement of people, things and words in and out of the location.’72 The ‘shape of the knot’ and how it changes depend on time and location, as ‘places are not static, local antithesis of an inherently mobile imperial system or global network. They are, to an extent, always global’ in their endless formation.73 The range of spaces within and between these incomplete formations allows more

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terrain for the possibility of indigenous agency. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern have written also of ‘the limits of imperial power [that] created interstices where subaltern people could exercise power’.74 In these ways historians interested in local sites transnationally interconnected by empire have been engaged in reimagining the landscapes of colonialism. They have focused on the changing conditions in which bodies have occupied space in proximity and to varying degrees of intimacy. Emphasizing embodied and relational rather than abstract structures or preexisting subjects, in the introduction to their collection Transnationalism from Below the editors Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith underline the importance of ‘grounding’ transnational history. They point to the necessity of investigating the relational formations of subjects in ways that open up possibilities for agency through realizing the multiplicity of subjectivities activated in any one context.75 This emphasis on proximity and intimacy counteracts the largeness of scale that has often accompanied the transnational turn, ironically adding to the obstruction of myriad proximities and agencies already silenced or occluded in official histories or archives. Transnational history inherits much of this interest in the translocal and ‘ground up’ history from the ‘history from below’ movement of the 1960s. In The Trouble with Empire (2015), Burton seeks to apply the insights of E.P. Thompson’s class analysis of historical change to the broader concerns of colonial history. According to Burton, the ‘trouble’ with most British imperial histories has been that they have not learned sufficiently from Thompson about the need to place ‘dissent and disruption’ at the centre of their investigation. According to Burton, ‘trouble, rather than extension and hegemony, was the characteristic of imperial power on the ground’.76 One of the major challenges facing transnational historians, Burton argues, is not only to think both horizontally and vertically about webs of influence and exchange but to do so in ways that capture friction, rupture and disorder. Colonial disorder was ‘often transnational’ whether because of colonial officials moving between colonies or because the resilience of populations made any appearance of order impossible to maintain. More than just rejecting the vertical view – the view from above that was characteristic of official histories of colonization – adopting transnational or horizontal perspectives requires that historians develop a ‘transcolonial lens’. In this way, they can ‘illuminate local conditions, movements, and forms of dissent’ that took place in a variety of colonized spaces to in ways that reveal the ‘shared temporalities – and repertoires – of disruption’.77 For

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Burton, the agenda has been not simply to uncover the uneven or contingent nature of empire, or even less to rehearse the narrative of rise and fall that attributes Britain’s trouble in empire to its over-extending ambitions. But rather to make the case for trouble is … to argue that empire was shaped as much by the repeated assertion of colonial subjects as by the footprint of imperial agents: it is to argue that empire was made – as in, constituted by – the very trouble its efforts and practices provoked.78

While much might be applied to the settler colonial from her important book, Burton offers a compelling case for the significance of feminist and postcolonial scholarship in general towards a rethinking of agency from the grassroots. The critical transnational scholarship she has in mind sets out to apprehend systems of race, gender, class and sexuality as they have intersected with, and complicated, troubled and sometimes obstructed, imperial rule.79 In her previous work, Burton had shown how British feminists during the late nineteenth century were engaged in facilitating their own agenda in empire rather than ending imperial rule. In the context of the many colonial, progressive or working-class movements critical of colonization, Burton asks of her own scholarship as much as the scholarship of others, where imperial history might end and anti-colonial history might begin, given the two have been so deeply imbricated. Whether in terms of historiography (the writing of history) or via the historical (the actual people, actions and events of the past), only by insisting on tensions at the horizontal as well as inverting top-down history, she writes, it is possible to illuminate the complexity of what she calls the ‘field of empire’.80 In this larger framing of colonial history, imperial power emerges as profoundly unstable and riven with anxiety. Those living under colonial rule were the outspoken and insightful critics of their own conditions, mobilizing against their oppressors the very terms of civilization and modernity on which their ‘civilizing’ was being carried out: Tracing the history of the kinds of principled skepticism articulated by colonised people about the legitimacy of such global-imperial ambition recaptures their often-unflinching assessment of colonial modernity’s violences, even when they chose collaboration, coexistence, and cooperation.81

Burton declares that developing this kind of attentiveness to nuanced expressions of critique and resistance requires thinking about the potentialities of agency beyond the binary of either collaboration or resistance.82 We should not assume that dissent was always anti-imperial, for

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example, nor should we seek ‘authentic others’.83 Instead, we must engage in ‘decolonising methodologies’ while at the same time aiming to decolonize our own imaginaries.84 Finally, Lisa Lowe in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents, also from 2015, applies the notion of proximity to vast populations interconnected by global history. She argues for their significance in the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism (here limited to the Americas), the transatlantic slave trades and the East India and China trades. To this end, she takes as her starting point the intersecting histories of slavery and unfree labour discussed in Chapter 1. Lowe argues for the ‘intimacies’ between ‘four continents’ of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas (unfortunately leaving the Pacific almost entirely out of her purview). Rather than treating these continents as separate transnational histories and regions, she calls forth the entanglements between them via populations circulating the global. Lowe argues that to investigate their exchanges and co-locations enables better understanding of the ways in which European settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans and Asians jointly created the new world of the Americas that was to be ‘intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity’.85 Sources are once again a crucial question, as are modes of reading them. At stake in Lowe’s account, as in Burton’s above, is how to employ a critical approach to the archive in order ‘[t]o make legible the forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation and independence’. Lowe concludes that to achieve this aim we have to ‘devise other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories’.86 Lowe deploys a self-consciously genealogical approach that sets out to disrupt notions of origin or progress. Thus, she aims to unsettle liberal concepts and categories such as mobility or individualism in order to excavate the process by which they ‘are reserved for some and wholly denied to others’.87 Thus, minor or unofficial archival sources can open up official accounts to new critical readings, while familiar archives become unfamiliar through asking new questions of them. Another strand in this larger set of objectives has been the emergence of methodologies that seek to shift the ground further by viewing history from indigenous perspectives. Asserting the creolization or hybridization of histories of contact, these projects weave histories of violence and repression with those of resilience and survival as well as celebration and cooperation. Thus, the injustices suffered by indigenous and colonized peoples are read

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not as leading always to hostility towards colonization or colonizers and nor is colonial violence by Europeans interpreted solely as expressions of racism. Reading backwards onto history with one set of assumptions may result in the erasure of myriad forms of indigenous agencies in their interaction with outsiders. The next chapter takes up this theme of possibility, resilience and potentiality. It draws from the new transnationalized historiography of the Black Atlantic and other oceanic histories that we outline in Chapter 1. But it focuses instead on subaltern life stories that have energized the subfield of transnational biographies. New insights into the many complex conditions of agency and proximity have been revealed through the study of transnational lives in the margins. In turn, these subaltern lives have posed new methodological and epistemological questions on the relationship between the biographical and the large scale of history.

Notes 1. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 2. Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: SelfGovernment and Imperial Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘“Bring This Paper to the Good Governor”: Aboriginal Petitioning in Britain’s Australian Colonies’, in Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire 1500–1920, ed. Saliha Belmessous (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 182–203; Ann Curthoys, ‘Taking Liberty: Towards a New Political Historiography of Settler Self-Government and Indigenous Activism’, in The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kate Fullagar (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), 237–55; Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); and Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, eds., Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria (Canberra: ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc., 2015). On Dominion empires, see, for example, Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne, eds., New Zealand’s Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). On Australians at the League, see, for example, Nicholas Brown, ‘Enacting the International: Raymond Watt and the League of Nations Union’, in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: ANU e-Press, 1999), 75–96.

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3. Curthoys and Lake, ‘Introduction’, 10–11. (We return to this collection at the end of Chapter 5.) See also Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, eds., Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (New York: Routledge, 2014). 4. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, 1st edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–14. 5. Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Integrating Metropolitan, Colonial and Imperial History: The Aborigines Select Committee of 1835–1837’, in Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Julie Evans (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2002), 75–91; and Zoe Laidlaw ‘Indigenous Interlocutors: Networks of Imperial Protest and Humanitarianism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections, and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 114–39. See also Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Miranda Johnson, The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). And on the commemoration of colonialism, see Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds, eds., Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (London: Routledge, 2015). 6. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 7. Adas, ‘From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon’, 1698. See also Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism. 8. Adas, ‘From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon’, 1716. 9. Ibid., 1708. 10. Dane Kennedy, ‘Essay and Reflection: On the American Empire from a British Imperial Perspective’, The International History Review 29, no. 1 (2007): 84. See also Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); and Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2006). 11. Hyslop, ‘Comparative Historical Sociology and Transnational History’, 614. 12. Ibid., 612.

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13. Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction: Indian Arrival – Encounters between Indians and Britons, 1870–1915’, in Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11. 14. Antoinette Burton, ‘Memory Becomes Her’ and ‘Archive Fever and the Panopticon of History’, in Dwelling in the Archive: Women, Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4–30 and 138–44. See also Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britain and Empire: Toward a New Agenda for Imperial History’, Radical History Review 72 (1998): 163–74. 15. See, for example, Rochona Majumdar, Writing Postcolonial History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); and Ghosh, ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’. 16. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1. See also Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65. 17. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 2. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class. See also Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 21. Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Marilyn Lake, ‘Nationalist Historiography, Feminist Scholarship, and the Promise and Problems of New Transnational Histories: The Australian Case’, Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 180–6. 22. Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, ‘Introduction’, in Rediscovering the British World, ed. Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 9–20. 23. Ibid., 18. 24. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre, eds., Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007). 25. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, in Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 2.

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26. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocidal Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. See also Eva Bischoff, ‘Experiences, Actors, Spaces: Dimensions of Settler Colonialism in Transnational Context’, Settler Colonial Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 135–40. 27. Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, 3. 28. Ibid., 4. 29. Ibid. See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 30. Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, 4. 31. Ibid., 5. 32. See, for example, Pamela F. Scully, ‘White Maternity and Black Infancy: The Rhetoric of Race in the South African Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1896– 1930’, in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (London: Routledge, 2012), 68–83; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992); Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000); Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2015); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Katie Pickles, ‘Transnational History and Cultural Cringe: Some Issues for Consideration in New Zealand, Australia and Canada’, History Compass 9, no. 9 (2011): 657–73. See also Amanda Behm, ‘Settler Historicism and Anticolonial Rebuttal in the British World, 1880–1920’, Journal of World History 26, no. 4 (2016): 787. 35. Jerry H. Bentley, ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (2000): 215–24. 36. Ian Tyrrell, ‘Comparative and Transnational History’, Australian Feminist Studies 22, no. 52 (2007): 49–54. See also Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 37. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick,

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38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. See also David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Armitage and Braddick, ‘Introduction’, 3. Ibid., 5. David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13. Ibid., 29. Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford, and David Armitage, ‘Introduction: Writing World Oceanic Histories’, in Armitage, Bashford, and Sivasundaram, Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2 (italics in original). Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Renaud Morieux, Clare Anderson, Jonathan Lamb, David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Oceanic Histories Roundtable’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018), https://doi. org/10.1353/cch.2018.0014 Ian Tyrrell, ‘Looking Eastward: Pacific Global Perspectives on American History in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 (2007): 41–57. For example, see Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). Frank Bongiorno, ‘Comment: Australia, Nationalism and Transnationalism’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 83. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, ‘Introduction: Transnational American Studies and the Transpacific Imaginary’, in American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning towards the Transpacific, ed. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 1–36. Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993), 6. See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). See Matsuda, ‘The Pacific’. Tamson Pietsch, ‘A British Sea: Making Sense of Global Space in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 5, no. 3 (2010): 424. Ibid., 425. Ibid., 426. And see Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, ‘Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire’, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture

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54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. Pietsch, ‘A British Sea’, 446. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 1–28; Antoinette Burton, ‘The Body in/as World History’, in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop, 1st edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 272–84. Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Anne Rees, ‘“Bursting with New Ideas”: Australian Women Professionals and American Study Tours, 1930–1960’, History Australia 13, no. 3 (2016): 382–98. Burton ‘Introduction’, 10. See also Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 70–89. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 2. Marilyn Lake, ‘Researching Australian History in the New York Public Library: Reflections on Transnational History in Practice’, Melbourne Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (2013): 4–17. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 23. Allen, Margaret, ‘“I am a British Subject”: Indians in Australia Claiming Their Rights, 1880–1940’, History Australia 15, no. 3 (2018): 499–518. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, Chapter 10. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Science in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Kathleen Wilson, ‘Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15. Ibid., 17. Cooper, Colonialism in Question. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 148. Penelope Edmonds, ‘White Spaces? Racialised Geographies, Anglo Saxon Exceptionalism and the Location of Empire in Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim Colonies, in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine

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70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

Ellinghaus (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing in association with the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2007), 364. Penelope Edmonds, Urbanising Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Countries (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010), 18 (italics in original). See also Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, ed. Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Fiona Paisley, ‘White Settler Colonialisms and the Colonial Turn: An Australian Perspective’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003), doi:10.1353/cch.2004.0008. Edmonds, Urbanising Frontiers, 17. Tony Ballantyne, ‘On Place, Space and Mobility’, New Zealand Journal of History 45, no. 1 (2011): 61. See also Tony Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, Empire, Colonisation’, Australian Historical Studies 11, no. 2 (2014): 7–37. Ballantyne, ‘On Place, Space and Mobility’, 62. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, ‘Introduction: British Identities, Indigenous Peoples and the Empire’, in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 10. Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith, ‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 3. See also Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2015): 1–20. Burton, The Trouble with Empire, 1. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 1. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3.

3 Living the Transnational

The first chapter examined the broad sweep of historiography on various forms of forced migration through an engagement with the transnational. This chapter focuses on the life histories of people whose lives were shaped by the larger currents of the slave trade, indentured and convict labour schemes and the vicissitudes of racism. A serious engagement with the transnational lives of people shaped by the slave trade and forced migration marks the newer historiography from the older on the Middle Passage, for example, which focused more intensely on numbers without as much regard as it might have for the fact that every number represented a person wrenched from their home. Gender, race and racialization have been an innovative focus of much of the newer work on biography, of a person or a family, in recent years. As Midgley, Twells and Carlier observe, transnational history has seen a ‘rehabilitation of biography, memoir and family archives’ and has thereby incorporated archival research more fully into transnational history. Writers have focused on not only the biography of individuals but also the biography of extended families, which allows for a fuller picture of individuals who left few traces in the records and helps trace their embeddedness in transnational worlds. Thus, the focus on ‘transboundary lives’ has also brought to the fore a concern with methodology, creating opportunities for historiographical interventions in terms of both how we do history and how we conceptualize it.1 Biography has long been home of white male elites, of elites in general or of people who have left written records either in diaries or in the public documentation of lives important to the nation. Even so, in a 2009 forum on ‘Biography as History’ in The American Historical Review, Lois Banner argued that historians ‘in general … often rank biography as an inferior type of history. They see it as inherently limited because it involves only one life, derives from a belles-lettres tradition rather than a scientific or sociological

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one’ and because for many years, biography tended to be written by historians outside of academia.2 In the 1980s and 1990s, historians of women’s history and black history helped to rescue biography from its secondary status into a respected and growing area of academic study.3 They did so in part by developing new methodologies and thereby showing the vivacity of the genre for historiography as a whole. The 2000s saw an increasing turn to historical biography of enslaved people such as Sally Hemings and Olaudah Equiano who were illuminated by the historical record, either because of key relationships with powerful figures or because of their own writing.4 Increasingly, as historians are also focusing on the lives of women and the subaltern who exist on the margins of the written historical record, or who appear in contexts so far from their own choosing, historians must wrestle with profound issues of representation and agency. The experience of indigenous people who were forcibly removed from their natal homes and displayed both in colonial settings and in Europe as verification of racial typologies encapsulates the issue of both representation and agency.5 In the course of the nineteenth century, an ‘enfreakment of cultures, the process whereby whole societies outside of Europe came to be regarded as singularly peculiar, became a key feature of most popular exhibitions’ in England.6 Sara Baartman, known as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, remains perhaps the most well-known individual, but she was not the only person displayed in life, and sometimes in death, as a racial exemplar. For example, Tono Maria, an indigenous woman from South America, was brought to London and shown off as a freak of nature, the ‘Venus of South America’, in 1822.7 Julia Pastrana was brought from Mexico, and Ota Benga from Central Africa was displayed in zoos in the United States in the early twentieth century.8 William Lanne, known also as King Billy, was made famous as being the ‘last’ Tasmanian Indigenous man; scientists dismembered his body upon his death. This chapter will focus on the histories of the Black Atlantic, which has seen such innovation since the mid-2000s, but there has also been a flourishing of attention to biography and transnational lives in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Lynette Russell’s Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790s to 1870s, documents the lives of Aboriginal men and women in the whaling industry and whose stories stand out in the history of dispossession, violence, missionization and insult as one of ‘enterprise and entrepreneurship’.9 Sue Peabody’s Madeleine’s Children focuses on enslavement and family in the Indian Ocean, and particularly the French islands of Mauritius and Reunion.10 In Subaltern Lives, Clare Anderson brings to life the biographies of convicts, indentured labourers and indigenous

Living the Transnational

people, all ‘socially marginalized’ in the Indian Ocean World.11 She focuses on people ‘who did not write memoirs’ but whose ‘archival trace is sufficiently strong to manoeuvre them into the heart of histories of colonialism in the Indian Ocean’.12 In her study of a little-known Aboriginal activist who lived and worked in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century, Fiona Paisley draws on archival traces surviving in a range of archives outside of Australia. Despairing for the future of his people – the Australian Aborigines – Anthony Martin Fernando had left his own country by the early 1900s. Never to return, he would spend the rest of his days working independently and protesting the conditions of his people. As far as it is possible to know, Aboriginal people who had travelled previously to Europe had done so only in the company of missionaries or entrepreneurs.13 Over the next several decades, Fernando appears in archives in Berlin, Trieste, Vienna, Rome and London, seeking to distinguish himself as an Australian Aboriginal man among hundreds of thousands of Black and South Asian people looking to escape ex-slavery, colonization and indenture. His political activism for Aboriginal rights in Australia was similarly innovative and global, given he called for international intervention into Aboriginal affairs via the League of Nations, on the grounds that British Australian rule was incapable of self-regulation.14 Historians writing these kinds of subaltern biographies, including life histories of individuals and of extended families, show ‘ordinary people doing great things … people who reinvented themselves ….To read and write “biographies of sorts” is to get to know people whose lives shaped the world, even if we have never heard of them before’15 and even if their lives were fundamentally constrained by forces of domination over which they had no control.

Transnational methodologies By focusing on the lives of people who were forced to move because of enslavement or impressment, or whose desire to escape such strictures also involved them in great mobility, biographers must consider seriously the criteria of what evidence helps constitute a biography and be comfortable with moving far beyond familiar national archival holdings. Russell’s injunction ‘to travel to the ports and islands, the museums and archives, to read, touch, feel, and sense the fragments, the text, and the objects that make up this partial history’16 might stand for the activities of many historians discussed below. In addition, historians must be willing to create new methodologies

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to grapple with how to render the complex lives of people who were often illiterate and yet made powerful marks on history. The biographical turn in transnational history engages with epistemology – how we know what we know – so as to include both empirically and conceptually the lives of people living on the margins of history – but who are in other ways central to the constitution of modernity. A major theme of these works is indeed the importance of trying to write the biography of people, especially black women, who left no journals, or autobiographies, or sermons, and only in some cases even no written words of their own at all. These issues pertain to the writing of a major figure in African and European history: Sara Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus. In writing of the life of Sara Baartman, Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais transferred the linguistic term ‘heterography’ to historiography in order to frame the kinds of epistemological challenges raised by studying someone so well known as an icon and relatively little known as a person who lived, loved and died. ‘Hetero’ stands for difference or ‘other’. Heterography is the study of how the same syllable can have different meanings and different sounds, such as the letter ‘g’ in English.17 It has also been used to describe a literary practice which combines various features of local languages, ‘prestige codes and literacies’ and visual representation to ‘provide identity and coherence to local communities’.18 For historians, heterography interpreted more broadly offers a way of thinking both conceptually and methodologically about writing the transnational lives of individuals whose lives were shaped by violence, bondage and mobility. An historical approach that explicitly engages with subjectivities foregrounds the complex negotiations and struggles of people who ‘lived in cross-currents of cultural and political flows’.19 As Lisa Lindsay argues, ‘we should be thinking about diasporic African identities not so much as based on specific locations or ethnicities – when they can even be known – as on particular constellations of subjectivities, goals, and contexts’.20 Scott and Hébrard use the phrase ‘micro history set in motion’ to describe their approach, arguing that attention to the very local helps illuminate processes that ironically are hidden at the level of the nation or the region.21 As we will see, historians concerned with transnational lives also foreground the constitution of the archives in wider political economies of power and the ways in which the fracturing of subaltern’s lives in the archives reflects the violence visited on these individuals. Heterography thus also invites the historian to think about how to write of people whose lives appear sporadically and opaquely in the archival or primary record. The latter meaning of heterography as a melange of different languages and visual representations lays out a fine methodology where the

Living the Transnational

historian searches for information in formal archives, visual records, oral history and traverses the globe trying to get a glimpse of the subject. ‘We might conceptualize such writing as a kind of cubist portrait in which planes of meaning intersect but do not, even looked at in totality, render an illusion of having “captured” the entire subject.’22 Verne Harris says the archives offers ‘researchers only a sliver of a sliver of a sliver’ of the past.23 For example, as Lisa Lindsay has observed, ‘typically what historians are able to discover of Black Atlantic lives are not cradle-to-grave biographies but rather fragments, a surviving shard or two of a lifetime of experience’.24 Lindsay and Sweet organize their 2013 edited collection, Biography and the Black Atlantic, around the themes of ‘mobility, self-fashioning, and politics’, thereby demonstrating the cosmopolitanism of many of the subjects of the book and, echoing Gilroy, also showing the centrality of ‘black actors, slavery, and colonialism to the political history of the modern Atlantic’.25 Martha Hodes argues that historians of transnational lives do a form of ‘multi-sited ethnography’, in George Marcus’s terms, by following the narrative to whichever sites it takes them.26 Creativity might be the meta-word of this era of scholarship as historians pushed the boundary of scholarship in both their choice of subjects and their engagement with different forms of evidence. The word ‘probably’ is said frequently in these texts as authors search for ways to render what the general archive suggests, but which no one particular letter affirms.27 As Martha Hodes conveys, ‘I invoke words like “perhaps”, “maybe”, and “probably” where it is impossible to know precisely what came to pass or how people felt. In place of fiction, I offer the craft of history, assisted by the art of speculation.’28 All use an accumulation of layers of sources to create the full portrait of the individual or family that they are depicting. These works demonstrate that persistent historical research across numerous archives and continents reveal much more about the subjects’ lives than historians might have imagined before embarking on their own transnational travels. This combining of creative methodologies and attention to affect are the most prominent contributions of this era and corner of transnational history.

Heterographies of the transnational Atlantic The volumes that emerged steadily in the 2000s focused on people who lived transnational lives whether through enforced movement or through

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some degree of autonomy gained through relationships or serendipity. On the one hand, biographers challenged existing assumptions by that oldest of historiographical skills: attention to evidence. On the other, historians pushed the boundaries of evidence and in some cases accepted a degree of uncertainty about and opaqueness of the exact historical record in order to convey the life of their subject. The mid-2000s witnessed the publication of three major biographies precipitating renewed attention to the genre while posing new questions about the nature of evidence. One focused on a very well-known black autobiographer of the eighteenth century, one on a former enslaved woman famous for her religious fervour and the other on a white woman of the nineteenth century who married a black West Indian man: all were literate and left letters and writings to help the historian, but these subjects’ lives and records also posed challenges for the historian of transnational lives and stimulated historians’ creativity. The new individual fashioning of self in the Age of Revolutions is one reason why historians of this era have returned to biography.29 Olaudah Equiano, a well-travelled and cosmopolitan man of the eighteenth century, is the focus of new work, and his life exemplifies this turn to the self in the period in which he lived. Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), created a compelling narrative of a happy West African childhood brutally ended due to capture by slavers, the terror of the Middle Passage, enslavement in Virginia and then a slow move to freedom, which he purchased in 1766, followed by work in Central America and then a career in the maritime Atlantic and Mediterranean. In 1774, Equiano became a Methodist, and thus also became part of the surge of anti-slavery activism in England in the later eighteenth century. He married an English woman and had two daughters. He died in 1797, as Carretta writes, ‘probably the wealthiest and the most famous person of African descent in the Atlantic World’.30 The commodification of wage labour, particularly within a nautical context, gave rise to the notion that one could explicitly create – and in some cases remake – identity. As Ross J. Pudaloff has argued, the emphasis of Equiano’s narrative on hard work, Christian redemption and entry into subjecthood by buying himself exemplifies this era. And his experience as a sailor meant he was part of the great mass of ‘sailors and navvies of the mercantile powers (who) formed the mass of 18th century waged labor’.31 Whatever the place of Equiano’s birth, he still resonates rightly as a man of his age who helped shape the British anti-slavery movement and exemplified in many ways the Atlantic World, so aptly described by Gilroy:

Living the Transnational

I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol …. The image of the ship – a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion – is especially important …. Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.32

Olaudah Equiano’s narrative has served as a template for much of how we understand the violence of the slave trade and the wrenching of people from their natal homes in Africa, even though the rest of his life after the Middle Passage was uncommon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., included an 1814 edition of the book in his 1987 collection of American slave narratives, and James Walvin wrote a biography, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797, in 1998.33 James Walvin noted that while we know much about the slave trade, ‘we know less about the moment and process of enslavement ….For this reason alone, Equiano’s account of his own experience is critical and has been used time and again by historians to describe how Africans were enslaved’.34 Linebaugh and Rediker focused on Equiano as exemplary of the multi-ethnic working class, which upended some previous ethnic labels such as ‘free-born Englishman’, and to make the connection of this working class, or ‘motley crew’, to use Linebaugh and Rediker’s phrase, to the struggle for rights.35 They elevate Equiano’s importance to freedom, in part, because he told Granville Sharp to study the writ of habeas corpus which prevented imprisonment and slavery without due process: this became the grounds for Sharp’s famous win in the case of James Somerset in 1772, which limited the rights of slaveholders to keep people enslaved in Britain.36 All these authors accepted Equiano’s account of having been born in West Africa. Walvin noted that Equiano’s account was influenced by ‘other commentators’ but said that the vagueness of the personal recollection had to do with the fact that he wrote his account some thirty years after the event.37 Vincent Carretta, however, made a key intervention in his 2005 biography of Olaudah Equiano. Citing new evidence about Equiano’s birth gained from naval and baptismal records, Carretta challenged the fundamental premise of Equiano’s famous autobiography: that he was born in Africa. Carretta argues that Equiano was born in South Carolina c. 1747, and Equiano’s magnum opus, while compelling and hugely significant in helping mobilize the anti-slavery cause, was probably fiction rather than fact. However, he

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cautions that ‘reasonable doubt’ about Equiano’s supposed African birth is ‘not the same as conviction. We will probably never know the truth about the author’s birth and upbringing’.38 His conclusion is that whatever the case, Equiano was a fabulous author who rendered the experience of the enslaved in the Atlantic World in a compelling way. Equiano’s life, so embedded in transnational movements, also again emphasizes the importance of West Africa to the Black Atlantic, both as a natal home, whether real or imagined, and as a place imagined for a future freedom. Equiano tried three times to go to Africa: first, in 1779, he hoped to be appointed as a missionary to the continent; then, in 1878 when the British Crown attempted to found the colony of Sierra Leone to settle poor black Londoners, a descriptor that included people of African or Indian or Native American descent. Equiano initially joined the expedition to start the colony as a commissary who would organize supplies while on board and bear gifts to local African rulers on arrival. However, infighting between various officials involved led to Equiano’s dismissal, and the first settlement was a disaster, with many settlers dying of disease. His last attempt to get to Africa was in the late 1780s when, according to Carretta, his name appeared on a list of volunteers to go to Africa sponsored by the African Association, founded to collect information about the continent.39 Carretta’s contribution rests on finding new evidence and using it both to focus on possible misrepresentations in the biography, but therefore also to celebrate Equiano’s ‘literary achievements’.40 Since many historical records can verify Equiano’s life, in part because he was so famous, ultimately Carretta and others have been able to write fulsome biographies of Equiano – even if there is some lack of clarity about Equiano’s birth. Historians endeavouring to write the biographies of people who were not literate or whose lives were recorded for reasons over which they had little control face other challenges. As Sweet remarks, the histories of people who traversed the Atlantic from Africa ‘are almost seamlessly woven into the narrative of Western democratic triumphalism, their political challenges framed as crucial to our understandings of liberty, equality, and freedom’, and this erases ‘African categories of knowledge’. Sweet points out that of the many millions of Africans enslaved in the Americas, millions never learned European languages and rejected Western institutions. Sweet renders a complex portrait of Domingues Alvares, originally from Dahomey West Africa, who endured Middle Passage slavery in rural and urban Brazil, was tortured by the Inquisition and ended his life in rural Portugal.41

Living the Transnational

Epistemological concerns over facts and interpretation have been particularly explicit in biographies of women who shaped the Black Atlantic. While narratives have long existed by enslaved women such as Mary Prince and Mary Seacole, for example, Equiano’s narrative remains the metastory of this era. This is perhaps in part because historical archives most easily reflect the masculinist framing of history, erasing the narratives of women, other genders and non-heteronormative sexualities. In the 2000s, historians brought new questions about gender and racial subjectivities to bear on the archives.42 Rebecca Protten (1718–1780), spiritual leader and formerly enslaved, lived in the same era as Equiano. In 2005, the same year that Carretta’s biography appeared, Jon Sensbach published Rebecca’s Revival. Sensbach’s book focused on how tracing the life of an individual can reveal the agency of enslaved women in their search for freedom. Sensbach also regards spirituality seriously as a vector of the meaning of freedom. Protten was born in slavery, but became free when young, and she became a preacher, proselytizing to enslaved people in the Caribbean. She was a classic transnational individual: speaking at least four languages, born on a British island, growing up on Danish St. Thomas and moving to Germany to the Gold Coast of West Africa. Although Sensbach uses the term ‘transnational’ only once, it documents precisely the rich history that can be produced out of attention to details and to archives on different continents. Rebecca arrived in St. Thomas as a child named Shelly in the 1720s from the neighbouring slave island of Antigua. She learned to read and write in the household of her owners, the van Beverhouts, and converted to Christianity, which Sensbach surmises might have been the key factor leading to her manumission.43 In 1736 her life became entwined with the Moravian Church, a German protestant sect which reached out to enslaved and free in various parts of the world, including South Africa, and which considered women equal to men, at least in the spiritual sense and thus gave them authority over women congregants.44 Rebecca became deeply involved in the church and became a highly respected leader on St. Thomas. Rebecca’s life was difficult: she spent time in prison on the island for her preaching; her two children died young; and her first husband, a German member of the Moravian community in St. Thomas, died in the first days of their trip to Germany. She married for a second time to Christian Protten, originally from the Gold Coast, the son of an African mother and Danish father. In 1763, after various tribulations, the couple moved to Fort Christiansborg, the Danish settlement, organized around the slave trade, on the Gold Coast to establish a Moravian settlement outside the castle walls to teach the

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mulatto children born of the Danish policy that encouraged Danish soldiers to marry local women.45 She died there in 1780. Using diaries of others, archival sources, the painting, and the few extant letters, Sensbach traces Rebecca’s life. He does so primarily through the memories of others who interacted with her and by providing deep context of others who lived at the time, the political economy of the islands, the brutality of slavery and religious experiences. Rebecca was literate and a few of her letters survive, giving something of a voice that is unusual for enslaved and formerly enslaved women. She was ordained as a deaconess in the Moravian Church in Germany, with another woman also from the West Indies. She was thus perhaps one of the very first black women to be ordained in the history of Western Christianity.46 The Moravians celebrated her contribution to the church also and thus documented her life. Rebecca’s proselytizing made her well known at the time: Moravian artist Johann Valentin Haidt painted ‘Rebecca and Christian’ in c. 1751. In contrast to the dry voice of detachment which accompanied the demographic analysis of slavery and the slave trade, in Sensbach’s book we are no longer in the world of big data, but in the intimate world of the severed leg, and the man rendered mute. Sensbach describes the brutality and torture visited on slaves – the amputations for running away or the tongue cut out for speaking out of turn – as a way of framing Rebecca’s will to freedom.47 Sensbach, like Crais and Scully, confronts head-on the methodological challenges of documenting the life of a black woman in a slave society. His methodology is to trace consistencies between her practices and the words. For example, he discusses a letter probably written by Rebecca to Moravian women in Germany. The letter is signed ‘Rebecca’, and it references living in the van Beverhout household; but the letter could have been written on her behalf, she might have received assistance or it might not be genuine at all.48 Rather than letting this uncertainty deter him, Sensbach uses the opportunity to reflect on the challenges of doing this kind of historical reconstruction. He argues either way that it provides valuable insight into Rebecca’s life; even if the letter was not written by Rebecca, but in her name, it echoes the sentiment she had already established in her preaching to enslaved people in the years before. The tone of the letter with its soft gentleness and appeal to fellow ‘sisters’ as well as its determination to take up the cross all reveal that it probably was Rebecca who wrote it, or crafted the sentiments, since those qualities make the letter very different to the harsh judgemental and self-flagellating mode of Moravian writings.49 He is comfortable saying: ‘Perhaps the most we can say is that the letter was designed to express certain

Living the Transnational

sentiments for a particular audience.’50 He makes similar ruminations about other letters either written by Rebecca or then heavily revised by others, which he discusses later in the book, again stressing the connection between the written words and her prior deeds. ‘The letter contained no hints of artifice, no ideal she had not already lived.’51 Sensbach’s portrait of Rebecca extends also to rumination on the life of Christian Jacob Protten, her second husband originally from Gold Coast, West Africa, also of mixed heritage. Both Rebecca and Christian were products of the emerging Atlantic World, of European soldiers and slave traders and African women; of white slaveholders in the Caribbean and enslaved women of African descent. As Sensbach notes, people in this position could become intermediaries and translators and benefit from their connections to multiple worlds, but they could also become ‘casualities’ – never being fully accepted anywhere.52 Like Rebecca, and indeed Equiano, Christian was also a ‘transnational sojourner’ fluent in many languages and pious. Christian’s grandfather was the Ga king Ofori, so he was of royal descent; but as a child of mixed race, he lived his life ‘between two seats’ which Sensbach says is an ‘apt metaphor for his entire life experience’.53 Rebecca and Christian were married in 1745.54 As with many of the individuals whose lives have become the subject of transnational biography, both Rebecca and her second husband were children of ‘mixed race’. Rebecca was characterized as ‘mulatto’, although the racial designation of her parents remains unclear in historical record.55 Christian’s mother was Ga, his father a Danish soldier. They ended their lives in West Africa, teaching in a school for children of mixed heritage, scrambling on the margins of both Ga and Danish expatriate societies. When Rebecca, again a widow, was offered the chance to return to the West Indies, she declined, preferring to remain, though in some poverty, in Christiansborg. To some extent, there is a reverse pattern to these transnational biographies than the traditional biography, which becomes ever clearer as the subject emerges into fame and history. These rather start with greater clarity, caught in the gaze of colonial regulation and records, and become ever fainter as the subject moves into freedom and away from bondage. Like many other black women in the Atlantic World, Rebecca’s life ended in obscurity, with less and less recorded of it. As Sensbach remarks, a short note of her death in 1771 was all that was recorded: she did not get an obituary, and we know very little of the last decade of her life. Sensbach, though, provides her with an epitaph:

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The important thing is that Rebecca made it to Africa at all. That she carried out a ministry in three distinct parts of the world was, for a free woman of color in the eighteenth century, virtually unique. She lived as a kind of reverse cultural bridge across the Atlantic during the period of the overwhelming one-way flow of Africans to America.56

He ends by arguing that Rebecca Protten’s spiritual labours in the West Indies importantly contributed to the emergence of black evangelical Christianity in the Caribbean and colonial United States, with a focus on ‘spiritual and social equality’.57 A very different portrait of a hard-working working-class woman is delivered by Martha Hodes, in her book The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century written about the same time (2006). Hodes nonetheless grapples with the familiar challenges of evidence, knowing not enough about central moments in her subject’s life and being creative in her historical approach. Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly was born white and working class in New England in 1851; her life ended at sea in 1877. She worked in the cotton mills and lived for a while in the South, where her husband ended up fighting for the Confederacy and her brothers for the Union. Widowed in the Civil War, Connolly later married William Smiley Connolly, a black man from Grand Cayman, in the British West Indies. Unlike Sara Baartman and Rebecca Protten, Eunice Connolly wrote many letters to her family, many of which remain in a collection at Duke University. On the one hand, the letters provided Hodes with the kind of insight into a poor women’s life of the nineteenth century of which historians dream. On the other, as Hodes points out, writing transnational biography has explicit challenges of scale. She asks, ‘How, then, do we write narratives that are both local and global while remaining true to the experiences of those whose lives we are re-creating and interpreting’?58 Hodes used these letters as windows into larger contexts of everyday life and thus provides a portrait of both Eunice Connolly and of the society in which she lived. We learn of the mills of New England and the fracturing of families as fathers left to pay bills, or just left, mothers sought work in factories and children were housed with relatives; we learn of racial stratification in Mobile, Alabama, where Eunice went to join her husband, and the scarce availability of work in a society which designated labour as a black and enslaved occupation. We learn of the heat and housekeeping and freedom a woman married to a respectable man of colour enjoyed even in a small windswept island in the Caribbean. And yet, despite all the letters, Hodes

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never could find out how Eunice met William, known as ‘Smiley’. Hodes parses rare and oblique references to ponder if the couple met in Mobile while Eunice was still married to her first husband. Eunice left Mobile when seven months pregnant to return to New England, perhaps to hide; she wrote of her daughter’s ‘very fair white fair skin’ – Hodes thinks perhaps this was a relief, for why in New England would she feel the need to note that, and later, from the West Indies she wrote that Clara ‘loves her father much’. Thus, ‘archival gaps in transnational lives may require imaginative, if wellgrounded, readings of the sources at hand’.59 A transnational life created unexpected trajectories that changed the vectors of race and class as experienced by Connolly. Hodes helps explore the complexities of racial classifications and experiences in different settings. She gives us a portrait of a white woman who flourished after marrying a man of colour and leaving the United States. Connolly gave up the privileges of white womanhood, but she also left behind precarity. In New England, Connolly had lived on the very margins of white respectability, growing up with an alcoholic father who left the family, working as domestic labour, ‘largely reserved for Irish immigrants and African American women’ and moving from job to job. In Grand Cayman, Connolly enjoyed a respectable life, with her own house, employing her own domestic servant and sharing the status of the community of the mixed race or ‘coloured’ society in West Indian parlance. Smiley Connolly was wealthy enough to own his house and had a thriving business at sea. His racial status as descended from Africans and Europeans, and his wealth ‘shaded him toward the category of “white”’.60 As Hodes concludes in ‘A Story with an Argument’, ‘unstable and malleable racial categories do not diminish the power of race: rather combined with geographical mobility, that instability and malleability only transfer power from certain people to certain other people. Within one national border, Eunice’s status diminished; within another, she rose in rank’.61 As the above authors have demonstrated, gendered, racial and economic status could all be in flux, always. Travel was no guarantee of improvement in opportunities or security and especially not for people of colour in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The life of Sara Baartman demonstrates this most clearly; it also shows how humbling close archival work can be for the historian. In 2009, Crais and Scully published Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. They wrote of Baartman’s life lived across nations/ imperial boundaries/centuries, and also demonstrated that in the process of transnational moves, the boundaries of identities could become blurred

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or collapsed. At the time of writing the book, Sara Baartman was known primarily as Saartje, Hottentot Venus of the early nineteenth century, who had been purportedly born in the Cape in 1789 (note the same date as the French Revolution). Baartman was brought from the Cape Town and displayed on stages in London and Paris from 1810 to her death in 1815. Georges Cuvier, the French founder of the discipline of comparative anatomy, was fascinated with Baartman because of his interest in racial science and the ways in which he thought the body could represent gender, race, and biological and cultural development. He thus observed Baartman while she was alive, and on her death, undertook an autopsy of her body. Tellingly, he did not do the autopsy to find out why she died (the cause is still uncertain) but to see what truths he could derive from her body about the supposed link between humans and animals, and about the nature of black female sexuality.62 Despite Cuvier’s contributions to racist science and culture writ large, his statue still stands in Paris, and his text book is still read in medical education. Artists, performers and writers exploited the icon of the Hottentot Venus through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries: her image was displayed in the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris, which tens of thousands of people attended. In 1937, millions of people attending the International Exhibition saw the plaster cast of Sara Baartman, displayed as the Hottentot Venus. In 1949, a musicologist, Percival Kirby, wrote some articles on Baartman’s display in London, informed by English newspaper accounts from the time. Concluding that nothing could be known of her life in the Cape, Kirby focused on how she had been brought from the then Cape Colony to London in 1810 by a ship’s surgeon and a Boer ‘Dutch settler’ to show her off as the Hottentot Venus: a supposed joke positing that a Venus could not also be a Hottentot. He also discussed Cuvier’s examinations of Baartman in Paris.63 From the 1980s, academics including Stephen Jay Gould and Sander Gilman, the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Diana Ferrus, film-maker Zola Maseko, writers Rachel Holmes and Barbara Chase-Riboud and cultural theorists Yvette Abrahams and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and art historian Zoe Strothers, among others, sought to historicize the fascination with the Hottentot Venus and focused on the ways in which Sara Baartman’s very personhood in life and death was colonized by science. They addressed how scientific racism used Baartman’s body as a template for conceptualizations of black women’s inferiority and added to our understanding of the artistic and cultural reverberations of Baartman’s display in Europe.64 Yet, these interventions generally took as fact that little more could be known

Living the Transnational

of Baartman, and, except for Abrahams, the focus was on the icon of the Hottentot Venus. As historians of South Africa, Crais and Scully were familiar with the colonial archives which might reveal more about Sara Baartman’s life before she went to England. Using tax records which recorded settlers’ property including their property in people, court cases and correspondence by colonial officials, they determined that Baartman was born in the 1770s, rather than the late 1780s, and was thus older when she came to Cape Town, and older when she went to England than had been hitherto assumed. She grew up part of Gonaqua society in the Eastern Cape, but on the farm of a Dutch settler in the zone of frontier violence, one might say genocide, in which settlers literally hunted indigenous people for sport, enslaving people from the Dutch East Indies and putting local people into conditions of bondage that resembled slavery. Baartman’s parents died, and in the 1780s she was sold to a trader from Cape Town. Crais and Scully detail her life in Cape Town as a wet nurse to the Cesar family in conditions similar to those experienced by enslaved people in the city. She had two relationships and two children, who died in infancy. It is unclear if she had a relationship with Hendrik Cesar, her employer. He, and Alexander Dunlop, the ship’s surgeon, took her to London in 1810. Much of that information of her early life was new, and the book provides more details than told here of her life in Cape Town. In this regard, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus echoes the work of Carretta in that it is based on evidence that changes our understanding of a life. Anti-slavery activists, who were outraged by Baartman’s performance on stage in Piccadilly, understood Hendrik Cesar to be a Boer. However, examination of tax rolls showed Cesar to be of slave descent, labelled as ‘free black’, a marker of such heritage. It appears Cesar went to England because he was in debt and could not leverage funds precisely because he was discriminated against due to his status as a person designated free black.65 Crais and Scully also seek to wrestle with conceptual issues related to doing the biography of individuals ill-served by the archives, by either being captured in racist stereotypes or leaving little of their own evidence. In particular, they wrestle with the issue of agency throughout the book, as does Russell in her biographies of Aboriginal whalers. Russell talks of an ‘attenuated agency’: ‘it seemed possible too that they made choices that made sense to them, enabled their freedom, and sometimes allowed them to move beyond colonial imposition’.66 Crais and Scully also argue that while Baartman’s life ended in destitution and abuse, historians also have to

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approach her full life on its own terms without imposing the ending on all periods of her life. For example, Baartman speaks in the record in a court case in London when anti-slavery activists sought to determine if she was there by her own volition. But, as the authors point out, Alexander Dunlop, the ship’s surgeon who was in fact the mastermind behind the whole venture, was allowed to be in the room during her interview, and thus we certainly cannot conclude that Baartman spoke freely.67 Another issue that raises the complexity of agency relates to the famous portraits of ‘Saartje, the Hottentot Venus,’ painted in 1810 and 1811 as advertising posters for the Piccadilly show, which exaggerated her bottom and dressed her in ethnic garb. They have become famous for establishing the grounds on which Sara Baartman became a foundational figure for nineteenth-century racism and images of ‘the’ black female body. Yet, in looking carefully at the writing accompanying the posters, the authors note that Baartman owned the copyright to the images. This meant that at least theoretically, she could have benefited financially from their sale, according to English copyright law. However, the authors also posit that Dunlop possibly put her name there as a strategy to deflect critics’ accusations of Baartman’s bondage.68 In short, even paying close attention to evidence does not solve the conundrums of doing the biography of exploited individuals who left so little writings or words of their own in the historical record. As with the other historians struggling with this issue, Crais and Scully also frequently use the words ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’. The heterographic gaze, which looks at planes of information, and at the past obliquely, thus becomes an analytic intervention to address the limits of the historians’ access to the past. And this entails a recentring of our understanding of the archives. As part of the postcolonial turn from the 1980s, historians had signalled the embeddedness of archives in historical structure of power.69 The Subaltern Studies movement was particularly influential in making explicit the colonial construction of the archival record, arguing for reading the archives against the grain to find the experiences of the colonized. Jeanette Allis Bastian argues that as Subaltern Studies progressed, it moved to a larger conclusion that recovery of the colonized, or the marginalized, was impossible. This would be especially true for subaltern women given, in Spivak’s words, that they remain in the records ‘caught in the cracks between the production of the archives and indigenous patriarchy, today distanced by waves of hegemonic “feminism”’.70 As Bastian has said:

Living the Transnational

With their heavy reliance on records to preserve the tenuous fabric of imperialism, the relationships between colonial societies and records reveal many of the worst and best manifestations of records themselves; their tyranny as well as their power …. For in the end what else can explain how tightly woven webs of records produced by minority bureaucracies held sway for so long over non-record producing majorities.71

Stoler in her Along the Archival Grain (2009) seeks to analyse colonial archives within the grain, paying attention to their structure and to the ways that colonial archives, even ones as bureaucratic as those in The Hague, are repositories of affect that inform the historian of government officials’ anxieties and preoccupations. This question is returned to in the next chapter regarding the fallibility of data collected by colonial regimes. Writing transnational history adds more layers to this particular endeavour, especially when one is concerned more with the lives of the subaltern than with the people who sought to manage and control them. Trouillout argues that archives cannot be left only to the colonizers.72 In addition, we see a way forward in recognizing the marginality of the official archival record itself to transnational subaltern subjects. Thus, historians are looking to artistic sources and memory work as archival forms that will better render the fullness of colonized lives.73 Others are looking to using a wide variety of sources across time and space to try and render as fully as possible the lives of people living in slavery and in freedom, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century they increasingly turned to wider family histories. Freedom Papers (2012) by Rebecca Scott and Jean Herbard follows the transatlantic and transnational life of the family Tinchant, spanning the late eighteenth century into the twentieth century and histories of Senegal, Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana, Belgium and France.74 The numerous papers written by members of the family as they traversed the Atlantic and the Caribbean across the centuries, leaving records of marriages, petitions for recognition, landholdings, and so on, provide a rich evidentiary source. Yet, like other historians, Scott and Hébrard have to make the individual document sing to a larger theme or melody. The book contributes methodologically to transnational history in its close attention to discrete events and ‘micro history’ and to the sophisticated use of diverse historical approaches – legal, social and cultural. The text can be understood as an interdisciplinary history, charting a family’s struggles from Senegal to Haiti, to Antwerp where the Tinchant family business sold cigars and fatally for one individual, to Nazi Europe.

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Scott and Herbard bring a keen eye to incorporating local complexities within their analysis, including regarding sites such as eighteenth-century Saint-Louis du Senegal as a ‘thoroughly Atlantic spot’ situated upriver at the confluence of trading routes, different languages and competing allegiances.75 They use ship captains’ accounts and the records of scribes in the Saint-Louis to render an evocative picture of how people were put on slave ships on the coast of West Africa, in order to illustrate what one of their subjects, Rosalie, might have experienced. Scott and Hébrard conduct a kind of geologic history – layering the information until it becomes a solid foundation of evidence on which stands their argument about the importance of putting words to paper, to the experience of transnational individuals wrenched from their natal home into a transnational life. Paradoxically, the law – which entrapped people in the status of slave or indentured labourer – is also the vehicle through which the historian detects how those individuals navigated their bondage and sometimes escaped. For example, Scott and Hébrard’s second chapter examines the life of one Rosalie on Saint-Domingue through five legal records. She had endured the Middle Passage from Senegal, slavery in Louisiana and then lived in the space between freedom and enslavement as a person without papers. Transnational mobility both allowed for and demonstrates the malleability of race. The transnational lives of so many of the Tinchant family with roots in Africa, slavery in the Caribbean, the nuanced multicultural and multiethnic New Orleans created, and forced perhaps, a creativity about the meaning of nationality, identity and citizenship, ‘race and rights’.76 Race, and the category of mulatto or mulatre, followed Tinchant family members in all those places, as Rebecca and Christian Protten had experienced in an earlier Caribbean, Europe and West Africa. In places like Grand Cayman and New Orleans, being mulatto conferred some respect in the complex racial hierarchies of that locale, but rarely the social right of equality. Edouard Tinchant, the grandson of Rosalie, was instrumental in introducing the concept of ‘public rights’ and of equal rights of race and gender into the Louisiana constitution of 1868, but the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth century took away this vision of non-racial male equality. In some circumstances the significance of being of mixed race lay dormant, muted by financial success, as in the case of Edouard Tinchant who owned the cigar business in Antwerp, less so for his son Charles who got into trouble with the law, the case notes then remarking that his complexion was ‘teint mulatre’.77 Adele Perry’s Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (2015) also charts the fortunes of a

Living the Transnational

family in which the fluidity of race and its different meanings shaped the lives of individual family members.78 James Douglas was born in British Guyana of a Scottish father and free woman of colour. Douglas spent most of his childhood and teen years in Scotland before moving to Canada in 1819. He married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of an Irish American father and a Cree mother. As Perry shows, Connolly is well known in Canadian history, becoming governor of British Columbia; his family serving well Canada’s claim to be a ‘Metis nation’.79 Perry demonstrates in a fine-grained history the fluidity and fragility as well as the significant importance of race in the nineteenth century: at various times, family members identified with and were ‘assigned a shifting range of national and racial designations – Coloured, Mulatto, Cree, Half-Breed, French-Canadian, British, Scottish’.80 In particular, Perry’s focus on intimacy is a project of feminist scholarship which enables new information as well as new analytic approaches. She writes tartly that even the ‘most uncooperative colonial archive can be read with a sharp eye for women. We can also take men seriously as gendered subjects’.81 Finally, in 2017, Lisa Lindsay’s Atlantic Bonds reversed the focus of much of the work on the Black Atlantic. Lindsay traces the life and afterlives of James Churchwill Vaughan, known as Church, an African American man who moved to Liberia and then to Yorubaland (now Nigeria) in the midnineteenth century. As with Olaudah Equiano, Rebecca Protten and Sara Baartman, a trip across the Atlantic suggested possibilities of escape, a new beginning and a vision of possible freedom. But while the aforementioned ventured to Europe, Vaughan sought Africa. This reverse migration is one to which historians have paid insufficient attention. Africa did not always guarantee a better life – we have seen the struggles of the early settlers of Sierra Leone and the Prottens’ difficult life in Christiansborg. For Vaughan, Liberia proved a false start for those dreams owing to the persistence of slavery and illegal slave trades, and brutal relations between American settlers and Africans. However, Vaughan’s move to Yorubaland with the Southern Baptist missionary societies launched a life and afterlife of riches in family, fortune and faith. By following the story of Church Vaughan, Lindsay raises the question of why historians of transnational experiences have allowed the paradigm and flows of the slave trade to dominate so much of our work. Lindsay locates Vaughan within histories of US slavery, illegal slave trades and colonialism on the Liberian coast and interior, and finally in the story of the emergence of modern Nigeria. Lindsay shows the entanglement of

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Native American families, free blacks and individuals newly manumitted from slavery. Her first chapter offers a biographical account of Scipio Vaughan, born in slavery in Richmond Virginia in 1780 and brought to Kershaw, South Carolina, in 1800. He was freed in 1825, as part of his owner’s will of c. 1815. As Lindsay details, the Vaughan family was able to carve out a sphere of autonomy in Camden, South Carolina, reliant certainly on cultivating good relationships with leading white families, which offered both a measure of protection and economic viability, despite the racialized inequalities. According to family lore, in 1840, on his deathbed, Scipio Vaughan told his children that they must move to Africa, saying, ‘Go to Africa, the land of our ancestors’!82 After his father’s death, James Churchill (Church) Vaughan, not very religious despite his name, began to explore alternatives to the narrowing of opportunities and the broadening of racial hostility in the South. By throwing a bright light on the movement west, and then east again, we learn about the ways in which ideas of freedom themselves shaped and then were reshaped by negotiations and encounters on the eastern seaboard of the United States, West Africa and back again. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed California to enter the union as a free state, if all black people – including those who were free – could be returned to their state of birth. Lindsay notes that in this context, African Americans started reconsidering various escapes including Canada, where some 3,000 people fled in the last three months of 1850, and Liberia.83 The Vaughans were such a family. Church Vaughan applied to the ACS in 1852 and despite some second thoughts, the Vaughan family set sail with others to Liberia later that year, with Church Vaughan soon following missionaries of the Southern Baptist Convention to settle in Yorubaland, Nigeria. What follows is a remarkable and uplifting story in which Church Vaughan worked as a missionary for some years, married a woman from the kingdom of Benin and then fled to Lagos during tensions caused by the expansion of British intervention. In contrast to the Vaughans in Camden who faced racism, extortion of their land and poverty, the Vaughan family in Nigeria flourished. In Lagos, Church became a leading member of the community partly through his success as owner of a construction company and as mover and shaker in founding the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Lagos. He was so successful that in 1869, only a year after arriving in Lagos, he sent a packet of gold coins to his family in Camden, a gift that ‘change[d] their lives’.84 His nephew, William Hammond, bought three lots and houses in Camden directly across from the houses the family used to own.85 Church

Living the Transnational

Vaughan died in 1893, leaving his widow and his three children well cared for financially, lauded by the community and buried with an impressive monument in Lagos: the newspapers carried his obituary. He had achieved the dream of a return to Africa. As Lindsay concludes, ‘the Vaughan family’s Atlantic bonds emerged not only from the painful history of the slave trade, but also from the way some diasporic migrants took risk on unlikely journeys – and sometimes succeeded’.86 These biographies of individuals and families demonstrate the great power of a transnational focus. While all these people and families were perhaps rare in emerging in some ways into the archival record, they do remind us of the complexity of people’s lives once one burrows down into the details. How many more people lived who told stories of family member far away, whether wrenched through the slave trade or who left to pursue opportunities in a world of few choices? These works challenge us to do the hard digging that helps reveals such lives, while being willing to imagine different ways of writing history and being willing to live with the ‘probablys’ and ‘perhapses’ that make it possible.

Notes 1. Clare Midgley, Alison Twells, and Julie Carlier, ‘Introduction’, in Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global, ed. Clare Midgley, Alison Twells, and Julie Carlier (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6–7. For a study of transnational history and biography, see Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire. 2. Lois W. Banner, ‘Biography as History’, The American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 580. 3. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle, 1st edn (New York: Vintage, 2003); Gerda Lerner, ‘U.S. Women’s History: Past, Present, and Future’, Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 4 (2004): 10–27. See also Lisa A. Lindsay, ‘Biography in African History’, History in Africa 44 (2017): 11–26. 4. Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

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5. Jeanette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures, 3rd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 6. Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 73. See Bernth Lindfors, Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 7. See ‘Sketches of Society: The Shows of London’, The London Literary Gazettte and Journal of the Belle Lettres (1822): 123, https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435059865105;view=1up;seq=131 (accessed 20 February 2018); Deborah F. Atwater, African American Women’s Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). 8. Pamela Newkirk, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 9. Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 6. 10. Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 11. Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. For example, Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Anouk Ride, The Grand Experiment: Two Boys, Two Cultures (Sydney: Hatchette Australia, 2007); and Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (New Haven: Yale University, 2004). 14. Paisley, The Lone Protestor. See also Ravi De Costa, A Higher Authority: Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006). 15. Lindsay, ‘Biography in African History’, 23. 16. Russell, Roving Mariners, 136. 17. Scully, ‘Peripheral Visions’, 32. Clifton Crais, ‘Heterographies: Writing the Self after the Linguistic Turn’ (Distinguished History Lecture presented at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, USA, 26 October 2006). 18. Sjaak Kroon, Dong Jie, and Jan Blommaert, ‘Truly Moving Texts’, in Language, Literacy and Diversity: Moving Words, ed. Christopher Stroud and Mastin Prinsloo (New York: Routledge, 2015), 7. 19. Scully, ‘Peripheral Visions’, 32. 20. Lisa A. Lindsay, ‘Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its African Ancestor’, in Biography and the Black Atlantic, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of

Living the Transnational

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 192–206; Cited in William H. Alexander, ‘Book Reviews’, The Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015): 524. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 4–5. Scully, ‘Peripheral Visions’, 32–3. Verne Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, Archival Science 2, no. 1–2 (2002): 65. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet, ‘Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic’, in Biography and the Black Atlantic, ed. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3. Ibid., 5. Martha Hodes, ‘A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife’, in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 17. Also see, ‘AHR Roundtable: The Archives of Decolonization’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015); Farina Mir, ‘Introduction’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): 844–51; and Victoria Haskins, ‘Decolonizing the Archives: Transnational Perspectives’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, ed. Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (London: Routledge, 2017), 47–68. See, for example, Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), where it is used forty times in an interpretive context. Martha Elizabeth Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, 1st edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 36. A review of the book notes, ‘a plethora of perhapses sets The Sea Captain’s Wife apart from other narrative biographies. But perhaps not as much as it may seem’. Glenn C. Altschuler, ‘The Story of a Life’, Reviews in American History 35, no. 2 (2007): 219–24. Scully, ‘Peripheral Visions’, 32. Carretta, Equiano, the African, xix. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 195. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4. James Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797 (London: Cassell, 1998). Ibid., 4. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 221. Ibid., 220. Walvin, An African’s Life, 4. Caretta, Equiano, the African, xv.

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39. Ibid., 336. 40. Ibid., x. 41. James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5. See also João José Reis, Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, trans. Sabrina Gledhill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 42. We are grateful to Suzanne Persard for this point. 43. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 39. 44. Ibid., 46–8. 45. Ibid., 207. 46. Ibid., 188. 47. Ibid., 9. 48. Ibid., 63. 49. Ibid., 64. 50. Ibid., 63. 51. Ibid., 130. 52. Ibid., 213. 53. Ibid., 209. 54. Ibid., 184. 55. Ibid., 31. 56. Ibid., 233. 57. Ibid., 241. 58. Hodes, ‘A Story with an Argument’, 18. 59. Ibid., 22. 60. Ibid., 23. 61. Ibid., 25. 62. A similar fate befell William Lanne, known also as King Billy and as the last Tasmanian indigenous man; scientists dismembered his body upon his death. 63. This information comes from Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. 64. Ibid., 1–4. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1st edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Sander L Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late NineteenthCentury Art, Medicine, and Literature’, Critical Inquiry 12, no.1 (1985): 204–42; Elizabeth Alexander, The Venus Hottentot: Poems (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990); Diana Ferrus, I’ve Come to Take You Home (Kulis River, South Africa: Xlbris Press, 2011), 15–16; The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: ‘The Hottentot Venus’, directed by Zola Maseko (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 1998), DVD; Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot

Living the Transnational

65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 – Buried 2002 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); Barbara Chase-Riboud, Hottentot Venus: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Yvette Abrahams, ‘Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain’, South African Historical Journal 35, no.1 (1996): 89–114; and ‘Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth R. Pierson and Nupur Chaudry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 220–36; T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); and Zoe S. Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–61. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais, ‘Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London’, Journal of British Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 301–23. Russell, Roving Mariners, 7. Walter Hawthorne struggles with similar issues in his article, ‘Gorge: An African Seaman and His Flights from “Freedom” Back to “Slavery” in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (2010): 411–28. Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, 75–78. For an excellent discussion from the point of view of an archivist, see Harris, ‘Archival Sliver’. On empire and archives, see Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive; Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 270, cited in Jeannette Allis Bastian, ‘Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation’, Archival Science 6, no. 3–4 (2006): 267–84. Bastian, ‘Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens’, 269. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 164. Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

Press, 2015). See also Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Family Politics and AngloMohawk Diplomacy: The Brant Family in Imperial Context’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005), doi:10.1353/ cch.2006.0004. Perry, Colonial Relations, 255. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 260. Lisa A. Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 42. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 145. Ibid. Ibid., 236.

4 Technologies and Economies of Rule

As we have noted in previous chapters, cultural history was influential in the emergence of transnational history as a popular field and in the study of transnationalism more broadly. In this chapter, we return to the material effects of transport, economics and trade. And we argue that they have been equally vital to transnational history and in the formations of its culturalhistorical effects worldwide. Technologies and economies of rule point to the diverse material effects of imperial modernity and their embodied, uneven and contradictory impacts in colonial and metropolitan settings. As scholars working in these fields have shown, technological and economic change – including the gathering of data about indigenous populations – has played a key role in the performance of colonial rule and the transnationality of those locations. In Chapter 2, we considered the formations of subjects within and beyond the contact zones of empire and colonialism. In this chapter, we turn more directly to the transnational circulations of knowledge formation as a technology of rule, as well as the rollout of material technologies in the project of colonial rule. The AHR forum on transnational history held in 2006 (outlined in our Introduction) called for scholarship on the encounters and exchanges that were culturally, spatially and materially mediated. Since then, historians of empire working in the transnational frame have returned to national historiographies with new questions. Contradiction, rupture, incompletion and contrast, as much as networks, exchange and co-valencies, have featured in their work. New transnational histories of economics and trade, informed by cultural, feminist and postcolonial frameworks, have illuminated the diverse relationships wrought by trade between China and Australia

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including through business networks, circuits of indenture and domestic service, while others have reached back into pre-European contact routes of social and cultural exchange such as operated between Aboriginal peoples in northern Australia and the Macassans of Makassar (now Sulawesi) in Indonesia.1 By the early twentieth century former colonial and settler nation states sought to control the historical flows of empire as they transformed into global capital. Dominion governments were concerned with the management of miscegenation within, and with incoming immigration from without. Anxiety about whiteness was articulated through anti-Asianism, fear of epidemic and perceived risks of moral contamination via port cities. Fear of political unrest was mobilized alongside that of medical pandemics, while criminologists sought to identify criminals, and welfare was to minimize the degenerative effects of the unemployed, or contamination by indentured workers from elsewhere. New scholarship on demography has investigated the material and cultural work of population debates and on immigration in nation-formation. Other work turned to health and medicine, education and welfare policy. Not surprisingly, given the transnational circuitries shaping embodied and material as well as ideological foundations of imperial and colonial power, the study of sex and sexuality has been  particularly productive also. The imperial project of gathering of information underlines these various studies. As we noted at the end of the previous chapter, the historical formation of archives has shaped the writing of transnational history. Tony Ballantyne explains that just as colonial archives played ‘a central role in the day-to-day paperwork that drove the wheels of empire’, so they have constituted collectively a singular information-gathering project expressing ‘the power of the imperial fantasy of the total archive: the dream that worldmastery might come about through documentation, the construction of an empire of knowledge based on the pen rather than the sword’.2 In the most obvious sense, archives are paper trails linking metropole and colony. They have functioned as components in a larger set of interconnected archival sites through which information circulated between the colony and the imperial centres and beyond. This complex intercolonial and inter-imperial circuitry of information created colonial worlds but in an ongoing and thus contingent fashion. For example, information about population and land shaped colonial policies and created new subjectivities. But that information changed over time. John Marriott has studied the parallels between myriad inquiries and reports concerning the physical and moral conditions of working-class English people in London and those of ‘natives’ in colonial

Technologies and Economies of Rule

India.3 To be measured, charted, enumerated or mapped was to be made amenable to the discipline of rule; the popularization of such supposedly expert knowledges was facilitated by the transnational circulation of reports and inquiries or by the publication of census. Writing on the purpose of data collection in settler colonial worlds, Tim Rowse and Tiffany Shellam argue cogently that statistics have been pivotal. They find census collection was central to the shift away from an imperial world view that colonized peoples especially indigenous would disappear due to the supposedly natural order of progress. Statistics indicated otherwise, particularly as mixed descent populations increased in number, and thus new theories began to predict the survival of ‘native’ peoples so long as they were humanely administered. They should be protected, henceforth, from the full impact of modernization due to their supposed incapacities to adapt to modernity. Their environment should be regulated through public health programmes and to a lesser extent through the provision of education of the sort being offered to the children of urban poor in Britain. In the process, missionaries, officials and experts in Australia represented Aboriginal people as ‘quantifiable, physical entities’ rather than as ‘doomed races’ dominated by primitivity, and increasingly treated them as ‘human aggregates that could be rendered governable through knowledge of their physical needs and capacities’.4 The answers sought shaped the questions asked. Historically constructed by its very nature, ‘knowledge’ operated nonetheless as a technology of colonial rule with significant consequences for actual people and places. Legal, social and political forms of control and management ranged from discriminatory legislation governing the lives of indigenous peoples (including the removal of children of mixed descent) and towards poor or ‘insane’ white and non-white subjects, to laws permitting or prohibiting certain sexual and other relations between individuals and groups of different ‘races’. Several studies of the transnational technologies of colonial rule appear in this chapter, including those investigating the counting and measuring of ‘native’ and indigenous populations; policing reproduction and sexuality within and across racial lines; and white population management via the so-called science of eugenics and population. Collectively, they indicate the myriad incremental actions required in the enactment of local authority and remind us that the body was a primary site of both intervention and resistance. In the following, we ask how knowledge creation mediated relations of space, place and subjectivity central to global, imperial, colonial, national and local worlds in interaction. And we witness how bodies and space or

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places subjected to surveillance and policing could and did exceed the authority of colonizing power. Ultimately, the disruptions and fractures wrought by the various agencies of indigenous, native or white settlers worked to confound imperial desires to know, categorize and control. Ann Laura Stoler argues that embedded within the archive is a fiction of order and reason. As this fictional space has been necessarily selective, the often-discrepant voices of the colonized, oppressed or exploited are relatively absent, having been marginalized or silenced by the official record. As Stoler has shown, cultural anthropology and ethnographic approaches provide ways to read against as well as along ‘the grain’, and, by adopting a ‘subaltern perspective’, that it is possible to excavate, if not oppositional Others then the traces and echoes of colonized subjects.5

Information empire From the 1990s, the influences of cultural anthropology were felt in transnationally-informed studies of imperial cultures of information. In his groundbreaking 1990s study of the British Empire in India, anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn identified several ‘modalities’ of imperial rule. First among them is that British rule cast non-European places and peoples as outside of history, reminding us of the moralization of space we considered in Chapter 2. In India, British officials sought to build structures of authority based on what they interpreted as local ruling practices, claiming to adapt Indian regimes of governance to the purposes of the colonial state (a practice later elaborated by Lord Lugard in his outline of the ‘Dual Mandate’ for British rule in Nigeria). Hence British administrators in the colonies were expected to uncover the mechanisms of pre-existing operations of power by collecting information through, for example, ‘“enquiries”’ aiming to document ‘customs and local histories’.6 Cohn argues that ethnography and colonial rule have been closely entwined historically. As a result, studies about Indian civilizations commissioned by authorities from historians of the ‘orient’ became essential reading among colonial officials and administrators involved in ‘the formation of legitimizing discourse about Britain’s civilizing mission in India’.7 These histories of the British in India gained additional ‘popular’ currency, thanks to the ‘construction of memorials and sacred spaces’,8 in various locations that rehearsed sensational tales of the imperial exploits of Europeans vanquishing native miscreants.

Technologies and Economies of Rule

Secondly, Cohn pointed to the travel modality of imperial rule that circulates in accounts of colonial encounters designed for metropolitan and settler audiences. Such accounts were structured typically around familiar locations, tropes and aesthetics. Thirdly, he identified the centrality of the survey at the core of the imperial project of mapping, measuring and classifying new territory. The counting of people resulted in thousands upon thousands of official census reports. Such collecting and counting reflect the ‘quest for total knowledge’ that assumed a factual basis to data gathered. In reality, the very act of accumulating data was deeply implicated in the construction of facts and their intimate interpolation within the production of knowledge. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the emerging social sciences gained authority by contributing desired expertise to colonial states. Zoe Laidlaw argues compellingly for the importance of intercolonial studies, which, as we have seen, are critical to disrupting narratives of empire based on a centre to periphery (or, for that matter, periphery to centre) model of influence and change. Laidlaw demonstrates how colonial administrative networks took shape as colonial management was considered increasingly to rely on statistical information.9 Information that flowed from and between colonial settings was inflected by the ambitions of officials and by the intertwining of official and unofficial sources claiming to know colonial places and peoples, and thus render them more available to exploitation. David Lambert and Alan Lester argue that imperial rule made space available to occupation in myriad ways not only by colonial officials (often working in more than one colony) but also by missionaries, travellers and adventurers. Conversely, local knowledge proved essential to the survival of early settlers and remained crucial to systematic forms of settlement. In the crown colonies in particular, local hierarchies of authority were often incorporated into colonial regimes, as representatives of empire were encouraged to utilize indigenous systems of organization.10 Imperial careerists were thus significant interlocutors of colonial knowledge and its intercolonial exchange. Colonial officials who administered empire often moved from one site to another, bringing with them experiences and world views with implications for the colonized peoples, settlers, migrants and others they administrated. The rise of the expert in the management of colonial affairs was mirrored in the emergence of expertise in the social sciences, biology/botany and the natural environment, population control and its improvement, as well as anthropology, among others, each in their own way contributing to the

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narratives of progress inherent to the ideology of colonial rule.11 European claims to know ‘savage’ places and peoples by measuring them, collecting data about them and intervening in their lives in the name of improvement would become fundamental to British Dominion settler nation states by the second half of the nineteenth century proclaiming degrees of autonomy from a distant metropolis. Careers in a variety of disciplines were established in the process of collecting information on supposedly scientific, objective and disinterested bases. These forms of knowledge were claimed necessary to humane forms of imperial, colonial and settler colonial rule. Although mostly articulated by men, among them numbers of elite white women sought also to exploit colonization to advance their own opportunities to become commentators, to study in and/or contribute to international debate about the future of empire, race relations and the white Dominions.12 We return to these and other self-consciously humanitarian and internationalist actors in the next chapter. Useful equally to metropolitan and colonial claims to expertise was a plethora of unofficial accounts and travel writing. Also instructive were images  and objects displayed in exhibitions and world fairs in various European and settler cities through the second half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries or in ‘first-hand’ experiences mediated via ethnographic films and illustrated magazines. In his 1983 Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, who argued for the influence of newspapers in creating national commons, inspired greater attention to the mediated, cultural construction of national identity. Mary Louise Pratt in her 1992 study Imperial Eyes deployed literary theory in her efforts to conceive of contact zones in ways that emphasized the co-productive interactions through which cross-cultural exchanges take place. Such zones of contact operating between individuals in first contacts was for Europeans already shaped by their assumptions about the order of the world.13 Ann McClintock in Imperial Leather (1995) focused on the anxieties and failures entailed in efforts to possess other places and peoples, including through a range of Edwardian domestic products and images imbued with gendered, sexualized and racialized notions of imperial ascendancy and authority that were consumed by the British public at home.14 In their 2006 edited collection At Home with the Empire, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose underlined the everydayness of empire in British popular culture.15 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numbers of key books about imperial and colonial rule reached global publics and became transnational sensations across the Anglo-American world.16 Transnational readerships were comprised of

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non-officials as well as of colonial administrators aiming to keep abreast of reports on race, social and health sciences and education in the colonies. Non-national organizations and non-state actors such as academics, internationalists, social reformists and progressives, and adventurers and expeditioners, as well as those involved in the practical matter of education and health provisions in colonial settings, worked in close cooperation with colonial authorities and thus were actors within networks of information that extended beyond imperial boundaries.17 Modern visual technologies of communication became ready modes for the promotion of colonization as a supposedly wholesome and progressive project. By the early twentieth century, for example, nineteenth-century colonial hunting cultures gained new currency in the wildlife film as ‘safari’ was reprised as a performative site of nostalgic post-imperial masculinity enacted in supposedly wild places by elite white men or at home by the Boy Scouts.18 Bill Schwarz has counted these kinds of intergenerational memories of empire among those shaping the attitudes of British leaders in the post–Second World War era of decolonization.19 Above all, surveillance was concerned with the power of looking. The display of supposedly ‘traditional’ forms of colonial culture to metropolitan audiences was at the same time an expression of mastery over them. It simultaneously rendered them exotic, retrograde or dangerous. Information produced in colonial archives could provide the basis for the dehumanization and even criminalization of certain colonized subjects and their cultures. Thus, for example, statistics reporting a prevalence of female infanticide in one section of the Indian population led, in turn, to the pursuit of this crime. The early use of fingerprinting in India reflected the extension of the surveillance modality into efforts to predict and thus prevent fraud and forgery (or, for that matter, sedition).20 More recently, Catharine Coleborne has linked the rise of the expert and the corrective institution in her transnational study of insanity and criminality in which she compares four colonial sites within the transcolonial, trans-Tasman world of late nineteenth-century Australasia.21 Similarly, Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford have studied the uses of isolation and exclusion in settler colonial histories of border management.22 Beyond specific institutional settings, the imperial archive helped to map (not least through actual maps) hitherto ‘unknown’ colonized spaces and populations, and to align them in the process with hierarchies of ‘degenerate’ or ‘primitive’ indicating their relative need of governance. Writing of violence in Pacific colonial histories, Tracey Banivanua-

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Mar describes the imperial project as actively constituting ‘unruly’ and ‘unlawful’ places on the map before then setting out to bring them into ‘civilization’.23 And yet these claims to name and thus rule operated in uneven, contingent and often contradictory fashion. Rather than erasing existing knowledge systems, colonial authorities interacted with them, whether knowingly or not. For example, Heather Goodall writes about the petitioning of authorities by Aboriginal people in Australia who had been moved onto missions following European settlement. She notes their agency, nevertheless, being able to remain therefore on country and thus maintain their connection to tribal lands.24 Banivanua-Mar demonstrates how Aboriginal and Pacific Islander communities relegated to land considered worthless in late nineteenth-century Queensland, Australia, remained relatively invisible to Europeans and so were able to retain degrees of autonomy over their own lives.25 Indigenous and native informants have shaped imperial and colonial history in myriad ways, no less so than in relation to knowledges about them. According to Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, what appears in the archives as ‘fact’ was thoroughly shaped by ‘hierarchies of credibility that conferred facticity’ but were actually interwoven with subjective talk or gossip and hearsay.26 That which was attributed the status of fact was ‘continually breached by an indigenous population who turned European rumours about native insurrection and subversion against their authors and to other ends ’.27 Thus historians need to attend to ‘dissonant voices rather than assuming coherence’ if they wish to see beyond the truth claims of an ‘omniscient colonial apparatus to one shot through with conflicts’ and vulnerabilities.28 Notions of culture and tradition as knowable sites of otherness were key to this process of knowledge construction. Colonial archives generated information and fashioned colonized knowledges about other subjects or places in ways that confirmed authority over them. Anthropological and social science frameworks reinforced assumptions of superiority in colonial settings despite zones of contact offering the possibility of an exchange of world views. In that process of contact, what counted as indigenous tradition was being formed out of assumed categories of difference reiterated or reformulated encounter by encounter, before being encoded and consolidated as ‘fact’.29 Through enabling these knowledge effects, the imperial archive has added to the range of violences carried out in the name of colonization – bringing to epistemological and representational violence

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the direct and physical. Careful analysis of archival sources can reveal as much – if not more – about the colonizer than the colonized.

Enquiries, census, social science The official enquiry and the census were two key genres of colonial knowledge production. Their claims to truth circulated transnationally from the colonial to the metropolitan world and back again, shaping and reshaping relations between groups and individuals from metropolitan society to the colony itself. The authority they enjoyed reflects the increasing role of the social sciences in anchoring empire’s claim to knowledge and right to rule. The historian of imperial and colonial enquiries, G. Roger Knight in his chapter ‘Colonial Knowledge and Subaltern Voices’ in Sources and Methods: Approaching the Imperial Archive, edited by Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, considers their important role in maintaining claims to knowledge and power in the Dutch colonial state of Java. As Knight points out, enquiries were sites in which indigenous informants as well as officials were agents in the creation of information. He concludes that inquiries with their appearance of expertise and statehood were profoundly mediated by ‘native informants’ whose testimony ‘significantly subverted the notional dichotomies of ruler and ruled, coloniser and colonised’.30 Knight agrees with Stoler that because categories of difference have been more ‘created’ than described, historians must work both along and against the grain of archival sources if they are to recognize ‘the dual character of archives as source and archives as subject’.31 In the same volume, Alexandra Widmer investigates colonial census taking ‘as a modern form of knowledge’ creating whole populations and types in need of improvement and management.32 Anthropologists, missionaries and doctors were involved in collecting information for colonial authorities because they were often in close proximity to native subjects and because colonial state apparatuses were often poorly developed. Data collection, particularly in the form of tables, reduced human complexity to rows and columns in which categories – such as those claiming to capture ‘race’ – and their interrelationships created the appearance of factuality and rationality. These representations, writes Widmer, ‘played a key role in constructing colonial reality’. The supposedly ‘separate stance’ of the observer33 appeared

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to affirm the possibility of control over ‘governable’ others.34 This appearance of objectivity and disinterest belied the thoroughly invested and subjective nature of the colonial gaze.

Regionalisms in new light Such knowledges have been significant also in the re-emergence of ‘regions’ as a category of study. Transnational historians have sought to uncover processes creating regions into spaces on the world map that were understood as unified by a common set of observable features. According to Alison Bashford, placing regional studies in a transnational frame has brought into question the ‘temporal arcs’ by which periodizations have been assumed.35 By opening up timelines and regionalisms to transnational interrogation, she finds that the history of immigration restriction, for example, cannot be attributed only to the white settler colonies: in fact, its historical emergence ‘simultaneously involved any number of other colonies from Malaya to Fiji, from Brunei to Singapore’.36 These kinds of global approaches to transnational regional histories underline the point that the historiographies of settler colonialism and colonialism, often treated as distinct or as regionally segregated, need to be brought into new critical relationship. Edited collections have helped to achieve this goal. They have been useful in creating transnational research networks that combine studies across regionalisms such as the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. These oceanic approaches have been discussed in previous chapters. The 2014 collection titled Pacific Histories edited by David Armitage and Alison Bashford includes chapters ranging from environment, law, gender, race and politics to science, religion and economics. In his chapter ‘A Pacific Century?’, Akira Iriye advises that transnational history of the Pacific ‘pays primary attention to non-national entities, non-state actors, and cross-border themes’. It ranges from ‘economic, social and cultural globalisation to migrations, human rights, diseases and natural disasters, [to] the spread of (and the efforts to prevent) drug abuses, terrorism, environmental degradation, advances in scientific and medical research, cultural and educational exchanges (including the development of shared memories), tourism and world events’.37 This remarkable breadth reflects the capacity of transnational historians to pursue areas of research that necessarily cut across historical fields, regionalisms and temporal boundaries.

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In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by Armitage and Braddick (discussed also in Chapter 2) topics range from migration to economics, religion and science. They are all also concerned with gender, class and race as hierarchies of difference operating within as well as beyond the parameters of the Atlantic World. In her concluding chapter, Lauren Benton points out that seeking to understand the Atlantic in ‘global context’ does not mean simply comparing that region to the Pacific. Such an approach would assume the pre-existing ‘characteristics of distinctive Atlantic-centered processes’ rather than seeking to study their emergence as sets of knowledges through which the Atlantic or other oceanic worlds took shape. Only by ‘beginning with global processes and analysing variants in the Atlantic’ – such as through networks of trade, information flows that shaped regional markets and ‘global legal regimes and their relationship to imperial and international law’ – can ‘widely occurring phenomena’ be seen in the process of ‘develop[ing] regionally distinctive patterns at particular historical moments’.38 Ironically, continues Benton, achieving this larger perspective has entailed returning to economic history. This has required reappraising an ‘older historiography that was pushed aside because of its dry detailing of organisational aspects of the administration of empire’. By attending to economic and other structures, but not in reductive ways, Benton finds it possible to open up to scrutiny a ‘multiplicity of spaces’ across a ‘complex and uneven network of commercial relations’ that reach into ‘distinct subregions within imperial spheres of influence’.39 Just as we have sought to show in relation to embedding the local or the biographical within the transnational, Benton argues that this kind of grounded yet panoramic perspective ‘reveals important structural parallel trends across regions, including similar institutional origins of slavery, global currents of forced migrations, and the militarization of empire’.40 New economic history has emerged as part of this transnational agenda. Patricia Clavin in the Journal of Contemporary European History (2005) argues that the transnational turn has brought to economic history a renewed interest in the imperial, regional and national networks and pathways necessary to trade. It is essential to understanding the cultural and social as well as financial influences of economic history. Clavin points out that, in any case, economic and financial historians have always needed to engage with transnational approaches because the nation has never been a sufficiently expansive framework for the study of economies.41 And, reflecting more broadly on the role of economics within colonial rule, Tony Ballantyne concludes that the imperial archive did more

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than simply create a range of colonized ‘others’: it made them available to the ‘extractive enterprises’ of colonial capital.42

Transport and communication The circulation of knowledge as much as goods and people required infrastructure in the form of transport and communication systems. Communication, trade and transport systems enabled the circulation of information essential to colonial rule and created new colonial settler subjectivities. As Frances Steel has shown in her 2016 book about modern transportation between Australasia and the United States, tourists enjoyed viewing what they experienced as their Pacific from the deck of steamships: travel for pleasure provided them with a sense of the region as though their own.43 In the previous century, white colonists were equally enabled to assume ownership by the advent of trains and ships. During the era of industrialization in the nineteenth century, the steam age that radically changed the lives of workers in Europe and the United States was cataclysmic for colonized workers. Workers living under colonization were faced with extreme changes in their daily lives, including in ‘the reconfiguration of time and space’ fundamental to the conditions of waged labour.44 Trains saw the rapid increase of settlers brought in ever-increasing numbers. These transport systems gave literal expression to the technological advancement claimed by empire: as an indication of its asserted ascendancy over supposedly less advanced peoples, travel confirmed a moral authority to occupy other people’s lands.45 When multiplied across myriad locations, the effects of rapid change being negotiated by colonized peoples on the ground illuminate also the constructed nature of categories of difference proclaimed by the colonial state.46 But not only goods, mail, people and disease travelled along railway lines. As they reduced travel time, the same steamships and trains that sped up the impacts of colonization became catalysts for new gender and race relations. Moreover, the speed of locomotion that produced a shrinking of distance was consolidated by the telegraph and daily newspapers which made possible the rapid transfer of information from one place to another.47 They brought what were considered by many colonial administrations to be dangerous ideas that could inflame anti-colonial and various political agendas and contained within them unpredictable effects.48 Jonathan Hyslop

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has written of port cities as transnational nodes in which vast populations of ex-colonized intersected in dynamic ways exceeding imperial control.49 The 2012 collection A World Connecting: 1870–1945 brings together a range of global histories concerned likewise with knowledge formation and technologies of rule. Organized into sections on empire and global history, migration histories, global economies and commodity chains, and circuits of expertise, the volume sets out to investigate interconnections between the movement of products and people around the empire and the role of experts in shaping not only colonial conditions but imperial relations. In her introduction, editor Emily S. Rosenberg points out that the contributors share an interest in the ‘dramatic shrinking of time and space as a result of the revolution in communications and transportation; the accompanying acceleration in mobility of people, goods, and ideas’ including ‘the power of (and challenges to) nationalism and racialist ideologies’.50 Rather than diminishing over time, these effects continued to be felt as ‘global flows’ became ‘denser’ over the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, if unevenly and at ‘different speeds’. Given the potent legacies of these histories, the presentday ‘gap between relatively connected worlds and relatively disconnected ones … [has only] widened’.51 According to Rosenberg, where ‘Europe’ and European modernity were once assumed to drive modernization, the new world history (one that is transnationally informed) seeks to historicize and interrogate such a foundational claim. And it has done so by investigating the role that contact and relationality with the non-West has played in assertions of ascendancy. Now world history has turned to the study of dynamic linkages and interactions and their differing characteristics and implications: it is influenced by cultural anthropology’s finding that culture is relational rather than coherent or unitary, and that modernity has been produced through claims of similarity as much as of difference.52 Reflecting on the cultural turn in transnational history, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton in their contribution to the volume ask if by emphasizing the social and cultural, historians have paid too little attention to equally important questions about structure and materiality. In ‘Remaking the World’, they remind us that from the 1870s ‘empire building and communication’ provided the very conditions for ‘the emergence of an increasingly integrated global order’ on which both the practical and ideological concerns of empire were reliant.53 They conclude that ‘the development of technologies and cross-cultural connections’ have been central to the ‘intellectual debates, political struggles, and cultural formations’ that unfolded globally in their wake.54 Railways were essential

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to expansion, settlement and industrialization: these massive ‘investments in capital and labour’ provided the basis for ‘communication complexes’ that became ‘core elements of imperial practice’.55 Their social and political effects were many. Women of elites in Europe, Asia and the Dominions enjoyed new degrees of mobility and modernity, thanks to steam-driven travel, for example, at the same time as economic development led to social transformations and ‘new sites of collision’ between colonized and colonizer. In the process, ‘subaltern subjects were increasingly locked in their social positions as laborers or as objects of … elaborate state mechanisms that policed mobility and citizenship’ while members of imperial elites enjoyed being transnational subjects.56 In similar fashion, imperial commerce internationalized ‘highly mobile colonial workforces’ that experienced conditions of mobility in quite different ways to their white counterparts. They were moved between and within colonies and around imperial circuits, being deployed in the construction of transportation and communication systems and other forms of ‘capital-intensive infrastructure’ such as roads, railway and telegraph lines.57 Modern imperial bureaucracies, add Ballantyne and Burton, created ‘depersonalized’ and ‘mechanized’ modes of surveillance and documentation of colonized populations. They utilized photography, fingerprinting and other forms of modernized information gathering and management reliant upon police, public officials and a vast array of everyday record-keepers.58 Given that racialized hierarchies were central in the categorization of colonial populations, assumptions about ‘race’ and difference produced vast statistics on health and work that predictably ascribed to ‘nonwhite workers’ the greatest vulnerability to the impacts of ‘industrial-imperial modernity’.59 And yet, even the most elaborate systems of surveillance were incomplete and, as we have noted above, those who were under scrutiny found many ways to influence the data collected about them. Given cultural and social difference has always been interpreted via the measurement of material conditions, assertions of relative advancement are not only suspect but revealing of colonization in practice. Ballantyne and Burton conclude that historians should focus on the ‘cultural consequences of … unevenness on the ground, and how common people, especially colonized workers, shaped the material and symbolic forms that global technological modernity assumed in the context of empire’.60 Rather than reiterate a centralized account of technology rolling out onto a supposedly primitive colonial landscape, Ballantyne and Burton emphasize the contested and contradictory nature of technology’s effects. Linkages wrought through technology brought ‘new

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patterns of circulation’, they write, that were available to a variety of local mobilizations. These new patterns had the potential to contribute in new ways to ‘ongoing processes of cultural transfer and adaptation in a world that had been radically, if unevenly, remade by global imperial systems’.61 The rise of experts was crucial to knowledge production, while technologies from trains to paper were essential to its circulation. Bodies and subjects were created in the process, but incompletely and in ways that could confound. As we see in the following sections, histories of population management and of sexuality are notably illustrative of this doubling effect.

The question of population Demography or the study of population emerged as much out of European colonization as from anxieties about the impacts of industrialization upon the urban poor in England. Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin demonstrate that early ideas about the dangers of overpopulation put forward by the economist Thomas Malthus in the late eighteenth century were greatly influenced by the New Worlds then being encountered.62 Population was a driving question for the project of colonization. In his 2008 transnational study of how biology became history, Matthew Connelly has shown how the global population movement emerging out of colonial rule and via the settler states with their immigration restriction acts sought to promote an international, global outlook regarding the world’s population. This population was deemed in need of management and regulation. Demographers were among the experts who could provide global answers to questions about population and its management facing administrators and officials in the Dominions. Concerns to reduce particularly non-white or working-class populations, while increasing the numbers of middle-class whites against ‘race suicide’ or the contaminating effects of ‘unfitness’, marked the emergence of a movement that illustrates a range of contradictions within a discourse of development still at work in world affairs today. Connelly concludes from his study that world politics and modes of governance continue to be shaped by the opposing forces of cooperation (evident in issues like population) and international conflict as  nation states compete for resources. Understanding the transnational history of this contradictory effect is, in his opinion, imperative for the future of the globe.63

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Similarly inspired to understand the trajectory of the past into the present, in her 2004 study of population Alison Bashford investigates the role of population management in Australian (settler) state formation. She reveals through her case study the historical importance of eugenics, immigration restriction and the rise of modern experts to understanding more broadly the workings of imperialism and its aftermaths. In Imperial Hygiene, Bashford sets out to understand the spatial dynamics of governance by investigating ‘the lines of hygiene’ that she argues became literal ‘boundaries of rule in many colonial and national contexts’.64 She interrogates through transnational lens the archives of the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales in order to investigate the valency of these forms of governance in local, national and imperial frame. As a result, she is able to trace all kinds of public health spaces and explore their intersection and oftentimes dove-tailing with real boundaries of rule: national borders, immigration restriction lines, quarantine lines, racial cordons sanitaires and the segregative ambitions of a grafted eugenics and public health. All of these spaces – therapeutic, carceral, preventive, racial and eugenic geographies – produced identities of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and citizenship, and of alien-ness.65

For Bashford, Australia provides an exemplary site through which to consider the intersections between ‘race’ and segregation in public health. She argues that these same intersections were intrinsic to imperial rule globally. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 2, critical histories of settler colonialism can problematize historicizations of colonialism that are more usually structured along a narrative arc from imperial rule to decolonization.66 By contrast, as she points out, national history in Australia was not an outcome of anti-colonialism but of a partial separation from the British Empire mostly based on historically particular investments in national forms of whiteness. The ‘health’ of the white nation has been paramount in articulations of not only ‘the metaphor of the “social body”, but also the actual corporeal connectedness of bodies, communities and nations’ through which ‘Australia’ was formed.67 The interconnected status of corporeality was also an endless source of danger, given the fantastical idea of a ‘pure’ nation was always at risk of contamination.68 Outsiders arriving within Australia’s borders contributed to these dangers, but so did the internal, Aboriginal population predominantly cast as ‘ungovernable’.69 Both sources of potential racial and moral contamination had to be managed, if not (as initially assumed) via the supposedly natural laws of

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degeneration and disappearance (specifically of indigenous peoples), then through systems of biological or social absorption. In other work, Bashford brings new insight into the transnational history of immigration restrictions and disease management across the twentieth-century Asia-Pacific and to global debates about population management at the League of Nations and the United Nations.70 She argues for less emphasis on ‘race’ in the histories of white exclusionary states like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States and more on their shared and distinct ideologies of population. By adopting a transnational, regional approach, Bashford asks new kinds of questions about the relationship between settler-colonial immigration restriction and other less-studied policies of immigration restriction in postcolonial nation states post-Second World War (for example between Australia in 1901 and Malaya in 1958). The latter often declared themselves as independent from empire by asserting their own immigration controls, not only in order to regulate ‘race’ but with the aim of managing a range of issues including disease, mental health, character, fitness and national security. Moreover, while explicitly ‘race’-based immigration policies declined in the post-war era, in Australia as elsewhere population management has remained the asserted grounds for restrictions on immigration into the present.71 In her book Building Better Britains? (2016), Cecilia Morgan has brought together many of these same themes in transnational mode in order to compare British settlement in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa. She does this via a series of themes and issues including contact and encounters, settling and governing, economies in local and imperial contexts, civil society and settler identity. Reprising some of the topics we interrogate in Chapter 2, her intention is to unpack ‘[w]ho would be considered a “British subject” and in what particular ways would they be seen as such by settlers and various levels of government’. She uncovers processes that ‘like other British colonies [were] … structured by relations of power and dominance’. And she finds that although ‘mutable’ and ‘subject to challenges wrought by various groups, both within the colonies themselves and in the metropole’ Britishness gave these societies ‘their form and structure’.72 Other transnational studies of masculinity and whiteness have concerned fears of moral degeneration or biological miscegenation in metropolitan and colonial society. Robert Young has written powerfully about the desires and dangers of otherness in the colonial imaginary.73 As discussed further in the next section, sexuality often sits at the core of these (sometimes overlapping) expressions of both attraction and revulsion.

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Economies of pleasure and danger In 2009 (as we note in Chapter 1), Margot Canaday introduced an American Historical Review forum on Transnational Sexualities. Reflecting on the emergences of transnational history and the study of sexuality, Canaday concludes ‘that these two major poles of intellectual energy have in a sense developed in tandem’.74 She reflects on the ways in which the study of sexuality helped to reinforce the need to interrogate social and cultural micro relations without being overwhelmed by the grand scale of transnational analysis and synthesis. And she argues that motifs of transnational history ‘such as “exchange”, “movement” and “circulation” are constructs with which historians of sexuality are deeply at home’.75 Canaday concludes that the task for transnational historians of sexuality is vast given it requires historians to follow their subjects across diverse geographical and thematic fields. Thankfully, at the same time this transnational scope has by necessity enabled greater collaboration and exchange between historians involved in this emerging field. The 2009 forum aimed to set out the main themes in the transnational history of sexuality, as well as to call for more attention to the diversity of experiences across the continent of Africa. Canaday also points to the need to uncouple ‘modern’ notions of sexuality from the historical analysis of pre-colonial and earlier sexualities, and she underlines the presence of violence in so many studies of sexuality as well as of colonization.76 As Canaday recognizes, earlier work by Stoler, Burton and McClintock had already conceptualized colonial contact as an encounter of ideas and practices of masculinity, femininity and sex. Sexuality has long been a pivotal site for transnational histories of colonization. Stoler, among others, has shown that the regulation of bodies, including in relation to sex, was integral to the daily enactment of colonial authority.77 At the same time, anxiety about intimate matters contradicted the claim of colonial authority to scientific distance, underlining instead the complex and fractured nature of daily interaction between embodied individuals otherwise supposedly separated by categories of difference. In their essay ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, Stoler and Cooper argue that by working between and across histories of Europe’s imperial projects and of colonial culture, historians can grasp the broader ‘political economy’ expressed in the classifications and surveillance of reproduction in colonial societies, and that are illustrated in the critical role that gender and sexuality has played in state formation. Not only was sexuality and biological reproduction to be regulated, but

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sexuality was integral to categories of difference being drawn more broadly, including those of whiteness, class and gender ‘which helped to define moral superiority and maintain cultural differences that in turn justified different intensities of violence’.78 Sexual relations between colonial and colonized were mostly legislated against. And yet they might also become mobilized in the name of assimilation. While at many times and in many places love across racial lines was deemed ‘illicit’, state authorities elsewhere or at other moments in the same location might adopt an opposite position. Studies working comparatively, transnationally and transculturally between the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have been particularly effective in uncovering these inconsistencies.79 Philippa Levine has been a key contributor to the emergence of gendered histories of imperialism viewed through a transnational lens. In The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset and the edited collection Gender and Empire, she has argued for the centrality of gender, sexuality and bodies to our understanding of the complex interrelationship between imperialism and colonial rule. In her preface to The British Empire, Levine writes that ‘imperialism mattered’ to daily existence, whether in relation to the British economy or ideas about British national identity, or for those living under colonial rule.80 In her work, Levine aims to investigate how colonial rule was lived and experienced; how women and men were treated differently whether they were rulers or ruled; and how those experiences differed from colony to colony. In a chapter on gender and sexuality, Levine discusses the impact of unbalanced sex ratios across the British world and how the imperial project imagined manliness and separate spheres from women and men of the white middleclass settlers. She notes that they routinely contrasted their own family and marital relations with the social and cultural ways of life they assumed of the ‘primitive’ peoples among whom they lived often in close proximity. Miscegenation was an ever-present fact in this world, one that threatened to dissolve the asserted distinction between them based on civilized behaviour equated with sexual control. Measures of difference including in relation to sexuality were imbued with racial meaning, states Levine. They were evident, for example, in the supposedly higher status of women in Western modern cultures than among the so-called less advanced. This asserted difference stood as proof of the necessity for colonization itself.81 Social scientists and biologists made claims for the comparison between modern and primitive womankind, equating the latter with degrees of animality and/

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or subordination that reflected the supposedly lesser advancement of African or Pacific Islander cultures, or, in the case of India, ‘civilization’.82 (And we saw in Chapter 3 how scientists discussed Sara Baartman as the embodiment of a supposedly lost moment in human evolution.) Similarly, in the United States, racist power relations were held in place by appeals to gendered rhetorics of threat and protection.83 The assumed need to protect white women from non-white men in South Africa and in Papua New Guinea led to ordinances criminalizing sexual relations between native men and white women.84 In this heightened context of whiteness, numbers of elite white women in the colonies exploited their status in order to promote women’s causes and their own agendas as the proclaimed protectors of white society. In some cases, they became advocates for the rights of indigenous women. Not coincidentally, campaigns for white women’s suffrage in the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand were among the first to be successful.85 Levine argues in her introduction to Gender and Empire that universalizing or generalizing accounts of gender fail to capture the contradictory and fractured nature of its mobilizations across a variety of imperial and colonial settings. Nor do they sufficiently recognize its profound entanglement with other forms of inequality operating through class and race divisions. Finally, however, ‘[g]ender … is always central to the ways in which social relations have been navigated, built, and secured as well as challenged and resisted’.86 Levine extends this analysis in her study of venereal disease in the British Empire. In Prostitution, Race and Politics (2003), she applies a cultural and feminist methodology to the fields of medical, military, political and social history in order to investigate the transnational relationship between colonialism, gender and race. Her study compares 1860s and 1870s contagious diseases’ legislations regulating prostitution in several colonial contexts and the resistances and oppositions they engendered. Given the aim was to protect sailors and soldiers across the empire, the management of venereal disease and prostitution reflects, she writes, the ‘culturallyspecific assumptions’ underlying British colonialism itself.87 And even more pointedly, because venereal disease was considered a racial poison its control became pivotal also in racializing and eugenic modes of debate about the quality of British working class and fighting men. This history reveals that official anxiety about the body of the white man and woman – as much as their racialized Others – was deeply interpolated within efforts to create and map racial hierarchies in colonial and metropolitan settings.88

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Sensitive to the interconnection between representation and actual relations between individuals, these new kinds of transnational studies illustrate the similarities and differences between colonial locales. And they show how imagined and actual bodies have interacted in complex and uneven ways. They reflect the point made by Stoler and Cooper that ‘[c]olonial projects were fundamentally predicated on a tension between notions of incorporation and differentiation … weighed differently at different times’.89 Just as ‘[t]he production of colonial knowledge occurred not only within the bounds of nation-states and in relationship to their subject colonized populations but also transnationally, across imperial centers’,90 so there is a need for new kinds of methodologies and archives that enable work on the ‘political nature of cultural projects’ being promoted by the social sciences and in the study of human society fundamental to the carrying out of colonization. As Stoler and Cooper make clear, the claim to knowledge by the social sciences was enabled in no small part by their role in the production of knowledge central to colonial rule, and also because cultural difference was embedded within the political economies of difference on which the domination and exploitation of bodies were justified.91 Attending to the history of the modern social sciences has contributed new insight into the impacts of imperialism on a global scale. In Race, Nation and Empire, edited by Hall and McClelland, Antoinette Burton calls on historians to look beyond any single empire not least because the role of the social science in the ideological work of empire has legacies continuing into our present. As we argue also in this book, Burton advises that ‘historicizing empires in a worldly way means understanding the global, along with the national, the local, the regional and the transnational, [and] not only as spatial frameworks’. This ‘worldly way’ of working is imperative to understanding the historical genealogy of ‘perspectives whose ideological work has become extremely powerful in Western social science’ and beyond any single empire. What counts as objective or ‘fact’ remains (as Burton contends) deeply embedded, moreover, within the tenaciously imperializing logics of history itself.92 As Robert Vitalis has also argued, by recognizing the historical embeddedness of the racialized relations of empire, the emergence of the social sciences can be brought into focus. In the case of American School of International Relations, Vitalis argues, it is possible to see how British imperial history interacted with the formations of US empire in significant ways that were impactful in relation to African Americans as well as colonized populations in the Pacific.93

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Into the era of decolonization As we have set out to show in this chapter, racially based policies and everyday racisms in the colonies not only impacted on colonized peoples with lasting legacies into the present but also impacted on those who benefited from colonization. Writing of the unfinished business of empire and its afterlives haunting the present, in her book Better Britons concerning the management of reproduction in Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the post-war era, Nadine Attewell describes the incompleteness of decolonization in the present. This incompleteness pertains ‘not just in those locales and for those subjects most bitterly affected by imperial rule, but in those locales and for those subjects whom it largely benefited’.94 In this way, ‘British and settler subjects have repeatedly turned to projects of reproductive management to imagine themselves as post-imperial, secured against the haunting force of such histories of violence as are their inheritance’.95 In her chapter on ‘Whiteness for Beginners’, Attewell states that the Australian nation state made ‘the sexual, reproductive, and family lives of Indigenous people its business’.96 In doing so, it mirrored similar if distinct social imaginaries and policy outcomes in New Zealand but also in contrast to Brazil where ‘breeding out of colour’ of the sort popularized in Australia did not gain traction.97 In Afterlife of Empire, Jordanna Bailkin argues that hitherto the history of decolonization has attracted insufficient investigation from historians, despite the ongoing influences of empire beyond imperial rule. Her book focuses on the historical relationship between authorities in the former colonies, of British migrants to settler colonies like Australia and of the metropolitan lifeworlds of immigrants to England. As post-war England became a destination for increasing numbers of ex-colonial subjects, the ambitions of myriad non-white Britons were variously facilitated, hindered and, above all, analysed by government authorities and public organizations. From its origins in the colonial era, the social sciences became integral to managing modern modes of interaction between the state and British migrant groups in which non-white subjects of the former colonial world but also the Irish closer to home were cast as outsiders in English society. Such populations racialized variously as not-English were considered inherently prone to pathology because of the asserted difference of their home societies, and by the geographical, social and cultural dislocations of migration itself. Numerous individuals

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or types were documented by authorities, each considered to require state intervention. Those declared ‘success stories’ due to their supposed adaptability to British society were promoted as exemplars of the capacity of their race to integrate. In the process, seeming evidence of sameness and/or difference was made available for management and monitoring in the service of Britain’s claims to be a progressive force in relation to numerous ex-colonies as well as at home.98 One of the issues for historians of this period is a relative paucity of official archival sources. But as Bailkin points out in her introduction, ‘The evidence for the afterlife of empire depends … on where we look’.99 Applying a transnational framework, she combines archives from several government departments, newspaper reports and individual life stories in order to unpack the ways in which new migrant subjects were variously constituted, pathologized and/or valorized. Like their counterparts in the colonies, they were routinely represented as requiring professional intervention from educators, psychologists and sociologists who in turn advised governments, wrote reports and carried out policy. Migrants from the West Indies were not considered unique in suffering the psychological strains of displacement and homesickness, however. As Bailkin shows, British migrants to Australia were considered to be subject also to psychological stress, leading one public health official to recommend the deportation of any migrant to Australia who was found to have concealed such tendencies during the pre-migration selection process. Similarly, the Irish were declared prone to higher rates of mental disturbance once transplanted onto British soil. From psychological studies of migration to the value of voluntary work overseas and the British settler, and from marriage studies across and within different cultures to the emergence of modern sociology, Bailkin underlines a question raised in our Introduction: What is left out of the official archives and why? One of the answers is who has been considered an actor and agent of history. As indicated in our earlier discussion, among these agents were the white men and women deemed to have expertise valuable to colonial rule. The manifold limits to mobility facilitating these actors and agents that were endemic to racially seeded nationalisms and imperial world views only continued into the twentieth century. The conditions of membership in the post-imperial world increasingly confronted contradictions within the ideologies of humane development that came to stand for the civilizing project of international government. Historically, the conditions of membership reflected the contradictions internal to the ideologies of

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humane development that were embedded within the civilizing project of imperial rule. Inheriting these global maps of mobility, a range of new technologies of modernity that supposedly broke from the imperial past continued to enable nonetheless the mobility of some, while restricting those of others. In her study of the transnational history of the passport, Radhika Viyas Mongia shows that despite being British subjects, in the early decades of the twentieth century Indian migrants continued to be subjected to the constraints of race-based mobility. In this case, they confronted immigration restriction policies instituted by the white settler colonies including in Australia and Canada.100 The politics of movement continues to be impactful today. The evident limits of universal rights proclaimed under British imperial rule and the failures of just or humane treatment of indigenous populations in the settler colonies produced critical voices. They led to social reform as well as anti-colonial movements. The Anglo-American world we discussed in Chapter 2, saw the emergence of Pan-African and African American rights networks into a global movement that promoted also the reform of conditions among the colonized peoples of the world. Many critics of empire and anti-colonial nationalists mobilized European claims to civilization and modernity in order to speak back to empire. Sometimes they established collaborations with white Anglo-American critics seeking a renewed, more humane form of imperial community still led by Europeans  – or expressed their ethical commitment to the futures of exploited others. In the nineteenth century, as Clare Midgley has shown, for example, elite women in Britain boycotted sugar in the name of solidarity with enslaved Africans working on British sugar plantations in the Caribbean.101 From the late nineteenth century a progressive movement for the reform of the old relations of empire gathered pace and found renewed valency in the era of the League of Nations.102 The question of how the new ideology of a family of nations would be formed was significant for imperial citizens as well, including for white women activists who sought to proclaim their rights through the responsibilities of (white) womankind in world affairs. As we will see in the next chapter, new histories of internationalism influenced by the transnational turn have brought fresh attention to the proliferation of non-official as well as official networks of international cooperation. As this work illuminates, while enabled by the relations of empire and utilizing imperial networks these alternative world views also imagined possibilities beyond their bounds.

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Notes 1. For example, Regina Ganter with Julia Martinez, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in Northern Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia, 2006); Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015); Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Oxford: Routledge, 2017); and Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie, eds., Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2015). 2. Tony Ballantyne, ‘Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3, no. 1 (2001): 90. 3. John Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 4. Tim Rowse and Tiffany Shellam, ‘The Colonial Emergence of a Statistical Imaginary’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 4 (2013): 922–3. 5. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 232–4. See, for example, Ashis Nandy, ‘The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India’, Psychiatry 45, no. 3 (1982): 197–219; and Bernard Cohn, ‘Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India’, in The New Imperial Histories Reader, ed. Stephen Howe (London: Routledge, 2010), 125–35 and 117–24; Tony Ballantyne, ‘Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 102–21; Catherine Hall, ‘Commentary’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 452–68; and Patricia Grimshaw and Russell McGregor, eds., Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples (Melbourne: University of Melbourne History Department, 2006). 6. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th edn (London: F. Cass, 1965). 7. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 6. 8. Ibid., 6.

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9. Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). 10. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41; and, for example, Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire. 11. On science more broadly, see, for example, Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge, eds., Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 12. See, for example, Jane Carey, ‘A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945’, Women’s History Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 45–69; and Anne Rees, ‘“A Season in Hell”: Australian Women, Modernity and the Hustle of New York, 1910–1960’, Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2017): 632–60. 13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 14. McClintock, Imperial Leather. 15. Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and extended edn (London and New York: Verso, 1991). Hall and Rose, ‘Introduction’. 16. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Antoinette Burton, ed., Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 17. For example, Julie McLeod and Fiona Paisley, ‘The Modernization of Colonialism and the Educability of the “Native”: Transpacific Knowledge Networks and Education in the Interwar Years’, History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2016): 473–502. 18. Lamont Lindstrom, Prudence Ahrens, and Fiona Paisley, Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and Empire in the Twentieth Century (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013); and Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 19. Schwarz, The White Man’s World. 20. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 11. 21. Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Ernst Waltraud, Colonialism and Transnational

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

Psychiatry: The Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c.1925–1940 (London: Anthem Press, 2013). Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, eds., Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion (London: Routledge, 2003). Tracey Banivanua-Mar, ‘Frontier Space and the Reification of the Rule of Law: Colonial Negotiations in the Western Pacific, 1870–74’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal 30, no. 1 (2009): 24. See also Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1980); and Peter Hulme, ‘Beyond the Straits: Postcolonial Allegories of the Globe’, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 41–61. Heather Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1992). Tracey Banivanua-Mar, ‘Belonging to Country: Racialising Space and Resistance in Queensland’s Transnational Margins, 1880–1900’, Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (2012): 174–90; and BanivanuaMar, ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 340–55. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 21. See also Rachel Standfield, ed., Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018). Ibid. Ibid. A classic text in colonial history is Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, ed. Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, and Christopher Steiner (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 450–61. G. Roger Knight, ‘Colonial Knowledge and Subaltern Voices: The Case of an Official Enquiry in Mid-Nineteenth Century Java’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, ed. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 86–7. For more on subaltern voice in postcolonial theory, see Majumdar, Writing Postcolonial History. Knight, ‘Colonial Knowledge and Subaltern Voices’, 88 (italics in original). Alexandra Widmer, ‘Making People Countable: Analyzing Paper Trails and the Imperial Census’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, ed. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 101.

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33. Ibid., 102. 34. Ibid., 104. 35. Alison Bashford, ‘Immigration Restriction: Rethinking Period and Place from Settler Colonies to Postcolonial Nations’, Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 28. 36. Ibid., 29. 37. Akira Iriye, ‘A Pacific Century?’ in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101–2. 38. Lauren Benton, ‘The British Atlantic World in Global Context’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 271. 39. Ibid., 272. 40. Ibid., 281. 41. Clavin, ‘Defining Transnational History’, 430. See also Paul A. Kramer, ‘Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, the United States, and the World’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 3 (2016): 331–62. 42. Tony Ballantyne, ‘Littoral Literacy: Sealers, Whalers, and the Entanglements of Empire’, in Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below, ed. Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (New York: Routledge, 2014), 160. 43. Frances Steel, ‘“Fiji Is Really the Honolulu of the Dominion”: Tourism, Empire, and New Zealand’s Pacific, ca. 1900–35’, in New Zealand’s Empire, ed. Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 147–62. 44. Ibid., 379. 45. Michael Adas, Machines as Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 46. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Remaking the World’, in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012), 382. 47. Ballantyne and Burton, ‘Remaking the World’, 379. 48. Ibid., 385. 49. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Durban as a Portal of Globalization: Mines, Railways, Docks and Steamships in the Empire of Otto Siedle’s Natal Direct Line, 1879–1929’, Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 26, no. 1 (2015): 35–50. 50. Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘Introduction’, in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012), 6–7.

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ballantyne and Burton, ‘Remaking the World’, 348. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 349. Ibid. Ibid., 350. Ibid. Ibid., 351. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 389. Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1. Ibid. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 9. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, eds., Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); and Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Bashford, Imperial Hygiene, 46. Cecilia Morgan, Building Better Britains? Settler Societies in the British World, 1783–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), xxi. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Canaday, ‘Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn’, 1252. Ibid., 1252. See Canaday’s introduction, ‘Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn’, as well as the individual essays in the volume. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 2. See, for example, Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

Australia, 1987–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); and Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2013), ix. Ibid., 143–5. Ibid., 152–3. For an early study of the gendered scaffolding of racial violence, see Scully, ‘White Maternity and Black Infancy’. Levine, The British Empire, 159. Scully, ‘White Maternity and Black Infancy’. Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?’ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2–3. See also Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007). Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 5. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 10. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. Antoinette Burton, ‘Getting Outside of the Global: Re-positioning British Imperialism in World History’, in Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 209. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also, David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); and Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 69.

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  98. Jordanna Bailkin, Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).   99. Ibid., 11. 100. Radhika Viyas Mongia, ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport’, Public Culture 11, no. 3 (1999): 527–56. 101. Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Routledge, 2007). 102. Pedersen, The Guardians.

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5 Internationalism and Cosmopolitanisms

As we have noted in previous chapters, mobility and contact created myriad forms of resistance and negotiation that seeded the critique of empire and colonial rule. White progressives were among those contributing to this critique. By decentring and destabilizing received historical narratives, transnational histories have revealed the many formations of international and cosmopolitan world views among European and colonizing subjects even as they were engaged in the governance of working class, or native peoples, at home or in the colonies. New histories of the internationalisms emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century have uncovered diverse genealogies of rights and humanitarian politics emanating from such zones of contact. These metropolitan and colonial expressions of disquiet at conditions encountered beyond the boundaries of Europe included the settler colonies. Some such networks of concern crossed racial lines, whether in the metropolitan or colonial world, illustrating the connections of affective and political nature between white liberal reformers and indigenous or anti-colonial movements. By illuminating how liberal Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms emerged out of zones of contact in colonial as well as metropolitan locations, transnational histories of internationalism have opened up new inquiry into the genealogies of international institutions and international networks emerging out of the late nineteenth century, previously assumed to have been essentially the work of Anglo-American and European elites. Through this transnational reframing, minor and marginalized internationalisms and cosmopolitanisms have been uncovered that express diverse visions and hopes for the future that persisted from the abolition of slavery to concerns of indenture and native conditions and beyond.

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This chapter focuses on the impact of the transnational upon late nineteenth and early twentieth-century histories of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. It builds on a central argument of this book that myriad forms of agency and subjectivity have been formed in the spaces between the national and the transnational, not least in the international. In the following pages we consider the implications of these histories for the emergence of modern internationalism previously ascribed to official international relations as they operated in and through, for example, the League of Nations. Transnational histories of internationalism have begun, moreover, to reveal the aspirations of cosmopolitans from both sides of colonial rule and of the impetus for reform and change based on competing notions of rights and justice. These expressions of critique and aspiration resulted in a proliferation of non-government networks and agencies that, by the interwar years, had emerged transnationally within and against the interconnected frictions and tensions of national, colonial, settler-colonial and imperial history. But first, a reminder that transnationality has never been and is not in or of itself inherently liberatory. In their collection Transnationalism from Below, editors Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo caution against assuming ‘the liberatory character of transnational practices’.1 Nor has becoming transnational brought benefits to a majority, in the past or in the present. They warn instead that a growing crisis of confidence in recent years in the nation state instigated by globalization has resulted in two equally celebratory but ultimately misleading propositions. The first is that the nation has been strengthened ‘from above’ because market rationality and liberalism are necessary counterpoints in a ‘disorderly world’. The second is that the nation has been strengthened ‘from below’ by globalization, which has brought with it ‘new liberatory practices and the emergence of “spaces from below” like transnational migration and … cultural hybridity’. The authors argue that both views falsely contrast the local with the global while paying little attention to the daily realities of inequality for most of the world’s population, realities that contradict the image of privileged transnational subjects who are free-floating, ‘unbounded social actors’.2 This fantasy of transcendence is a luxury few can afford. In her account of migration as a form of transnationality, Aiha Ong (1996) has argued that transmigrant identities are by necessity often conservative. They can be as much about embracing the status quo in new homelands as ‘contesting hegemonic narratives of race, ethnicity, class, and nation’.3

Internationalism and Cosmopolitanisms

The same caution applies in our discussion of new transnational histories of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Rather than somehow transcending history, internationalists and self-identified cosmopolitans were embedded within it. They were usually engaged in promoting newer versions of the same kinds of racialized, gendered and class-based relations of power they found wanting. Given the contradictions embedded within internationalism as it emerged out of the age of empire, Miguel Bendeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro advise against trying to judge internationalism as either more or less successful: rather they argue for the importance of internationalism and cosmopolitan world views in revealing the ‘motivations and decisions of actors according to their understanding of the present and their imagination about the future in a given time’. Thus it is essential, they argue, to unpack the interrelationship between internationalisms and the organization and practice of imperial rule.4 In her study of this relationship, Amalia Ribi Forclaz has deployed the term ‘humanitarian imperialism’ to illuminate late nineteenth-century liberal critiques of empire. These sought to modernize empire in the name of humanity but by applying Western notions of development and uplift.5 The example of anti-slavery politics investigated by Forclaz in her book and discussed in Chapter 1 is returned to later in this chapter. Although intertwined with modern forms of imperial nationalism and colonial rule, a cosmopolitan engagement with otherness in the profession of a shared humanity offered spaces for alliances and exchange. They offered the conditions of emergence for many of the concepts, languages and locations utilized by European liberal reformers as well as the members of anti-colonial movements. As we saw in the previous chapter, technologies of communication, transport and other forms of modernization and modernity sped up incursions into colonized territory. They were the means also for the circulation of humanitarian and reform discourse, as well as reports of abuses of colonized peoples, and their resistances and agencies including through strikes, uprisings, letters and petitions. Some of this information reached national, intercolonial and even world audiences. Global movements that grew out of agencies at the local level were not inherently destined to become anti-colonial nationalisms. But they articulated what Heather Streets-Salter has called a range of ‘alternative visions that imagined political boundaries’ beyond those ‘set by colonial powers, as well as anti-colonial activity that moved between – not merely within – colonial borders’ and that questioned ‘colonialism everywhere as a systemic, worldwide problem’.6

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Alongside the crown colonies, the foundations and trajectory of settler colonialism offered critics with key questions about the purpose and ethics of imperial rule. Seeking an end to myriad forms of injustice including frontier violence inspired political critiques and forms of active resistance among their victims, ranging from armed revolt to collaborative campaigns with sympathetic settlers. By the interwar years, some indigenous movements sought to bring their status and conditions to the attention of metropolitan audiences internationally. So, for example, Deskaheh, the representative of the Six Nations of the Iroquois personally petitioned the League in the 1920s.7 In some cases, these agendas overlapped with the agendas of white imperial critics. But as Bernard Porter has pointed out, such critics characteristically sought to improve imperial and colonial relations rather than to end them.8 And yet, given postcolonial histories of colonial resistance have focused mostly on anti-colonial nationalisms, Amanda Behm has argued that more analysis needs to be made of such liberal voices for imperial reform.9 They might be involved in strategic collaboration with individuals and groups from the other side of the colonial divide while living in metropolitan centres like London. In London, vibrant exchanges between transnational colonial elites (both European and non-European) sought new global agendas for empire and race relations. In her book Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance and Interaction on British India at the height of imperialism, Elleke Boehmer has described early twentiethcentury London as a set of ‘interstitial spaces’ through which ‘channels of cross-border interaction and alternative nationalist thinking’ operated between colonial elites, both European and Indian, who were engaged in social and cultural experiments in modernity and modernism. Their politics and their personal lives were informed by new aesthetic, spiritual and political ideas.10 In many cases, exchanges between colonial elites were formative of what Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra call ‘cosmopolitan thought zones’.11 According to Jane Haggis, the task for historians of cosmopolitanism is to ‘explore how networks formed within and through’ such thought zones, without losing sight of the effects of whiteness or race politics upon them. Thus the challenge is to investigate the ways in which they were ‘articulated despite the awkward complicities and liminalities individuals and cosmopolitan thought zones inhabited’. Rather than authentic otherness, or universal sameness, Haggis points to a ‘myriad’ of ‘interpersonal dialogues and exchanges’ taking place across religious, racial and/or colonial divides.12

Internationalism and Cosmopolitanisms

By the early decades of the twentieth century, circuitries of exchange saw various humanitarian causes and rights agendas criss-crossing AngloAmerican imperial and settler colonial worlds. These included Black American, Pan-African, Indigenous and later First Peoples activisms. In some examples, such communities of concern and resistance collaborated with Europeans of conscience who were seeking individual and collective redemption for what they saw as the failures of colonial rule. They were active also in the name of renewing Western modernity’s claims to moral leadership. These redemptive agendas reiterated in many ways the history of European anti-slavery in the previous century. Missionaries, although directly implicated in the colonization process, contributed also to the promotion of ‘civilization’, Western Christianity ostensibly asserting the right of all to just treatment and secure family and community life.13 Colonized people regularly applied the Christian language of universal rights to the unjust conditions under which they lived. Thus the terms of modernization, Christianization and ‘civilized’ governance were routinely reframed into a critique of Europe, signalling an intention to demand their own place in the national or imperial story and, by extension, their right to challenge colonization as a system based on domination. A key question for consideration in this chapter is the transnational interconnections that operate between local and global rights agendas. For example, the intersecting histories of rights politics emerging from the local into the international are apparent in the diversity of aims and objectives directly or indirectly brought to bear upon mainstream international institutions like the League of Nations – and in the proliferation of nongovernment organizations and networks expressing the vibrancy of alternative civil societies beyond their parameters. The complex histories of these diverging and converging genealogies provide a crucial way to understand the formations of human rights discourse following the Second World War that continue to operate in fractured fashion into our present.14

Cosmopolitanisms and international worlds In many ways mirroring the emergence of transnational history, new theories and histories of cosmopolitanism and internationalism emerged following the end of the Cold War. They helped to displace the European

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origins previously attributed to political thought. In ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’ (1993), Bruce Robbins draws from James Clifford’s notion of travelling cultures to argue for the complexity of local–global encounters in competing lifeworlds. Robbins argues that far from limited to the metropolitan elite, cosmopolitanism was widely distributed, often non-elite and articulated in relation to the local at the same time as being worldly in agenda and lifeworld. Rather than rejecting cosmopolitanism as a false universalism, we should approach its expressions as the intention of an individual or group to transcend the specific conditions of the present and the desire to do so in the name of a shared humanity with others.15 Robbins proposes that everyday specificities are the source of myriad non-mainstream cosmopolitanisms, and that they reflect the lifeworlds of individuals more usually cast as cosmopolitanism’s others: migrant workers, for example, or indigenous intermediaries who intervened in the construction of statistical ‘facts’ about their lives (as we saw in Chapter 4). Their marginalized – or entirely veiled – expressions of worldliness should be recognized, therefore, as evidence of manifold minority transnational histories. These demand from us a decentred methodology, because aiming to incorporate them into an ever larger version of mainstream history would simply reiterate the kinds of universalizing Eurocentric narratives once typical of old-style world history. The contradictions and tensions embedded within transnationalisms plural are noted by Emily Rosenberg in her chapter for A World Connecting (a book we discussed in the previous chapter). Rosenberg states that the rapid increase in globalization from the late nineteenth century ‘helped to coproduce and accelerate … transformations’ that ‘drew the world together in new ways’ even as it brought to the world stage the divergences of experience and opportunity that structured relations between its peoples and populations.16 In order to capture this uneven confluence, Rosenberg finds it particularly useful to think of the ebb and flow of ‘currents’ rather than networks if we are to capture ‘the variety of visions that animated [those] individuals who operated and held strong allegiances across political boundaries’. But even where these allegiances were formed, and while they ‘often transcended geographical boundaries, … they nevertheless participated in other kinds of boundary drawing’. Thus cosmopolitan world views were not transcendent but were themselves embedded, including in their uses of the ‘language and categories of disease, gender, race, cultural affinities, religion and science’ within which they at best ‘created new grammars and

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registers of difference’.17 In a fluid and cyclical process, these grammars and registers became entangled in local currents, sometimes revealing what the anthropologist Anna Tsing has tellingly called moments of ‘friction’.18 Frictions and tensions between competing and intersecting interests and agendas point to the productive nature of zones of contact more broadly. In her discussion of the genealogy of cosmopolitanism for Transnationalism from Below, Louisa Schein begins by endorsing the argument made also by Robbins that the problem of ‘free floating intellectuals’ cannot be answered by simply referring back to the local. Rather, the frictions and tensions inherent to the idea of mobility itself needs to be acknowledged. Schein agrees that inequality is embedded with the social and political contexts that shaped and were shaped by the self-consciously cosmopolitan world views of progressive commentators and activists. As well as the new forms of connection and collaboration they sought, Schein states that it is important to recognize the frictions operating between different cosmopolitanisms and thus ‘to consider the discrepancies between [them] as vital interstices from which oppositionality could be enunciated’.19 Friction was necessary to enunciation. Rather than judging them as more or less distinct from the status quo, she contends that ‘[c]osmopolitanisms, in their multiple incarnations, ought … to be thought of as processual and as potentially renegotiating precisely that nexus of privilege and constraint that conditions them’.20 One of these potentialities can be found in the complex relationship between universalism and particularity. In his introduction for the edited collection Global History, Hopkins opens by rehearsing the familiar genealogy of internationalist thought derived from Europe: the Kantian virtues of thinking and being situated beyond the local or national. On the basis of this transcendent cosmopolitan world view, European civilization claimed to provide the progressive force in world affairs through which all peoples would either benefit directly or be benevolently looked after. And if not, they were destined by natural law to ultimately disappear. The latter viewpoint increasingly shaped attitudes towards indigenous peoples throughout the nineteenth century, until statistical evidence in the early twentieth century revealed examples of their survival despite the brutalities of colonization. Enlightenment cosmopolitanism promoted universalizing principles that assumed the local would be absorbed into the global. In his analysis, Hopkins then proceeds to a second version of cosmopolitanism, one that he argues is built instead on notions of diversity. Hopkins considers this second version to have been equally influential

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in shaping global history. Thus, diasporic cosmopolitanisms formed as colonized or dispersed ethnic groups negotiated the effects of ‘mobile regional or even global localities that interact with [their] host societies’.21 Furthermore, these two versions of cosmopolitanism – the one universalizing and the other particular – overlap when a locality gains authority and begins to promote its particularities onto the world: the universal has, in this sense, always been already rooted in the local. Hopkins concludes that ‘[s]tates and nations exhibit this tendency; empires epitomise it’22; while in a compelling footnote, he adds that ‘empires projected universals that also acquired a cosmopolitan character as a result of interacting with diverse localities’.23 Acting in the name of the rights of others informed a range of humanitarianisms. In the next section we turn to how new transnational histories of the humanitarianism have begun to reveal more about their contradictory effects. Humanitarianisms in imperial history were inspired by contact with colonized peoples – in large part through the agencies of indigenous people themselves – whether directly and in person or through a variety of media such as humanitarian publications and the transnational circulation of reports about their treatment often syndicated from local newspapers. As noted in Chapter 1, the Anti-Slavery Society in London produced its own widely distributed reports on world slavery issues. As we will see below, the society and its publication were influential in Australian humanitarianism regarding the conditions of Aboriginal people. We then consider the ambiguous location of white women in the context of reform or critique in the name of ‘women’ or of ‘natives’. And finally we turn to ‘alternative’ rights agendas, including those articulated by indigenous actors that in some cases intersected with those of white reformers. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these histories of exchange and rupture for writing transnationally informed histories of the settler nation.

Humanitarianism and settler/ colonial worlds In their edited collection Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, 1860–1950 (2007), editors Kevin Grant and Philippa Levine with Frank Trentmann advocate a transnational perspective in order to uncover to the contested formations of gender, sexuality and race

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in British, settler colonial and US imperial history. In their introduction, they recommend the transnational for its capacity to reveal imperial history as comprising ‘critical sites where transnational social and cultural movements took place’.24 As early advocates of transnational intercolonial history, the authors emphasize that transnational flows have occurred not only between metropole and colony but also between the various crown and settler colonies. This transnational effect was particularly evident in relation to ‘issues that palpably transcended the sovereign nation-state, such as slavery’.25 Furthermore, they argue, continuities have existed between imperial systems operating effectively as sites of international exchange beyond the limits of sovereignty. Such forms of internationalism were to become foundational to the League of Nations and then the United Nations. In their analysis, this continuity is most apparent in the contestation over sovereignty that continues into our present.26 At the same time, however, liberal reforms envisaged by humanitarians often contributed to the empowerment of colonial administrators and officials. Humanitarians proclaimed the need to govern in a more humane and efficient fashion. This contradictory effect can be seen in the asserted desire to protect Aboriginal people against settler violence in Australia by increasing surveillance over them. Alan Lester has written about the historical emergence of protective colonialism during the early years of British rule in colonial Australia. In particular, he has noted the danger that colonization was claimed to represent for Tasmanian Aborigines, who were described as destined to die out unless the impact of European modernity was mediated.27 Other historians have written of the geographies of colonial philanthropy in Australia as comprised of a intersecting circuits of missionaries, colonial officials and humanitarian reformers, those in London having by the mid-nineteenth century turned their attention (and careers) from the ‘end’ of slavery to the amelioration of indigenous conditions in the settler colonies.28 But policies designed to protect indigenous peoples were intrinsic to imperial rule and colonial management rather than external to it. Thus, the transnational history of ‘protection’ amply illustrates the contradictory effects at the core of the colonial project. As we saw in the previous chapter, Banivanua-Mar argues that violence against native peoples was a by-product of the very accounts of the otherness attributed to them and that provided the impetus for the supposedly protective forms of governance they required. The savagery declared to be intrinsic to native societies – for example, in the much proclaimed propensity of Melanesians in the Pacific for cannibalism –

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fed directly into the levels of settler violence directed against them, legitimating the destruction of their ways of life, the occupation of their lands and the exploitation of their resources, all in the name of progress.29 Comparative work on the paradox of settler colonial humanitarian interventions into frontier relations has shown that ‘protection’ was central to the governance of indigenous peoples across quite distinct locations. In their study of the emergence of humanitarian discourses and networks, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart investigate their intersections with colonial administrations in the Australian colonies and in Britain, and within settler economies in mid-nineteenth century Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and the Port Phillip Protectorate (Victoria). They reveal the ways in which overarching spatial and temporal frameworks interacted sometimes unpredictably with actual relations and conditions on the ground. Among these relations and conditions were those operating between humanitarians and diverse forms of indigenous agency including silence and noncompliance.30 Amanda Nettelbeck and fellow contributors to Fragile Settlements set out to investigate protective responses to settlers’ interactions with Aboriginal people on nineteenth-century frontiers during a period of the rapid expansion of European settlement in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada. Showcasing the value of transnational studies, the collection brings into dialogue a range of scholars aiming to ‘learn from a more detailed cross-colonial study of the history of settler colonialism and current efforts at indigenous-settler reconciliation in Australia and Canada’.31 To this end, their joint study brings transnational economic histories into critical relationship with histories of indigenous peoples, their lands and resources. Occupation and exploitation provide the material framework from which the authors excavate contrasts between actual practice and the aims of humanitarianism. In their introduction, Nettelbeck and her co-authors write that while ‘[t]he histories of these settler colonies are notably similar in terms of demographic, temporal, and legal/institutional development’, their ‘divergences, as much as their similarities, make them ideal comparative settings for unravelling broader transcolonial historical processes associated with the subjugation of indigenous peoples through law, their resistance to it, and the legacies of settler colonial histories in the twenty first century.’32 Nettelbeck and colleagues point in particular to the work of C.A. Bayly in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. They note that he explicitly tied the ‘process of interconnection’ between local, national and regional histories to the ‘global spread of Western ideas and practices associated with modernization’.33 They share his interest

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in the uneven effects and resistances at the local, especially those mediated by indigenous peoples themselves. Secondly, the authors acknowledge the importance of the work of James Belich whose Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 argued that successive periods of rapid colonization led to an acceleration of white settlement bringing with it a ‘reintegration and close linking of newly settled territories with the imperial metropolis’. His work indicates that ‘the Anglo settler revolution equally affected the colonial settler sites’ that were crucial to a successful Anglo-World.34 Liberal humanitarianism was not external to these shifts in locale, space and economics, Nettelbeck and her co-editors conclude, but was integral to the ‘dispossession and subjugation of indigenous peoples’ on which they relied. This was especially so in the case of protective legislations introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Both Australia and Canada had by the end of the century set in place specific forms of legislation in the name of protection that ‘heightened Indigenous peoples’ unequal treatment’35 and that ultimately contributed to the violence and deprivations they suffered. In the next section, we turn from settler colonial worlds to new conceptions of international government emerging in the twentieth century which became zones of imperial and colonial friction and struggle in their own right.

Transnationalizing twentiethcentury internationalism In 2009, a range of scholars including Sandrine Kott, Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga (whose work has been discussed previously) met to reflect on the recent spate of transnational histories about the institutions of world government arising in Europe from the 1920s. In her introduction to the resulting special issue of the Journal of Global History, Glenda Sluga declares that the transnational turn in the history of internationalism and international institutions illuminates the intersecting twentieth-century histories of ideas and politics, of empires, nations, and international institutions. It draws crooked lines connecting East and West, North and South, through the international hubs and fora of international institutions. It brings together a variety of strands of historical methodology – the study of ideas, institutions, intellectuals, bureaucrats, subjectivities, and ‘publics’.

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Future work, she hopes, will ‘raise new questions about how national public opinions were generated transnationally, about the transnational influence of national campaigns, and [thus might generate] … new genealogies of global civil society’.36 As noted in the introduction, Sluga argues that the age of nationalism was equally the age of internationalism, a confluence from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries with considerable significance for international actors negotiating competing national and international visions of progress. In her introduction to Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Sluga notes further that new histories of the international informed by transnational approaches have begun to look beyond imperial boundaries to uncover examples of ‘an international present or future that surfaced not only along a transatlantic passage nor simply in the interests of colonialism’.37 To illustrate this point, she refers to the work of Sunil Amrith who investigates the Bandung Conference in 1955 that brought into conversation non-aligned nation states and other political entities representing the interests of a range of communities hitherto excluded from the international world order. Many colonies were among them, seeking independence through decolonization.38 Other scholars have investigated the presence of non-state actors in Geneva who were concerned to contribute to the international world order taking shape at the League following the First World War. In his book No Enchanted Palace, Mark Mazower argues against analyses of the formation of the United Nations that see it as an American-led break from the imperial past and thus one that remained relatively uncontaminated by the imperial origins of the League of Nations. Mazower states that the UN is actually ‘a further chapter in the history of world organisation’ that continues to be ‘linked through to the question of empire and the visions of global order that emerged out of the British Empire in particular in its final decades’.39 His book sets out to illustrate these degrees of continuity through investigating the themes of modernization in the settler colonies, the treatment of refugees in wartime and the reception of post-war independence movements. Non-state actors were a key part of this mix. In similar fashion, Harald Fischer-Tiné has written of Indian representatives who went to Geneva in the League era to advocate for India’s place in world affairs and its Dominion status within the British Commonwealth.40 In this way, official representatives attending the League Assembly did not act in isolation. They were not without access to competing agendas being put forward simultaneously by non-member states and communities engaged in world affairs. And nor were they entirely segregated from those

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promoting different versions of internationalism. However self-interested they might be, white women from the settler colonies were part of this complexity. For example, Paisley’s investigation of an Australian woman who attended the League as an ‘alternative’ (non-voting) delegate in 1935 critically interrogates her responses to an appeal from the General Assembly by Ethiopia for international condemnation of Italy’s invasion, made in part on humanitarian grounds. Slavery in Ethiopia was one aspect of Italy’s claim to rightfully take control of the country: that is, to create a settler colony purportedly for the benefit of Ethiopians as well. Before joining the Australian delegation to the League, Bessie Rischbieth had been an activist in Australia and the British Commonwealth who advocated for the agency of white women in proclaiming better conditions and treatment for Aboriginal women. But although she was a liberal critic of settler colonialism in her own country and an opponent of Italy’s military action in Ethiopia, Rischbieth did not explicitly compare this most recent example of ‘settlement’ by a European power of a ‘native’ population to Britain’s settlement in the eighteenth century of her own country, the southern continent that became Australia.41 From the 1990s, as we have noted in this book, transnational histories found increasing value in adopting transcultural and biographical approaches in order to ground the vast scope of globalizing analyses. Similarly, in the case of internationalism, historians have begun to interrogate the contradictions and fractures within the lives and work of official delegates and elite internationalists. One particular theme has been the role of the interpersonal in the workings of the League of Nations or the International Labour Organization, both located in Geneva. Historian Madeleine Herren and colleagues apply what they call a transcultural approach towards reconceptualizing the League as a contact zone and to do so in ways that foreground the ‘incompatibilities, tensions and disputes which develop whenever peoples, objects, concepts, or ideas transgress the ruling orders of their times’.42 In their work, Herren et al. argue that new global (or in our terms, transnational) histories have been enabled by a resurgence in the interrogation of the cultural bases on which exchanges between individuals, peoples and nations take place. They argue that, from 1919, the rapid increase of non-government organizations saw international networks engaged increasingly in ‘cultural contact zones and complex forms of institutional entanglements’ that involved an array of political actors utilizing ‘the agenda of international politics to their own ends’.43 Thus, they conclude that transnational histories of civil society can contribute to the

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writing of ‘a connected, entangled and entwined history’ of global culture itself.44 In the previous chapter, we saw that the social sciences were vital to empire. Similarly, internationalists relied on data and knowledge drawn from imperial and colonial sources. The role of women experts will be returned to in the next section on women’s internationalism. But for now it should be noted that international experts reiterated, if often in revised form, a range of colonial knowledges of the world that assumed also the supposedly less advanced peoples, places and regions could be measured scientifically towards their better governance. In a chapter on transnational approaches for the Routledge Handbook of International Organization (2013), David Rodogno, with Shaloma Gauthier and Francesca Piana, calls for more attention to the role of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations in the history of internationalism. He notes that scholarship undertaken over the past two decades by historians like Sandrine Kott has interrogated the significance of experts drawn into international organizations from those networks who were key contributors to ideas about peace, development and social change circulating through the League. By recognizing, furthermore, the kinds of interpersonal networking taking place between participants while in Geneva, it is possible to realize even more clearly the importance of informal interactions and exchanges to policymaking.45 Reprising many of the elements of transnational history discussed in previous chapters, Rodogno and his co-editors state that a transnational perspective stresses formal and informal relationships, pointing to their often unequal nature. It decodes the forms that these relationships take and the way in which power materializes within them … including a broader range of actors … in order to understand cooperative efforts that bring governments, organizations and individuals together. This perspective looks at spaces where ideas are generated, spaces through which ideas move, are exchanged, and eventually change.46

In 2015, Rodogno and co-editors Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel produced Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s. They open with an acknowledgement of the insights of international historian Patricia Clavin into the intertwined formations of transnationalism and the nation. They concur also with Glenda Sluga that the co-valence of nationalism with the era of internationalism from the late nineteenth century profoundly shaped the transnational history of twentiethcentury internationalism. According to Rodogno and his co-editors, however,

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much work still needs to be done if networks – from national to international and beyond – are to be properly understood not only as ‘sites and conduits of power’ productive of new ideas but also as embodied, social locales that relied on personal and political relationships.47 The transnational approach offers a valuable framework for investigating these sometimes fraught interconnections, thereby revealing the uneven formations and fractures of ‘transnational epistemic communities’ as well as the ‘changing factors of transnational mobilization’ through which they formed and reformed over time.48 The capacity to work across national and regional historiographies, while deploying spatial frameworks borrowed from cultural geography, has been of vital importance to the renewal of international history. And this is no more evident than in the history of humanitarianism.49 Anti-slavery politics is a case in point, given its historical circulations between imperial and colonial, settler colonial and Anglo-American worlds from the mid-nineteenth century. Daniel Laqua in ‘The Tensions of Internationalism: Transnational Anti-Slavery in the 1880s and 1890s’ points to the transnational context of anti-slavery activism in this era through the shared language developed by its protagonists.50 According to Susan Zimmerman, anti-slavery appeared on the international stage on three levels: via the agency of non-state actors; in the discursive formation of global claims about rights and the need for humanitarian reform; and as an integral part of the historical development of politics across borders involved in treaty making, cooperative imperial and colonial politics, and international standard setting through conventions and international law.51 As noted in Chapter 1, anti-slavery began as a movement against African slavery. By the interwar years, it had become embedded within the new world order promised by the League of Nations. In A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa 1884–1926 published in 2005, Kevin Grant explains the important link between the Anti-Slavery Society in London and the League. He traces various genealogies from the late nineteenth-century empire and abolitionism into the interwar emergence of humanitarianism and human rights. Modes of being and forms of protest circulated within and between these genealogies. Among influential scholarship by Grant is a 2006 chapter in the collection Decentring Empire, edited by Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, in which he discusses the genealogies of hunger strikes and political fasts. In his account, Grant highlights the uses of this embodied form of political resistance from Indian nationalists to Russian dissidents and from Irish hunger strikers to suffrage feminists.52 Images and witnessing were elemental aspects of the anti-slavery cause. In a chapter in the collection Humanitarian Photography: A History, edited by Heide Fehrenbach and

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Davide Rodogno, Grant analyses the uses of atrocity photography in the Congo Reform Campaign led by Alice and John Harris of the Anti-Slavery Society in their sensational publicity of Belgium’s treatment of native people in that territory. In his study, Grant pays particular attention to what was suppressed in that highly visual campaign. Taking into critical consideration Thomas Laqueur’s account of the suffering body as an iconic form aiming to engender the compassionate response of the reader and inspire them to humanitarian action, Grant points to euphemistic references to rape (a weapon of colonial violence) in ways that occluded from Western imaginations the brutal treatment of Congolese women. Many of these women were kept as hostages by Belgian soldiers in order to ensure the compliance of their men who could only redeem them by meeting rubber quotas.53 Over following decades, anti-slavery continued to shape international affairs and was increasingly influential in relation to liberal reform politics on the settler colonies. The interwar years saw a revitalization of concern for the legacies of slavery through the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in London, as well as globally through the League and the International Labour Organization. As Paisley and Lydon have demonstrated, anti-slavery politics were highly influential in articulating critiques of settler violence in Australia.54 Among the society’s informants during the interwar years were middle-class Anglo-Australian women activists who sought to mobilize international opinion on behalf of their plight.55 On the visual histories of anti-slavery, Jane Lydon has shown that since the nineteenth century Australian, American and British languages of anti-slavery were mobilized in campaigns concerned with the status and conditions of Aboriginal Australians. Lydon’s compelling analysis of photography and visuality has revealed the circulation of languages of humanitarianism across the Anglo-American world, including ones that explicitly compared Aboriginal Australians to African slaves.56 As we turn to in the next section, many of these campaigns were promoted by women activists advocating their own moral leadership towards Aboriginal women, men and children.

Transnational feminism Transnational histories of feminism have investigated the contested place of white women in these networks of concern. Although women might not yet be citizens, because they were white they benefited nevertheless

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from the conditions of colonial rule. This fact played out in suffrage and rights campaigns in settler colonial locales as well as in the United States and Britain in competition with black rights. Following on from the work of Antoinette Burton, Ian Tyrrell and others addressing imperial feminisms, in order to better understand the gendered aspects of settler nationalism emerging in that Dominion Katie Pickles has investigated the philanthropic intentions of conservative women in the Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire.57 In their special issue of Women’s History Review (2016), ‘Connecting Women’s Histories: The Local and the Global’, Barbara Bush and June Purvis utilize the term ‘transnational’ rather than ‘international’ to describe this kind of feminism, arguing for the former term’s capacity to encompass ‘less formal networks of interaction’ as well as formal ones operating between the national branches of international organizations.58 They celebrate the transnational turn in feminist history for having opened up new avenues in the study of ‘the interconnections of people, politics and social movement’. A transnational approach enabled feminist historians to investigate feminism’s operations along ‘horizontal linkages that cut across vertical lines of imperial and global power and are expressed through more egalitarian relations between individuals and social and political movements’.59 As we have already noted, Clare Midgley has contributed in important ways to the transnationalizing of histories of British imperial women’s internationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.60 With co-editors Alison Twells and Julie Carlier, in Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global (2016) Midgley argues that feminist history has been a fruitful and influential strand of transnational history. At the same time, the gendering of transnational and global history still remains a way off, she continues, given that women are routinely relegated to the margins in histories of migration, diasporic communities, consumption, imperial and colonial cultures, and intercultural exchanges  – ‘key topics’ in the transnational field.61 She and her co-editors find this marginalization particularly disappointing because women’s history has long focused on transnational interactions and multiplicities, and it has done so through creatively applying interdisciplinary approaches. As reflected by the contributors to their collection, moreover, feminist scholars were making ‘pioneering contributions’ to the emergence of transnational history as a field of scholarship and had been actively applying ‘transnational approaches to women’s and gender history’.62 Thus, their collection aimed to ‘open up a

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broader dialogue between women’s and gender history and transnational and global history’ including through the adoption of new perspectives ‘“from below” – indigenous, subaltern, grassroots, local, community, everyday – that destabilize established categories and binaries in both fields, including the dichotomy between the global and the local and the binary of resistance to/complicity with imperialism’.63 As such innovative collections suggest, transnational frameworks and methodologies enable us to see the internal fractures within humanitarian reform campaigns. For example, they can show how contemporary theories of cultural and racial difference contributed to women internationalists seeking to engage directly with ‘other’ women through international conferencing. In her investigation of cultural internationalism in the women’s interwar Pacific, Paisley studies the anxieties and desires of Australian and other white women engaged in forming communities of concern alongside non-white counterparts in the region. While confronting their assumptions of hierarchies between races and peoples in the Pacific, the presence of women from outside of white Dominion feminism worked to reconfirm their sense of responsibility to uplift and mentor supposedly less-advanced women in the Pan-Pacific. The experience raised nonetheless many questions for the white women involved regarding their own privilege and authority as women from the (settler) colonizing, Anglo-American world. The result was a degree of anxious reflection that enervated their exchanges with non-white delegates. Delegates who represented ‘eastern’ or ‘native’ peoples were admired for their apparent capacity to modernize while at the same time being cast as inherently less international or worldly in their outlook. In turn, such women made it clear that they aimed to shape the movement in order to draw greater attention to the conditions of their home communities at the international level. They, too, sought universal changes in the contemporary world order, but for distinct and sometimes contrasting aims and objectives.64 While cultural and racial relations continued to shape organizations like the Pan-Pacific women’s movement, it provided a space for some degree of recognition concerning past and present injustices experienced by non-white women and their communities. As we saw in the previous chapter, sexuality has been a pivotal issue in the history of imperialism. Daniel Gorman has pointed to the key role played by sexuality and gender politics in shaping the public cultures of internationalism. These public cultures included responses to the women’s rights agendas also being promoted by white feminists in the name of their supposedly less advanced or empowered sisters.65 Sensational accounts

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of the sexual exploitation of non-white women in India, for example, became a means to reject as premature the call of Indian nationalists for independence. In her study of the reception of one of most notorious of those texts by imperial feminist Katherine Mayo – the 1927 book Mother India – Mrinalini Sinha investigates the global reception of its assertions of the traditional subordination of Indian women. Among those arguing against the book were black rights groups in the United States and Indian women’s organizations, as well as Indian nationalists themselves. Sinha concludes that the controversy surrounding the book with its anti-Indian and broader anti-Asian stance provided an ‘immediate context’ for discussion of the ‘future of the British policy of devolution’. Beyond India itself, debate about the book mobilized a set of international concerns ranging from the growing economic and geopolitical power of the United States to anxiety about the Russian Revolution and its global effects, the ‘battle about citizenship rights provoked by the global movement of nonwhite peoples’ and the women’s vote in the United States.66 This potent mix, combined with the rise of liberal and anti-colonial nationalisms in India itself, saw masculinity, heterosexuality and the status of Indian women become key factors in the debate about decolonization and the Indian nationalist movement. By extending the scale of her analysis from the colonial and the imperial to the transnational and global, Sinha sees in the controversy over the book the ‘disruptive impact of public debate’ functioning as ‘a before and an after [moment] … in the dominant understanding of Indian society’. And she is able to pursue the ‘contagious and self-propagating waves of commentary … [that] cascaded through the transnational system to produce an unpredictable event: a social epidemic’.67 This epidemic, she shows, spread around the world including to the United States. As these various locales proliferated, the ‘facts’ could not be simply agreed on or refuted, but were mobilized both in agreement with Mayo’s stance that Britain must stay in India and in opposite fashion to make a case that India’s economic and social backwardness was actually an effect of colonial rule itself. Thus, the usual distinction between the political and social spheres of colonialism was dissolved, as the ensuing legislation against child marriage in India appeared to align colonial rule with social issues ‘in ways that eroded the legitimacy of the colonial state’.68 The controversy over Mother India brought discussion about this problematic relationship into ‘wide public currency’ that came to stand ‘at the center of a broader global restructuring of colonial rule in India’.69

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Vernacular and alternative transnationalisms Echoing the critical histories of imperialism and colonialism discussed in Chapter 2, transnational histories of internationalism reveal the uneven and often contradictory outcomes of imperial authority and colonial power. By uncovering vernacular communities of exchange concerned with rights and justice, these histories have shown how alternative cosmopolitanisms could enable counter-intuitive forms of resistance and agency in sometimes the most repressive of situations. In ‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis’ (2008), for example, Laura Briggs and others argue that transnationalism ‘belongs to genealogies of anti-imperial and decolonizing thought’ as much as it does to global capital, and so they have constructed a genealogy of its emergence out of a range of anti-imperial, left traditions from decolonization movements in Latin America to the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.70 Thus ‘Europe’ becomes provincialized in anti-colonial mobilizations that were sometimes in alliance with European social reform movements themselves.71 As the historical mobility of large populations around the globe suggests, indigenous critics of empire have been agents also in these alternative histories of empire. Some of these counter-histories were discussed in Chapter 3. According to Lisa Lowe by travelling lesser known pathways, myriad unknown individuals peopled a history of interaction that remains almost entirely hidden but was profoundly influential in shaping world history.72 In her work on indigenous rights networks in the Pacific, Tracey Banivanua-Mar endorses the way in which Alan Lester acknowledges the often-hidden connectivities across indigenous networks that have shaped the British world.73 In her own work, Banivanua-Mar is concerned with what she has called the ‘common if sometimes fleeting and ephemeral circuitry’ of subaltern and indigenous agency and resistance caught momentarily in the archives often as ‘isolated flash points recorded for the purposes of colonial administration’.74 Mobility but also immobility could provide the impetus for political agency. Campaigns for rights were expressed in the actions of marginalized individuals whether or not they travelled beyond the local or whether they were or were not leaders of movements. Two examples from Australian Aboriginal political history illustrate this point. A.M. Fernando (referred to briefly in Chapter 3) was an Aboriginal activist who travelled in Europe

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during the first decades of the twentieth century. During the interwar years, through a series of street protests in London and Europe he declared his interest in an international intervention into the conditions of his people. Doubtful of the value of appealing to the League of Nations, Fernando approached a leading Swiss newspaper that published his account of Australian conditions and his calls for an international response. This report sparked an investigation by Australian and British authorities but Fernando always represented himself as a lone protestor.75 His decision against the League no doubt reflects what Susan Pedersen has shown was the rerouting back to their national governments of any petitions received from ‘native’ people in the settler colonies. Petitions from the mandated territories were received, however, by the Permanent Mandates Commission in the 1920s and 1930s through which the former colonies of Germany were being to be managed internationally, including by Australia.76 Aboriginal Australian activist Pearl Gibbs was aware of the importance of gaining British and League attention to the conditions of Aboriginal people. She did not leave Australia to make her case but wrote to the League in 1938 appealing for its support against the Federal Government’s appointment of (in her opinion) a racist judge in the Northern Territory. She was encouraged in her plea by the fact that the Australian government reported to the Permanent Mandates Commission on its mandates in New Guinea and Nauru, hoping that this same process could be extended to Aboriginal people living under federal authority in the north of Australia.77 In the introduction to their collection on indigenous networks, Jane Carey and Jane Lydon point out that worldliness and modernity have been ascribed historically to European or white subjects. By contrast, indigenous subjects have been represented as ‘autochthonous and fixed, or as displaced and inauthentic’.78 And yet, during the first decades of the twentieth century indigenous political movements ‘increasingly forged international alliances’ in ways that ran counter to the dominant view that primarily indigenous people have been the victims of colonization and not agents in their own right.79 Much transnational history unintentionally reprises this bias by focusing on white ‘colonizing agents’, they argue, and thus reprises ‘the unfortunate tendency to decentre the violent impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples, or else position them as powerless dupes of imperial and national racial regimes’.80 Carey and Lydon promote instead a twofold approach in order to investigate firstly the ways in which indigenous peoples can be ‘part of, or exploit, transnational or imperial networks’ and secondly to show how these networks were ‘shaped and

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even constituted through engagement’ with indigenous actions and agendas. They conclude that when viewed collectively and through this dual framework, what comes to the fore are the ‘limits and contradictions of imperial power, authority and legitimacy’.81 And they assert, therefore, that the networks explored reveal multiple forms of connection and disconnection … [they disclose] tensions about the meaning of Indigenising transnationalism in its historical manifestations and contemporary trajectories. Mobility did not necessarily signify freedom, nor did participation in networks always indicate power.82

These tensions between reform agendas and indigenous activisms can be seen also in relation to state-authorized ‘humanitarian’ or protective agendas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, indigenous political agency has drawn from other black politics as well as those of liberal reform. Indigenous historian John Maynard has uncovered, for example, exchanges between African American and Lascar sailors and Aboriginal dockworkers in Sydney during the early 1920s. He has identified the influence of Garveyism upon the politics of his great-grandfather who was the instigator of one of the first Aboriginal rights organizations in modern Australia.83 Ravi de Costa in A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia investigates the ways in which, particularly following the Second World War, Indigenous Australians utilized the concept of minority rights in order to take their place on the international stage and to promote their own rights agendas. While Indigenous rights politics has a genealogy stretching back as long as colonization itself, an Australian Indigenous voice emerged most stridently on the world stage following the Second World War, encouraged by the addition of self-determination to the principles of the United Nations’ Charter. This addition helped to inspire the formation of a transnational First Nations Movement. De Costa concludes that the ‘national’ issue of Indigenous rights in Australia is seen clearly when viewed through international and transnational contexts, just as can the histories of nations themselves.84 During these decades, an international black politics movement emerged on the world stage. ‘The intellectual and institutional links [that] were tangled and complex as international solidarity movements among the colonized peoples of the globe creatively reshaped the language and ideologies of the 1930s and constructed the politics of the African diaspora’, writes Penny Von Eschen in her book on African diaspora politics in the United States

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from the late 1930s through to the late 1950s.85 In particular, Von Eschen emphasizes the fact that ‘wartime political alliances and innovations in mass communications radically altered the boundaries of the possible’. Mass communication along with internationalism brought new ideas about sovereignty and citizenship, and these offered African Americans like WEB Du Bois ‘hopeful sites for their own struggles and brought … a new vision of the rights and responsibilities’ to millions of black people around the globe. This emerging diaspora – this sense of ‘profound history and materiality’ – built on the activism of leaders like Du Bois who had in previous decades developed a politics of anti-colonialism through understanding the historical and ongoing effects of ‘racism and [the] shared bonds … of slavery, colonialism and imperialism’.86 In her 2003 book Eyes off the Prize, Carol Anderson demonstrates that African American leaders in the United States used the world’s concern with the horrors of anti-semitism to argue for human rights and against segregation in the United States while in the following decades the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) turned its attention to racism on the African continent. At its 1945 Colonial Conference, the NAACP committed itself to ending white supremacy in Africa, particularly in South Africa. By the early 1950s, a coalition of the NAACP that sought to mobilize against white rule in South Africa and Namibia had petered out, but according to Anderson ‘the groundwork had been laid’ for future mobilization.87 In her book From Scottsboro to Munich about interwar transatlantic networks between black leaders and Anglo-American social reformers, Susan Pennybacker illustrates the transnational circulations of an international sensation surrounding the arrest of a group of young African American men accused of the rape of a white woman. Despite the retraction of the original accusation by the woman in question, and even though in 1935 the US Supreme Court ruled that their constitutional rights had been violated, subsequent retrials upheld the young men’s convictions. Most were found guilty, only one being pardoned – the last among them finally released only in 1950.88 In her analysis, Pennybacker is interested also in the ways in which the American South was seen by progressive circles in London as a warning to Europe concerning the dangers of racial hatred upon Western civilization. The Scottsboro case came to stand for these degenerative effects. In her book Pennybacker maps humanitarian and rights responses to the case, involving ‘individual lives known to one another through this case … from liberal anti-slavery politics and humanitarian refugee activism, to liberalism, socialism, and communism’ united across ‘common and discordant languages’ and by ‘visions of the future’.89 The individuals she follows

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either were directly involved as advocates for the accused or were more distant contributors to the case by donating funds, holding events to publicize the plight of the accused or more generally through contributing to the formation of various intersecting solidarity politics that grew out of these activities and that more or less connected with other social justice and reform issues such as the nationalist movement in India or the Italo-Ethiopian War in North Africa. Each of these cases contributed to a new awareness among ‘communities of colour’ in cities across Europe.90 The relation of these movements with Africa is also illustrative of the role of transnationalism in rights politics. According to Geoffrey Ely in Alabama in Africa Andrew Zimmerman provides an outstanding example of transnational history that brings into new focus the engagement of marginalized or oppressed communities (in this case, of African Americans of the American South) with the world issues of their day. In this study, Zimmerman considers the German imperial influence in Africa following the scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s. And he reads this historical context in relation to the Negro education movement led in Atlanta at Tuskegee by the African American educator, Booker T. Washington. Considering basic education and labouring work to be the future of African Americans, Washington promoted his self-proclaimed successes in basic education in German Togoland in 1900. Bringing new insight into the genealogies and implications of this expedition, Zimmerman traces the connections between German colonization in Africa and Washington’s promotion of Negro education in the context of contemporary sociological accounts of ‘race’ as they were being popularized by the work of the sociologist Max Weber. In this way, Zimmerman is able to link internal colonization and plantation labour in the Prussian East with contemporary responses to the so-called ‘Negro problem’ in the post-slave South. Ely concludes that Zimmerman has illustrated how events that seem solely ‘situated in Germany’s “east” [its African colonies] actually had far more complex genealogies that can be tracked back and forth between Europe, Africa and the Americas’.91 Ely commends this analysis for epitomizing the value of bringing ‘large-scale frameworks … down to the ground’. By grounding global or transnational research in a specific case study as well as in its relationship to ‘the imperial’, Zimmerman shows that ‘the local’ may best be understood as ‘a summary term for all those specifics of time and place, custom, law, gender, sexualities and family forms, economy, social relations, institutional recalcitrance and cultural differences which colonizers needed to negotiate when they entered the putative space of imperial rule’. Or as ‘a kind of metonym for all those

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spaces – sometimes physical, institutional or geographic, but also often cultural, existential, imaginary and imagined – from which public powers, regulatory interventions, the machineries of welfare and policing, all the intrusions of governmentality may be contained and deflected or even kept out’. Between these two meanings of the local, concludes Ely, lies the myriad everyday personal or informal spaces of resistance ‘seldom allowed a secure and acknowledged place inside the available practices of a polity or the accessible political relations of a society’.92 Lastly, rather than replacing imperial or national narratives of progress with transnational versions, transnational historians can never assume the essentially progressive nature of global solidarity politics. To do so would be to reduce anti-colonialism to a normative project.93 As Jonathan Saha argues, historians need to think about the exclusions that are brought into effect whenever inclusive rights agendas are professed in the name of common humanity. Moments of disaggregation as much as universality have shaped the lives of cosmopolitanism. As Saha notes, the politics of loyalty has prevailed so often over the politics of sympathy.94

Transnationalizing national history In this final section, we return to the question of national historiography raised in our Introduction. We consider what a thoroughly transnational and comparative national history might look like. In their introduction to Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (2005), Lake and Curthoys reflect on the formations of Australian History following the First World War and how they veiled the place of the transnational in Australia’s colonial and national formations. These occlusions included the role of women’s international networks with their internationalizing critiques of gender, race and sexuality politics, as well as the transnational arguments of key African American commentators such as W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James whose accounts of global race politics were influential worldwide.95 Indeed as Robin D.G. Kelley stated in 1999, Black History has always been transnational. Historians of the African American experience, as well as African American intellectuals (and we might add, their counterparts in the settler colonies), have in this sense always thought beyond the nation. Kelley argued that ‘some kind of diasporic vision or sensibility, shaped by antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and

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deeply ensconced in black intellectual and historical traditions, profoundly shaped historical scholarship on black people in the New World’.96 Bringing histories of black consciousness and indigenous politics into greater dialogue is a vital arena for transnational history. Curthoys and Lake admit that there are evident ‘dangers’ in writing transnational history that is disconnected from local and national audiences and thus from national political debates.97 And yet they remain convinced of its virtues in relation to uncovering alternative transnationalisms. ‘The gains [of the transnational turn]’, they write, ‘seem very clear. As historians we all belong and have obligations to an international interpretive historical community as well as to our own societies.’98 Such gains are especially valuable ‘in the study of movements protesting against racial inequality and exploitation’.99 Admiring the scholarship of John Maynard (discussed above) regarding the influence of Marcus Garvey’s black political movement in the United States upon Aboriginal activism in New South Wales in the 1920s, including that of his own grandfather, they point more broadly to the influence of African American rights politics upon Aboriginal activists. Engaged by these politics in the 1950s, activist Faith Bandler went on to become an important figure in the Aboriginal rights movement in the 1960s. Curthoys reflects on her own history as a white university student who joined the Australian Freedom Rides in the 1960s, themselves modelled on Freedom Rides into segregated towns in the South. As a young woman, Curthoys travelled for two weeks across New South Wales with other white students and the Indigenous leader Charlie Perkins. There they confronted at first-hand the deeply spacialized and ubiquitous forms of everyday racial discrimination experienced by Aboriginal people.100 Both Curthoys and Lake add that Aboriginal activists pursued many unique strategies, including by establishing a ‘tent embassy’ outside the Parliament House in Canberra in the 1970s that continues to this day.101 The two historians remark further upon the flourishing of transnational settler colonial histories from the 1990s (evident, for example, in the edited collection Unsettling Settler Societies by Stasiulus and Yuval-Davis). But they find notable the relative absence of US histories among them. They remind us of Tyrrell’s call (discussed in our Introduction) for a sustained deconstruction of American exceptionalism. Indeed, as we noted in an earlier chapter, Lake joined with Henry Reynolds in an investigation of the vibrant connections between the United States and the other ‘white men’s countries’ at the turn of the twentieth century involving a generation and more of officials, politicians, commentators and historians.102

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Finally, we have seen that white liberalism has figured as both a source of critique and a form of closure in transnational histories of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Whiteness necessarily dominates many studies of humanitarianism, in order to unpack its implications within imperial and (settler) colonial rule. Finding evidence of the lives of subaltern subjects in these internationalisms, given they have been marginalized from national history-making – as we saw particularly in Chapter 3 – can be difficult but not impossible. Historian Caroline Bressey writes poignantly about the irony of searching for the ‘invisible presence’ of the Black British community in the British archives, belying the vibrancy of its long presence in the city.103 And as Burton notes, ‘empire is not simply a backdrop but an active agent in the construction of cultural and especially social reform discourses’.104 As discussed in previous chapters, assuming the existence of marginalized agents with critical views on colonial authority opens up the colonial archives to new kinds of questions and methodologies. It also requires the historian to question her or his own relationship to the past. Natalie Zemon Davis points out that this decentring process is necessary in order to allow ‘the subalterns and their practices and beliefs to carry the narrative’.105 Recreating what we can of the perspectives of those living empire from the margins reveals hitherto hidden worlds that, as Catherine Hall points out, have always been there.106 In his account of ‘colonized intellectuals’ using Western political and Christian thought in the promotion of their own community and individual rights, Australian historian Tim Rowse states that Indigenous leaders were and continue to be deeply engaged in examining the fundamental questions of their day, including the core issue of how settler and indigenous communities might live together on more equitable grounds.107 These are the world views, advises Lisa Lowe, that will remain obscured if the ‘archive of liberalism’ is not brought into critical relationship with the archive of the colonized world.108 That task still lies ahead.

Notes 1. Guarnizo and Smith, ‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, 5. 2. Ibid., 3–6. 3. Ibid., 12. See also Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 178–210. 4. Miguel Bendeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Pasts to be Unveiled: The Interconnections between the International and the Imperial’, in

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present, ed. Miguel Bendeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4. Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of AntiSlavery Activism, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Heather Streets-Salter, ‘International and Global Anti-Colonial Movements’, in World Histories from Below: Disruption and Dissent, 1750 to the Present, ed. Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 47. Joelle Rostkowski, ‘The Red Man’s Appeal for Justice: Deskaheh and the League of Nations’, in Indians in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed. Christian F. Feest (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 435–54. Bernard Porter, The Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1968; London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). See also Jeanne Morefield, Convenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain. Behm, ‘Settler Historicism and Anticolonial Rebuttal’. See also Amanda Behm, Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion: Britain, 1880–1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance and Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22. See also Antoinette Burton, ‘Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siécle London’, History Workshop Journal 42, no. 1 (1996): 126–46; Leila Gandhi, Affective Communities: AntiColonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Jane Haggis et al., Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also, for example, Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Narayan, eds., European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies (London: Routledge, 2017). Haggis et al., Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire, 8. For example, Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, eds., Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange (Brighton and Portland: Sussex University Press, 2010); and Hilary Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World c1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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14. For example, Moyn, The Last Utopia; Peter N. Stearns, Human Rights in World History (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History and Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 15. Bruce Robbins, ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1–19. See, for example, Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance (London: Routledge, 1999). 16. Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘Transnational Circuits in a Shrinking World’, in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012), 815 and 816. 17. Ibid., 817, 818 and 819 (italics in original). 18. Ibid., 820. See also, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 19. Louise Schein, ‘Forged Transnationality and Oppositional Cosmopolitanism’, in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 293. 20. Ibid., 293 (italics in original). 21. A. G. Hopkins, ‘Introduction: Interactions between the Universal and the Local’, in Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, ed. A. G. Hopkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 8. 22. Ibid., 9. 23. Ibid., fn 22 on 32. 24. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentman, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism c.1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 2–3. 27. Alan Lester, ‘Personifying Colonial Governance: George Arthur and the Transition from Humanitarian to Development Discourse’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, no. 6 (2012): 1468–88. 28. Anne O’Brien, Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Integrating Metropolitan, Colonial and Imperial History’; and Penelope Edmonds and Anna Johnston, ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016), http://muse.jhu.edu.libraryproxy .griffith.edu.au/article/613279 29. Tracey Banivanua-Mar, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting the Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth Century Fiji’, Comparative Studies

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30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2010): 255–81. Mar investigates the ways in which these discourses were variously mobilized by Pacific Islanders in their interactions with Europeans. See also Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); and Tracey Banivanua-Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–28. Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, ‘Colonization and Humanitarianism: Histories, Geographies and Biographies’, in Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the NineteenthCentury British Empire, ed. Alan Lester and Fae Dussart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–36. And for a larger framing of protection, see Christina Twomey, ‘Protecting Slaves and Aborigines: The Legacies of European Colonialism in the British Empire’, Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 10–29. On the role of missions in protective and humanitarian colonialisms, see, for example, Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa 1823–1853 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997); Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). Amanda Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2016), 6. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 12. Glenda Sluga, ‘Editorial – The Transnational History of International Institutions’, Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 222. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 8. See also Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Sunil Amrith, ‘Asian Internationalism: Bandung’s Echo in a Colonial Metropolis’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2005): 557–69. See also Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 14. Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘The Other Side of Internationalism: Switzerland as a Hub of Militant Anti-Colonialism (c. 1910–1920)’, in Colonial Switzerland.

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41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins, ed. Patricia Purtschert and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 221–58. Fiona Paisley, ‘The Italo-Abyssinian Crisis and Australia Settler Colonialism in 1935’, History Compass 15, no. 5 (2017), http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12363/full Madeleine Herren, Martin Rüesch, and Christiane Sibille, Transcultural History: Theories, Methods, Sources (Cham: Springer, 2012), 6. See also Madeleine Herren, ed., Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations (Cham: Springer, 2014). Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47. Davide Rodogno, Shaloma Gauthier, and Francesca Piana, ‘What Does Transnational History Tell Us about a World with International Organizations? The Historians’ Point of View’, in Routledge Handbook of International Organization, ed. Bob Reinalda (New York: Routledge, 2013), 96. Ibid., 97. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, ‘Introduction’, in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 13. Ibid., 14. David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2–3. See also Burton, At the Heart of Empire, 1–23. Daniel Laqua, ‘The Tensions of Internationalism: Transnational AntiSlavery in the 1880s and 1890s’, The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011) See also David Laqua, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). Susan Zimmerman, ‘The Long Trajectory of Anti-Slavery in International Politics: From the Expansion of the European International System to Unequal International Development’, in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labour Relations: The Long-Term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, ed. Marcel van der Linden (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011), 431–96. Kevin Grant, ‘The Transcolonial World of Hunger Strikes and Political Fasts, c1909–1935’, in Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Durba Gosh and Dane Kennedy (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2006), 243–69.

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53. Kevin Grant, ‘The Limits of Exposure’, in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 64–88. 54. Fiona Paisley, ‘Introduction: Special Issue on Anti‐Slavery and Australia’, History Compass 15, no. 5 (2017), doi:10.1111/hic3.12336. See also Fiona Paisley and Jane Lydon, ‘Introduction: Australia and Anti-Slavery’, Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (2014): 1–12. 55. Paisley, Loving Protection?; Holland, Just Relations; and Sue Taffe, A White Hot Flame: Mary Montgomerie Bennett, Author Educator, Activist for Indigenous Justice (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2018). 56. See, for example, Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 57. Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). See also Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire; Burton, Burdens of History; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 58. Barbara Bush and June Purvis, ‘Connecting Women’s Histories: The Local and the Global’, Women’s History Review 25, no. 4 (2016): 494. 59. Ibid., 494. 60. Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (Oxford: Routledge, 2007); and Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 61. Midgley, Twells, and Carlier, ‘Introduction’, 2. See also Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott, eds., Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Vera MacKie, ‘The Language of Globalization, Transnationality and Feminism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 2 (2001): 180–206; and Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 62. Midgley, Twells, and Carlier, ‘Introduction’, 2. 63. Ibid. 64. Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific. See also Angela Woollacott, ‘Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s–30s’, in Feminisms and Internationalism, ed. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 81–104. 65. Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Briggs, McCormick, and Way, ‘Transnationalism’. Dipesh Chakarbarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 5. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Banivanua-Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights’, 4. See also Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks’. Banivanua-Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights’, 4. See also Tracey Banivanua- Mar and Nadia Rook, ‘Counter Networks of Empires: Reading Unexpected People in Unexpected Places’, Special Issue Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018), https://muse.jhu. edu/article/700162 Paisley, The Lone Protestor, esp. Chapter 4. Susan Pedersen, ‘Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations’, in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, ed. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (New York: Routledge, 2012), 113–34. Paisley, The Lone Protestor, 166. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Networks: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Connections’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 2. See also Paisley and Reid, Critical Perspectives on Colonialism. Carey and Lydon, ‘Introduction’, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Ibid., 3. John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). de Costa, A Higher Authority. See also Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent, eds., Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Col Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 6. Ibid., 4–5. Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals, 131. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 349.

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  89. Ibid., 5.   90. Ibid., 9.   91. Geoff Eley, ‘Imperial Imaginary, Colonial Effect: Writing the Colony and the Metropole Together’, in Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 235.   92. Ibid., 236.   93. Antoinette Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).   94. Jonathan Saha, ‘Murder at London Zoo: Late Colonial Sympathy in Interwar Britain’, The American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1468–91.   95. Curthoys and Lake, ‘Introduction’, 8.   96. Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950’, The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1047.   97. Curthoys and Lake, ‘Introduction’, 14.   98. Ibid., 10.   99. Ibid., 11. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 12. 102. Ibid., 10. 103. Caroline Bressey, ‘Invisible Presence: The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination of the British Archives’, Archivara 61, special issue (2006): 47–61. See also on the archives, Adele Perry, ‘The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v British Columbia’, in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 325–50. For a valuable discussion of the archives from an indigenous perspective, see Lynette Russell, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Archives: Accessing Hidden History and Understandings’, Australian Academic and Research Libraries 36, no. 2 (2005): 161–71. 104. Antoinette Burton, ‘Rules of Thumb: British History and “Imperial Culture” in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 488. 105. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World’, History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 190. 106. Catherine Hall, ‘Histories, Empires and the Post-Colonial Moment’, in The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 76.

Internationalism and Cosmopolitanisms

107. Tim Rowse, ‘The Identity of Indigenous Political Thought’, in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (London: Routledge, 2013), 95–107. 108. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 4.

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Conclusions As we have argued, the relationship between nation and transnationalism and between global/world/transnational history remains both unresolved and a node of creative tension. Much remains unfinished in the move to write large scale and also embodied and located history. The transnational turn, as it has emerged over the last two decades, has sought to displace the constraints and distortions of ‘national history’ understood through narratives of nationalism and exceptionalism. It has sought to replace them with a larger and more complex perspective on the historical formations of subjects and places, systems of power and authority, cosmopolitan or worldly identity politics and various forms of social, cultural and political resistances in a variety of locations over time around the world. As we noted in the Introduction, transnational history has demanded that national history be historicized in new ways. We have discussed how transnational history has been essential in reframing imperial and colonial histories in order to better understand the role of flows and circuitries beyond olderstyle margin-to-periphery models and inclusive of transcolonial, interimperial and global models. In this Conclusion, we consider some recent reflections on the futures of transnational history. Before closing with some further consideration of the ethics of working transnationally, we ask what the emergence of the transnational turn means in the era of digitization. As the preceding chapters have set out to illustrate, the emergence of transnational history in the 1990s owed much to the already emerging trends in women’s history and black history. At the same time it contributed in important ways to new trends in the allied fields of critical imperial history, postcolonial and feminist scholarship, history from below, minority history and histories of cross-cultural encounter. Each has been concerned with historical intersections that are both large and small in scale. Transnational approaches have required not simply critically reframing

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national time and perspective but destabilizing Eurocentric assumptions about historical progress. For the historian, writes sociologist Gurminder K. Bhambra, the task is to deconstruct ‘dominant narratives at the same time as … [being] open to different perspectives and [to] seek to reconcile them systematically both in terms of reconstruction of theoretical categories and in the incorporation of new data and evidence’.1 Modernity, she notes, has been one of those core narratives.2 As we have argued, this dual process of deconstruction and reconstruction has entailed opening up world history not simply to evermore inclusivity but to the critical questioning of which historical subjects are viewed as historical actors and of the mechanisms of power that perpetuate dominant historiographies. This double task has entailed working sometimes in collaboration with communities of scholars and often across archives, as well as against received periodizations and geographies, their formations becoming in the process objects of our interrogation. From mass population movements to international collectivities, and from elite cosmopolitans to the marginalized and even voiceless, transnationalisms have multiplied in ways that point to connection and exchange as well as violence and oppression, reflecting the complexity and contingency of uneven power relations between individual and communities, whether literally mobile or responding as the world came to them, or a combination of both. We also have noted the dangers of transnational history that reinstates its own progressive narratives or reinvests in the nation through uncritical comparative history. In a 2017 collection Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, the Australian editors Anna Clark, Anne Rees and Alecia Simmonds reflect on the impact of transnational history becoming mainstream. They describe themselves as among the generation that came after Connected Worlds by Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, being ‘raised on mantras of mobility, imperial circuitry and the need to think beyond national borders’.3 New orthodoxies of entangled histories and metaphors of circulation from the margins as ‘a radical critique of national historiographies’ have benefited Australian history. It is no longer ‘a quarantined field of study’ but has been critically situated ‘on the outer rim of Pacific and Indian Ocean studies, as a nodal point in British imperial studies and connected, or cast in a comparative light, with other settler colonial nations’.4 The transnational lens has not only provided a counterpoint to the nation but complicated understandings of the criteria of constituting national history in the first place.5 But they also conclude that ‘the methodological novelty’ of transnational history has

Conclusions

become largely unquestioned, for example little has changed in relation to the temporality of the nation. The traditional periodizations of precontact, colonization and nationhood have remained largely in place while transnational historical actors continue to be derived mostly from national elites.6 Another of the themes of this book is that the nation requires critical reconceptualization and should not be left to one side in the transnational reframing of history. The nation, in fact, is essential to grounding transnational approaches in ways that illuminate power. In a special issue for History Australia in 2013, ‘Nationalism and Transnationalism in Australian Historical Writing’, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and David Lowe argue for the national as a corrective to the kinds of transnational history that see fluidity and possibility without acknowledging their limits and counter histories.7 Thus the co-editors of a 2017 special issue of History Compass titled ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Nation in World History’, Kim H. SophieJung, Alastair McClure and Joseph McQuade point to the value of work that engages with the ‘tensions between the national and the global, sovereignty and territory, and the making and unmaking of political imaginaries’ including national identities.8 While endorsing the larger framing of the nation that is enabled by global and transnational approaches, these critics see the transnational history as a productive force in the destabilizing national, regional and global frameworks.9 Also questioning the capacity of transnational history to open up new avenues of enquiry, in a 2013 issue of American Historical Review Matthew Pratt Guterl concluded that the potential of transnational history to be innovative depends upon the state of history as a whole. It will be ‘shaped by our ability to find an even ground for the discipline [of history] as a whole to interrogate the interrelations of time and space, and by our commitment to challenge the received wisdom of historiography. In the long run, transnational lives … might, once they fully shake off the dominance of nation time, provoke some profound re-periodizations’. Ultimately, transnational history will need to provide new ‘“eras” to match the new mappings of time and space and change’.10 For some, this will mean adopting a transtemporality of the sort that David Armitage proposed in an article for History Australia titled ‘The Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past’. Here he considers the value of a longue durée extending into deep time, pointing to the work of others who have framed the present within the era of the Anthropocene, that of human influence over natural systems that previously governed the planet.11

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Our book has discussed the question of perspective and focus via the productive tensions between grand-scale transnational histories and the often fractured, biographical narratives of transnationalism. We have considered, for example, the importance of peopling histories of the mass movements engendered by slave trades, enslavement, and forced labour and of empire by looking to the lives of those living in the translocal, international and transcolonial. We have examined the lives of enslaved and newly manumitted people who both lived transnational lives in situ through engagement with new religious identifications, including Rebecca Protten and James Churchwill Vaughn, who moved from the United States to West Africa, and started a new familial connection with the continent of their ancestors. Within and beyond colonial administrators or imperial elites, we have considered scholarship that has sought to uncover the lifeworlds of indigenous subjects from British settler colonies who travelled transnationally or were displaced within their own lands and were sometimes explicitly the critics of empire. Thinking transnationally beyond any single empire can bring into focus the multiple lived empires of indigenous peoples, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, in which the agendas they articulated were necessarily distinct from those of European liberal or humanitarian elites but in many cases utilized languages of protest and concepts of rights drawn from both. Moreover, as Catherine Hall notes above, these histories remain alive in our present. However partial and incomplete the archival traces may be, the contested public and domestic spaces of myriad colonial and imperial worlds they represent have never entirely disappeared but continue to haunt our memories of empire and confront how we respond to them.12 Working in the archives of living empire underlines the ongoing presences of transnational imperial and colonial worlds in the historian’s own relationship with the past. In their introduction to Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan have pointed out that our engagement with the archives is an integral part of what makes research meaningful: it has the potential to enable greater understanding of our own ‘historically shaped experience’ through bringing to light the experiences and histories of empire’s others.13 And, as many transnational histories illustrate, these new understandings can produce history that shapes public knowledge about the foundations and formation of national history. In Australia as in other settler colonies, for example, transnational history has been a significant factor in destabilizing national narratives that have otherwise occluded the fact

Conclusions

of prior occupation and the resilience of Indigenous communities. Official archives are only partially revealing of these realities.14 The history that came before and has continued alongside empire often can be seen most clearly at the translocal. Tony Ballantyne has shown how maritime empires disrupted existing social and geographic boundaries within and between indigenous worlds and brought with them myriad new forms of cross-cultural contact. Following vertical and horizontal lines of interconnection, his webs of empire, Ballantyne has revealed a process that created myriad forms of political and economic exploitation and exchange that over time ‘thickened and multiplied … creating novel assemblages that empowered some and disempowered and dispossessed many others’.15 At the same time as acknowledging the violences experienced by indigenous peoples, Ballantyne is concerned that historians should not reduce the complexity and unevenness of imperial power by emphasizing only violence and domination. Rather he calls for the kinds of transnational history that critique those ‘circumscribed geographic imaginaries and fixed vantage points that … occlude or marginalise the importance of … linkages and the multiple forms of mobility [of the sort] that underwrote both the routine operation of empires and the production of nation-states’.16 According to Ballantyne, the transnational approach seeks to denaturalize national borders in both temporal and spatial terms: for example, recent scholarship that documents exchanges between northern Australia and Southeast Asia or investigates Australasia in Oceania in ways that reveal a variety of competing colonial influences and in some cases of territorial control. Thus, transnational histories pay attention to not only webs of influence interconnecting ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ but also intercolonial worlds and underline the importance of oceans as historically formed spaces that have living histories of their own. Ballantyne concurs that ‘if mobility was central in the constitution of colonial space, it was also integral to the making and remaking of place’.17 Place is of course central to transnational history, and this has had led to a reframing of histories of internationalism and cosmopolitanism also. For example, James Clifford has called for scholarship on ‘indigenous forms of interactive cosmopolitanism’ that brings mobility and diaspora in imperial and world history into critical relationship with the study of indigenous peoples from the settler colonies.18 Burton argues similarly that the historian’s task is to represent the ‘fugitive histories’ of marginal subjects without ending up by ‘reintegrating [them] into the grand narratives of either indigenous community formation or national/imperial hegemony’.19 Paying attention to

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the intersecting identities and agencies of indigenous and other minority subjects living within and against the bounds of settler colonial rule has proven an important impetus to the transnational remapping of imperial history. New analyses drawing from cultural, embodied and spatial histories have contributed greater attention to interactions between incoming and local populations inside settler colonies also. In combination, then, such transnational, trans-oceanic and translocal perspectives have provided the groundwork for scholarship interested in the multiple formations of colonial modernities and their influence upon the metropolitan world, revealing in ever more complex fashion how white and ‘native’ subjectivities have been relational, multiple, contingent and contested.20 Transnational history has seen new investigations of myriad vernacular, informal and ‘alternative’ formations of communities of critique and cooperation. These have sometimes exceeded not only national but other borders of difference, such as those deployed to demarcate colonized from colonizer, and have been policed via hierarchies of race transcending national and imperial borders by proclaiming on a global or ‘scientific’ scale supposedly distinguishable degrees of modernity or advancement between individuals and populations. The interconnectedness of global and local  – rather than their binary opposition – particularly by the late nineteenth century with the rise of the racial and human sciences, has been a theme of this book. The intersecting transnational lives of those moving back and forth between colonial and metropolitan worlds and between colonies (including career administrators and social science ‘experts’) were significant in efforts to manage the circulating flows of population and influence and thus were critical to the formations of modernity and cosmopolitanism themselves.21 Transnational histories of internationalism and cosmopolitanism have looked beyond formal networks and exchanges to also investigate the presences of ‘discordant’ or minority internationalisms with their own rights agendas. As Dorothy Driver has said in reference to the work of novelist Zoe Wicomb, in these cases in particular translocal is a ‘more appropriate’ term than transnational with its disinterest in the nation or the national, noting in Wicomb’s fiction ‘her astute attention to spatial juxtapositions and interactions’.22 Scully argues that Wicomb’s fiction, which centres on Cape Town and its more distant environs, including in recent work the relationship between the rural Cape and Scotland, wrestles with themes of history, place, belonging and alienation and opens up a new way of being in the world, ‘pushing past the preoccupations of cosmopolitanism’ or indeed transnational framings ‘towards a recognition of a new translocal selfhood’.23

Conclusions

Finally, it is the capacity of transnational history to defamiliarize the past and reframe the present that inspires us. Referring to Gilroy’s lament about the way in which cosmopolitanism has been ‘hijacked’24 as a form of human rights discourse amenable to political and legal applications, Scully through her reading of Wicomb calls for a more critical interpretation, one seeking to unsettle ‘the creation of any solidified “we” that gets to speak for a point of view’ and that draws attention to the ‘structural inequalities that prevent individuals and groups from even participating in a conversation’. Scully finds in Wicomb’s fiction knowledge that action, dialogue and writing are ‘always-incomplete’.25 History is ‘an unsettled site to which we constantly return, revisit, and rewrite, as a place of uncertainty and contestation, rather than a place where one can go to settle things once and for all’.26 Scully offers a reflection on cosmopolitanism that applies equally to the discrepant forms of transnationalism: ‘the spectre of incommensurability haunts the affirmative of cosmopolitanism and the certainties of history. Misunderstanding, the very messiness of human relations in the present, and our own remembering of our pasts threaten to disrupt order’.27 Drawing from Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in a World of Strangers, Scully concludes: ‘It is not so much that we live in a world of strangers, but that we are also, and remain, strangers to our own pasts and ourselves as well.’28 The practice of researching and writing transnational history is indeed a humbling experience – working across different archives reminds one of the challenges of accessing that past. Yet, in the era of digitization, the past appears ever more accessible, at least to those with access to a computer and the internet. Historians’ relationship to resources and to online archives has perhaps special relevance for transnational scholarship, given its engagement with different sources and geographies. In her 2016 article in The American Historical Review, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’, Laura Putnam urges historians to explicitly consider the implications of digitization: ‘What kinds of knowledge and insight did place-based research across borders instil? What are the intellectual and political consequences of leaving that behind?’29 Putnam raises two methodological transformations that impact and facilitate the work of transnational history. The one she calls ‘side-glancing’ is the ability to quickly look at work from outside of one’s particular place-based expertise.30 The other she labelled as ‘borderless term-searching’, the ability to quickly search for terms through Google Scholar, databases and across many publications.31 She argued that these ‘change the questions we are likely to ask and the stories we are able to tell’ and ‘particularly for the nineteenth and

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early twentieth century Anglophone worlds’.32 Using the term ‘peripheral vision’, which we encountered in our discussion of biography, she suggests that pre-internet, the ability of the historian to include issues peripheral to a national or local story was hampered by the source material and its location in a physical national archive.33 With ‘side glancing’ that peripheral vision can now be quickly sated with a Google search, and one can ponder the effects of international commerce or the lives of missionaries living in very different spaces. All to the good, but Putnam warns that this delivers a confidence of knowing that is ill-advised and can be weakly supported by evidence.34 Putnam also asserts that digitization bolsters the transnationality of the data itself: ‘When glancing becomes faster by many orders of magnitude, and national boundaries no longer constrict our range of vision, the number of transnational hypotheses shaping our collective mission is necessarily going to rise.’35 Putnam is not necessarily against this movement. She suggests that attention of the transnational to different scales of meaning and experience, rather than just the larger narratives of world or global history; side-glancing enables a new method for transnational history. As Scott and Herbrard have argued, attention to the very micro-level can also reveal new insights into huge processes such as the Middle Passage or the rise of capitalism.36 ‘Termsearching’ also enables us to trace individual people across many records and to engage in the kinds of biographical illuminations discussed in Chapter 3. Putnam, however, is less sanguine about the need for so much attention to ‘transnational lives’ because, she argues, these stories will crowd out others in the way that did earlier versions of history.37 We would argue, however, that the point is not just to insert narratives of individuals into historiography but to show how focusing on these individuals enables understanding of vaster historical processes. In addition, sometimes, it is just good to be reminded that actual individuals peopled the past – not every life has to be relevant in some grand narrative to be worth telling. While digitization facilitates transnational history it also calls into question the very ethics that first sustained the development of the field. Digitization is primarily a First World phenomenon. ‘Digitization and uploading make it increasingly possible to do history as a desk discipline, at least for scholars who are linked to well-funded institutions in the Global North.’38 Putnam and others such as Melanie Newton worry about a facile transnational history, which can be conducted without ever really engaging with local historiography or place.39 Putnam is concerned that doing this digitized transnational history allows historians to think they are ‘speaking

Conclusions

of the world’ and ‘to the world’ while they are actually ‘insulat[ed] from it’.40 Place matters: wandering in the halls of crumbling buildings housing ancient texts, or taking a bus, or walking down a particular street all help inform the historian’s insights into their subject. This ethics of fieldwork41 informs an ethical historiography. Nonetheless, the opportunity provided by digitization has been no more fruitfully applied than in the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project led by a team of researchers in the UK including the historian of Britishness, Catherine Hall. The database produced by the project (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) has given unprecedented public access to historical compensation of twenty million pounds to slave owners for the loss of the human property. Hall sees this work as part of a larger project of re-membering the past that has the potential to be reparative. Transnational links extend out of this project into the Pacific, because when the Caribbean closed down significant numbers of former slave owners invested their own lives and capital provided by their compensation into colonial Australia of the 1830s and 1840s. This emerging investigation promises to offer a window onto the assumptions about racial difference brought by them into the antipodean world.42 We have sought in this book to bring into view both the standard history of transnational history, with its origin story in the reconsideration of US history in the 1990s, and the vital histories of enslavement, migration, colonialism and racism which have always in some sense been transnational, both in their very subject matter and in their attention to the vectors of sea, cultures and violence that shaped so many people’s lives. Focusing also on the turn to biography we have sought to engage with some of the more innovative interventions in transnational history, with their consideration of epistemology and affect. We have attended to the ways in which colonial cultures created sets of knowledge about the local and the global, which impacted people living in settler colonies as well as the metropole. We have seen the impacts of Black Atlantic history, as well as in feminist and postcolonial histories, demanding new recognition of analytics that push beyond within the nation state. Here we can think of Ann McGrath’s Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the US and Australia, which conceptualizes interracial marriage as ‘an enactment of transnational sovereignty’.43 As Anna Clark et al. argue, McGrath’s concept of ‘colonising transnational’ allows her to work on indigenous women whose ‘mobility was more mental than physical’.44 The vibrancy of transnational historiography means that it opens up new questions. We are left asking: How far does gesturing to the transnational go in undoing progressive narratives or frameworks of nation, empire or

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whiteness? Might the focus on mobility in transnational history end up reinscribing the centrality of the white, citizen subject and thus reinvesting the power of national narrative? Has the ‘west and the rest’ perspective been overturned by the transnational turn or simply deferred and reframed? We continue to wrestle with these issues, if incompletely. Critical race studies and gender and feminist scholarship underline the dangers of a transnational history that does not disrupt and push against boundaries. At its best, we hope that transnational history moves forward as a critical intervention in history and as a method which challenges our relationship to the past.

Notes 1. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33. 2. Ibid. 3. Anna Clark, Anne Rees, and Alecia Simmonds, ‘Testing the Boundaries: Reflections on Transnationalism in Australian History’, in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, ed. Anna Clark, Anne Rees, and Alecia Simmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 1–2. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and David Lowe, ‘Introduction: Nationalism and Transnationalism in Australian Historical Writing’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 7–11. 8. Kim, McClure, and McQuade, ‘Making and Unmaking the Nation in World History’, 1. 9. Ibid., 1–9. 10. Guterl, ‘Comment’, 138. 11. David Armitage, ‘The Horizons of History: Space, Time, and the Future of the Past’, History Australia 12, no. 1 (2015): 207–25. See also Alison Bashford, ‘The Anthropocene Is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time’, Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 341–49. For more on the debate over big and small history, see David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and discussion in ‘AHR Exchange: On the History Manifesto’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (2015).

Conclusions

12. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–22. 13. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, ‘Introduction: The Role of Serendipity, Family Connections, and Cultural Memory in Historical Research’, in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2008), 2. 14. Paisley, ‘White Settler Colonialisms and the Colonial Turn’. 15. Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, Empire, Colonisation’, 8. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 36. 18. James Clifford, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties’, in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 200. 19. Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: Travelling Criticism? On the Dynamic Histories of Indigenous Modernity’, Cultural and Social History 9, no. 4 (2012): 495. 20. Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, Empire, Colonisation’, 7–37. 21. Lambert and Lester, ‘Introduction’. 22. Dorothy Driver, ‘Zoë Wicomb’s Translocal: Troubling the Politics of Location’, in Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa, ed. Kai Easton and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2017), 7. 23. Pamela Scully, ‘History, Critical Cosmopolitanism and Translocal Mobility in the Fiction of Zoe Wicomb’, in Zoe Wicomb & the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa, ed. Kai Easton and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2017), 130. 24. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 59. 25. Scully, ‘History, Critical Cosmopolitanism and Translocal Mobility in the Fiction of Zoe Wicomb’, 122. See also Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 162–70. 26. Scully, ‘History, Critical Cosmopolitanism and Translocal Mobility in the Fiction of Zoe Wicomb’, 126–7. 27. Ibid., 129. 28. Ibid. See Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 1st edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 29. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 59; Scully, ‘History, Critical Cosmopolitanism and Translocal Mobility in the Fiction of Zoe Wicomb’, 124.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable’, 380. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 383–4. Ibid., 384. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. Putnam also cites Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes’, The American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 472–9. Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable’, 392. Ibid., 395. Ibid., 397. She cites Melanie J. Newton, ‘“We Are All Haitians Now?”: The Caribbean, Transnational Histories, and Empire’ (paper presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, USA, January 2013). Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable’, 399. Shalini Puri, ‘Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement’, in Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South, ed. Shalini Puri and Debra A. Castillo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 29–49. Cited in Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the TextSearchable’, 396. Catherine Hall, ‘Doing Reparatory History: Bringing “Race” and Slavery Home’, Race and Class 60, no. 1 (2018): 3–21; and Hall, ‘Writing History, Making “Race”: Slave-Owners and Their Stories’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 3 (2016): 365–80. McGrath, Illicit Love, 11. Clark, Rees, and Simmonds, ‘Testing the Boundaries’, 6.

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233

Index

abolition movement 51–3 Aboriginal people 97, 122–3, 128, 160–1, 165, 173–4 Abrahams, Yvette 108–9 ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins) 158 Adam, Thomas 6, 9, 28–9 n.27 African diaspora German colonization 176 slave trade and slavery 47 US politics 174–5 African Slave Trade Database 46 African’s Life, An: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797 (Walvin) 101 Afterlife of Empire (Bailkin) 142 Ahmed, Sara 83 Alabama in Africa (Zimmerman) 176 Alexander, Elizabeth 108 Allen, Margaret 81 Along the Archival Grain (Stoler) 111 alternative transnationalism 172–7 AME (American Methodist Episcopal) 48 ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’ (Tyrrell) 9 American Historical Review 6, 9, 46, 48, 95, 121, 138 American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning towards the Transpacific (Shu and Pease) 77 Americas emancipation struggles 54–5 indigenous perspectives 87–8 slavery and slave trade 38, 41–2, 44–8, 102 Amrith, Sunil 164

Anderson, Benedict Richard O’Gorman 126 Anderson, Carol 16, 31 n.80, 175 Anderson, Clare 50, 54, 61 n.95, 76, 96 Anderson, Warwick 25 Annales School 10–11 anti-colonialism 1, 16, 18, 21, 24–5, 66, 80–1, 86, 132, 136, 144, 153, 155–6, 171–2, 175, 177 anti-slavery activism 25, 36, 51–2, 54, 100–1, 109–10, 155, 157, 160, 167–8, 175 Anti-Slavery Reporter 52 Anti-Slavery Society (London) 160, 167–8 Anzaldua, Gloria 2 Araujo, Ana Lucia 23, 55 areas of research, cultural history. See also cultural anthropology census 129–30 decolonization era 132–4 demography 135–7 imperial cultures of information 124–9 official enquiry, metropolitan society 129–30 regionalism 130–2 sexuality 138–41 technologies and economies of rule 121–4 transport and communication 132–5 Armitage, David 75–76, 130–131, 191, 198 n.11 At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Hall and Rose) 78, 126

Index At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Burton) 5 Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean (Wheat), 1570–1640 47 Atlantic Bonds A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa. (Lindsay) 113 Atlantic Slave Trade, The : A Census (Curtin) 38 Atlantic World 35–7, 40, 43, 46–7, 53, 75, 100, 102, 105, 107, 131, 162 Attewell, Nadine 25, 142 Australia colonial administrations 162 Freedom Rides 178 gendered histories 139 immigration restrictions 81, 137, 144 oceanic perspectives 74, 77 regional power 82 settler colonialism 65, 79, 136, 140, 168 settler violence 168 Australian Historical Studies 77 Baartman, Sara 15, 24 Bahadur, Gaiutra 54 Bailkin, Jordanna 25, 142, 143 Ballantyne, Tony 27 n.12, 31 n.68 Bandung Conference 1955 164 Banivanua-Mar, Tracey 128, 161, 172 Banner, Lois W. 95 banyaga (slaves) 53 Bashford, Alison 25, 76, 127, 130, 135–7 Bastian, Jeannette Allis 110 Bayly, C. A. 14, 31 n.69, 61 n.93, 162 Behm, Amanda 156 Belich, James 67, 163 Bender, Thomas 20–1, 33 n.104 Benton, Lauren 131 Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (Attewell) 142 Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship

in Postemancipation Societies (Cooper, Holt, McGuiness and Scott) 54 Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, 1860–1950 (Grant, Levin and Trentmann) 160 Bhambra, Gurminder K. 190 Bibb, William 54 biography black history 96 challenges in writing 106, 109–10 historiographical skills 100–3, 105 new methodologies 97–9 role in transnational history 95–110 women’s history 96 Biography and the Black Atlantic (Lindsay and Sweet) 99 ‘Biography as History’ (Banner) 95 Birth of the Modern World, The 1780– 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Bayly) 162 Black Atlantic colonial history 96, 99, 102–3 race and gender analysis 40–1 slavery and slave trade 48, 113 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 22, 35, 40, 48 Black Jacobins, The (James) 40 Black Lives Matter 51 Black Majority (Wood) 44 Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Carney) 22, 36, 44 Blain, Keisha N. 16 Boehmer, Elleke 69, 156 bondage 37, 45, 50 Bongiorno, Frank 77 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa) 2 Bose, Sugata 61 n.89, 156 Boucher, Leigh 66 Braddick, Michael J. 75, 131 Braudel, Fernand 61 n.86 Bressey, Caroline 52, 179, 186 n.103 Briggs, Laura 172

235

236

Index British Atlantic World, The, 1500–1800 (Armitage and Braddick) 131 British Empire biographical writing 102–3, 106, 113–14 enslaved subjectivities 40 feminist and cultural studies 82 gender and race analysis 140–4, 160–1, 168–9, 179 horizontal and vertical view 85–6 in India 124, 164, 171 information network 126–7 local context 136–7 national identity 139 oceanic approaches, spatial and temporal concepts 75–9 settler colonialism 67–8, 71–5, 165, 173, 192 transnational historiography 71–5 trans-Pacific context 79–81 British Empire, The: Sunrise to Sunset (Levine) 139 ‘British Sea, A’ (Pietsch) 78 Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Darian-Smith, Grimshaw and Macintyre) 23, 72 Brown, Christopher Leslie 52, 62 n.105 Brown, Vincent 39, 57 n.21 Buckner, Philip 72 Building Better Britains? (Morgan) 137 Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture (Burton) 3 Burton, Antoinette 5, 13, 24, 29 n.29, 69, 78–9, 85–6, 133–4, 138, 141, 150 n.92, 169, 179, 193 Bush, Barbara 169 Campbell, Gwyn 48 Canada gendered histories 139 immigration restriction policies 144 multiracial nationalism 80

national and racial delegation 113, 137 protective legislations 163 Canaday, Margot 56 n.4, 138 capitalism 21, 37, 39, 51 Carey, Hilary 66, 173 Carey, Jane 66, 173 Carlier, Julie 95, 169 Carney, Judith 22, 36, 44 Carretta, Vincent 24, 100–2, 109 census 129–30 Center for Transcultural Studies (University of Chicago) 13 Chaplin, Joyce E. 135 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 108 Christopher, Emma 36 Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Hall) 23, 40–1, 54 Civilized Savagery, A: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa 1884–1926 (Grant) 167 Clark, Anna 190, 197 Clavin, Patricia 15, 17, 31 n.78, 32 n.88, 131 Clifford, James 43, 193 Coates, Timothy J. 54, 63 n.115 Cold War 5, 49, 157 Coleborne, Catharine 127 colonial enquiries 129–30 Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Perry) 112 Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (Haupt, Kocka, Juneja and Pernau) 11, 20 Congo Reform Campaign 168 Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Curthoys and Lake) 26, 66, 177 ‘Connecting Women’s Histories: The Local and the Global’ (Bush and Purvis) 169

Index Connelly, Matthew 6, 15, 135, 149 n.63 Connolly, Eunice 24, 106 Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–1853 (Anderson) 54 Coolie Woman (Bahadur) 54 Cooper, Frederick 15, 23, 31 n.77, 39, 54, 57 n.17, 70–1, 128, 138, 141 cosmopolitanism alternatives 172 expressions of worldliness 158 race politics 156 vernacular communities of exchange 172–3 versions of 160 white liberalism 179 Crais, Clifton C. 24, 98, 104, 107, 109–10 Crow, Jim 16 Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Science in Australia (Anderson) 81 cultural anthropology archival sources 122, 124, 127–9 imperial rule 124–5 surveillance modality 127 travel writing 126 Curthoys, Ann 3, 26, 58 n.32, 66, 177–8, 190 Curtin, Philip D. 37–8, 56 n.10 Darian-Smith, Kate 23, 72–3 Daunton, Martin 85 Davis, David Brion 38, 42 de Costa, Ravi 174 de la Fuente, Alejandro 57 n.21, 58 n.37 Decentring Empire : Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Grant, Ghosh and Kennedy) 167 Drawing the Global Color Line (Lake and Reynolds) 23, 79 Driver, Dorothy 48, 194 Duara, Prasenjit 10 Dubois, Laurent 16, 39, 79, 80

Dussart, Fae 162 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 49 Edelson, S. Max 46, 60 n.69 Edmonds, Penelope 23, 83–4 Eller, Anne 55 Ellinghaus, Katherine 66 Eltis, David 38, 41–2, 46, 56 n.6, 57 n.12, 58 n.33, 60 n.67 embodied culture 46, 74, 79, 83, 85, 121–2, 138, 167 empire centre-periphery models 66, 82 critiques of 153, 155, 172 enslaved population 39 global agendas 156, 164 historical flows 121–2, 141, 172 information 124–9 labour demands 35 militarization 131, 140 modernizing of 66, 133–4, 144 regional approach 137 settler 67–71 trading systems 48 Empire, Race, and the Politics of AntiCaste (Bressey) 52 Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance and Interaction (Boehmer) 156 Equiano, Olaudah 24 Eyes off the Prize (Anderson) 175 Eyre, Edward John 40 Fehrenbach, Heide 167 feminism/feminists cultural internationalism 82, 170 historians 2–3, 169 key topics 169–70 scholars/scholarships 2, 40, 113, 169, 189, 198 Fernandes, Leela 41 Fernando, A. M. 172 Ferris, Kate 21 Ferrus, Diana 108

237

238

Index First Nations Movement 174 Fischer-Tine, Harald 164 forced migration 24, 35, 41, 43, 48, 50, 53 Forclaz, Amalia Ribi 155 Frances, Raelene 132 Free Produce Society 52 Freedom Papers (Scott and Herbard) 111 From Africa to Brazil:Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Hawthorne) 42, 47 From Scottsboro to Munich (Pennybacker) 175 Gandhi, M. K. 80 Garvey, Marcus 16, 32 n.81 Gauthier, Shaloma 166 gender -based violence 53 cosmopolitan world 155, 158 division of labour 44–5, 55 equal rights 112 indigenous groups 43 international critiques 177 narratives 103 rice cultivation 46 role of oceans 74, 130–1 political agendas 75 settler colonialism 86, 126, 138–40, 160–1, 169–70, 176 slave trade 42 Gender and Empire (Levine) 139–40 Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947 (Mohammed) 53 Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Paton and Scully) 55 Ghosh, Durba 167 Gikandi, Simon 40, 58 n.29 Gilman, Sander L. 108 Gilroy, Paul 22, 35, 40, 46, 48, 99–100 Glissant, Eduard 20 global context cosmopolitanism 154–60, 162–72, 176–7

economies of rule 122–3, 126, 130–1, 133–7, 141–4 internationalism 154–60, 162–72, 176–7 settler colonialism 42, 44, 65, 70, 76–84, 86–7 transnational framework 2–11, 13–15, 17–18, 20–1, 23 transnational lives 97, 106 Global History (Hopkins) 159 globalization 6, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21 Global and Transnational History (Iriye) 2, 6 Goodall, Heather 128 Gorman, Daniel 170 Gould, Stephen Jay 108 Grant, Kevin 25, 160, 167–8 Grew, Raymond 2 Grewal, Inderpal 3 Grimshaw, Patricia 23, 72 Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo 85, 154 Guterl, Matthew Pratt 191 Haggis, Jane 156 Haitian revolution 52 Hall, Catherine 23, 28 n.15, 28 n.16, 40, 54, 71, 78, 126, 141, 171, 192, 197 Hall, Stuart 19–20, 33 n.100 Halpern, Rick 85 Harris, Verne 99 Hartman, Saidiya 39, 47, 57 n.20, 60 n.76 Hau’ofa, Epeli 77 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard 11, 18 Hawthorne, Walter 42, 46–7, 60 n.73, 119 n.67 Hebrard, Jean M. 98, 111–12 Herren, Madeleine 165 Herskovits, Melville 44 heterography 24, 98 transnational lives 99–115 Heywood, Linda 41, 47, 58 n.34 Higher Authority A: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (de Costa) 174

Index histoire croisée 4, 12 historical biography, enslaved people 96 histories of colonization British administrators 124 demographic study 135–7 ideology of colonial rule 126 study of sexuality 138–41 transport and communication 132–5 travel modality 125 historiography 3, 6, 9–12, 20, 23, 35–7, 39, 41–3, 48–9, 54, 56 Hodes, Martha Elizabeth 24, 99, 106–7, 117 n.26 Hoerder, Dirk 18, 32 n.96 Hofmeyr, Isabel 14, 48–50, 58 n.28 Holmes, Rachel 108 Holt, Thomas Cleveland 54 ‘Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past, The’ (Armitage), 191 Hsu, Madeline Y. 33 n.97 human rights 4, 8, 17 Humanitarian Photography: A History (Fehrenbach and Rodogno) 167–8 humanitarianism 1, 16–17, 25, 51 liberal 163 white domination 163, 168–71, 173, 175, 178–9 hybridity 6, 8, 12 Hyslop, Jonathan 32 n.82 Ibn Battuta 44 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 126 Imperial Eyes (Pratt) 126 Imperial Leather (McClintock) 126 imperialism 5, 8, 21, 25, 111, 136, 139, 141, 155–6, 170, 172, 175. See also British Empire indenture 53–6 Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Northrup) 53 India exchanges between colonial elites 156

fingerprinting 127 nationalist movement 176 settler colonialism 123–4 traditional subordination of Indian women 171 Indian Ocean British imperial studies 190 colonialism 97 convict and indentured labour 54 slave trade 48–57 transnational lives 96 VOC empire 49–50 Indigenous Australians/ Indigenous peoples. See also Aboriginal people concept of minority rights 174 unequal treatment 163 violent impact of colonialism 173–4 indigenous peoples agencies 85–8, 162 colonial archives on 109 cosmopolitanisms 26, 158–61 embodied culture 83 humanitarian movements 51 modernization impact 123–4 native informants 129 protective agendas 174 race politics 66–7, 82 rights agendas 70–1, 172–4 violence against 9, 43, 74 women’s rights 140 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (Equiano) 100 International Exhibition (1937) 108 International History Review, The 21 International Labour Organization (ILO) 165 internationalism contradictory effects 161 late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries 163–8 liberalism/white liberalism 154, 161, 179

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Index role of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations 166 sexuality and gender politics 170–1 Western notions 155 Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Sluga) 164 Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the Wars, (Clavin) 17 Intimacies of Four Continents, The (Lowe) 87 Iriye, Akira 2, 6–8, 29 n.29, 130

Lester, Allan 16–17, 24, 51, 125, 161–2, 172, 181 n.27, 182 n.30 Levine, Philippa 25, 139–40, 160 Linebaugh, Peter 39, 101 ‘Looking Eastward: Pacific and Global Perspectives on American History in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ (Tyrrell) 76–7 Lovejoy, Paul 57 n.13, 59 n.41 Lowe, Lisa 87, 172, 179, 191 Lydon, Jane 168, 173 Lynette, Russell 96

James, C. L. R 35, 56 n.2 Jeronimo, Miguel Bendeira 155 Journal of Contemporary European History 131 Journal of Global History 163 Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51 Juneja, Monica 20

Macintyre, Stuart 23, 72 Madeleine’s Children (Peabody) 96 ‘Making and Unmaking of the Nation in World History, The’ (Sophie-Jung, McClure and McQuade), 191 ‘Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World’ (Scully) 43 Manjapra, Kris 156 Many Headed Hydra, The: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker) 39 Marriott, John 122 Marxism 10–11 Maseko, Zola. 108 Maynard, John 174, 178 Mayo, Katherine 171 Mazower, Mark 164 McClelland, Keith 141 McClintock, Anne 126, 138 McClure, Alastair 191 McGuiness, Aims 54 McQuade, Joseph 191 Melbourne conference 72 metropolitan culture colonial expression 23–4, 54–5, 65–6, 121–2, 127, 139–40, 153, 156, 161, 194, 197

Kale, Madhavi 53, 62–3 n.110 Kaplan, Caren 27 nn.5–6 Kelley, Robin D. G. 177 Kennedy, Dane 68, 167 Kim, Sophie-Jung H. 191 Kirsch, Gesa E. 192 Knight, G. Roger 24, 129 Kocka, Jurgen 11, 18 Kopytoff, Igor 38–9 labour 35, 43–9, 51, 53, 55 Laboring Women (Morgan) 42 Laidlaw, Zoe 24, 66, 125 Lake, Marilyn 3, 18, 23, 26, 32 n.92, 66, 68, 79–82, 177–8, 190 Lambert, David 125 Laqua, Danial 167 League of Nations 17, 154, 157, 161, 164–5, 173 Legacy of African Culture/s in the Americas (Carney) 22

Index feminist studies 82 imperial cultures 69–71, 83, 163 social life 5, 15, 129, 137, 158 travel culture 125–6 Micol, Siegel 8 Midgley, Clare 26, 62 n.101, 95, 144, 169 Miers, Suzanne 38–9 migration 3, 8, 10–11, 13–15, 18–20. See also forced migration Miller, Joseph Calder 42 Mintz, Sidney Wilfred 43 Mohammed, Patricia 53 Mongia, Radhika Viyas 144 Morant Bay Rebellion 40 Morgan, Cecilia 25, 137 Morgan, Jennifer 42 Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Ballantyne and Burton) 78 Moyn, Samuel 32 n.86 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 16, 175 Native Life in South Africa (Plaatje) 48 Neither Slave Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (Wong) 42 Nettelbeck, Amanda 25, 162–3 Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Ward) 36, 49 New Imperial History, A: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Wilson) 82 New Zealand decolonization 142 gendered histories 139 immigration restrictive policies 81 imperial past 74 territorial expansion 65 white women’s suffrage 140

Newton, Melanie J. 196 No Enchanted Palace (Mazower) 164 Northrup, David 54 oceanic histories. See also Indian Ocean; Pacific Ocean categories and binaries 81–4 national historiographies 79–81 transnational approach 75–9 Oceanic Histories (Sivasundaram, Bashford and Armitage) 76 ‘On the American Empire from a British Imperial Perspective’ (Kennedy) 68 ‘On Place, Space and Mobility’ (Ballantyne) 84 Pacific Histories (Armitage and Bashford) 130 Pacific Ocean areas of research 130 colonial violence 127 indigenous rights networks 172 indentured labour 53–4 national history 80–2 races and people 170 regionalism 76–7 proximity, notion of 87 settler colonialism 65, 68, 74, 162 transnational lives 96 transport and communication 132 Paisley, Fiona 32 n.81, 54, 63 n.116, 91 n.32, 92 n.46, 94 n.70, 97, 116 n.14, 129, 146 nn.17–18, 147 n.30, 147 n.32, 165, 168, 170 Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, The (Iriye and Saunier) 2, 6, 16 Paton, Diana 37, 55 Patterson, Orlando 39, 57 n.18 Peabody, Sue 96 Pease, Donald E. 77 Pedersen, Susan 32 n.87, 173 Pedro Monteiro, Jose 155

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Index Pennybacker, Susan D. 175 Permanent Mandates Commission 173 Pernau, Margrit 20 Perry, Adele 112–13 Peter Smith, Michael 85, 154 Piana, Francesca 166 Pickles, Katie 74, 169 Pinto, Samantha 40 Poignant, Roslyn 179 Porter, Bernard 156 postcolonialism 3–4, 11, 14, 25, 41 Pratt, Mary Louise 126 Problem of Emancipation, The : The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Rugemer) 55 Problem of Slavery as History, The : A Global Approach (Miller) 42 Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, The (Davis) 38 Prostitution, Race and Politics (Levine) 140 Protten, Rebecca 24 Purvis, June 169 Putnam, Lara 26, 33 n.120, 195–6 Quaker societies 52 Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed) 83 Race, Nation and Empire (Hall and McClelland) 141 racializations 18–19, 23, 25, 40, 42–3, 51 Rawley, James A. 38 Re-Orienting Whiteness (Boucher, Ellinghaus and Carey) 66 Rebecca’s Revival (Sensbach) 103 Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese (Sweet) 47 Rediker, Marcus 39, 101 Rediscovering the British World (Buckner and Francis) 72 Rees, Anne 79, 190 regionalisms 130 Reid, Kirsty 129

Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (Stewart) 52 Renda, Mary 36, 56 n.4 Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade (Araujo) 55 Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Belich) 163 Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Bender and Duara) 10, 20 Revel, Jacques 21 Reynolds, Henry 23, 68, 79–82, 178 rice cultivation 44–7 Rice and Slave (Littlefield) 44 Rischbieth, Bessie 165 ‘Rise of Global and Transnational History, The’ (Iriye) 8 Rodogno, Davide 25, 166, 168 Rohan, Liz 192 Rose, Sonya 52, 78, 107, 126 Rothschild, Emma 18, 32 n.93 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth (Clifford) 43 Routledge Handbook of International Organization (Reinalda) 166 Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans (Russell) 96 Rowse, Tim 123, 179 Rugemer, Edward Bartlett 55 Russell, Lynette 109 Russell, Penny 109 Russian Revolution 171 Saha, Jonathan 177 Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Smallwood) 47 Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Crais and Scully) 107, 109 Saunier, Pierre-Yves 2, 6–9, 13

Index Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Practices (Caplan and Grewal) 3 Schein, Louise 159 Schwarz, Bill 127 Scott, Rebecca J. 42, 54, 58 n.37, 98, 111–12, 196 Scully, Pamela 24, 31 n.76, 37, 43, 55, 62 n.106, 98, 104, 107, 109–10, 194, 195 Sea Captain’s Wife, The: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (Hodes) 106 Seed, Patricia 14 Sensbach, Jon F. 24, 103–5 Set the World on Fire (Blain) 16 settler colonies 1, 16, 25 comparative histories 65–7 sexuality 25, 69, 78, 86, 108, 122–3, 135, 137–9, 160, 170, 177 Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (Rodogno, Struck and Vogel) 166 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 108 Shellam, Tiffany 123 Shu, Yuan 77 Simmonds, Alecia 190 Sinha, Manisha 23, 36, 51 Sinha, Mrinalini 26, 51–2, 55, 171 Sivasundaram, Sujit 76 Skinner, Rob 16, 32 n.84, 51, 62 n.98 Slave’s Cause, The; A History of Abolition (Sinha) 23, 36, 41, 51 slaveholders 42, 45, 53, 55, 101, 105 slavery 2, 14, 16, 22–3, 25, 35–43, 45, 47, 49, 51–5, 99–104, 109–14, 160–1, 168 slave societies enslavement categories 37–41 race and gender analysis 41–3 Sluga, Glenda 17, 25, 32 n.85, 163–4, 166 Smallwood, Stephanie E. 47 Smith, Michael Peter 85, 154

Societies after Slavery (Cooper) 54 ‘Sources and Methods: Approaching the Imperial Archive’ (Reid and Paisley) 129 space and temporality 81–4 Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Sinha) 171 Steel, Frances 132 Stoler, Ann Laura 23, 70–1, 111, 124, 128–9, 141, 145 n.5, 199 n.12 Strange, Carolyn 127 Streets-Salter, Heather 155 Struck, Bernhard 25, 166 Subaltern Lives (Anderson) 96 Sulu Zone, The 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Warren) 49 Sutherland, Heather 49, 53, 61 n.88, 62 n.107 Sweet, James 47 Sweet, John Wood 99, 102 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Mintz) 43–4 Tensions of Empire (Cooper and Stoler) 23, 70 Thinking with and through the Nation (Burton) 79 Thornton, John K. 47, 60 n.77 ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’ (Armitage) 76 transatlantic slave trade 22, 37, 47, 52, 87 Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Lovejoy) 38 translocal histories 84–8 agency potentialities 86 entanglements 85 notion of proximity 87 port cities 65, 75 rise of nation states 76

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Index ‘Transnational and the Text-Searchable, The: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’ (Putnam) 26, 33 n.120 transnational Atlantic histories forced migrations 43–7 racial and gendered ideologies 42–3 slave trades and slavery 41–7 transnational biography. See also biography archival research 95, 97 and transnational lives 99–100, 107, 112, 191–2, 196 Transnational Feminism in the United States (Fernandes) 41 transnational history Atlantic slave trade 48–50, 55 biography 95, 98–9, 111 cosmopolitan 157–68 European genealogies 9–12 feminism 168–71 internationalism 157–68 key features 6–7 limits 18–22 material effects 121–2, 130, 133, 135, 137–8, 144 modernity principles 8 political debates 176–8 race and gender analysis 41 settler colonialism 66–7, 71, 73–6, 81–2, 84–6 US genealogies 9–12 Transnational History: Theory and History (Saunier) 2 transnational Indian Ocean. See also Indian Ocean slave trade 48–51 Transnationalism from Below (Guarnizo and Smith) 85, 154 ‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis’ (Briggs) 172 Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History (Clark, Rees and Simmonds) 190

Transnational Pacific histories. See Pacific Ocean Trouble with Empire, The (Burton) 13, 85 Twells, Alison 95, 169 Tyrrell, Ian 9, 28 n.19, 50, 76, 169 United Nations’ Charter 174 United States black political movement 178 genealogies 9–12 national historiographies 79 as settler empire 67–71 Universal Exhibition (Paris 1889) 108 Unsettling Settler Societies (Stasiulus and Davis) 178 Urbanising Frontiers (Edmonds) 23, 83 Van der Linden, Marcel 4, 27 n.13 vernacular transnationalism 172–9 Vitalis, Robert 141 Vogel, Jakob 166 Von Eschen, Penny M. 174–5 Voyage: Slave Trade The, Database (Eltis) 41 Walcott, Derek 36 Walvin, James 101 Ward, Kerry 49–50, 62 n.105 Warren, James Francis 49, 61 n.87 Washington, Booker T. 176 We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Eller) 55 Weld, Theodore Dwight 51 Werner, Michael 12, 30 n.58 Wheat, David 47 White Male and Middle Class (Hall) 71 ‘White Spaces? Racialised Geographies’ (Edmonds), 83 Widmer, Alexandra 129 Williams, Eric 37, 56 n.9 Wilson, Kathleen 82 Wolfe, Patrick 72

Index women African American/black 16, 52, 98, 105, 107 biographies of 103 conservative 169 cultivation of rice 46 enslaved 104 indentured labour 53 indigenous 16, 43, 96, 110, 197 internationalists 170 settler colonies 139, 168 sexual exploitation 171 white 74, 79, 126, 134, 140, 143–4, 160, 165, 168 women’s history 2, 96, 169, 189 Women’s History Review 169 Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global (Midgley, Twells and Carlier) 169 Wong, Edlie L. 42 Wood, Peter 44

Woollacott, Angela 2, 26 n.3, 41, 58 n.32, 79, 88 n.2 Worden, Nigel 40, 58 n.26 world. See also British Empire; cosmopolitanism; metropolitanism Anglo-American 65, 71, 126, 144, 168, 170 Anglophone 1–2 Atlantic 35–7, 40, 43, 46–7, 53, 75, 100, 102, 105, 107, 131 history 6–9, 21, 23, 41, 133 working-class, English 43 World Connecting, A: 1870–1945 (Rosenberg) 133, 158 Yearbook of Transnational History, The 9 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe 60 n.79 Zemon Davis, Natalie 179 Zimmerman, Susan 12, 167, 176, 183 n.51

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