Colonial Relations
The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World

A new perspective on the nineteenth-century imperial world through one family's history across North America, the Caribbean and United Kingdom.

Adele Perry (Author)

9781108440011, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 July 2017

310 pages, 23 b/w illus. 2 maps 1 table
23 x 15.4 x 1.6 cm, 0.46 kg

'This is an enormous achievement. Adele Perry's study of the Douglas–Connolly family and especially of one of its members, colonial administrator, James Douglas, is at one level a lively narrative history of a family, deftly introducing historical figures and exploring their personal trajectories and networks of relationships. At the same time, as readers we are drawn into an exploration of many of the issues that make history so exciting today … For those of us investigating similar themes in other places, as I am, part of the charm of this book is that the story told here is both parallel to and yet utterly different from our own. To those looking for readable and locally-grounded colonial histories that also illuminate larger imperial and indeed world history themes, I will in future say read Perry's Colonial Relations.' Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney

A study of the lived history of nineteenth-century British imperialism through the lives of one extended family in North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The prominent colonial governor James Douglas was born in 1803 in what is now Guyana, probably to a free woman of colour and an itinerant Scottish father. In the North American fur trade, he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. Adele Perry traces their family and friends over the course of the 'long' nineteenth-century, using careful archival research to offer an analysis of the imperial world that is at once intimate and critical, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Perry engages feminist scholarship on gender and intimacy, critical analyses about colonial archives, transnational and postcolonial history and the 'new imperial history' to suggest how this period might be rethought through one powerful family located at the British Empire's margins.

1. Empire, family, and archive
2. Housekeepers and wives
3. Free people, servants, and states
4. Changing intimacies, changing empire
5. Local elites, governance, and authority
6. Governors, wives, daughters and sons
7. Colonies, nations and metropoles
8. Wealth and descendants
Conclusion: empire, colonies, and families
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], History of the Americas [HBJK], British & Irish history [HBJD1]