Empire, Kinship and Violence
Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842

An ambitious account of Indigenous-settler relationships and struggles over Indigenous rights in British white settler colonies from the 1770s to 1830s.

Elizabeth Elbourne (Author)

9781108479226, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

345 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.9 cm, 0.79 kg

'In this exemplary transnational history, Elizabeth Elbourne provides a creative and devastating account of the linkages between family, intimacy and colonial violence in the British Empire. Focusing on the Brant, Bannister, and Buxton families, Elbourne demonstrates the intertwining of humanitarianism and colonialism during the first half of the nineteenth century and offers a model of how an analytic focus on family sheds new light on indigenous and settler histories as well as colonialism itself. Highly recommended.' Pamela Scully, Emory University

Empire, Kinship and Violence traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Elizabeth Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Elizabeth Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.

Introduction. 'Kinship, violence and the colonial state'
Part I. North America: 1. Before the revolution: belonging and un-belonging in American-Haudenosaunee borderlands
2. All the king's men: kinship and the American revolution
3. Land, identity and Indigenous sovereignty in British North America, 1783-1820
Part II. Upper Canada, New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, Victoria, Western Australia, the Cape Colony, Sierra Leone: 4. Upper Canada: Haudenosaunee land claims and the politics of expertise
5. New South Wales: Frontier warfare and the 'rule of British law'
6. Southern Africa: Protest, petitions and the paradoxes of imperial liberalism
7. From Sierra Leone to Swan River: The Bannisters' imperial world
Part III. Britain, the Cape Colony, West Africa: 8. Colonial sins and Priscilla Buxton's quest for virtue
9. Keeping colonialism in the family: humanitarianism, empire and the Niger Expedition
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1]