Empire, Kinship and Violence

Elizabeth Elbourne is Associate Professor at McGill University. Her previous publications include Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in Britain and the Eastern Cape, 1799-1852 (2003) and Sex, Power, and Slavery (2014), co-edited with Gwyn Campbell.

• 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.

'Elbourne's exploration of settler colonialism at Britain's 'imperial meridian' is magisterial in scope and execution. Via the sprawling Brant, Bannister and Buxton families, Elbourne expertly connects colonial violence both to economic exploitation and to humanitarian moralising in revolutionary America, the new Antipodean colonies, West Africa and metropolitan Britain.' Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne