Victorian liberalism and the effect of sovereignty: a view from the settler periphery

Abstract

Postcolonial thinking has offered ‘new imperial’ historians productive avenues to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British Empire. Questions of territory and sovereignty have, however, often been seen as secondary in these new histories of the citizen-subject of liberalism. From an Antipodean perspective, this seems a remarkable elision. Through an examination of the ideas of liberals in colonial Victoria, this article explores whether we might consider sovereignty as a ghost in the machine of everyday liberalism and asks whether these questions should remain safely on the imperial margins. Drawing on theorisations of settler-colonialism that have emerged in Antipodean historical research, this article proposes to read the political subject of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal imagination as both effecting and an effect of sovereignty.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• Liberalism
• reform
• selfgovernment
• settler colonialism
• reform
• sovereignty

James Vernon’s Politics and the People (1993) was, amongst other things, a history of the constitutive exclusions of mid-nineteenth-century English political culture and the peculiarly British liberalism that came to function as its normative standard. By tracing a ‘history of [the] subjectivities and identities’ that populated nineteenth-century political life, Vernon was able to examine how ‘politics defined and imagined people’. Whilst attentive to the ways in which individuals could ‘play at the margins of [political] languages’, he nonetheless worked from the assumption that in any historical moment, ‘individual and collective actors are constrained by the finite subjectivities’ that populate their discursive worlds.¹ Through a close engagement with so-called postmodern feminism, Vernon’s work thus unhooked the once steady relationship between representational politics and the real. This produced a confronting history of the ways in which liberalism and the various forms of radicalism it inaugurated became steadily less democratic in the mid-century, in part because gendered ideas about the ‘people’ and the ‘nation’ became mechanisms that disenfranchised and disempowered. Two decades later, his revelation of the cultural contingency of political subjectivities remains unsettling; the levers of historical transformation still seem difficult to identify, let alone grasp and control.²

Elaine Hadley’s more recent Living Liberalism (2010) is a powerful example of the ways in which Vernon’s discursive approach to mid-Victorian political reform has been further developed by scholars informed by the ‘new imperial history’.³ Like Vernon, Hadley examines how cultural life constituted the horizons of political engagement and the limits and possibilities of citizenship. Following the lead of Catherine Hall and others, though, Hadley sees the ‘rule of colonial difference’ as necessarily inflecting these political possibilities.⁴ Hadley argues that the ‘paradoxical status’ of the ‘Irish liberal subject … as both a voting citizen and imperial subject’ was a crucial axis through which mid-Victorian liberals imagined the character and capacities of rights-bearing political subjects. In the 1860s and 1870s, Hadley discovers, liberals racially excluded the Irish subject from full citizenship through his repeated representation as ‘unripe for individuation’ because ‘he’ was still ‘of the soil’. Taking Hadley as emblematic, then, it seems no longer possible to write the cultural history of the political subject of the liberal imagination without reference to how ‘he’ was entangled with the practices and cultures of colonisation. It was through a dynamic constellation of subject positions, formed within what Mrinalinhi Sinha terms an ‘imperial social formation’, that liberals constantly reworked the uneven rights and obligations of citizenship.⁵ An historiographic genealogy from Vernon to Hadley demonstrates how scholars informed by Vernon’s discursive approach now also consider ‘constitutive impact … of British imperial experiences and encounters’ on the liberal imagination of citizenship in mid-Victorian Britain.⁶ What questions, though, might the dispossessive dynamics of settler-colonialism throw up for the history of how mid-Victorian liberals imagined and reframed citizenship?

Seen from an Antipodean perspective, it seems strange that the sites in which manhood suffrage was first achieved in the British World have not substantively figured in the attempts by Hadley and others to ‘provincialize’ the history of British liberalism and its rights-bearing subjects. In colonial Victoria, to take one Antipodean example, the years between the 1832 and the 1867 Reform Acts in Britain were characterised by a dynamic reconfiguration of ideas about self-government and citizenship. Even metropolitan liberals of the 1860s noted that the settler colonies of empire had functioned as laboratories of liberal democracy.⁷ As the ‘violent times’ of the frontier seemed to draw to a close in the 1840s, colonial liberals drew upon and contributed to a transcolonial vocabulary of racialised political entitlement to argue for self-government and political autonomy. Soon thereafter, these liberals deployed the same political vocabulary to organise citizenship within this newly constituted colony, passing manhood suffrage legislation before the 1850s came to a close. At the same time, however, colonial political culture was plagued by questions about the ‘Aboriginal problem’; what position would the surviving Aboriginal population have in the colony? As one liberal asserted in colonial parliament, this was a matter of ‘justice [for these] inhabitants of the soil’ who had been so swiftly dispossessed by the colonists.⁸ The Aborigines Protection Act of 1869 answered this question by simultaneously granting surviving Indigenous peoples rights to ‘protection’ whilst also suspending a variety of their rights as liberal (British) subjects.⁹ Following Hadley, then, the imagination of Aborigines as ‘of the soil’ would seem to have both determined the limits of liberal citizenship whilst, at the same time, providing a crucial discursive counterpoint to assert the political capacities and entitlements of settlers.

However, the array of political subjectivities that confronted and enabled colonial liberals looked rather different from the constellation that populated metropolitan public culture. Indeed, the dynamics of settler colonialism necessarily shaped the relationships between these subject positions in specific ways. Settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe argues, was and is a politics of territory and sovereignty in which an ‘elementary logic of elimination’ seeks to materially and politically replace Indigenous peoples rather than extract labour from their bodies.¹⁰ Yet, while Wolfe’s work has been both productive and provocative for historians working in specific settler-national historiographies, his theorisation of settler colonialism has hardly registered on the horizons of new imperial historians who consider the mutual constitution of nineteenth-century liberalism and empire.¹¹ Indeed, metropolitan liberals were hardly afraid to mobilise the exterminative poetics of settler colonialism to anchor their ideas about the rights-bearing liberal subject. As Hadley notes, Anthony Trollope was comfortable in his 1873 discussion of cognition and capacity to suggest that the fate of Indigenous peoples in Australia was ‘to be exterminated; and the sooner that their doom be accomplished, so that there be no cruelty, the better it will be for civilisation’.¹² So too, if we read these political reconfigurations of mid-nineteenth-century Victoria with Wolfe’s thesis about settler colonialism in mind, the constant imagination of Indigenous peoples as ‘of the soil’ looks less like a resolution of the question of citizenship and more like the return of the problem of territorial sovereignty.

In what follows, then, I first trace out the ways in which accounting for empire has reframed our understanding of the political subject of liberalism in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and bring the problematic of settler sovereignty to bear on this historiography. I then read an (admittedly narrow) set of liberal interlocutors in colonial Victoria in the moment and wake of self-government to demonstrate how questions of dispossession and sovereignty inflected the constitution of political subjects through which citizenship would be organised.¹³ I am interested here in how colonial interlocutors imagined their political world and, following Geoff Eley, how they contributed to liberalism as ‘an evolving structure of political argument inside a wider skein of public conversation’.¹⁴ Rather than accept the oft-made claim that territory and sovereignty are either already determined or ‘secondary’ to the liberal imagination of citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century,¹⁵ we can, following J. G .A. Pocock, read the language of citizenship through the ‘problematic of sovereignty’ because these vocabularies invoked the contingent ‘terms of association’ that necessarily anchor political culture.¹⁶ Indeed, rather than assessing who was ‘first past the post’ of manhood suffrage in the imperial world (and thus naïvely replicating the claims of nineteenth-century settlers to political modernity), I suggest in this article that the settler-colonial history of mid-Victorian liberalism can help us think about the ways in which liberal determinations of citizenship also, in a performative sense, effected determinations of sovereignty.¹⁷ So, too, this reading has implications for historians of settler colonialism. If the opening gestures of new imperial histories were shaped by a shared vocabulary of feminist thinking about the contingent formation of political subjects, what might they offer to accounts of settler sovereignty influenced by Wolfe’s productive theorisation? Indeed, might attention to the dynamic constitution of political subjectivities offer a different answer to the concerns some historians have raised about the deterministic historiographic effects of Wolfe’s theorisation?¹⁸

Liberalism, empire and settler sovereignty

Historians of nineteenth-century liberalism face the oft-acknowledged problem of definition; Vernon’s opening discussion in this collection is a testament to how hard dissenting voices still have to work to suggest that liberal (political) economies represent a contingent political order rather than some kind of state of natural freedom. It is, however, acknowledged by many historians at least that liberalism was, ‘at its heart, concerned with political relationships and political liberties’.¹⁹ In a nineteenth-century British context, these concerns were articulated in a frame that suggested acts of reform (whether parliamentary, social, economic or otherwise) were seeking to ‘restore’ a natural condition of freedom whilst, at the same time, mobilising an historicised sensibility to suggest that the peculiar and exceptional capacities of the British people justified this revelatory restoration.²⁰ These tensions between the historically peculiar and the philosophically universal explain why Stefan Collini has long been unpicking the ways in which liberalism depended upon the morality of manly ‘character’ to locate and moderate its abstracted ideals.²¹ Political liberalism required potently gendered ideas about maturity, capacity, competency and sensibility in order to manage its operations; and these encoded both the individual and the nation.

We can now see, moreover, that these gendered ideas about Britishness were formed by their imperial contexts because two decades of scholarship has (finally) paid heed to a critique that haunts the territorial, ideological and imaginative margins of liberal thought: its ‘paradoxical’ capacity to smooth over the radically unequal distribution and reach of rights across variegated imperial domains whilst maintaining an attachment to the vocabulary of liberty.²² The deep historiography of mid-Victorian liberalism between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts exemplifies both the difficulties and possibilities of these interventions. Following the calls for historians to interrogate rather than accept Britain’s ‘Island Story’ of political development, Catherine Hall, Jane Rendall and Keith McClelland waded through a century of historical contests and traced the ways in which unfree peoples of empire functioned as crucial discursive counterpoints in debates about reform in the 1850s and 1860s.²³ It was no longer possible to see the 1867 Reform Act as only an attempt to resolve domestic ‘problems and anxieties’. Rather, the production of a ‘new rational and responsible male political subject’ via these determinations of citizenship was now understood to be both discursively cohered and politically haunted by ‘those it had excluded’.²⁴

Various scholars concerned with the question of India have pushed these implications further to suggest that, rather than considering imperialism as the paradox and exception to be resolved by liberal thought, we instead need to see how practices of colonial differentiation constituted nineteenth-century liberalism.²⁵ Now that postcolonial scholars have blown the lid open on the complicity of nineteenth-century liberalism and empire, a cottage industry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars has emerged that considers whether these paradoxes were inherent at liberalism’s eighteenth-century birth, or only emerged as its later contradiction.²⁶ New imperial historians have even, according to some, obscured the ways in which liberal thought always provided the intellectual resources to critique the exploitation of Others.²⁷ However, in always posing the question of ‘difference’, liberalism necessarily naturalised the terms under which contests over its incorporations and restorations could unfold. Debates that were structured by questions of differentiation and rights necessarily enacted (rather than reflected) the terms under which the limits and paradoxes of liberalism would be (always unsuccessfully) managed. The question, then, should not be whether or not liberalism was ‘inherently’ exclusionary, but how the terms of political engagement, enfranchisement and exclusion were produced.²⁸

It seems significant, though, that the sites and dynamics of settler colonialism remain largely uninterrogated in these historiographic reconfigurations, even though the history of mid-century political reform suggests that these colonies of settlement were crucial laboratories of liberal modernity, and the ‘Irish question’ was as much a contest over sovereignty as it was a determination of property and citizenship.²⁹ In a searching discussion of the recent work that elaborates the specificity of settler colonialism in the British Empire, Zoë Laidlaw notes that we are only just coming to terms with the ways in which a primary orientation to land rather than labour produced a specific kind of political culture, not least in the ways in which settler politics tended to anomalise Indigenous survival.³⁰ Ideas about liberalism and liberty, Laidlaw suggests, were constantly recast in settler contexts where a Manichean distinction between colonised and coloniser cannot explain either the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers, nor cast any light on the ways in which settler societies became both appellants to the metropolitan centre and its dispossessive agents. Indeed, thinking across different forms of colonialism reminds us to be careful about assessing liberalism on the basis of ‘how far’ it reached or ‘how many’ people it enfranchised, and instead to consider how the contingent production of colonialism’s subjects constantly reworked and reordered the calculus by which these so-called expansions and regressions would occur.

It is little wonder, then, that Wolfe’s discernment of a ‘logic of elimination’ at the heart of the settler enterprise has become a powerful organising trope amongst students of settler colonialism. For Wolfe, settler colonialism is determined by an ‘elementary logic of elimination’ because settlers seek to replace Indigenous peoples rather than extract labour from their bodies; settler colonialism was and is a politics of sovereignty rather than labour. Territorial hunger had little use for Indigenous peoples and mere survival functioned as a form of resistance to the settler enterprise that required psychological, cultural and legal suppression.³¹

In contexts where political liberalism was normalised with remarkable expedience in local political cultures, local Indigenous populations were completely reorganised by the swift territorial acquisitions of settlers and a suite of vocabularies and practices of governance emerged as dynamic responses to the settler colonial condition.³² Wolfe argues that a variety of strategies unfolded across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ‘demographically erode’ an Indigenous constituency including ‘territorial removal and/or confinement, the imposition of regimes of private property … discourses of miscegenation, Native citizenship, child abduction, total institutional surveillance … intensive educational programmes, religious conversion and related assimilationist interventions’.³³ Ideas about race, unsurprisingly, became a crucial mechanism to justify these legal exceptions as ‘race restore[d] the inequality that the extension of citizenship had theoretically abolished’. These ideas, however, were produced through and by colonialism’s operation rather than providing the material foundation for its effects – race was and is, to return to Wolfe, ‘colonialism speaking’ (continuously and performatively, it should be noted).³⁴ Whilst postcolonial scholars have long noted the fabrication of racial categories as a mechanism of colonial rule, these categories were always dynamically oriented by the imperatives of historically specific colonialisms.

If, following Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘settler colonialism … conditions … all the political, economic and cultural processes that those societies touch’, then we need to ask in what ways did the territorially-oriented imperatives of elimination and replacement inflect these contestations over the capacities and capabilities of the rights-bearing liberal subject. Indeed, noting the ways in which the rediscovery of Foucauldian governmentality has thrown open new ways of thinking through, amongst other things, liberal rationalities of rule, Morgensen also notes how, for Foucault, a liberal ‘art of managing things and persons … depends on “the question of sovereignty” no longer determining the field of power’.³⁵ Whilst many postcolonial and new imperial historians see the question of territory as secondary to the determinations of liberal subjecthood that echoed and rebounded across nineteenth-century political life, from an Antipodean perspective, this seems a politically and historiographically troubling assertion. The politics of sovereignty that determines settler colonialism is in danger of ‘remaining naturalised’ as the precondition for contests of the limits of liberal citizenship.³⁶

Political theorists and their associated intellectual historians would most likely suggest that bringing these two terms together is philosophically discordant, and this partly explains why these historiographical concerns – the imperial dimensions of liberal citizenship and the eliminatory structures of settler sovereignty – have rarely been read across and between each other. After all, citizenship is something that is managed within the sovereign territories of the liberal imagination. Under these terms, raising the spectre of territory and sovereignty represents, as Jordana Bailkin notes, the ‘wrong question to ask’.³⁷ So too, in the rubric of Foucauldian governmentality, sovereign forms of power represent an entirely different rationality of rule to the mechanisms and practices organised around notions of freedom.³⁸ As Jens Bartelson suggests, however, it is precisely because modern political orders presuppose sovereignty that this category must be ‘at play’ in any political moment. Indeed, whilst there has been much work that traces the question of sovereignty in its international and domestic jurisprudential settings (whilst, at the same time, deploying the history of empire to call into question how those categories came into being), there has been less attention paid to the ways in which everyday political cultures necessarily ‘presuppose some answer’ to the question of sovereignty.³⁹ This ‘answer’, however legally incoherent and ill-informed, took particular forms in the performative space of settler-colonial political cultures, where the discursive and corporeal management of Indigenous peoples necessarily inflected configurations of the terms of political association. Liberal rationalities of rights were thus constantly reassembled and reconfigured under contingent axes of differentiation that necessarily and simultaneously effected determinations of sovereignty.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that one of the metacategories of the liberal imagination in the mid-nineteenth century – ‘self-government’ – had purchase in both individual and geopolitical terms and, in a settler context, was articulated in consistent counterpoint with declarations of Indigenous political incapacity. It might be tempting, moreover, to see settler self-government as a form of prophylaxis against what David Armitage diagnoses as the contagion of sovereignty that unfolded from the late eighteenth century on the edges of European empires – a kind of rear-guard protection of an imperial polity with its uneven and oddly-shaped jurisdictions. However, this would miss the ways in which territorial and jurisdictional determinations of sovereignty have a long history of partial, graduated and dynamic forms – of which, settler self-government was one.⁴⁰ As Lisa Ford notes in her interrogation of settler jurisdictional ambiguities, operations of sovereignty necessarily entail a determination of ‘which sorts of political communities could exercise rights over land and people and under what conditions’.⁴¹ ‘Self-government’ was both a way to instantiate a settler political community and a normative ideal of political manhood; it functioned as a claim to the kind of ‘attenuated’ and ‘gradated’ sovereignty that Ann Laura Stoler suggests characterised imperialism and also operated as an organising principle of citizenship within those constantly ‘becoming’ polities.⁴²

Self-government and citizenship in colonial Victoria

In the 1840s, vocal claims on political autonomy took shape across the settler periphery in the wake of political unrest in Canada and the Durham report that followed, crafting new terms of political association to instantiate settler polities in the language of liberalism.⁴³ Reformers in the Australian colonies watched the establishment of forms of legislative autonomy in the Cape and in Canada in the 1840s, noting how these transformations were ‘framed in a liberal spirit’; the development of colonial liberalism was clearly more than a story of metropolitan invention and colonial mimicry.⁴⁴ Campaigns for self-government within a broader imperial constitutional framework dovetailed reasonably quickly into reform movements for the expansion of citizenship rights within Antipodean polities, leading to the democratic wonder of manhood suffrage between 1856 and 1858 in NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Conventionally, settler-national historiographies in Australia have tended to wonder whether the speedy move from ‘self-government’ to ‘ultra-democracy’ can be explained by the influence of Chartism, the provocations of the rebellions on the Gold Fields or by some accident of land inflation.⁴⁵ However, Angela Woollacott argues that we need to see ‘colonial democratic movements as connected to the expansion of colonial territory, and fully cognisant of frontier struggles over land and the dispossession of Indigenous people’.⁴⁶ Indeed, as Jessie Mitchell has shown, these liberal appellants drew on racialised ideas about the ‘galling yoke of slavery’ to suggest that they deserved to be unshackled from their metropolitan masters.⁴⁷ Port Phillip petitioners thus imagined the continued hand of the colonial office in the ‘affairs of the colony’ and rule from New South Wales as a racialised anomaly, a form of injustice for a polity imagined in the racialised languages of political manhood.⁴⁸ Seen from this perspective, as I have argued elsewhere, the terms of association by which settlers constituted a form of attenuated sovereignty in the 1840s governed the reach of rights within that polity a decade later.⁴⁹

Between the late 1840s and 1860s, a flurry of short articles, essays and books imagined, in historical terms, the emergence of a Victorian political sensibility – shaped and mutually policed by a love of liberty, an attachment to political institutions and a capacity for measured self-government and self-possession. Whilst some observers had greeted the agitated rush to the gold fields with fears about social and political disorder, a more prudent form of excitement captured these level-headed reforming types.⁵⁰ In the wake of self-government and the context of suffrage reform, liberal writers suggested that

the political history of the first fourteen years of [the colony’s] existence [reads as] the emancipation of [an] independent existence under the fairest auspices … [Victoria is becoming] a second happy England in the Antipodes … Here, civilization is destined to find an asylum.⁵¹

By the end of this small boom in historical writing, adult men in the colony had been enfranchised: the liberal historian, ethnographer and parliamentarian Thomas McCombie suggested Victoria had transformed from a ‘perfect despotism … to the very opposite point of democracy’.⁵²

Taken together, these histories told a story of enterprising and freeborn men who successfully argued for colonial self-government and then manifested this spirit of self-possession in the creation of democratic political institutions. Given many of these figures were implicated in the campaign for self-government, their appeals to popular constitutionalism should be no surprise; they were, in a sense, discursively constituting a colonial polity. This kind of historical framing, as Vernon notes, represented the ‘master-narrative’ of mid Victorian British politics and Paul Pickering has similarly traced its purchase in colonial New South Wales.⁵³ Whilst the vocabularies and practices of these settlers might have deployed narratives of recognition and restoration, we should be suspicious of these appeals to ‘already existing’ rights, and instead consider the possibility that they were invented traditions of liberty. Settlers may, in fact, have been forging new ideas about the capacities and competencies of the British subject through gendered and racialised stories of settler-colonial progress. In these early colonial histories, we can see the operation of these ideas laid bare, perhaps because they sought to both enact and explain political manhood.

This master narrative was, in the context of dispossession, enabling the constitution of a settler-colonial liberal subject, characterised by respectable freedom and drawn in sharp contrast to the pre-political Aborigine and the racially suspect convict. Indeed, the explanation for this smooth transformation, many suggested, lay in the racialised character and competency of the Port Phillip settlers. For James Bonwick, for example, the penal histories of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land provided a clear way to constitute Victoria as the bearer of the liberal tradition; convict ‘men lived an adventurous, hazardous and semi savage life. [Victoria, however, was] established as a colony by freemen, free emigrants, and free enterprise’. So too, these writers racially marked out the project of settler colonial reform in contrast to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land this transformation unfolded; ‘Aborigines’ were declared ‘not fit to have a political existence’ in this newly constituted colony.⁵⁴ Indeed, Bonwick argued that the history of settler expansion would much more productively draw on the traditions and style of ‘Sharon Turner rather than Hume or Macaulay’.⁵⁵ Citing Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons from the first decades of the nineteenth century, liberal historians like Bonwick mobilised a tradition of explicitly racialised histories as the framework to historically comprehend the democratic temper of the colonies.⁵⁶

Similarly, William Westgarth, described by some historians as a ‘John Stuart Mill of Victoria’, understood the projects of settler dispossession, self-government and manhood suffrage in racial terms.⁵⁷ A key player in the campaign for self-government in the late 1840s, Westgarth became a member of the colonial legislature where, like most parliamentarians, he supported the campaign for suffrage reform. For Westgarth, later reflecting on the early history of the colony, it seemed an ‘inevitable law of nature’ that Indigenous people in Victoria would ‘disappear before the invading progress of the colonists’.⁵⁸ In sharp contrast, however, ‘politics was an engrossing subject in the Antipodes because all classes … independent in their means … insist on playing their part’. ⁵⁹ Manhood suffrage, he suggested, was simply a reflection of the ‘independent and responsible’ character of the settler, a citizen-subject he contrasted to the ‘Aboriginal native (who is) unable to rise to a comprehension of the actions, motives and principles that compose the structure of civilisation’.⁶⁰

Indeed, many of these liberals had been deeply entangled with questions reverberating around 1840s and 1850s colonial public culture concerning the ‘place’ of Indigenous people in the re-forming colony (Westgarth, for example, had written an ethnographic account of the ‘Capabilities and Prospects of Australian Aborigines’ in 1846.⁶¹) Whilst historians of Indigenous life have suggested the 1850s marked a ‘decline’ in public concern about what would soon be termed the ‘Aboriginal Problem’ in Victoria, as the failures of the Port Phillip Protectorate loomed large in colonial public life, the story is a little more complex than this.⁶² This decade also marked an upswing in anthropological interest in the rights and capacities of Indigenous people. Debating societies, philosophical and mechanics institutes, the Royal Society and various other instruments of ‘public’ debate were littered with lectures and debates about the ethnographic ‘character’ of the ‘Aborigine’.⁶³ Participating fully in this upswing (and in the same year that the colonial parliament was determining the reach of political rights), McCombie – by then a member of the Legislative Council – called in 1857 for a select committee to ‘investigate the condition’ of Indigenous peoples in Victoria. He wanted this committee to develop come kind of coherent legislative framework for their amelioration. This was, McCombie claimed, a matter of ‘justice [for these] inhabitants of the soil’ who had been so swiftly dispossessed by the colonists. It seems crucial, moreover, that the select committee was as much an exercise in anthropological imagination as it was a moment of policy development; almost two thirds of the material collected was framed by an anthropological questionnaire devised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to determine the character and political capacities of Indigenous Peoples. The committee ultimately suggested that the ‘original owners of the soil’ should be ‘protected’ through a network of reserves and missions with legislation to support the management of this system of protection. Whilst the legislative framework McCombie sought would be close to a decade in coming, the 1858 report provided the impetus to concretise the emerging system of reserves and missions into the Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines (CBPA). More importantly, though, McCombie argued for a thorough exception to the rights and entitlements of British subjecthood: freedom of movement, freedom of contract and the right to familial privacy should all be suspended for Aborigines in the liberal regime of protection, justified by an anthropological account of their incapacities and incompetencies.⁶⁴

While some historians have connected the Aborigines Protection Act of 1869 that followed these recommendations to evangelical discourses of protection from the earlier nineteenth century, it also represented a governmentalisation of these ideas in the language of liberalism and liberty.⁶⁵ The Board would now be able to employ the mechanisms of the colonial state to control where Indigenous people lived, where their children went to school, what happened to any income they earned, and even the clothes they wore – simply by virtue of their legal status as an ‘Aborigine’. As the Minister for Justice described to his fellow legislators, the Bill was ‘intended to provide for the protection and management of the aboriginal natives of Victoria’ and he predicted the legislation would enable ‘the board to watch over the adult aboriginals throughout the colony’ because the CBPA would now ‘act in loco parentis to the aborigines’.⁶⁶

Here, then, would seem to be a paradigmatic example of the colonial paradoxes of liberalism, where the racialised imagination of the ‘Aborigine’ managed Indigenous people’s status as ‘equal subjects with unequal rights’ whilst also nourishing claims to self-government for settlers.⁶⁷ In the same decade that adult men in the colony were enfranchised (deploying the same political subjectivities that had been forged during the campaign for self-government a few years beforehand), the ‘Aborigine’ became an object of liberal differentiation; and whilst Aboriginal men were not formally excluded from the franchise, their liberal rights were suspended in a variety of other ways. What happens, though, if we keep the question of territory and sovereignty ‘in mind’ when considering the racialised dynamics of settler citizenship?

In 1856, as settler political culture was over-determined by questions of self-government and citizenship, an editorial in the Argus, a newspaper not known for its ‘liberal humanitarianism’, punctured the by now all too-common liberal story of racialised respectable modernity. Instead, questions of territorial possession unsettled such a neat organisation of rights:

We have long held the opinion that as a people we are guilty of the basest meanness and dishonesty in our treatment of [the Aborigines] … the far-famed Anglo-Saxon – the true Caucasian – appears in a … thoroughly despicable light … He takes possession of the land as a matter of course. He alters water-courses, drives off game, fences, clears, and cultivates, tears open the very bowels of the earth, and walks away with uncounted wealth, while the original occupant of the soil … only looks helplessly on … What, to true nobility of nature would be an additional plea for fair and even liberal treatment – the helplessness and unsophistication of those we dispossess – becomes with us – oh, shame, shame that it should be so – the opportunity for dishonesty and fraudulent misappropriation. We assert that under present circumstances this country has been shamelessly stolen from the blacks.⁶⁸

Indeed, humanitarians in Port Phillip and Victoria in the 1840s and 1850s had repeatedly called for legislative action; so too Anne O’Brien’s work has traced a consistent call for some form of reparations across the Australian colonies in the 1830s, usually configured as the granting of protection and land.⁶⁹ From the 1840s in Victoria, these attempts to secure some form of protection often included an argument that the ‘Aborigines’ had some kind of ‘rights of the soil’. In 1842, the Melbourne Debating Society was instituted, a forum whose very formation performed the accoutrements of liberal capacity and competency. Its first five debates, with a total of 20 speakers, considered the proposition that ‘Aboriginal blacks do not possess an indefeasible right to the soil’.⁷⁰ Questions about these rights of the soil reverberated across colonial political life as the projects of reform took shape. Liberals noted that ‘in the occupation of their soil we are partakers of their worldly things’, humanitarians repeatedly asked whether they should not have their ‘rights of the soil’ recognised, and even in the context of violent conflict in the Western District, a Geelong newspaper wondered whether this was not because ‘Aborigines [were] originally the lord and owner of the soil’.⁷¹

Historians of citizenship would no doubt be familiar with this term, and it might be read as an evocation of a foundational premise of citizenship claims within the British context, where birth within a specific territory provided the foundation for recognition as a British subject.⁷² So too, Elaine Hadley notes how liberal configurations of the Irish voter were constantly drawn back to ‘his’ status as ‘of the soil’. For Hadley, this evocation of ‘soil’ was a rhetorical device through which questions of property and suffrage were managed in a racialised imagination of a near-peasant people. While in a narrow jurisdictional sense, these rights of the soil could be a way for colonial courts to determine whether or not an individual would be afforded the rights and recognition of British subjecthood (a determination with particular relevance where colonies from competing empires butted against each other), in the less deterministic and more performative and ambivalent space of political culture, was this constant recourse to the rights of the soil not an echo of the ghost of sovereignty? As Julie Evans notes, cultures of settler sovereignty that took shape from the late eighteenth century were oriented by an imperative to ‘disencumber … expropriated territory of an Indigenous counterclaim’ and convert this territory into ‘alienable private property’.⁷³ In a performative sense, moreover, this disencumbering was always ‘at play’ rather than at some point resolved.

The point here is not that liberals and humanitarians were intentionally rupturing the politics of settler sovereignty, rather that the figure of the Aborigine, so crucial to how liberals determined ideas about individual capacity and competency, necessarily evoked the question of sovereignty, not least because these vocabularies had been developed through claims on a form of attenuated sovereignty in the campaign for self-government. Of all the ways to talk about settler obligations to Indigenous people as a group, the ‘rights of the soil’ seems to call into question territorial possession. Perhaps, then, we need to read the smooth surfaces of colonial public cultures in different ways, and not only in relation to the paradoxes of liberal subjecthood.

Moreover, reading the constitution of political subjects in liberal political culture as always and already a determination of sovereignty has implications for the broader history of mid-century liberalism. Indeed, whilst Hadley works hard to consider how questions of land and soil inflected metropolitan assessments of Irish capacity in the 1860s, nowhere does she see the question of territorial sovereignty disrupting these contests over capacity – even as, in a Pocockian perspective, the question of sovereignty was the very precondition for these contests over citizenship, and the languages of the former provided the means by which the latter could be determined. By reading these political imaginings only in relation to the reach of (individual) rights, we risk repeating, rather than interrogating, the myths by which settlers took possession of Indigenous territory (a point that might well be remembered in the Irish case). Failing to see these sovereign reverberations, whether in Britain or Victoria, would mean that we inadvertently naturalise the territorial politics of empire, even as we reveal the imperial dynamics of racialisation.

Conclusion

This article has offered a tentative reply to Pocock’s call for a new British history that takes seriously the ‘problematic of sovereignty’.⁷⁴ I have, following that call for historians to account for the historically contingent terms of political association, sketched how specific political subjectivities were imperial constitutions that could simultaneously function as ways to geopolitically organise empire and distribute rights within those reforming spaces. In settler colonies like Victoria, perhaps because the move to self-government occurred in tandem with an empire-wide reconfiguration of the political subject of liberalism, we can see in sharp relief how these terms of association were dynamically constituted by the processes they pretended to describe.

In his work on ‘western discourses of sovereignty’ Antony Anghie asks historians to interrogate the relationship between ‘internal and external dimensions of sovereignty’, by which he means we should interrogate how a ‘people’ come to be recognized as sovereign within a political domain and how the territorial borders of that sovereignty come to be recognised by others.⁷⁵ The ‘people’ and ‘others’ of these determinations, though, were imagined in the crucible of imperial expansion and, moreover, in a settler colony, liberal political cultures required ‘Aboriginal people’ and their ‘internal’ counterclaim on sovereignty to be constantly foreclosed in the language of citizenship. Like all discursive foreclosures, though, the category of ‘Aborigines’ necessarily produced a possibility of disruption. Even as Indigenous peoples were denied a ‘political existence’ within the settler polity, their production as a category within the liberal imagination and their material survival brought into political possibility another (always foreclosed) sovereignty. In a political culture determined by the (always unsuccessful) project of dispossession, then, determinations of citizenship did not simply mobilise the vocabularies of the self-governing settler subject; their racialised constitution was necessarily haunted by their contingent territorial foundations because the political and un-sovereign existence of Australian Aborigines was produced by colonialism itself.

Recently, Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse have raised questions about Wolfe’s logic of elimination, suggesting that a theory of settler colonialism cannot explain how sovereignty was contested and reconfigured in historical reality. They note that historians now see settler sovereignty as a fragile and unstable accomplishment rather than a fait accompli and warn that it would be an injustice to retrospectively concretise the notion that nineteenth-century international law always and coherently denied state status and sovereignty to Indigenous peoples.⁷⁶ In a contemporary context where Indigenous peoples are seeking to have their sovereignty re-animated, here, then, would seem to be a useable past of ‘empirical’ and ‘factual’ sovereign uncertainties. ⁷⁷ Indeed, with an eye on contemporary Australian politics, Rowse argues that those working within the ‘elimination … paradigm … have trouble dealing with Indigenous agency’ because the ‘structure’ of settler colonialism necessarily determines the terms of political engagement’.⁷⁸ Their shared answer to the ‘problem’ of Wolfe, as Ford writes, is a turn to the empirical, because ‘empiricism deals more honestly, and sometimes more usefully, than theories of liberalism or settler colonialism with the historical, legal and political detritus that constrains our reality’.⁷⁹ Faced with a contemporary politics in which claims to Indigenous authority are tied to notions of authenticity and a preceding claim on territory, the temptations of empiricism are understandable. The answer to the ways in which Wolfe’s work can turn settler political and legal cultures into the endlessly smooth reflection of a settler will to expropriation would seem to be, in this light, the recovery of empirically authentic identities from which a different politics might be excavated. Past and present settler political cultures, then, could be celebrated for the moments in which they reflect authentic Indigenous heterogeneity or self-consciously admitted sovereign ambiguities.

In this article, though, I have argued that attention to the discursive constitution of imperial citizenship necessarily throws up some useful questions about how the terms of settler sovereignty were contingently effected rather than materially determined. Sovereignty is always a performative foundation of political culture and retreating to a contest over empirical veracity will never be able to account for how these ‘terms of association’ were performatively instantiated even as they claimed to have material and empirical foundations. At the same time, though, Wolfe’s determination to reveal the structure of settler colonialism, where the political ‘interests’ of settlers and Indigenous peoples have an immutable logic, is an awkward fit with the attempt to turn the history of liberalism into a history of dynamic and unstable constitution. Seen discursively, settler colonialism perpetually inaugurates and seeks to eliminate the troubling spectre of an Indigenous counterclaim on sovereignty; this was a ‘population’, in the Foucauldian sense, whose racialised instantiation within liberal political cultures necessarily animated its possible status as a territorially bounded sovereign people. It required discursive work, then, to constantly cohere the notion that questions of sovereignty were resolved before the moment of citizenship, and thus foreclose any revelation of these territorial contingencies. Nowhere is this more clear than in the political work colonial liberals had to perform in order to reproduce the myth that the ‘Aboriginal problem’ was a question of rights rather than territory, a question of property rather than sovereignty. We need to interrogate the terms under which these foreclosures occurred, and uncover the moments when they were threatened by their own deconstruction. For it is in these always uncertain sovereignties that the territorial politics of liberalism can be laid bare.

About the author

Leigh Boucher is a lecturer in British History at Macquarie University. His research interests centre on political culture, liberalism and questions of difference. He is currently completing a monograph that considers the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal reform and settler colonialism.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the participants in the symposium from which this paper is drawn and, in particular, James Vernon and Kate Fullagar, for their generous engagement in the days surrounding this event as well as the reviewers for their thoughtful comments. A thoughtful read from Clare Monagle offered much needed clarity in a crucial moment and, lastly, many thanks to Sarah Pinto, whose engagement (and house) nourished the difficult work of writing this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6.

2 In that sense, historians had and have good reason to be ‘afraid of the linguistic turn’, as Vernon wryly put it. James Vernon, ‘Who’s Afraid of the “Linguistic Turn”? The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents,’ Social History 19, no. 1 (1994): 81–97.

3 Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010). This question of empire Vernon himself would later consider more carefully. See, for example, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, Berkeley Series in British Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

4 For a discussion of what would become known as the ‘new imperial’ approach to the relationship between culture, the ‘rule of colonial difference’, and politics, see Catherine Hall, ‘Introduction‘, in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

5 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 4–5.

6 Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3.

7 Marian Sawer, ed., Elections: Full, Free & Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001). For a suggestion that liberal reforms were ‘beamed back’ to Britain from the settler colonies, see Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (2003): 9. This phrase is, of course, from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

8 Victorian Parliamentary Debates: Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly (VPD) (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1869), 1726–1727, 1808.

9 For a full discussion of this Act, see Leigh Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular Ethnography and the Governance of Aboriginal Subjects’, in Settler Colonial Governance in the 19th Century Victoria, ed. Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell (Canberra: ANU E-Press and Aboriginal History Monographs, 2015).

10 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, no. 36 (1994): 96.

11 There are a few exceptions here, usually working within settler-national historiographies and/or contexts. Although they do not always articulate their research in relation to the question of sovereignty, see for example, Marilyn Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self Who Claimed the Right to Self-Government’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (2012): accessed 3 May 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ 10.1353/cch.2012.0011; Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76; 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).

12 Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain, 15.

13 I am, I must confess, looking at what Paul Pickering has termed the ‘smug merchants who were rapidly securing their grip on the levers of political power’ in the colonies – precisely, though, because they seem to exert such power – whether we see power in Foucauldian terms or not. Paul Pickering, ‘Was the “Southern Tree of Liberty” an Oak?’, Labour History, no. 92 (2007): 140. Due to the limitations of space this must, at best, be considered a suggestive reading.

14 Geoff Eley, ‘Liberalism Forever: Intellectual History, Social History and the Global Adventures of a Concept’, Social History 39, no. 3 (2014): 430.

15 See, for example, Simon Gunn and James Vernon, ‘Introduction’, in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Simon Gunn and James Vernon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 8.

16 J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 259, 306.

17 I am using ‘performative’ here in the sense developed by Judith Butler where terms of political identification are endlessly deferred citations, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95.

18 See, for example, Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, 45, no. 3 (2014): 297–298, 310.

19 Peter Mandler, Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

20 Gunn and Vernon, ‘Introduction’, 7.

21 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

22 Long before properly named postcolonial history pointed out the ‘enduring paradox’ of liberalism, marginal figures had deployed their ambivalent positions to point this out.

23 Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–70.

24 James Vernon, ‘Notes Towards an Introduction’, in Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.

25 This literature is expansive, but perhaps the most important work to frame this project remains Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

26 Jennifer Pitts, ‘Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century’, The American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 94.

27 Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Liberalism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century International Law’, The American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 127.

28 I am drawing here, obviously, on feminist theorisations of difference, see Joan W. Scott, ‘Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 32–50.

29 David Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 63.

30 Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia’s Bounds’, Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 826.

31 This point is made in Sherene Razack, ‘When Place Becomes Race’, in Race, Space and the Law, ed. Sherene Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), 4.

32 Julie Evans, et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003), 1–16.

33 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Race and the Trace of History’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 272.

34 Ibid., 275.

35 Morgensen, ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, 55.

36 Ibid., 71.

37 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Place of Liberalism’, Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (2005): 85.

38 There is a developing historiography that takes account of the more recent rediscovery of the theoretical possibilities of ‘governmentality’, I am, however, interested here in a rather narrowly conceived notion of political culture in order to rehearse these questions. On empire, liberalism and governmentality, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003).

39 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13; See also, Jens Bartelson ‘The Concept of Sovereignty Revisited’, European Journal of International Law 17, no. 2 (2006): 463–474.

40 David Armitage, ‘The Contagion of Sovereignty: Declarations of Independence since 1776’, South African Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2005): 1–5.

41 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6.

42 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 129.

43 Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98–122.

44 The Herald (Sydney), 24 September 1832, 5.

45 See, for example, Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006); J.B. Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales, 1848–1884 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988).

46 Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies, 104.

47 Jessie Mitchell ‘“The Galling Yoke of Slavery”: Race and Separation in Colonial Port Phillip’, Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 2 (2009): 125.

48 ‘Affairs of the Colony’, Geelong Advertiser, 29 October 1845, 1. On racialised political manhood see, Marilyn Lake, ‘The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia’, History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 41–62; Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self Who Claimed the Right to Self-Government’.

49 I have mounted this argument elsewhere, see: Leigh Boucher, ‘Race, Rights and the Re-forming Settler Polity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Victoria’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013): 83–104.

50 David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 30, 36, 85 See also, for example, Thomas McCombie History of the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: Sands and Kenny, 1858); James Bonwick, The Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip: Being a History of the Country Now Called Victoria (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1856); William Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria: Its History, Commerce, and Gold Mining; its Social and Political Institutions Down to the End of 1863 (London: Sampson Low and Marston, 1864).

51 Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria, 18–19.

52 McCombie, History of the Colony of Victoria, 1–4.

53 Paul Pickering, ‘The Oak of English Liberty: Popular Constitutionalism in New South Wales, 1848–1856’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 3, no. 1 (2001): 1–27; see also, Mark McKenna, ‘Transplanted to Savage Shores: Indigenous Australians and British Birthright in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Australian Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (2012): accessed 3 May 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ 10.1353/cch.2012.0009.

54 McCombie, History of the Colony of Victoria, 9–13.

55 James Bonwick, ‘The Writing of Colonial History’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 26 (1895): 6–7.

56 As Horsman so compellingly describes, Anglo-Saxonism was an ‘echoing cavern of banalities out of which even a well-lit historian might never emerge’. Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 3 (1976): 389.

57 Geoffrey Serle, ‘Westgarth, William (1815–1889)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 12 November 2015, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/westgarth-william-4830/text8057.

58 William Westgarth ‘On the Relations of the Colonies to the Mother Country’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 1 (1870): 70.

59 Cited in Empire, 4 January 1862, 2.

60 William Westgarth, A Report on the Condition, Capabilities, and Prospects, of the Australian Aborigines (Melbourne: William Clarke, 1846), 37.

61 Ibid.

62 See Leigh Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, for further discussion.

63 See, Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria (Canberra: ANU E-Press and Aboriginal History Monographs, 2015).

64 See Leigh Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection’.

65 This is the project of Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origns of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

66 VPD (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1869), 1726–1777, 1808.

67 Evans, et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, 2

68 Argus, 16 March 1856, 4.

69 Anne O’Brien, ‘Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 2 (2011): accessed 3 May 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2011.0016.

70 Reported in Southern Australian, 29 November 1842, 3.

71 Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, 25 January 1854, 4; Herald, 2 November 1850, 2; Cited in Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origns of Humanitarian Governance, 147.

72 David Dutton, One of Us?: A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), 11.

73 Julie Evans, Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance, Otago History Series (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 2005), 7.

74 Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History, 268.

75 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9; See also, Julie Evans et al., eds, Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility (Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).

76 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 4–5.

77 Kent McNeil, ‘Legal and Factual Sovereignty’, in Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility, 62; see also, Mark Finnane, ‘Settler Justice and Aboriginal Homicide in Late Colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (2011): 244–259.

78 Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’: 297–298, 310.

79 Lisa Ford, ‘Introduction,’ in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 10.