Colonial Formations highlights the critical importance of colonial dynamics at the so-called peripheries of the British Empire. With a focus on the Australasian settler colonies, the Pacific, India, and China, it examines colonised peoples’ subjectivities, mobilities and networks, through accounts of labour, law, education and activism.
Decentring the British metropole, while shedding light on its enduring power, contributors chart the vast array of mobilities and connections that shaped these dynamics. They illuminate contexts and experiences of labour, education, touring, courtrooms and anticolonial struggles. Many attend to questions of colonial belonging and its limits – within cultures of sociability – or citizenship and its attendant benefits and rights. The chapters show how colonised peoples, both Indigenous and ‘coloured’ migrants, critiqued and mobilised to challenge imposed strictures on their life possibilities, whether in individual colonies, in cross-colonial networks or across the imperial arena. In doing so, this collection offers new insights into the interplay of place, mobility and power, and on the critical importance of colonial formations.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal History Australia.
Introduction: on the critical importance of colonial formations
Jane Carey and Frances Steel
1. The New South Wales Bar and Aboriginal people: making Aboriginal subjects c. 1830–1866
Paula Jane Byrne
2. ‘A walk for our race’: colonial modernity, Indigenous mobility and the origins of the Young Māori Party
Jane Carey
3. Potter v. Minahan: Chinese Australians, the law and belonging in White Australia
Kate Bagnall
4. The ‘Chinese’ always belonged
Peter Prince
5. ‘I am a British subject’: Indians in Australia claiming their rights, 1880–1940
Margaret Allen
6. Servant mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand: the transcolonial politics of domestic work and immigration restriction, c.1870–1920
Frances Steel
7. Anticolonialism and the politics of friendship in New Zealand’s Pacific
Nicholas Hoare
8. The politics of friendship and cosmopolitan thought zones at the end of empire: Indian women’s study tours to Europe 1934–38
Jane Haggis
Biography
Jane Carey teaches and researches across settler colonial, women’s and Indigenous histories at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the editor of Re-Orienting Whiteness (2009), Creating White Australia (2009), and Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (2014).
Frances Steel teaches and researches Pacific and colonial history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (2011) and editor of New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives (2018).
