Abstract
As multiple studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imperialism demonstrate, family history and imperial history are intertwined fields. Family networks might play integral roles in the shaping of imperial economies and political institutions, as the eighteenth-century Johnstone family of Scotland demonstrates. They also might be constituted through and because of imperialism, both in eighteenth-century South Asia under East India Company rule and in the Caribbean slave economy. In other contexts, interracial families were created by Anishinaabe and Cree women's unions with British fur traders, unions that facilitated the northwest fur trade, or, as the Connolly-Douglas family of Vancouver Island demonstrates, ties of intimacy could also be shaped both by the Caribbean slave trade and the northwest fur trade. Later in the nineteenth century, the families of British colonizers in India found it impossible to escape their imperial context, even though they wielded more power and influence than the families of colonized people. Although imperial family formations were shaped by their members’ relationships to imperial power, and much depends upon where, when, and at whom one looks, this body of scholarship tells us that families and the networks in which they were embedded have been an integral part of imperial formations. In turn, family fortunes were shaped by the empire's vicissitudes and contingencies.
Elizabeth Elbourne's Empire, Kinship, and Violence, then, enters a growing and dynamic field. A well-respected historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and British imperialism, Elbourne is best known for her 2001 prize-winning monograph on religion, power, and violence in South Africa, Blood Ground. In her new book, she broadens her scope to examine the links between families, the creation of settler colonialism, and the relationship between humanitarianism, Indigenous rights, and state violence in early Canada (most notably, the colony of Upper Canada), Australia, and South Africa. Elbourne has chosen three distinct, (although at times closely connected) families and the networks that they both created and were shaped by as structural devices through which to explore her themes. The Brants, Bannisters, and Buxton families were all engaged with the spread of British imperial power, albeit from a range of locations and from different perspectives. The book opens with an exploration of the history of the Brant family, particularly Joseph, his son John, and sister Mary, Mohawk members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Elbourne goes on to examine their roles as both advocates for Indigenous sovereignty and as mediators with imperial officials and settler-colonists in the years that led up to, during, and after the American Revolution. She then moves to England's Bannister family or, more precisely, the three Bannister brothers: Saxe, John William, and Thomas, whose imperial travels took them from England to Upper Canada, Australia, and Africa. The Bannisters’ work for empire—and Saxe Bannister's advocacy for a “moral settler empire” (p. 153)—was carried out through landowning, the legal profession, and the British army and navy. Finally, Elbourne's third family, the Buxtons, were central actors in the campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Following its success, they also carried their activism into campaigns to highlight settler abuse of Indigenous people, first in the context of South Africa and then, more broadly, as disseminators of information about settler violence across the Empire.
Much of this book is concerned with the politics and violence of settler colonialism, but families provide the backbone for Elbourne's work. For one, the Brant family's history illuminates the centrality of kin networks to Indigenous diplomacy and decisions around war and peacekeeping, ones in which women such as Mary Brant could be significant actors. This history also, though, illustrates the extent that warfare—whether with other Indigenous nations or, more significantly in this period, with Anglo-Americans—shaped familial and kin networks within the Confederacy, since captives taken in war might become adopted kin. Moreover, as Elbourne points out, the “creation of fictive kinship,” whether through the adoption of other forms of cultural exchange, “helped shape the treaties” that settler society in Upper Canada (for example) would see in rather different ways (p. 58). The Brant family, closely tied to British imperial power through the Indian Department (not least because of Mary Brant's intimate relationship with the Department's North American Superintendent of Indians, William Johnson) was in a position to exercise particular forms of, as Elbourne calls it, family biopower. Joseph, Mary, and their children and other kin exercised that biopower not just through the fraught and, for the Haudenosaunee, tortuous process of the American Revolution but also in the new colony of Upper Canada. Decisions over Indigenous sovereignty that concerned land and the Confederacy's ability to control non-Indigenous residency at the Grand River (for example) were made within the context of shifting family and kin networks. Moreover, the Indian Department in the colony had its share of kinship networks that included Indigenous people, not least the Brants. However, Elbourne argues that by the 1840s, as the colonial state's need for military alliances with Indigenous nations ended and the fur trade declined in importance (at least so far as the southern portion of the colony was concerned), Indigenous communities found themselves subjected to a more bureaucratic, paternalistic approach, one in which Indigenous family and kin networks lost their ability to shape settler government's treatment of them.
In contrast, despite their opposition to its brutality, the Bannister brothers were proponents of settler colonialism and to some measure its beneficiaries. Saxe Bannister's 1823 appointment as the first Attorney-General of New South Wales ended prematurely with his humiliating recall by London; he then moved to Cape Town, where he worked with Khoekhoe people to create several petitions and to make the case that the slave trade, even if officially abolished, was present in the colony. Despite his work to call attention to settler violence and the abuse of Indigenous people, though, in both New South Wales and at the Cape, Bannister supported settler colonialism. For Bannister, protecting Indigenous people from settler violence was both a moral and humanitarian principle, but he also saw such protection as a way to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty and clear the way for the formation of settler colonial states. In turn, his brother John William became Sierra Leone's Chief Justice in the late 1820s, where he attempted to fight corruption and protect enslaved people rescued from other imperial powers. His career was cut short, though, by death in 1829 from fever. Prior to his appointment John also bought a substantial amount of land in Upper Canada and promoted sponsored emigration to the colony; after his death, Saxe and John's widow Mary owned 2,970 acres, and Saxe continued to advocate for its settlement by British laborers. The third Bannister brother, Thomas, a former army officer whose career took him from France, the Caribbean, and Nova Scotia, became a settler official in West Australia and Van Diemen's Land, where he also invested in land. Elbourne argues that despite the great differences between these places, the careers of the Bannisters are a kind of aperture, one through which we may see more clearly the important role of communications in this stage of imperial expansion; the Bannister brothers were both inveterate correspondents and, particularly in Saxe's case, early historians of the British Empire. Their careers also tell us much about the complicated relationship between humanitarianism, capitalism, and settler colonialism: through legal agreements reached with Indigenous communities, settler states were able to commodify Indigenous territories.
Violence, though, was never far from the surface. The Buxton family's engagement with the spread of the British Empire was one of calling attention to, first, the violence and immorality of slavery, and then the violence of settler colonists towards Indigenous people. As Elbourne points out, the Buxton family “became a collective humanitarian enterprise” (p. 307), a role most clearly seen in their participation in the 1836–1837 House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements). Here, Elbourne's analysis of family dynamics and relationships shifts to women's work and the centrality of Priscilla Buxton and Anna Gurney to humanitarian campaigns. Like many prominent abolitionist families (some of whom, like Elizabeth Fry, also were related to the Buxtons), these family members either were practicing Quakers or had historical ties to the Society of Friends. Elbourne's accounts of the Brant and Bannister families do not ignore women's roles, as she gives both Mary Brant's activism and the support of the Bannister sisters as much consideration as the sources will allow. However, Buxton and Gurney, coming from backgrounds that valued Christian service and reform, played a more integral role in exposing imperial failings and immorality than was possible for the Bannister sisters. As daughters, wives, and intimate partners, these women wrote copious amounts of correspondence, much of it in a semi-public nature that helped knit together abolitionist and humanitarian circles. For example, they shared important information about wars with Xhosa people in South Africa provided the basis for lobbying and parliamentary investigations. The Buxton family went on to sponsor an expedition down the Niger River, one designed to persuade African chiefs in the area to abandon slave trading, embark on trade with Britain, and embrace both Christianity and Western-style farming. Yet unlike their work in abolitionism and the founding of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, the expedition overall was a failure
The book ends in the 1840s, a decade when Elbourne argues, settler colonial states started to become more independent in their internal governance, more bureaucratic, and more insistent that Indigenous peoples needed “protection,” not sovereignty. So far as family histories are concerned, while the families themselves did not vanish from the archival record, family politics, manifested in networks and alliances, took on a different valence. As Elbourne points out, “at different ends of the world, the mutual entanglement of family and state power arguably persisted but shifted significantly in the direction of colonial bureaucracies. Even if those bureaucracies would continue to be affected by powerful families for many years, their forms would be more ostensibly determined by state policy and by settler democracy” (p. 375). In the case of Upper Canada—the colony that would become, first, Canada West and then Ontario—Elbourne's point warrants more attention from Canadian historians of both the state and the family. Historians have yet to fully plumb relationships between families, patronage networks, and the growth of the nation-state, but such research might provide more nuance to our understanding of the “bureaucratic state.”
With its wide-ranging geographic reach, conceptual sophistication, and research that is both broad and deep, Empire, Kinship, and Violence is a major contribution to the history of settler colonialism. Elbourne tells us much not just about these families and the colonial and metropolitan sites in which they operated, but she also demonstrates the very tight and, often, tense ties between the domain of intimate relations and the colonial state. Not only does Elbourne help us to refine our thinking of those relations, but her work needs to be juxtaposed against the rise of other discourses and familial practices which suggest that families could be hived off from the workings of the marketplace and the state. Moreover, as well as tracing in great detail the histories of these three families, her extensive research also includes those of other, linked family networks such as the Moodies, whose histories encompassed the Canadas, Australian colonies, and the Cape Colony. Elbourne's work, then, opens up the door for future research possibilities and future insights into the interlinked relations of families to settler colonialism.