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Precarious Intimacies: Cross-Cultural Violence and Proximity in Settler Colonial Economies of the Pacific Rim

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Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

The development of settler colonial cultures was deeply dependent upon the everyday proximity of Indigenous and settler workers; yet we know surprisingly little of how the precarious intimacies arising from that proximity were intrinsically connected to forms of colonial violence. This chapter examines recent trends in colonial, postcolonial, and feminist scholarship to unpack how violence and intimacy were intertwined in the settler colonial encounter, and how this connection was embedded in the formation of settler colonial economies around the Pacific Rim. Considering a wider range of colonial dynamics beyond formal labour relations, it considers the role of ideological, moral, and emotional economies in shaping the complex colonial relationships that formed the building blocks of modern settler states.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

  2. 2.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001), 829.

  3. 3.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

  4. 4.

    For instance, Lyndall Ryan, ‘The Struggle for Recognition: Part-Aborigines in Tasmania in the Nineteenth Century’, Aboriginal History 1, no. 1 (1977), 27–52; Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Antoinette Burton, ed. Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006); Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Victoria Haskins, Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914–1934 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013); Angela Wanhalla, In/visible Sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2013); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008); Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

  5. 5.

    For instance, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  6. 6.

    For instance, Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  7. 7.

    Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 1–3 and ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 387.

  8. 8.

    Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 2.

  9. 9.

    Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2.

  10. 10.

    Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing End Point of Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal 37/38 (2012), 40–62.

  11. 11.

    Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 29.

  12. 12.

    E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (February 1971), 76–136.

  13. 13.

    Norbert Götz, ‘“Moral Economy”: Its Conceptual History and Analytical Prospects’, Journal of Global Ethics 11, no. 2 (2015), 147–162.

  14. 14.

    Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey with Simon Robb, Haunting the Knowledge Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Anna Johnston, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (Perth: UWA Press, 2011); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Strategic Intimacies: Knowledge and Colonization in Southern New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Studies 14 (2013), 4–18.

  15. 15.

    Paul Gillen and Devleena Ghosh, Colonialism and Modernity (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007). On alternative or peripheral modes of modernity built from imperial foundations, see also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1995); Luke Gibbons, ‘Peripheral Modernities: National and Global in a Post-Colonial Frame’, 19th-Century Contexts 29, no. 2/3 (2007), 271–281.

  16. 16.

    Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).

  17. 17.

    Perry, Edge of Empire; Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers; Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Anna Johnston, ‘“Greater Britain”: Late Imperial Travel Writing and the Settler Colonies’, in Where All Things Are Possible: Oceania, the East and the Victorian Imagination, ed. Richard Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 31–43.

  18. 18.

    Damon Salesa, ‘Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 72.

  19. 19.

    For instance, Peter Burroughs, ‘Colonial Self-Government’, in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C.C. Eldridge (London: Macmillan Education, 1984), 39–64; Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘The Advent of Self-government, 1840s–90’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–169.

  20. 20.

    Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Katherine Ellinghaus, Re-orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave UK, 2009); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016).

  21. 21.

    Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australia-Pacific Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).

  22. 22.

    Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 1997).

  23. 23.

    For instance, J.R. Ward, ‘The Industrial Revolution and British Imperialism, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review 47, no. 1 (1994), 44–65; Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds. Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017).

  24. 24.

    On the correlation between colonial expansion and the economic development of empire, see, for instance, Ralph Austen and Woodruff Smith, ‘The Economic Value of British Colonial Empire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006), 54–76.

  25. 25.

    For instance, Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Stuart Ward, ‘The “New Nationalism” in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: Civic Culture in the Wake of the British World’, in Australia and the World: A Festschrift for Neville Meaney, ed. Joan Beaumont and Matthew Jordan (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 191–214.

  26. 26.

    Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2000); Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud and Niklaus Steiner, eds. The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008); Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools: Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Frontier Violence (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).

  27. 27.

    Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 Global Convections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth, the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  28. 28.

    For instance, Lindsay Proudfoot and Michael Roche, eds. (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (London: Ashgate, 2005); Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

  29. 29.

    Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); John Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1800–2011 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London and New York, Routledge, 2001).

  30. 30.

    Antoinette Burton, ed. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

  31. 31.

    Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, ‘Preface’ in Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback, ed. Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2006), iv.

  32. 32.

    Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnography (London: Cassel, 1999), 2–3.

  33. 33.

    Deborah Bird Rose, ‘The Redemptive Frontier: A Long Road to Nowhere’, in Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback, ed. D.B. Rose and R. Davis (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2006), 49.

  34. 34.

    Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007); Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane, Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty After Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).

  35. 35.

    Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 391–392.

  36. 36.

    Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Hard Times: An Australian Study’, in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas, and Hilary Ericksen (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), 6; Julie Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law: The Settler-Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Review 30 (2009).

  37. 37.

    Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990).

  38. 38.

    Jan Critchett, ‘Encounters in the Western District’, in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 54; Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Introduction’, in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History, ed. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), xi–xxiii; Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016), 209–224.

  39. 39.

    Clive Moore and Ann Curthoys, ‘Working for the White People: An Historiographic Essay on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Labour [online].’ Labour History, special issue, no. 69, Nov. 1995, 1–29. See also Rae Frances, Bruce Scates, B. and Ann McGrath, ‘Broken Silences? Aboriginal Workers and Labour Historians’, in Challenges to Labour History, ed. T. Irving (Kensington: UNSW Press, 1994).

  40. 40.

    Likewise see more recently Diane Kirkby and Sophie Loy-Wilson, eds., Special issue, ‘Labour History and the Coolie Question’, Labour History 113 (Nov. 2017).

  41. 41.

    Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).

  42. 42.

    Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  43. 43.

    Tim Rowse, ‘“Were You Ever Savages?”; Aboriginal Insiders and Pastoralists’ Patronage’, Oceania 58, no. 2 (1987).

  44. 44.

    For instance, Henry Reynolds, With the White People (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990); Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, eds. Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015).

  45. 45.

    For instance, Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003); Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian–Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2006).

  46. 46.

    For instance, Anne Clarke, ‘“The Moorman’s Trowsers”: Macassan and Aboriginal Interaction and the Changing Fabric of Indigenous Social Life’, in East of Wallace’s Line: Studies of Past and Present Maritime Societies in the Indo-Pacific Region, ed. Sue O’Connor and Peter Veth (Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 2000), 315–335; Marshall Clark, ‘Tangible Heritage of the Macassan–Aboriginal Encounter in Contemporary South Sulawesi’, in Marshall Clark and Sally May, Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2013), 159–182.

  47. 47.

    Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974), 13. See also Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Location New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012).

  48. 48.

    Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Networks: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Connections’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–26.

  49. 49.

    Salesa, ‘Samoa’s Half-Castes’, 72; Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties’.

  50. 50.

    Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie, ‘Decolonizing Domestic Service: Introducing a New Agenda’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 7, 1–18.

  51. 51.

    Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5–6.

  52. 52.

    Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey, ‘Australian Settler Colonialism over the Long Nineteenth Century: New Insights into Gender and Biopolitics’, The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, ed. Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017), 371–389.

  53. 53.

    Perry, Edge of Empire, 19.

  54. 54.

    Jane Carey, ‘“Wanted! A Real White Australia”: The Women’s Movement, Whiteness and the Settler Colonial Project’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 136.

  55. 55.

    On how this process emerged in the early modern age of expansion, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. History and Classics, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Penelope Edmonds

  2. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amanda Nettelbeck

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Penelope Edmonds

  2. School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amanda Nettelbeck

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Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (2018). Precarious Intimacies: Cross-Cultural Violence and Proximity in Settler Colonial Economies of the Pacific Rim. In: Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (eds) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_1

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