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Books > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
Imperial spaces takes two of the most influential minority groups
of white settlers in the British Empire - the Irish and the Scots -
and explores how they imagined themselves within the landscapes of
its farthest reaches, the Australian colonies of Victoria and New
South Wales. Using letters and diaries as well as records of
collective activities such as committee meetings, parades and
dinners, the book examines how the Irish and Scots built new
identities as settlers in the unknown spaces of Empire. Utilizing
critical geographical theories of 'place' as the site of memory and
agency, it considers how Irish and Scots settlers grounded their
sense of belonging in the imagined landscapes of south-east
Australia. Imperial spaces is relevant to academics and students
interested in the history and geography of the British Empire,
Australia, Ireland and Scotland. -- .
This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the
neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the
development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain
and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the
1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and
secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over
several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the
fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. The book
offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire
and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in
both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and
'revisionists' alike. The book will appeal to undergraduates,
postgraduates, scholars in history and politics and all those
interested in and concerned with the past, present and future of
Labour politics in Britain, Australia and more generally. -- .
For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the
start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and
Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening
these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional
coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure,
and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The
Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea
to practice, from intention to outcome, from myth to reality. Those
who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and
Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific
investigation that had been developed by previous generations of
seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans,
empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping,
measuring, observing, and preserving. They found, however, that
their survival and success depended less on this system of
universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by
native peoples. While explorers sought to advance the interests of
Britain and its emigrant communities, Dane Kennedy discovers a more
complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously, explorers
whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided, and, above all, local
states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own
purposes. The collisions, and occasional convergences, between
British and indigenous values, interests, and modes of knowing the
world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.
One of the British Empire's most troubling colonial exports in the
19th-century, James Busby is known as the father of the Australian
wine industry, the author of New Zealand's Declaration of
Independence and a central figure in the early history of
independent New Zealand as its British Resident from 1833 to 1840.
Officially the man on the ground for the British government in the
volatile society of New Zealand in the 1830s, Busby endeavoured to
create his own parliament and act independently of his superiors in
London. This put him on a collision course with the British
Government, and ultimately destroyed his career. With a reputation
as an inept, conceited and increasingly embittered person, this
caricature of Busby's character has slipped into the historical
bloodstream where it remains to the present day. This book draws on
an extensive range of previously-unused archival records to
reconstruct Busby's life in much more intimate form, and exposes
the back-room plotting that ultimately destroyed his plans for New
Zealand. It will alter the way that Britain's colonisation of New
Zealand is understood, and will leave readers with an appreciation
of how individuals, more than policies, shaped the Empire and its
rule.
The term Polynesia refers to a cultural and geographical area in
the Pacific Ocean, bound by what is commonly referred to as the
Polynesian Triangle, which consists of Hawai'i in the north, New
Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the southeast.
Thousands of islands are scattered throughout this area, most of
which are currently included in one of the modern island states of
American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Hawai'i, New
Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and Wallis and Futuna. The
third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Polynesia greatly
expands on the previous editions through a chronology, an
introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 400
cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events,
places, organizations, and other aspects of Polynesian history from
the earliest times to the present. Appendixes of the major islands
and atolls within Polynesia, the rulers and administrators of the
13 major island states, and basic demographic information of those
states are also included.
This book examines the distinctive aspects that insiders and
outsiders perceived as characteristic of Irish and Scottish ethnic
identities in New Zealand. When, how, and why did Irish and Scots
identify themselves and others in ethnic terms? What
characteristics did the Irish and the Scots attribute to themselves
and what traits did others assign to them? Did these traits change
over time and if so how? Contemporary interest surrounding issues
of ethnic identities is vibrant. In countries such as New Zealand,
descendants of European settlers are seeking their ethnic origins,
spurred on in part by factors such as an ongoing interest in
indigenous genealogies, the burgeoning appeal of family history
societies, and the booming financial benefits of marketing
ethnicities abroad. This fascinating book will appeal to scholars
and students of the history of empire and the construction of
identity in settler communities, as well as those interested in the
history of New Zealand. -- .
The Philippines belong to one of the most rapidly developing parts
of the world, and it is impossible to understand Asia without it.
This second edition, a greatly expanded and updated version of the
first, is essential reading for those interested in Asia, as well
as the millions of Filipinos who have made their homes abroad. The
A to Z of the Philippines provides more than 400 hundred entries on
important persons, places, events, and institutions, as well as
salient economic, social and cultural aspects. The more than four
centuries of the Philippines history covered by Guillermo,
including the periods of Spanish and American dominance over the
country, is neatly wrapped up in an introduction, clearly laid out
in a chronology, complemented with statistical data in the
appendix, and concluded with a bibliography allowing further
research and study.
Madness in the Family explores how colonial families coped with
insanity through a trans-colonial study of the relationships
between families and public colonial hospitals for the insane in
New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand between 1860
and 1914.
Falkland Islanders were the first British people to come under
enemy occupation since the Channel Islanders during the Second
World War. This book tells how islanders' warnings were ignored in
London, how their slim defences gave way to a massive invasion, and
how they survived occupation. While some established a cautiously
pragmatic modus vivendi with the occupiers, some Islanders opted
for active resistance. Others joined advancing British troops,
transporting ammunition and leading men to the battlefields.
Islanders' leaders and 'trouble makers' faced internal exile, and
whole settlements were imprisoned, becoming virtual hostages. A new
chapter about Falklands history since 1982 reveals that while the
Falklands have benefited greatly from Britain's ongoing commitment
to them, a cold war continues in the south Atlantic. To the
annoyance of the Argentines, the islands have prospered, and may
now be poised on the brink of an oil bonanza.
This book considers how Samoans embraced and reshaped the English
game of cricket, recasting it as a distinctively Samoan pastime,
kirikiti. Starting with cricket's introduction to the islands in
1879, it uses both cricket and kirikiti to trace six decades of
contest between and within the categories of 'colonisers' and
'colonised.' How and why did Samoans adapt and appropriate the
imperial game? How did officials, missionaries, colonists, soldiers
and those with mixed foreign and Samoan heritage understand and
respond to the real and symbolic challenges kirikiti presented? And
how did Samoans use both games to navigate foreign colonialism(s)?
By investigating these questions, Benjamin Sacks suggests
alternative frameworks for conceptualising sporting transfer and
adoption, and advances understandings of how power, politics and
identity were manifested through sport, in Samoa and across the
globe.
This book explores the relationship of a colonial people with English law and looks at the way in which the practice of law developed among the ordinary population. Paula Jane Byrne traces the boundaries among property, sexuality and violence, drawing from court records, dispositions and proceedings. She asks: What did ordinary people understand by guilt, suspicion, evidence and the term "offense"? She illuminates the values and beliefs of the emerging colonial consciousness and the complexity of power relations in the colony. The book reconstructs the legal process with great tetail and richness and is able to evoke the everyday lives of people in the colonial NSW.
In this engaging tale of movement from one hemisphere to another,
we see doctors at work attending to their often odious and
demanding duties at sea, in quarantine, and after arrival. The book
shows, in graphic detail, just why a few notorious voyages suffered
tragic loss of life in the absence of competent supervision. Its
emphasis, however, is on demonstrating the extent to which the
professionalism of the majority of surgeon superintendents, even on
ships where childhood epidemics raged, led to the extraordinary
saving of life on the Australian route in the Victorian era.
Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of
Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was
heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer.
As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered
uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi
Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this
human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories,
records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial
administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling
narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of
industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into
conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of
other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human
impact on the environment.
How have the Aluni Valley Duna people of Papua New Guinea responded
to the challenges of colonial and post-colonial changes that have
entered their lifeworld since the middle of the Twentieth-Century?
Living in a corner of the world influenced by mining companies but
relatively neglected in terms of government-sponsored development,
these people have dealt creatively with forces of change by
redeploying their own mythological themes about the cosmos in order
to make claims on outside corporations and by subtly combining
features of their customary practices with forms of Christianity,
attempting to empower their past as a means of confronting the
future.
This book provides a new approach to the historical treatment of
indigenous peoples' sovereignty and property rights in Australia
and New Zealand. By shifting attention from the original European
claims of possession to a comparison of the ways in which British
players treated these matters later, Bain Attwood not only reveals
some startling similarities between the Australian and New Zealand
cases but revises the long-held explanations of the differences. He
argues that the treatment of the sovereignty and property rights of
First Nations was seldom determined by the workings of moral
principle, legal doctrine, political thought or government policy.
Instead, it was the highly particular historical circumstances in
which the first encounters between natives and Europeans occurred
and colonisation began that largely dictated whether treaties of
cession were negotiated, just as a bitter political struggle
determined the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi and ensured
that native title was made in New Zealand.
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