In this compelling study, Anna Johnston shows how colonial knowledge from Australia influenced global thinking about convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples. These were fascinating topics for British readers, and influenced government policies in fields such as prison reform, the history of science, and humanitarian and religious campaigns. Using a rich variety of sources including natural history and botanical illustrations, voyage accounts, language studies, Victorian literature and convict memoirs, this multi-disciplinary account charts how new ways of identifying, classifying, analysing and controlling ideas, populations, and environments were forged and circulated between colonies and through metropolitan centres. They were also underpinned by cultural exchanges between European and Indigenous interlocutors and knowledge systems. Johnston shows how colonial ideas were disseminated through a global network of correspondence and print culture.

Anna Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She maps out this position through an examination of texts published by missionaries of the largest, most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. These texts provide a fascinating commentary on nineteenth-century evangelism and colonialism, and illuminate complex relationships between white imperial subjects, white colonial subjects, and non-white colonial subjects. With their reformist, and often prurient interest in sexual and familial relationships, missionary texts focused imperial attention on gender and domesticity in colonial cultures. Johnston contends that in doing so they rewrote imperial expansion as a moral allegory and confronted British ideologies of gender, race and class. Texts from Indian, Polynesian and Australian missions are examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism and race.

Arguing that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, Anna Johnson analyzes missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnson reveals how missionaries were caught between imperial and religious interests through an examination of texts published by the largest and most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. Texts from Indian, Polynesian, and Australian missions are also examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relationship to gender, colonialism, and race.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem "The Aboriginal Mother," written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies. This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.

Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) was a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling and rivaled his popularity as a writer during her lifetime, but her legacy faded due to gender-biased politics. She spent 22 years in India, mainly in the Punjab. This collection is the first to focus entirely on this "unconventional memsahib" and her contribution to turn-of-the-century Anglo-Indian literature. The eight essays draw attention to Steel's multifaceted work-ranging from fiction to journalism to letter writing, from housekeeping manuals to philanthropic activities. These essays, by recognized experts on her life and work, will appeal to interdisciplinary scholars and readers in the fields of British India and Women's Studies. Contributors: Amrita Banerjee, Helen Pike Bauer, Ralph Crane, Grainne Goodwin, Alan Johnson, Anna Johnston, Danielle Nielsen, LeeAnne M. Richardson, Susmita Roye

This reprint - originally published by Quintus Publishing - brings together essays by leading Australian and international historians in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley and republished in 2008. Until this book, Friendly Mission has rarely been considered in a context beyond the immediacy of "Van Diemen's Land" (the original European name for Tasmania). Yet, George Augustus Robinson's diverse writings constitute a body of work that typically has one set of meanings for local readers, and another for those outside its sphere of production. Robinson's texts are exemplary of the ways in which colonial texts circulated around what Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, has called 'imperial networks.' Reading Robinson, while remaining cognizant of local resonances, extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity and situates it within international contexts, both in terms of contemporary accounts of colonial/settler contact, conflict with indigenes, and current scholarship analyzing this material.