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Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain
Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the Eastern Cape region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.
It examines:
* the origins and development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Eastern cape and the construction of colonial settler identities.
For any student or resarcher of this major aspect of history, this will be a staple part of their reading diet.
It examines:
* the origins and development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Eastern cape and the construction of colonial settler identities.
For any student or resarcher of this major aspect of history, this will be a staple part of their reading diet.
- GenresHistory
272 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 26, 2001
12 people want to read
About the author
Alan Lester
32 books4 followersAlan Lester is an English historian, historical geographer and author who has worked for Sussex University since 2000. He was appointed Professor of Historical Geography in 2006. He is known for his research on imperial networks, colonial humanitarianism and imperial governance.
In Colonisation and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance he and co-author Fae Dussart analysed the ways in which men considering themselves humane oversaw the destruction of Indigenous societies. His book Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, he examined how imperial governance worked 'everywhere and all at once' across the British Empire at key moments during the nineteenth century.
Lester gave the Distinguished Historical Geographer Lecture at the 2022 Association of American Geographers annual conference. He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press's Studies in Imperialism research monograph series. Lester has been described as “the pioneer of the idea” of “a key concept much used in recent ‘new imperial history’ writing … that of the imperial network”.
Lester has written of his concern at the recent politicisation of imperial history, and critiqued British academic Nigel Biggar's representation of colonialism.
In Colonisation and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance he and co-author Fae Dussart analysed the ways in which men considering themselves humane oversaw the destruction of Indigenous societies. His book Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, he examined how imperial governance worked 'everywhere and all at once' across the British Empire at key moments during the nineteenth century.
Lester gave the Distinguished Historical Geographer Lecture at the 2022 Association of American Geographers annual conference. He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press's Studies in Imperialism research monograph series. Lester has been described as “the pioneer of the idea” of “a key concept much used in recent ‘new imperial history’ writing … that of the imperial network”.
Lester has written of his concern at the recent politicisation of imperial history, and critiqued British academic Nigel Biggar's representation of colonialism.
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May 25, 2012
When European powers began to lay claim to regions around the globe, the same initial concerns inevitably arose: 1) how best to exert ownership over the territory, and 2) how to manage the native inhabitants. While the colonizers’ queries remained essentially the same, their solutions varied and were dependent on when the conquest was initiated and what impetuses were driving the invasion – land, natural resources, or a need to establish a base of power in the region. Alan Lester’s book, Imperial Networks, focuses on how Great Britain addressed these imperial questions in the context of nineteenth century South Africa. However, by the time Britain joined the great ‘Scramble for Africa,’ colonial powers were also beginning to wonder “What is our responsibility to these native people?” Lester claims that Britain’s response to this question was the product of a living dialogue between the emigrated Britons and the Xosan and Khoesan peoples whose lives and lands the colonials had invaded. The discussion as to how Africans influenced the formation of Britain’s colonial identity, as well as how they contested Britain’s continued presence is the crux of Lester’s work.
The nineteenth century was a fascinating era when a number of developments in scientific thought converged with social and cultural movements shaping the discourse of colonial politics at home in the empires and the policies that were implemented abroad in the metropoles. Great Britain took pride at having been at the forefront of the movement to end international slave trade, which was one of the most salient political decisions of the era. By the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1814, most European countries had also joined this commitment. While this agreement signified a turning point for European-African relations, it did not lead to native Africans having political or economic self-determination. Instead, the official end to the slave trade marked the moment when Europeans, eager to continue capitalizing on the continent’s rich natural resources, stopped exporting Africans and began to import themselves. Enabled by nineteenth century technological advancements, such as the steam ship, Europeans were for the first time able to access and claim Africa’s interior. The tensions that arose between the Africans and the growing influx of business and government officials, especially white settlers, led to the creation of colonial policies and practices designed to subjugate the African population. Eventually, these practices made way for the capitalistic enterprises that resulted in the Africans’ essential enslavement within their own lands.
Colonial practices in the nineteenth century were also defined by the ideas of the Romantic era and middle class reformers who were looking for ways to improve British society by educating the poor and lowest classes. Lester notes that beginning in the 1830s, these early humanitarian missionaries saw colonialism as a vehicle to expand the ‘civilizing mission’ abroad. Organizations such as the London Missionary Society and the Anglican Church Missionary Society, used anti-slavery sentiments to feed growing public opinion that colonized people should be treated with more compassion than they had during previous centuries of colonialism, and to convince colonial officials that they could gain regional stability more effectively through teaching natives to conform to European social expectations than through brute military force. In exchanging Christianity for civilization, Europeans found a moral justification for colonialism that foreshadowed the same sentiments expressed by Rudyard Kipling in “White Man’s Burden” at the end of the century. There was a general feeling that “the failure to effect the moral improvement of ‘aborigines’…was a crime almost on par with their active destruction.” Through their work, missionaries perceived themselves to be saving souls as well as lives.
Lester considers “the founding premise” of his work to be the same as Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s – that “social transformations are a product of global patterns and local struggles.” His key innovation builds on the idea of global connections and he argues that the networks Britain established with its metropoles in order to move information, goods, and ideas from the home empire to its colonies abroad, also worked in reverse. These networks, Lester argues, are best conceived not as direct pipelines, but as true conduits of exchange which brought external information back to Britain causing the empire to continually re-think its ideas and methods of colonialism and in the process reshape its identity. Or as Lester wrote, “British colonial discourses were made and remade, rather than simply transferred or imposed, through the ‘geographies of connection’ between Britain and settler colonies like the Cape…” Lester further frames his work by identifying three phases of colonialism based on the groups who acted: official or governmental, settler, and humanitarian. Each of these groups engaged with the Xhosa, and other native populations, in ways that they deemed to be in the best interest of the empire. Word of the colonials’ successes and failures of their civilizing mission traveled back to Britain, and over time produced changes in attitude regarding Britain’s relationship toward and treatment of its colonies.
The British began their tenure of South Africa in 1795 in the wake of the Dutch East India Company rule. By then, the Cape of Good Hope was already heavily populated by Europeans – 20,000 whites who claimed ownership over 25,000 (presumably black) slaves already lived there and European social hierarchical structures and expectations had been firmly established. Between 1795 and 1803, the British employed a number of severe colonial governors who did little to improve relations with the Xhosa, Afrikaners, Khoesan, or the Dutch colonials, many of whom were “bywoners, or landless peasants.” The region was subdivided by a complex system of boundaries which had resulted as a way of ensuring that the Europeans had access to crucial natural resources, such as water. Complicating local relations in the later decades of the eighteenth century had been the rise of Xhosa chiefdoms in the western part of the territory. These Xhosa leaders rejected British/European control, and situated themselves as the protagonists to colonial rule. Much to the consternation of the colonial government and white settlers, the Xhosa engaged in a regular ritual of swiping cattle. Legislation, such as the “spoor law,” and other methods proved to be wholly ineffective in combating this Xhosan act of perceived savagery.
The humanitarians often touted their civilizing mission as the method that would eventually eliminate problems between the settlers and the Africans, and therefore improve society as a whole. Once the natives were taught English, converted to Christianity, and conformed to an anglicized way of life, it was believed that they would cease fighting British domination and amalgamate with the superior culture. Thus, if the settlers wanted to keep their cattle from being carried off by the Xhosa, they would have to civilize them first. Interestingly, it was the settler women who initiated the earliest phase of this project when they began to train Africans to serve as their domestic servants. In order to make their help acceptable, the women instructed them on how to dress and act with European acceptable manners, thus eliminating the “Xhosa savagery.”
Lester uses the white settlers who immigrated to Cape Town from Britain to demonstrate how colonials continually remade their identities. The majority of the Cape’s settlers were from the lowest level of society; they came to Africa because they had no opportunity for upward mobility back home. Lester noted, however, that not long after their arrival, these settlers from lowly origins quickly adopted the pretenses of middle and upper class British society, but with a colonial twist – class was distinguished by race. Once they were able, women spurned the rough outside chores alongside their husbands in favor of a more domestic life inside - they recreated “Britishness” as best they could, from hosting teas, to griping about the scarcity of good help and the quality of persons who worked for them. Because many of their husbands spent a great deal of time away from home to hunt, women saw and took the opportunity to engage in business activities, and became “substitute patriarchs” when needed. Many of them, single or married, engaged in activities that helped contribute to their family’s finances.
In the final chapters of the work, Lester discusses the British Colonial officials growing disillusionment with the humanitarians’ civilizing mission after a series of failures ensued at many colonial locations around the world. Lester examines the discourse of two committees which were formed to oversee the civilizing mission in the Cape to demonstrate how the information about events unfolding in the metropole reshaped thinking in the mainland. The first committee was located in the Cape and headed by Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for the Colonies; James Stephan, the Colonial Under-Secretary; and Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the Cape’s Governor. Their position was nominally humanitarian, but with an eye on finding the best solution for peace between the settlers and natives at the least cost to the government. The other, the Select Committee on Aborigines, was formed in London with the renowned humanitarian Thomas Buxton at its head. Buxton’s committee “soon became a rallying point for humanitarian discourse” and represented the majority opinion of the public. The outbreak of war between the settlers and the Xhosa on the Cape, and the reports from Glenelg and Stephan’s committee, however, called into question the viability of the Londoners’ humanitarian position.
Crucially, Lester argues that the problems the British were experiencing “in the mid-century Cape cannot be conceived of in isolation from these more global transformations.” Reports from places such as Jamaica, the West Indies, India, New Zealand, as well as the Cape, traveled back to the well-intentioned British colonials who watched in exasperation when the freed natives and former slaves rejected the new way of life and social systems that the missionaries had attempted to instill through the civilizing project. In Jamaica, for example, more than half of the freed slaves moved off of the large sugar cane plantations, where they had been enslaved. Even though they earned wages for their work in the new system, many saw little difference between master and employer and instead opted to work their own plots of less profitable land. As a result, the once enviably profitable Jamaican sugar industry saw its earnings cut in half between 1838 and 1840. Perhaps most disquieting to the humanitarians was that once freed from colonial restraint, the Jamaicans resurrected their native religious practices and stopped abiding by Christian teachings. The humanitarians were left to wonder what, if any impact they had made on these people; and, more cynically, question if these non-white races were even capable of receiving instruction. Lester quoted Thomas Holt as noting “the answer to the question of what went wrong in Jamaica…had consequences beyond its particular boundaries and in domains other than economic.”
Thus, Lester determines that the war between the settlers and Africans continued on the Cape because the humanitarians were ultimately “unable to counter settler notions of indigenous irreclaimability…largely because [they were] inadequately prepared to deal with the question of indigenous resistance to a British ‘civilizing’ mission.” The British officials and humanitarians in London looked at the global picture, and concluded from the information they received from the various metropoles that the potential success of the civilizing mission in Africa looked bleak, and they changed their policies accordingly. Lester concludes that the upshot of the natives’ resistance to European practices and beliefs would be the continuity of paternalistic, hegemonic relationships. The manifestation of this paternalism occurred in the form of funding ‘colonial projects’ – roads, schools, and infrastructure all designed to continue to demonstrate what proper civilization looked like. The empires often found these projects too expensive to fund, and many were never completed, especially after it was questioned whether the civilizing mission was even feasible. Therefore, Lester deduces that the imperials exercised far less influence over their resilient native subjects than is frequently presumed.
* * *
Although Lester states from the outset in his preface that “the book’s main subjects are not the Xhosa,” rather “the main subjects are those who considered themselves British,” this position creates an epistemological gap. He justifies his stance by citing from Cooper and Stoler’s Tensions of Empire, which states that colonialism was “shaped as much by political, social, and ideological contests among {British} colonisers as by the encounter with the colonised.” That said, the colonizers were participants in this process and it would have been useful for readers to have had something from the Xhosa perspective that gives them a bit more depth than the image of troublesome cattle rustlers. Even if no written documents by the Xhosa exist, it seems likely that Lester could have read against the grain of the British imperial records, just as many of the authors he cited have done in their own works. In the field of post-colonial studies, which aims to study empire and the anti-conquest narrative by including the perspective of the subaltern, the omission is glaring. More evidence about how the Africans reacted to the civilizing mission would have enriched Lester’s narrative and helped to support his contentions regarding native resistance.
Lester’s work is an excellent resource for scholars of African and British histories as well as post-colonial studies. It is not a work for the first time reader of South African history, as Lester expects a working understanding of African geography and ethnic groups. He includes several regional maps throughout the text, although a full African map in the introduction would be a welcome addition. Helpfully, Lester rejects using “vacuous spatial metaphors” as other post-colonial theorists do, in favor of naming “the ‘actual’ spaces across which colonial discourses operate.” His decision to avoid abstractions, among other stylistic choices, helps keep Lester’s prose fluid, free of jargon, and generally engaging throughout the text. Although nineteenth century South Africa has been thoroughly vetted by previous scholarship, Lester’s premise that imperial networks had transformative properties in identity formation for both patria and colony, pushes the scholarly dialogue in a new and interesting direction, demonstrating that it can indeed be fruitful to revisit old ground with new insights.
The nineteenth century was a fascinating era when a number of developments in scientific thought converged with social and cultural movements shaping the discourse of colonial politics at home in the empires and the policies that were implemented abroad in the metropoles. Great Britain took pride at having been at the forefront of the movement to end international slave trade, which was one of the most salient political decisions of the era. By the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1814, most European countries had also joined this commitment. While this agreement signified a turning point for European-African relations, it did not lead to native Africans having political or economic self-determination. Instead, the official end to the slave trade marked the moment when Europeans, eager to continue capitalizing on the continent’s rich natural resources, stopped exporting Africans and began to import themselves. Enabled by nineteenth century technological advancements, such as the steam ship, Europeans were for the first time able to access and claim Africa’s interior. The tensions that arose between the Africans and the growing influx of business and government officials, especially white settlers, led to the creation of colonial policies and practices designed to subjugate the African population. Eventually, these practices made way for the capitalistic enterprises that resulted in the Africans’ essential enslavement within their own lands.
Colonial practices in the nineteenth century were also defined by the ideas of the Romantic era and middle class reformers who were looking for ways to improve British society by educating the poor and lowest classes. Lester notes that beginning in the 1830s, these early humanitarian missionaries saw colonialism as a vehicle to expand the ‘civilizing mission’ abroad. Organizations such as the London Missionary Society and the Anglican Church Missionary Society, used anti-slavery sentiments to feed growing public opinion that colonized people should be treated with more compassion than they had during previous centuries of colonialism, and to convince colonial officials that they could gain regional stability more effectively through teaching natives to conform to European social expectations than through brute military force. In exchanging Christianity for civilization, Europeans found a moral justification for colonialism that foreshadowed the same sentiments expressed by Rudyard Kipling in “White Man’s Burden” at the end of the century. There was a general feeling that “the failure to effect the moral improvement of ‘aborigines’…was a crime almost on par with their active destruction.” Through their work, missionaries perceived themselves to be saving souls as well as lives.
Lester considers “the founding premise” of his work to be the same as Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s – that “social transformations are a product of global patterns and local struggles.” His key innovation builds on the idea of global connections and he argues that the networks Britain established with its metropoles in order to move information, goods, and ideas from the home empire to its colonies abroad, also worked in reverse. These networks, Lester argues, are best conceived not as direct pipelines, but as true conduits of exchange which brought external information back to Britain causing the empire to continually re-think its ideas and methods of colonialism and in the process reshape its identity. Or as Lester wrote, “British colonial discourses were made and remade, rather than simply transferred or imposed, through the ‘geographies of connection’ between Britain and settler colonies like the Cape…” Lester further frames his work by identifying three phases of colonialism based on the groups who acted: official or governmental, settler, and humanitarian. Each of these groups engaged with the Xhosa, and other native populations, in ways that they deemed to be in the best interest of the empire. Word of the colonials’ successes and failures of their civilizing mission traveled back to Britain, and over time produced changes in attitude regarding Britain’s relationship toward and treatment of its colonies.
The British began their tenure of South Africa in 1795 in the wake of the Dutch East India Company rule. By then, the Cape of Good Hope was already heavily populated by Europeans – 20,000 whites who claimed ownership over 25,000 (presumably black) slaves already lived there and European social hierarchical structures and expectations had been firmly established. Between 1795 and 1803, the British employed a number of severe colonial governors who did little to improve relations with the Xhosa, Afrikaners, Khoesan, or the Dutch colonials, many of whom were “bywoners, or landless peasants.” The region was subdivided by a complex system of boundaries which had resulted as a way of ensuring that the Europeans had access to crucial natural resources, such as water. Complicating local relations in the later decades of the eighteenth century had been the rise of Xhosa chiefdoms in the western part of the territory. These Xhosa leaders rejected British/European control, and situated themselves as the protagonists to colonial rule. Much to the consternation of the colonial government and white settlers, the Xhosa engaged in a regular ritual of swiping cattle. Legislation, such as the “spoor law,” and other methods proved to be wholly ineffective in combating this Xhosan act of perceived savagery.
The humanitarians often touted their civilizing mission as the method that would eventually eliminate problems between the settlers and the Africans, and therefore improve society as a whole. Once the natives were taught English, converted to Christianity, and conformed to an anglicized way of life, it was believed that they would cease fighting British domination and amalgamate with the superior culture. Thus, if the settlers wanted to keep their cattle from being carried off by the Xhosa, they would have to civilize them first. Interestingly, it was the settler women who initiated the earliest phase of this project when they began to train Africans to serve as their domestic servants. In order to make their help acceptable, the women instructed them on how to dress and act with European acceptable manners, thus eliminating the “Xhosa savagery.”
Lester uses the white settlers who immigrated to Cape Town from Britain to demonstrate how colonials continually remade their identities. The majority of the Cape’s settlers were from the lowest level of society; they came to Africa because they had no opportunity for upward mobility back home. Lester noted, however, that not long after their arrival, these settlers from lowly origins quickly adopted the pretenses of middle and upper class British society, but with a colonial twist – class was distinguished by race. Once they were able, women spurned the rough outside chores alongside their husbands in favor of a more domestic life inside - they recreated “Britishness” as best they could, from hosting teas, to griping about the scarcity of good help and the quality of persons who worked for them. Because many of their husbands spent a great deal of time away from home to hunt, women saw and took the opportunity to engage in business activities, and became “substitute patriarchs” when needed. Many of them, single or married, engaged in activities that helped contribute to their family’s finances.
In the final chapters of the work, Lester discusses the British Colonial officials growing disillusionment with the humanitarians’ civilizing mission after a series of failures ensued at many colonial locations around the world. Lester examines the discourse of two committees which were formed to oversee the civilizing mission in the Cape to demonstrate how the information about events unfolding in the metropole reshaped thinking in the mainland. The first committee was located in the Cape and headed by Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for the Colonies; James Stephan, the Colonial Under-Secretary; and Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the Cape’s Governor. Their position was nominally humanitarian, but with an eye on finding the best solution for peace between the settlers and natives at the least cost to the government. The other, the Select Committee on Aborigines, was formed in London with the renowned humanitarian Thomas Buxton at its head. Buxton’s committee “soon became a rallying point for humanitarian discourse” and represented the majority opinion of the public. The outbreak of war between the settlers and the Xhosa on the Cape, and the reports from Glenelg and Stephan’s committee, however, called into question the viability of the Londoners’ humanitarian position.
Crucially, Lester argues that the problems the British were experiencing “in the mid-century Cape cannot be conceived of in isolation from these more global transformations.” Reports from places such as Jamaica, the West Indies, India, New Zealand, as well as the Cape, traveled back to the well-intentioned British colonials who watched in exasperation when the freed natives and former slaves rejected the new way of life and social systems that the missionaries had attempted to instill through the civilizing project. In Jamaica, for example, more than half of the freed slaves moved off of the large sugar cane plantations, where they had been enslaved. Even though they earned wages for their work in the new system, many saw little difference between master and employer and instead opted to work their own plots of less profitable land. As a result, the once enviably profitable Jamaican sugar industry saw its earnings cut in half between 1838 and 1840. Perhaps most disquieting to the humanitarians was that once freed from colonial restraint, the Jamaicans resurrected their native religious practices and stopped abiding by Christian teachings. The humanitarians were left to wonder what, if any impact they had made on these people; and, more cynically, question if these non-white races were even capable of receiving instruction. Lester quoted Thomas Holt as noting “the answer to the question of what went wrong in Jamaica…had consequences beyond its particular boundaries and in domains other than economic.”
Thus, Lester determines that the war between the settlers and Africans continued on the Cape because the humanitarians were ultimately “unable to counter settler notions of indigenous irreclaimability…largely because [they were] inadequately prepared to deal with the question of indigenous resistance to a British ‘civilizing’ mission.” The British officials and humanitarians in London looked at the global picture, and concluded from the information they received from the various metropoles that the potential success of the civilizing mission in Africa looked bleak, and they changed their policies accordingly. Lester concludes that the upshot of the natives’ resistance to European practices and beliefs would be the continuity of paternalistic, hegemonic relationships. The manifestation of this paternalism occurred in the form of funding ‘colonial projects’ – roads, schools, and infrastructure all designed to continue to demonstrate what proper civilization looked like. The empires often found these projects too expensive to fund, and many were never completed, especially after it was questioned whether the civilizing mission was even feasible. Therefore, Lester deduces that the imperials exercised far less influence over their resilient native subjects than is frequently presumed.
* * *
Although Lester states from the outset in his preface that “the book’s main subjects are not the Xhosa,” rather “the main subjects are those who considered themselves British,” this position creates an epistemological gap. He justifies his stance by citing from Cooper and Stoler’s Tensions of Empire, which states that colonialism was “shaped as much by political, social, and ideological contests among {British} colonisers as by the encounter with the colonised.” That said, the colonizers were participants in this process and it would have been useful for readers to have had something from the Xhosa perspective that gives them a bit more depth than the image of troublesome cattle rustlers. Even if no written documents by the Xhosa exist, it seems likely that Lester could have read against the grain of the British imperial records, just as many of the authors he cited have done in their own works. In the field of post-colonial studies, which aims to study empire and the anti-conquest narrative by including the perspective of the subaltern, the omission is glaring. More evidence about how the Africans reacted to the civilizing mission would have enriched Lester’s narrative and helped to support his contentions regarding native resistance.
Lester’s work is an excellent resource for scholars of African and British histories as well as post-colonial studies. It is not a work for the first time reader of South African history, as Lester expects a working understanding of African geography and ethnic groups. He includes several regional maps throughout the text, although a full African map in the introduction would be a welcome addition. Helpfully, Lester rejects using “vacuous spatial metaphors” as other post-colonial theorists do, in favor of naming “the ‘actual’ spaces across which colonial discourses operate.” His decision to avoid abstractions, among other stylistic choices, helps keep Lester’s prose fluid, free of jargon, and generally engaging throughout the text. Although nineteenth century South Africa has been thoroughly vetted by previous scholarship, Lester’s premise that imperial networks had transformative properties in identity formation for both patria and colony, pushes the scholarly dialogue in a new and interesting direction, demonstrating that it can indeed be fruitful to revisit old ground with new insights.
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