Colonial Relations

Abstract

A study of the lived history of nineteenth-century British imperialism through the lives of one extended family in North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The prominent colonial governor James Douglas was born in 1803 in what is now Guyana, probably to a free woman of colour and an itinerant Scottish father. In the North American fur-trade, he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. Adele Perry traces their family and friends over the course of the 'long' nineteenth-century, using careful archival research to offer an analysis of the imperial world that is at once intimate and critical, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Perry engages feminist scholarship on gender and intimacy, critical analyses about colonial archives, transnational and postcolonial history and the 'new imperial history' to suggest how this period might be rethought through one powerful family located at the British Empire's margins.

Native–White Intermarriage and Family in 19th‐century North America

“…Some of these studies, like Adele Perry's new book on the Douglas-Connolly family, adopt a micro-historical approach, while otherssuch as a pair of recent volumes by Katherine Ellinghaus and Ann McGrath which juxtapose a variety of interracial relationship configurations in the United States and Australiaare more broadly comparative. 41 However they are pitched, these works will open new windows onto questions about the roles of sex and gender in settler colonial societies, the nature of state expansion during the 19th-century, and especially the common histories of peoples-in-between in the age of empire.…”

The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule

“…As Adele Perry acknowledges in her study of the Douglas-Connolly family, to reconstruct the intimate, interior worlds of men and women is bound to involve engaging with an archive that constructs the intimate in part precisely through the confining of female subjectivities to the private sphere. 27 Of the essays that follow, just one, that by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, can be said to take place within that sphere but it is a story built around the "private life" of one exemplary public man: the chief immigration officer of the Cape Colony in the early twentieth century. The only essay located within the material space of the home, meanwhile, is set within that very public home of Government House: Charlotte Macdonald's reading of the diary of Harriet Gore Browne, wife to the New Zealand governor during the New Zealand wars of the 1860s, takes the principal trope for structuring colonial anxieties-"the native rising"-not as the object of colonial emotions but as the setting or the scene.…”

Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes

“…12 Anderson 2012;Perry 2015. See also Moments of colonial celebrations of empire may have inadvertently served anticolonial purposes by presenting the Indigenous participants with opportunities to interact across larger distances than had been practical or possible in the past.…”