Invoking Empire - (Studies in Imperialism) by Darren Reid (Hardcover)

About the Book

Invoking Empire combines nine case studies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to demonstrate the diverse ways people continued to interact with imperial authority in the decades before and after their colonies gained self-government, attending specifically to their efforts to apply imperial power in their local communities.

Book Synopsis

Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860-1900, when each gained some degree of self-government yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. It applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers and Indigenous peoples who lived through these decades to make two main arguments. It argues that colonial subjects adapted imperial citizenship to both support and challenge settler sovereignty, revealing the continuing importance of imperial authority in self-governing settler spaces. It also posits that imperial citizenship was rendered inoperable by a combination of factors in both Britian and the colonies, highlighting the contingency of settler colonialism on imperial governmental structures and challenging teleological assumptions that the rise of settler nation states was an inevitable result of settler self-government.

From the Back Cover

Invoking Empire analyses local perceptions and impacts of imperial governance in Britain's settler colonies to explore the entanglement of imperialism and settler colonialism in the late nineteenth century. The book brings together nine case studies from settler and Indigenous communities across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to demonstrate the multiplicity of ways colonial subjects leveraged imperial authority in their everyday lives. Asking how and why colonial inhabitants attempted to co-opt imperial authority in diverse contexts ranging from an 1868 smallpox outbreak in British Columbia to the Bechuanaland Wars of 1882-85, it provides valuable microhistorical and comparative insights into the lived experiences of imperial political subjecthood during the transition to self-government in the settler colonies.
By critically assessing the failures of imperial citizenship to achieve tangible results, the volume offers crucial insights into the complicity of British governments and publics in settler colonialism. It adopts an integrative approach that brings Indigenous and settler experiences together, contributing a novel approach to imperial citizenship that captures the diverse cultural and political connotations of imperial connectivity. Additionally, the book's approach to settler colonialism as deeply entangled in imperial continuities contributes to ongoing efforts to reconceptualize national settler histories through a transnational lens.
Through its deliberate attention to the complexity and indeterminacy of the late nineteenth century, Invoking Empire provides an essential window into to the messiness, the hopefulness, and the often times paradoxical nature of imperial subjecthood during a period of massive and consequential political changes.

About the Author

Darren Reid is a Postdoctoral Fellow in History at McGill University