The study of nineteenth century metropole-colony interrelations is a growing field. Numerous books and articles have argued that the divisions between those pursuing different colonial 'projects' helped shape modern understandings of nationhood, race, class, gender and modes of governmentality, both across the British Empire and within Britain itself.

The struggles between humanitarians and settlers were particularly pronounced during the first half of the nineteenth century as settlers in each part of the empire were obliged to defend their practices against a humanitarian critique. Rival imperial networks were maintained, with settlers in different locations appealing to each other and to allies in Britain, and humanitarians co-ordinating counter representations from missionaries and others in each colony. During the first half of the nineteenth century, humanitarian informants protested at settler brutality towards indigenous peoples and advocated what they saw as a more benign and more properly 'British' model of colonial relations in regions being colonized for the first time such as the eastern Cape, New Zealand and parts of New South Wales.

Humanitarians were able to achieve considerable influence over both colonial policy and popular metropolitan imaginations of 'racial' difference during the 1830s and early 1840s. But that influence waned during the succeeding decades. By the mid-nineteenth century, the backward but potentially reclaimable 'native' of the humanitarian imagination was being supplanted in metropolitan discourse by the settlers' dangerous 'savage'. Historians have stressed the roles that post-emancipation developments in the West Indies, colonial wars and shifting scientific understandings played in contributing to this revised popular understanding. But there has been no substantial study of the struggles over representation between British settlers and humanitarians across the broader terrain of Britain's empire of settlement. Relations between these interests in the southern hemisphere, and between them and their political allies and foes in Britain in particular, have been almost entirely neglected.

Aims and Objectives

The aim of this project is to broaden our understanding of settler-humanitarian politics and their implications for diasporic British imaginations of both the colonial and the domestic world, and particularly understandings of 'racial' difference. The project will achieve this by exploring the ways in which settlers and humanitarians in the Cape Colony, New Zealand and New South Wales imagined ideal relations of race, class and gender, and then by examining the nature and effectiveness of the appeals that these situated groups made to each other and to allies and interested parties in Britain.

Once concluded the project will have answered the following questions:

• How did humanitarian ideals conflict with the projects pursued by settlers, in differentiated ways, in the Cape, New Zealand and New South Wales?
• What form did the struggles between humanitarians and settlers take in and between each of these colonial sites?
• How did humanitarian and settler groups in each colony seek to influence metropolitan 'public opinion', as well as opinion in other colonies?
• To what extent did settler-humanitarian contests across the southern hemisphere contribute to shifting understandings, especially of race, but also of class, gender and nation, in Britain?

Given their wide-ranging nature, these questions will be tackled by focusing especially on certain key episodes of contestation that prompted correspondence about the morality of colonization and the nature of 'racial' difference between settlers and humanitarians located in all three of the research sites. They include:

• The Eastern Cape Frontier War of 1834-5 and its aftermath.
• The formation, work and effects of the 1836-7 Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements).
• The 1838 'Myall Creek massacre' and its aftermath in New South Wales.
• The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand.
• The 'Wairau massacre' of 1843 and its aftermath in New Zealand.
• The careers of Governors Richard Bourke (Cape Colony and New South Wales, 1820s-30s) and George Grey (South Australia, New Zealand, Cape Colony and New Zealand again, 1830s-60s).