Sample proposal: monographs
Book Title: The Empire Of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians And The Language Of Colonial Government
Author: Bruce Buchan
The Empire of Political Thought is a book about how European colonists in Australia represented the Indigenous peoples they found there, and the tasks of governing them within the terms of Western political thought. The book is unique because it uses material drawn from the Australian colonial experience to analyse the broader relationship between the traditions of Western political thought and colonial perceptions of Indigenous people. The title of my book - ‘The Empire of Political Thought’ - emphasises how the framework of ideas and concepts drawn from the traditions of Western political thought was employed in the imperial government of Indigenous peoples. This framework rendered Indigenous peoples ‘familiar’ and ‘knowable’ to Europeans. The main argument of the book is that rather than effacing Indigenous difference, colonists employed a conceptual language that recognised those differences but assimilated them within a framework of concepts that rendered those differences as ‘deficiencies’.
The book highlights hitherto neglected continuities linking the imperial government in Australia with other colonial contexts such as North America and Canada. There is a rapidly developing interest in tracing the imperial implications of Western political thought in the colonisation of British North America. This book will be among the first to trace connections to be made with Australia’s colonisation. In doing so, it will demonstrate:
how ideas of civilisation and savagery applied in the North American context were translated to Australia;
- how ideas of property developed in Europe and extended in North America also informed early colonial interpretations of Indigenous people across the Pacific;
- how colonial anxieties over frontier violence in Australia drew on much older debates over the legitimacy of war in Western political thought.
The central argument of the book is that colonists in Australia were able to make sense of Indigenous ‘differences’ (culture, beliefs and social organization) by means of the language of Western political thought. The central concepts within this language (such as ‘civilisation’, ‘government’, ‘property’, and ‘society’), were used by colonists to render Indigenous ‘differences’ recognisable not on their own terms, but as ‘problems’ requiring special governmental solutions. While previous studies have analysed the institutions through which this government was effected, this study focuses on the conceptual language the colonisers used. This book emphasises how the conceptual language the colonists used helped to shape the colonial encounter between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers.
The Empire of Political Thought is unique in using Australian colonial sources to reflect on the connections between empire and the development of Western political thought. The Australian colonial experience and contemporaneous European imperial expansion in the Pacific has hitherto been largely neglected in the burgeoning literature on empires, colonialism and political thought. Significantly, the existing literature focuses on the Atlantic colonial context (and especially on North America). Here, scholars have argued that Western political thought was deployed in the quest to create an ‘empire of uniformity’ that did not fully recognise Indigenous differences to Europeans. I will contend however, that the Australian colonial experience illustrates how an ‘empire of difference’ between Indigenous peoples and Europeans was conceptualised. The ‘empire of difference’ consisted in the conceptual distinctions and exclusions that Europeans drew between themselves and the Indigenous peoples.
This will be the first book of its kind to explore the conceptual continuities between the government of Indigenous peoples in Australia and other colonial contexts. The existing literature on empire tends to regard Australia as either an insignificant chapter in the history of British imperialism (a story dominated by the North American experience), or as an exceptional case that stands apart from other colonial contexts. The exceptional qualities of Australia’s colonisation have been traced to the absence of any treaties with the Indigenous inhabitants, such as those in North America. This absence is attributed, in large part, to the failure of Captain Cook and later colonisers to obtain Indigenous ‘consent’ to British annexation and colonisation. A major element of my argument is that this ‘failure’ was itself the consequence of an established language and practice of British imperial expansion in North America linking diplomatic negotiation with Indigenous people to engagement in colonial ‘traffick’ or trade. In this and in other examples, Australia’s colonisation shows a close connection to other colonial contexts, and reveals the profound importance of analysing the conceptual language the colonisers used in articulating their strategies for colonisation.
The contemporary relevance of this book is underscored by the continuing efforts of Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere to articulate their visions of political (and cultural) self-government and self-determination. In doing so, they employ a language of concepts adopted from Western traditions of political thought that have a colonial heritage. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ongoing debates in Australia, and elsewhere, over the extent of Indigenous dispossession and existing Indigenous entitlement to land. In Australia, debate continues to rage over whether British imperial authorities declared the land to be unowned, or a terra nullius. Simultaneous debates on the violence of colonisation, and whether this violence constituted ‘war’ or ‘genocide’, have become entwined with competing visions of national identity. Such debates raise but have so far failed to confront careful analysis of the conceptual language the colonisers used.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Sections: (i) Whither Terra Nullius?; (ii) Colonisation and political thought; (iii) The ‘empire of uniformity’ or an ‘empire of difference’?
The introduction orients the book toward recent scholarship on the importance of studying the relationship between political thought and the colonial experience. It does so by using current debates in Australia on the status of terra nullius as a colonial doctrine to introduce broader debates about the colonial legacies of Western political thought. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that the language of political thought was used not to deny Indigenous presence or difference, but to recognise both by articulating special techniques of colonial government.
Chapter 1: The Empire of Political Thought
Sections: (i) Civilising political thought; (ii) The savagery of political thought; (iii) Histories of civilisation.
It is argued in this chapter that notions of ‘savagery’ and ‘civilisation’ in Western political thought were used in the colonisation of America to construct a particular image of Indigenous peoples. Hinging on the idea that ‘savage’ peoples had no legitimate form of government, concepts of ‘civilisation’ underpinned the articulation of historicized accounts of the primitiveness of ‘savage’ peoples in contrast to more advanced, ‘civilised’ Europeans. By means of such discursive strategies, colonisers were able to assimilate Indigenous people within Western political thought by rendering their difference as ‘deficiency’. This process of assimilation is referred to as the ‘empire of political thought’.
Chapter 2: The ‘Traffick’ of Empire: Commerce, Consent and Colonisation
Sections: (i) Britain’s empire of trade; (ii) Trafficking for subjection: America and the Pacific; (iii) ‘With the consent of the natives…’
This chapter discusses the vexed issue of whether any Indigenous ‘consent’ to British annexation of Australia (and subsequent colonisation) was ever sought by Captain Cook in 1770. It will be argued that the idea of ‘consent’ was bound up with a range of other concepts (such as property and government) that could be signified through engagement in ‘traffick’ or trade. The explanation for what Captain Cook did (or did not do) in the Pacific and Australia thus lies in carefully reconstructing contemporary understandings of what those concepts meant to Europeans, and how they shaped European interactions with Indigenous peoples. Undertaking this reconstruction involves tracing the very long experience of colonial trade and ‘traffick’ – so central to British perceptions of their own empire as peaceful - in North America and its intricate entanglement with treaty negotiations there.
Chapter 3: Savage Subjects: War, Conquest and Empire
Sections: (i) The Subject of War: From Salamanca to Sydney Cove; (ii) Difficult subjects; (iii) Subjecting the natives; (iv) Subjects of the Crown
Attention shifts in this chapter to the continuity of imperial anxieties over colonial warfare with Indigenous peoples from the early work of Victoria and the School of Salamanca, through to the vigorous public debates in Britain about the legitimacy of conquest in the new colony of New South Wales in 1788. These anxieties led colonial authorities to construe the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia as ‘subjects of the Crown’. The application of this status, it will be argued, can only be understood as a corollary of the denial of Indigenous sovereignty. Despite the obvious violence of frontier conflict, colonial authorities in Australia and England clung to the conviction that this did not constitute a war of conquest. This chapter therefore highlights the importance of a central dilemma of political thought in colonial Australia, namely, how to reconcile the ‘sovereignty’ of the state with the ‘protection’ owed to its ‘subjects’. It also raises a tension between the language of civilisation (that rendered Indigenous people ‘subjects of the Crown’), and the language of war (that would have accorded them ‘rights’ as ‘foreign subjects’).
Chapter 4: Fit for Society
Sections: (i) Concepts of society; (ii) The government of society; (iii) Social subjects: Australia and beyond.
This chapter examines the centrality of new understandings of ‘society’ in the formulation of early policies for the ‘civilisation’ of Indigenous people in Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, it is argued that the meaning of ‘society’ was decisively shaped by British experiments in social reform of the lower classes (at home) and colonial government of Indigenous peoples (abroad). An enduring preoccupation of Indigenous policy in Australia throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, was how to ‘fit’ Indigenous people – who were thought to have no ‘society’ of their own - for taking their place in colonial ‘society’. In framing the ‘problem’ in this way, society came to be defined as a domain of interaction dependent upon techniques of government at once invasive, but also conceptualised as productive of greater autonomy and liberty. In the ever-expanding literature on liberal political thought, this normative tension is dismissed as a conflict between the incompatible claims of ‘liberal’ freedom, and ‘paternalistic’ governmental interference. In arguing so, political theorists have failed to grasp the ways in which the development of liberalism (and of colonial liberalism in Australia) was shaped by the history of colonial government.
Chapter 5: Benevolent Empire – Aboriginal Welfare
Sections: (i) Race, society and government; (ii) Sociality to culture; (iii) Governing culture; (iv) Protection – Welfare - Assimilation
This chapter explores the gradual shift in perception after 1860 away from seeing Indigenous ‘sociality’ toward the identification of Indigenous ‘culture’ as the appropriate site of governmental intervention. It is argued here that this shift underlay the formation of policies of ‘welfare’ and ‘assimilation’, often informed by emerging ethnographic and anthropological investigation of ‘Aboriginal culture’ in the late nineteenth century. While this early anthropological knowledge was deeply imbued with notions of race, and of the so-called ‘doomed race’ theory, it also signalled some significant shifts in colonial policy. First, it showed that the ‘problems’ Indigenous people were thought to present might best be understood in terms of the breakdown of the domain of ‘Aboriginal culture’. Second, it indicated a significant revision of the colonial discourse of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ toward a social scientific understanding of the functional relationship between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as interconnected domains. Paradoxically, while the demise of ideas of ‘civilisation’ eventually led to greater acknowledgement of the rights of Indigenous peoples, it also gave rise to policies of assimilation that denied Indigenous ‘difference’ and demanded greater cultural uniformity.
Chapter 6: Colonial Legacies - Sovereignty, Self-Determination and Native Title
Sections: (i) The empire of political thought; (ii) Native Title; (iii) A future for Indigenous sovereignty?
Attention is focussed in this concluding chapter on how ongoing campaigns of Indigenous people in Australia and world-wide are framed and constrained by the Western language of political thought. This is particularly apparent in relation to two of the most important concepts in Western thought, sovereignty and property. The concluding chapter will address the ongoing struggle of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to confront the colonial legacies of these concepts. It will conclude by reflecting on their efforts to articulate alternative political visions free from the colonial legacies of Western political thought.
Timetable for Completion
I anticipate that the book manuscript will be completed and ready for publication by mid 2007. At present, the Introduction and Chapter One have been written (copies have been submitted with this proposal). In addition, chapters Two and Four are substantially complete. Chapters Three and Five exist in rough form and await more substantial work. Only Chapter Six needs to be written more or less from scratch, but even here the skeleton of the chapter has been planned and much material gathered.
Comparable Books
Henry Reynolds, Law of the Land (Penguin, 1992) – Reynolds’ work has been influential in the re-assessment of the legacies of colonialism in Australian law and politics. The lynch-pin of Reynolds’ work is the contention that the British colonial dispossession of Indigenous people in Australia was illegal – by the standards of international law at the time – and therefore, the British failure to recognise Indigenous ‘rights’ and ‘sovereignty’ was frankly disingenuous. Though groundbreaking, Reynolds’ work fails to measure the significance and influence of colonialism in the very concepts of Western political thought, often assuming that their legal definition was universally shared and accepted.
Michael Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius (Macleay Press, 2005) – Connor’s polemical book is an attack on Reynolds and on the notion that the British applied the concept of terra nullius in Australia in 1788. While attracting wide attention in Australia, the book singularly fails to take a close look at the complex range of concepts (other than terra nullius) that British colonisers were using in 1788 and thereafter.
D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders (eds.), Political Theory and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2000) – a significant collection of papers that covers the broad field in which political theorists have contributed to deepening our understanding of the legacies of colonisation. These essays remain focussed on conceptualising ways to address those legacies in present day multi-cultural, liberal-democratic societies. As such, the essays largely overlook the colonial legacies in the very concepts and terms of political thought, and thus do not direct a self-critical gaze at the tradition of Western political thought.
Merete Falck Borch, Conciliation – Compulsion – Conversion (Rodopi, 2004) – This is a major recent history of British attitudes to Indigenous peoples in Australia, North America and South Africa from 1763-1814. This book’s most serious shortcoming is that as a work of history it does not concern itself with exploring and analysing the conceptual language the colonisers used.
Potential Markets
The primary market for this book includes scholars and students working in the fields of political theory and its history, Australian history, and comparative studies of colonialism. Current interest in the relationships between the history of political thought and empire is vibrant and the literature on the topic is one of the fastest growing of any area within the humanities. This is attested to by the frequent publication of monographs on the topic by British and American university presses, and regular scholarly papers on the topic in journals such as Political Theory, History of Political Thought, History of the Human Sciences, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. That this topic is going to continue to be of interest to academics across the globe is also underlined by the number of recent international conferences and symposia devoted to political thought and empire.
Secondary markets for the book include sales to university libraries in Australia and overseas. The book will be relevant for a range of courses in Australian studies and history at universities in Australia and overseas. Among the courses in which I teach at Griffith University for example, the book could be recommended as an essential supplementary source. These courses include:
‘The Rise of Europe’: a course in European intellectual history with two concluding topics on the British Empire in Australia and the Pacific in the late eighteenth century. Enrolments in this course have been up to 300 students per semester.
‘Australian History’: a new Australian history course being planned for 2008. This course has projected a enrolment of up to 150 students.
‘Contact Zones’: a course in which I teach a unit of three to four weeks on American and Australian colonial history. Enrolments in this course have been climbing up to 60 students per semester.
This is a small sample of courses in Australia for which my book is a relevant source. There is of course a larger number of such courses taught across all Australian universities. There are also a number of other courses in Australian history and Australian studies taught at universities in the UK, such as those offered by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at Kings College London.
Because the book addresses issues of concern in public debate (such as Native Title and Indigenous sovereignty), it is anticipated that the book will also be attractive to general readers (outside of universities). Such readers will be those looking for analysis of current political issues from an alternative perspective informed by historical analysis. The need for this analysis is pressing given continued controversy (and confusion) in Australia and overseas over the legacies of colonisation. There has for instance been ongoing debate over the status of terra nullius, over the attribution of genocide to the early colonists, and the desirability of a treaty with the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Each of these issues features heavily in my book. The topical nature of the book means that I would easily be able to work on generating further public interest by preparing short opinion pieces or essays for the media.