Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 by Elizabeth Elbourne (review)

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• Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 by Elizabeth Elbourne
• Christoph Strobel

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842. By elizabeth elbourne. Critical Perspectives on Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xiii + 431 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-47922-6. $120.00 (hardcover).

Elizabeth Elbourne’s Empire, Kinship and Violence is a pathbreaking new study that helps us to think about colonialism and the British [End Page 169] Empire in North America, Australasia, and in sub-Saharan Africa. By exploring issues such as violence and settler colonialism through the experience of three families, the book provides an insightful new perspective. Empire, Kinship and Violence expands on some of the themes and connections explored in Elbourne’s first book—Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853. This book, alongside publications by Alan Lester, Zoe Laidlaw, and several others have deepened our understanding of the global as well as trans-colonial nature and connections of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The book is structured into three parts—each dedicated to the story of one extended family. Part I takes place in North America and centers around the Brant family—an influential Haudenosaunee (Iroquois/Six Nations) family that played a leading role in the Kanien kehá ka (Mohawk) nation. Part II follows the Bannisters, a minor English “gentry family in financial peril” (p. 9). Members of the Bannister family pursued colonial activities in Upper Canada, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Victoria, Western Australia, southern and western Africa, and were tied into the networks of the British Empire. The analysis in part three focuses on Britain, the Cape Colony, and western Africa. These chapters center on the Buxtons, an affluent, influential, and well-connected English noble family. Members of this family were active in “networks of humanitarian lobbying,” especially in the abolitionist cause and they also saw themselves as advocates for Indigenous rights (p. 307). But as Elbourne argues, through their activism, they were also advancing the colonizing agenda of the British Empire.

Empire, Kinship and Violence is a nuanced and detailed study. Elbourne provides us a glimpse into the violence, global connections, paradoxes of imperial liberalism, gender, power, family networks and dynamics, Indigenous capacities to deal with white settlers and administrators, enslavement, abolition, as well as struggles for land and sovereignty in the British Empire. The book “examines the entangled history of the conquest of Indigenous lands and the development of linkages between these very diverse peoples through the experience of colonialism between the 1770s and the 1830s” (pp. 4–5). It focuses especially on the role that family and kinship played in these developments, and how settler colonialism became not only entrenched in, but also brokered, the lives of the peripherally linked families studied in this volume. Elbourne argues that from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, there was a shift [End Page 170] away from using “family biopower as a core technique of governance.” This arrangement allowed, for instance, at times, for potential “alliances between Indigenous and British elites” (p. 14). Throughout the nineteenth century, however, there was a shift in dynamics, as “the colonial state would struggle with increasing assurance to control and define Indigenous identity, and to replace fluid family power by the bureaucracy of a racialized state” (p. 150).

Elbourne’s effort to underscore the occurrence of the above quoted transformative developments and processes in the British Empire also raise some questions. She argues, for example, that the Sullivan campaign, an extremely brutal expedition against the Haudenosaunee by revolutionary American forces, was of a “different order of magnitude.” But the dynamics of Sullivan’s Campaign might not have been as new as Elbourne suggests. For instance, during the Nine Years’ War in North America (1688–1697), the French launched several massive and destructive campaigns against the Haudenosaunee homelands. Like Sullivan’s campaign, these missions aimed to destroy Indigenous settlements, burned harvests and food storages, and targeted enemy noncombatants such as women and children. Atrocious warfare was also deployed...