ABSTRACT
This article centres upon three sites of colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century: the Cape Colony, New South Wales and New Zealand. However, the paper is not intended to be a comparative history of these sites. What I would like to do is to conceive of each of these spaces as being nodes within an imperial network. Materials, people and above all ideas continually flowed through this network. Although, in many respects, Britain was at its hub, the trans-global constitution of the network rendered the boundaries of the imperial ‘centre’ remarkably permeable. Among other things, bourgeois ideas of legitimate behaviour towards others and corresponding notions of Britishness itself moved through, and were contested within, circuits connecting Britain with each of its colonies. Rather than comparing and contrasting colonial episodes in New South Wales, New Zealand and the Cape, then, I want to indicate some of the ways in which they were constituted through their transactions with one another and with Britain. 1
