ABSTRACT
The history of Britain’s white settler colonies at once reflects and refutes the dominant developments and motifs of metropolitan Victorian society. The place names, institutions and personnel of colonial Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa all tapped common roots of identity planted firmly in British soil. In letters, landscapes, newspapers, novels, travelogues and pageantry, settlers in these emerging polities repeatedly affirmed their enduring ties to fondly remembered, hopefully imagined and craftily concocted British homelands. No less conspicuous, however, in white settler histories were colonists’ repeated departures from British practices and precedents. Overwhelmingly agrarian in a period during which Britain itself became predominantly urban, Victorian settler societies also departed from metropolitan norms in their political constitutions, ethnic compositions and legal regimes. Vociferous in demanding democratic and economic rights from the imperial government, moreover, white settlers were tenacious in defending their British ‘birthrights’ from the competing claims of aboriginal inhabitants in their adopted homelands. ‘Settlers occupied a strategic, curious, and contested place within the conduits of power that constituted the British World’, Adele Perry has commented, underlining the extent to which settler self-government and ‘the lived practice of rule’ fragmented colonial identities. ‘Settlers thus occupied what we might call a doubled place within the Empire: they experienced being colonized and colonizing in simultaneous and seemingly contradictory ways’ (Perry 2005: 159).
