ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with Indigenous subjects from British settler colonies who travelled transnationally and were sometimes the critics of empire. It considers some of the more recent work answering this call by focusing on empire worldviews from the margins. The chapter also considers some of the conceptual frameworks and archive questions raised by researching the life of a marginal or minority subject. It turns to the process of writing such life worlds in terms of the limits and possibilities faced by the historian for whom archival sources are not only dispersed but incomplete, and when even what can be found usually provides only secondhand accounts of the aims and objectives of the subject her or himself. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the living empire as it pertains to the historian – in this case, a White settler colonial who is thus thoroughly implicated in the ongoing power relations of the imperial archive and its colonial histories.
