Emotions and Empire: A Historical Exploration of Empathy and its Role in British Colonialism
Introduction: Emotions and Empire
Edward Eyre's 1842 Despatch and Colonial Conflict
Edward John Eyre's 1842 despatch from Adelaide provides insight into the emotions surrounding colonial conflict and cross-cultural exchange. Following intense interracial violence, particularly the Rufus River Massacre of late 1841 along the Melbourne-Adelaide overland route, white settlers experienced significant rage and fear. Eyre, sent to mediate, aimed to foster peace.
His account emphasized the humanity of Aboriginal inhabitants, depicting them as individuals with families experiencing sorrow for lost loved ones (husbands, parents, children). He portrayed Aboriginal men not as fierce warriors but as fathers with dependents, arguing for colonists' responsibilities towards them. Eyre advocated for the establishment of a permanent station on the Murray, at the junction of the Rufus, to be directed by someone knowledgeable in Aboriginal customs. He believed this would prevent future large-scale property losses and violent retaliations, envisioning a future of goodwill between colonists and Indigenous peoples. Eyre himself later undertook the role of a Protector.
While Eyre's plea for compassion for Aboriginal people was unusual for his time, such arguments were a key part of imperialism, highlighting the crucial role of emotions in building relationships across cultural, spatial, and temporal divides.
Book Overview: Emotions, Empathy, and Imperialism
This book investigates how perceptions of 'who to feel for and with' evolved across the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It specifically examines the role of compassionate emotions, now often termed empathy, in establishing and maintaining imperialism, focusing on relations between Britain and its Australasian colonies, and between settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Emotional narratives are shown to have:
Created relationships between individuals and distant others.
Maintained cultural distinctions.
Legitimized conquest.
In settler colonies, empathy was crucial for:
Uniting dispersed communities.
Connecting the metropolis with its colonies.
However, it also served as a tool for exclusion, particularly on racial grounds.
British imperialism facilitated communication between diverse peoples, constructing new relationships through competing, highly emotional narratives. This led to evolving ideas about humanity, nation, cosmopolitanism, empire, slavery, convicts, and Indigenous peoples. These narratives often drew on domestic themes like family, childhood, and inheritance, which were then amplified and challenged by imperial networks, revealing the deep interconnections of feelings, morality, and debates central to conquest.
The Concept of Empathy: From 'Fellow-Feeling' to 'Einfühlung'
Drawing on a wide array of sources, especially popular culture, the book traces the history of what the eighteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Smith called 'fellow feeling' throughout the British Empire. This 'fellow feeling' was instrumental in forming diverse emotional communities united by common allegiances and goals.
Smith's broad concept of sympathy encompassed what, in the twentieth century, became increasingly known as 'empathy.' The term 'empathy' was introduced to English only in 1909 as a translation of the German word 'Einfühlung' (meaning 'feeling into'). Its initial turn-of-the-century use in English referred to aesthetic experiences, such as reacting to art, and bodily responses. Over the twentieth century, 'empathy' absorbed the complex, multidimensional meaning of 'sympathy' used by earlier observers.
In this book, terms like 'sympathy' are used in their historical context. However, referencing extensive recent critical literature that employs a broad and inclusive definition of 'empathy,' the author uses 'empathy' to refer to the broader constellation of sympathetic emotions, retaining Smith's inclusive sense of 'fellow-feeling,' despite some modern interpretations that suggest 'empathy' implies closer identification with another's emotional state than 'sympathy.'
Challenging Orthodoxy: Emotions, Imperialism, and Political Malleability
Within scholarship on emotions like pity or compassion, it is often argued that these feelings mask complicity with oppressive practices. However, some scholars have challenged this, demonstrating that emotional bonds, such as friendship, can actually undermine the reinforcement of racial boundaries and power inequalities. While acknowledging the significant limitations of empathetic understanding, the book argues that such feelings must be understood as politically malleable and contingent processes, rather than fixed entities. It emphasizes the need to differentiate between diverse contexts of reception and response when examining the role of emotional discourse in imperial relations, avoiding a judgment of emotions as inherently 'positive' or 'negative' and instead mapping their political effects in historical context.
Researching the History of the Emotions
Emergence and Core Ideas
Over the past three decades, a growing interest in the history and culture of emotions has highlighted their crucial role in human life and their cultural and temporal variability. The assertion that emotional experiences and expressions are universal has been challenged, revealing their tremendous variations across different times and places. This research field largely emerged from gender history and family history in the 1990s.
It challenged the historical construction of opposing spheres:
Domestic, feminine, 'private' sphere.
Rational, male, public domain.
This work demonstrated that gender was a tool for naturalizing social hierarchies and uneven power distribution. Similarly, emotions, often linked to the private female domain, permeate all aspects of life and define fundamental categories such as:
Male and female
Public and private
Subject and object
Human and nonhuman
Determined and free
Emotional experience has extensively defined, reproduced, and reified central social, political, and scientific categories across diverse periods and cultures.
Anthropological Insights and Emotional Economies
Anthropologists have documented the diversity of emotional vocabularies and norms, arguing that emotion is intricately linked to the politics of everyday interaction. Therefore, a primary focus of emotion studies should be the politics of social life, rather than merely individual psychology. Emotions can be:
Collective
Historically created
Locally contingent
Dynamically responsive to circumstances, responses, or refusals within systems of circulation and exchange, which Sara Ahmed terms 'emotional economies'.
Conceptual and Methodological Approaches
Scholarship has developed various ways to understand the historical role of emotions. A central interdisciplinary question concerns the relationship between:
Universally experienced bodily responses (affects), often seen as the domain of scientists and neuroscientists.
Their cultural expression (emotions).
While debated, a consensus holds that these domains are not opposed; biological and cultural studies of emotion are mutually informative. Discourse, particularly language, shapes both the experience and expression of emotion. A broad scholarly agreement distinguishes between the biological and embodied nature of 'affects' and the social and cultural expression of 'emotions,' while acknowledging their complex interrelationship.
Accessing Past Emotions: The 'Experience versus Expression Question'
A crucial methodological challenge is how to access the emotional lives of people in the past – how to interpret their expressions (in language, performance, or visual imagery) to understand their actual emotional states. This is known as the 'experience versus expression question,' which asks how we can reconstruct the subjectivity of historical actors who may have been constituted very differently from us.
Emotional Communities and Systems of Feeling
To reconstruct past emotions, various approaches emphasizing the collective, normative aspects of emotional cultures have been developed. Barbara Rosenwein's concept of 'emotional communities' is particularly flexible, positing that these are 'largely the same as social communities' (e.g., families, neighborhoods, syndicates, factories). This concept accounts for negotiation, challenge, and frequent deviation from norms, allowing for simultaneous participation in multiple 'circles'.
Drawing on this, the book aims to uncover 'systems of feeling' that define what members of these communities consider valuable or harmful, thereby generating specific emotions. Conversely, these systems also determine which emotions are devalued or ignored (e.g., 'royal-watchers' in the final chapter).
Emotions are a communicative tool expressed through conventions. To reconstruct affective bonds and emotional expression, the author examines and contextualizes a wide range of 'emotions-related utterances' in documentary sources. This linguistic focus highlights the importance of shared ideas and narratives in forming communities among people who are not personally acquainted.
Emotions as Practices and Objects of Feeling
This study intersects with post-colonial scholarship, which has shown how Western conceptions of history and culture, and the methods used to conceive, construct, and convey meaning about other peoples, are deeply implicated in imperialism and oppression. This focus on representation has been expanded by cultural theorists, following Pierre Bourdieu, to view colonial narratives less as signs and more as 'practices, or as signifying practices rather than elements of a code.'
Viewing emotions as 'practices' allows for their understanding as:
Practical engagement with the world.
Overcoming false binaries between body and mind, and expression and experience, by revealing their interrelationship.
As practices, emotions constitute 'objects of feeling' – those towards whom we feel pity, anger, or love. Monique Scheer argues that this framework 'elaborates most thoroughly the infusion of the physical body with social structure, both of which participate in the production of emotional experience.' In practice theory, subjects are seen as products of practices, not prior to them, with the body deeply shaped by the habitus (ingrained habits, skills, dispositions).
Emotional Practices: Media Consumption and the Imperial Commons
The consumption of media (texts, visual images, music) is an important emotional practice that transforms knowledge into bodily engagement. Fictional representations in literature, theatre, and film are analyzed as 'artefacts used by actors in their emotional practices, as providers of templates of language and gesture as well as mediators of social norms.' These artefacts are examined within their historical context, looking for evidence of their intended and actual effects across the empire, within what is termed an 'imperial commons' – a vibrant, empire-wide print culture.
The dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of print and communication technologies fostered the creation of larger 'imagined communities,' united by shared values, myths, and emotional narratives that shaped cultural and historical imagination. The Victorian press connected Britain and its colonies, giving readers a sense of their shared world. Bestselling books contributed to the imperial commons by circulating globally, translated into diverse cultural, linguistic, and social contexts. The partiality of intellectual property law and the 'scrapbooking' method of newspapers reproducing text facilitated this accessibility, creating a 'widespread and homemade global idiom' – a demotic form of world literature.
These portable, mobile, accessible texts depicted how imperialism functioned or offered engaging accounts of shared concerns, such as children in the metropolis, mission work, or slavery.
Mediality and 'Close Reading at a Distance'
In emotional practice, these 'artefacts' were mediated by performance, manuscript, print, or digital forms, constituting 'the means through, and historical conditions under which human imagination materializes itself.' Through their translation across diverse cultural and spatial contexts of reception, narratives that evoked feelings crossed boundaries of class, race, and gender, even as they simultaneously helped create these divisions.
To recover this condition of mediality, the author undertakes 'close reading at a distance' – combining textual attention with an understanding of its wider and diverse reception. For example, 'overlander' George Hamilton, after experiencing frontier violence, sought to justify it as self-defense in art and text. He quoted Charles Dickens's Bleak House to criticize 'greasy Chadbands' who supported Aboriginal rights, aiming to align his readers with colonists and against Indigenous people. Such interpretive schemes define some lives as more human and worthy of concern than others.
By examining key texts, images, and authors in Australia and their reception across the imperial world, the book explores how emotional narratives defined specific 'objects of empathy,' directing responses towards or away from groups like white settlers, Aboriginal people, missionaries, orphans, or members of the royal family.
Visual Culture and Historical Emotions
Visual culture is a significant means of accessing historical emotions. Images are shaped by contemporary conventions, cultural predispositions, and allegiances. Yet, they can reveal contemporary emotions, including ambivalence and the moral uncertainties of invaders. Visual theorists show that 'looking' is historically and politically specific; images are ambivalent historical traces that gain meaning when embedded in written, oral, visual, or embodied narratives. Globalizing visual cultures are an important part of the imperial commons. Interpretive contexts for visual meanings evolve, allowing for better recognition of past premises and conventions, and new interpretations of images.
Images, by arousing emotions like empathy or compassion, connect distant peoples and create social relationships. They can be performative and perlocutionary, aiming to persuade, frighten, anger, or evoke compassion. Art often seeks not just to depict but also to create emotions. As Erin Sullivan notes, 'there are very few works of art that set out not to make their audiences feel something.' The book argues that images can evoke compassion, disgust, sorrow, or fear in the present in ways that forensic historical analysis sometimes cannot.
Changing Emotional Regimes across the British Empire
The 'Cult of Sensibility' and Its Transformations
During Britain's colonial expansion in the eighteenth century, a broad emotional regime emerged across Europe and America known as the 'cult of sensibility,' influenced by moral philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith. This orientation was defined by contrasts between home and other, and domestic and cosmopolitan priorities, fluctuating with political contexts.
For instance, British perceptions of the French Revolution as excessively sentimental and egalitarian led to a backlash in the 1790s. This resulted in suspicion of excessive sentimentality and a desire to distance themselves from 'the French fashion for tears, sensibility and revolution.' Hierarchical ideas about human difference and natural classification increasingly excluded non-white peoples from full humanity. An opposition between emotion and reason developed, implying that 'savage' peoples, being less emotionally controlled, lacked the capacity for civility.
In imagining new Antipodean 'homes,' core oppositions were invoked, contrasting the 'natural emotions' of parenthood with an 'unnatural universalism,' pitting 'near' against 'distant,' and 'national' against 'cosmopolitan' – an enduring imperial theme. Such exclusions relegated Indigenous people to the past, with their 'inevitable disappearance' becoming a cause for mourning.
The Abolition of Slavery and the Rise of Humanitarianism
Humanitarian sensibility was applied to various reforms, most notably the British movement to abolish slavery, which culminated in August 1833 when Parliament abolished slavery throughout British colonies. Historians debate the relative importance of emotional, religious, economic, and political factors, but it's clear that the successful mobilization of empathy for slaves through emotional discourse was key to the campaign.
This anti-slavery campaign bridged the 'ages of sensibility' and 'sentimentality,' demonstrating the politicization of emotional regimes intertwined with debates on empire, nation, and political ideologies like liberalism and republicanism. The discourse of sensibility also linked to the expansion of international British missionary networks from 1790 to 1812.
Religious values and humanitarianism were mutually constitutive (e.g., for Thomas Hodgkin, co-founder of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1837). Evangelical Protestantism fostered a 'new sentimentalism' that upheld sympathetic feeling as natural and virtuous, and an optimistic view of human nature. Both movements shared the fundamental impulse to feel with others and act to alleviate suffering. The public sentiment aroused by the anti-slavery movement's success drove a new wave of missionary activity during the 1830s and 1840s.
The Historiography of Humanitarianism
Over the past two decades, interest in the history of 'humanitarianism' has led to significant work tracing the emergence of concern for the suffering of distant others within a long genealogy of human rights. This scholarship reveals how:
Globalization and imperialism were linked to the expanding category of 'the human'.
Communicative technologies and colonial experience generated new ideas about distant others.
'Humanitarian' serves as a useful historiographical term to connect places and periods, often denoting historical actors (anti-slavery activists, missionaries, secular figures) who worked to ameliorate the plight of non-white peoples from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Humanitarianism, Governance, and Complicity
This field demonstrates that humanitarianism was intimately connected to the developing institutions of the colony and nation-state. Ideas and practices of imperial politics and administration both shaped and were shaped by evolving notions of humanitarianism. Scholarship has explored the scope and limits of humanitarian responses to empire, focusing on British imperial policy in the early to mid-nineteenth century and the transition from post-abolitionist commitment to Indigenous justice to settler self-government.
British civil society and the state adopted humanitarian principles alongside political economy as part of their governance apparatus, both domestically and across the expanded empire. The establishment of Aborigines protectorates with magisterial authority in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales and in New Zealand during the late 1830s exemplifies 'protection' as a broad legal reform program, extending British legal jurisdiction and sovereignty. Amanda Nettelbeck argues that protecting Indigenous rights relied on their reform as governable colonial subjects, including through legal punishment.
Transnational Links and Anti-Slavery Discourse in the Colonies
Humanitarian histories, as part of the 'new imperial histories,' have revealed transnational links and synergies forged across settler colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through religious and reform campaigns. Between the abolition of the slave trade and the consolidation of settler governance, evangelical humanitarian networks directed the emotional and moral power of anti-slavery discourse towards the plight of Indigenous peoples.
Though this scholarship hasn't explicitly focused on emotional experience, it has explored the intellectual and religious dimensions of humanitarianism – ideas of redemption, atonement, active help for suffering, and reliance on sentimental language. Elizabeth Elbourne's 2003 essay traced continuities between the British anti-slavery campaign (led by MP Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, victorious in 1833) and his 1836-7 initiative, the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements). This committee 'applied to British settlers and traders the same language that had so recently been brought to bear against slave owners.'
Humanitarians across the British Empire used anti-slavery discourse to arouse concern for Indigenous peoples during the growing frontier violence of the 1830s. In a context where Aboriginal people were stereotyped as primitive and non-human, counter-images and strategies from anti-slavery discourse aimed to constitute them as objects of white compassion. Two forms of masculinity mobilized empathy: the 'sensibility of manliness' of metropolitan evangelical Christianity competed with racialized settler masculinities, a common process in many settler colonies during the 1830s and 1840s.
While humanitarian ideas of 'atonement' for invasion focused on Christianization and 'civilization,' philanthropists often stopped short of acknowledging Aboriginal land rights. This demonstrates that their idealizing empathy for Indigenous peoples was deeply complicit with dispossession.
The Contested Meaning of 'Humanitarian'
The term 'humanitarian' itself, as a category of analysis, can obscure differences and exaggerate continuities, especially during the period from 1840 to 1860 when it entered common English usage and was highly contested. Claire McLisky notes that the Oxford English Dictionary defined 'humanitarian' only in 1844 as 'one who advocates or practices humanity or humane action; one who devotes himself to the welfare of mankind at large; a philanthropist.' Before this, 'philanthropist' was the preferred term.
Initially, 'humanitarian' was used with contempt, connoting excessive and ill-conceived views. Its first appearance in the colonial press in 1843 was satirical, ridiculing proposals for 'temporary insanity' verdicts in homicide cases and concluding: '' Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the term was invariably used ironically in Australasian newspapers, signifying the actual cruelty, impracticality, or foolishness of the position in question. It was deployed to attack the liberalization of the criminal justice and convict systems.
Emotional Contests over Suffering
Proponents of 'humanitarian' views were derided as 'sentimental,' 'maudlin,' and immoral. For instance, the radical working-man's People's Advocate and New South Wales Vindicator in 1850 scornfully argued against leniency for men who murdered their wives. It stated, '' By contrast, the People's Advocate asserted, ''
These censorious uses reflect an emotional and moral contest over the meaning of suffering and the proper object of sympathy, distinguishing between deserving and undeserving, acknowledged and excluded. This also signaled broader cultural shifts concerning discipline, punishment, and liberal individualism. The People's Advocate used the language of sentimentality to locate and assign sympathy, 'thereby designating who possesses affect and who elicits it.' This struggle over the term 'humanitarian' reveals the opposed positions of 'philanthropists' and their opponents in the imperial political deployment of emotions during this period. The author aims to be precise in addressing these historical tensions, while still engaging with the important humanitarian historiography.
Decline of Missionary Enthusiasm and Racialized Opposition
Until the late 1840s, the missionary enterprise and the status of Indigenous peoples were acceptable, even favored, objects of sentiment. However, colonial experiences of frontier conflict and the slow pace of Indigenous conversions eroded the enthusiasm of the 1830s. Concurrently, notions of biological race strengthened, leading to a backlash against missionary work.
Around 1849, an explicit and racialized opposition emerged in metropolitan debates between imperial evangelization and local urban reform, exemplified by the exchange between political theorists Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Carlyle's notorious 'Occasional discourse on the Negro Question' (1849) attacked the perceived hypocrisy of the philanthropic movement for West Indian slave emancipation, claiming it ignored problems faced by the British. Two years later, Henry Mayhew adopted Carlyle's logic in his slum exposé, London Labour and the London Poor (1851), arguing that ''
Literary Crystallization of Racialized and Emotional Oppositions
These racialized and emotional oppositions, rooted in binaries between home and foreign, and domestic and imperial responsibilities, were powerfully crystallized by two popular sentimental novels published in the early 1850s:
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly: This phenomenally successful anti-slavery novel aimed to evoke compassion for slaves (who would not be emancipated in North America until the end of the Civil War in 1865).
Charles Dickens's Bleak House: This novel established an affective and moral opposition, featuring Mrs. Jellyby – the first 'humanitarian' in fiction – whose satirically portrayed 'telescopic philanthropy' represented the hypocritical expenditure of empathy for distant peoples. In stark contrast, the white waif Jo the crossing-sweep was presented as the novel's proper and most powerful object of compassion. Dickens's explicit opposition between imperial evangelization and local urban reform directed audiences to care about the white poor, inferring that black people were not a suitable focus for concern.
Some contemporaries viewed Bleak House's moral logic unfavorably against Uncle Tom's Cabin, seeing it as a direct attack on abolitionism. Jo's poignant story circulated widely in Australia and New Zealand, used to transmit inherited British values and interpret local political and social conditions. By the late nineteenth century, Jo's colonial re-making effectively solidified racial exclusions.
Domesticity and Imperialism
Gender, Home, and Colonial Categories
Ideas about gender, particularly the ideology of separate spheres (which positioned women within the home as the source of moral and sentimental values), played a critical role in:
Defining colonial categories.
Furthering imperial ambition.
Justifying colonial rule.
The very meaning of 'domestic' relies on its opposition to the 'foreign,' contrasting the familial household with everything outside it. Metropolitan domestic ideals were applied to the expanded imperial world, seeking to recreate the European social order and, ostensibly, incorporate Indigenous peoples within it. This sentimental investment in the home and family formed the basis for the colonial project of assimilation, a vision in which women were central, bringing their supposed feminine sensibility to bear on training the young.
Imperial Intimacy and Its Limitations
Ann Stoler's exploration of the 'tense and tender ties' of imperialism highlighted how seemingly 'private' relationships and domains define and maintain imperial power. Her study of European interactions with Indigenous populations in households and their personal or sex lives in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Indonesia showed that 'intimate matters and narratives about them' helped define the 'racial coordinates and social discriminations of empire,' advancing imperialism by creating colonial categories and distinguishing rulers from the ruled.
This approach revealed interracial marriage as a key strategy for settler colonists to access Indigenous land and resources, and an important practice of imperial rule. Analysis has extended to a range of relationships and sites, including violent encounters, familial correspondence, and colonial port recruitment. However, while rich in suggesting powerful feelings, the framework of imperial 'intimacy' often takes the emotional and affective dimensions of these 'tender ties' for granted, favoring exploration of power relations in imperial governance. 'Intimacies' often becomes a shorthand for interracial sex or marriage, and 'sensibilities' connotes cultural proclivities or taste, without explicitly focusing on emotional experience and expressions, which are tacitly assumed to be universal.
Ann McGrath's Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia is an exception, offering closer analysis of the emotional dimensions of cross-cultural relations. McGrath argues that '' explicitly examining feelings, tenderness, and tender emotions in nation formation. Recent scholarship has also begun to examine the intertwining of violence and intimacy in settler colonial encounters and their shaping of various colonial economies, including exploration journeys, everyday interactions between officials and Indigenous peoples, and the supposedly private settler colonial home.
Missionaries and Love
Christian Ethos, Love, and Internal Tension
The missionary enterprise offers a rich area for analyzing compassionate emotions in an imperial context, given its complex Christian ethos of love, pity, and compassion. Missionaries adhered to the New Testament's doctrine of salvation through love and its command to draw others into a loving relationship with God. This love was unconditional and inclusive, expressed in Jesus Christ's 'new commandment': ''
However, this empathetic stance existed in tension with the injunction: '' This expressed the imperative to care for one's own family before more distant others. This emotional and moral friction animates diverse transnational discourses on religion, economics, and gender, infused with evangelical Christian ideas about sin, repentance, and national character. In a sense, the religious and emotional burden of imperialism often fell upon missionaries.
Emotional Expression and Indigenous Engagement
Many Christian missionaries understood their faith to be grounded in an intimate, affective connection to God, and explicitly sought to articulate their emotional experience. Many Protestant denominations believed that emotion in religion signified God's grace and proved salvation.
Missionary histories also illuminate Indigenous experiences of Christianity and cultural exchange. Many cultures embraced Christianity, often synthesizing or developing their own innovative emotional regimes. Some Indigenous peoples utilized print technologies to involve their communities in colonial networks and participate in the imperial commons.
Pity, Atonement, and the Modality of Power
Pity and its emotional cognates (compassion, sympathy) justified missionary intervention into Indigenous lives, framed as a form of atonement and redemption. Some view this as an inherent contradiction in pity, where the very offer of sympathy requires maintaining distance between the subject and observer, rather than eliminating the conditions of pity's existence. As Amit Rai argued concerning imperial India, sympathy functions as '' while appearing not to be, particularly evident in efforts to transform and Christianize the 'other'. The British missionary movement's active use of religious and emotional values and language formed a powerful emotional regime deeply intertwined with imperialism.
Missionaries Challenging Colonial Exploitation
Missionaries could also challenge the colonial exploitation of Indigenous people, as explored in Chapter 6: 'Aboriginal 'Slavery' on the New Frontier.' For example, in 1885, missionary John Brown Gribble, after visiting London's philanthropic Exeter Hall circle, attempted to establish a mission in north-western Western Australia. This region was still experiencing frontier violence, brutal labor practices, and sexual exploitation. Gribble quickly antagonized the colonial pastoralist interests, leading to a press scandal where the pastoralist lobby sought to ridicule Gribble's claims for sympathy towards Aboriginal people, advocating for their own interests instead.
Gribble aspired to 'muscular Christianity,' a form of masculinity linking spiritual belief to secular values of bravery and heroism; his hero was the African missionary David Livingstone. Gribble embodied how missionaries aimed to transcend racial and imperial dichotomies by harnessing print culture to create supportive emotional communities united by Christian fellowship.
Though the anti-slavery movement's climax had long passed, Gribble's infamous 1886 denunciation, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, is replete with anti-slavery quotations and imagery, reflecting his immersion in this global cause. However, many colonists found Gribble's intensely emotional language sensational and excessive, undermining his credibility. By the 1870s, alongside Victorian pathos and romantic sentiment, a contrasting emotional style emerged, linked to modernist biological race and Darwin's theory of natural selection. Restraint became an increasing marker of civilization within a universal language of emotion that sought to explain variability in evolutionary terms.
Racial thought fueled colonial skepticism towards what many called 'missionary propaganda.' Gribble's writing typified Christian heroism narratives within a religious literary tradition of persecution, self-sacrifice, and redemption, ultimately modeled on Jesus Christ – a plot reenacted by figures like David Livingstone in Victorian popular culture. Ultimately, Gribble's intended object of sympathy was his own mistreatment, displacing sympathy for Indigenous people.
Charity Begins at Home? Philanthropy, Magic Lantern Slides and Missionary Performances
Chapter 7 examines the significance of magic lantern slide performances as a powerful visual culture in communicating across diverse imperial publics during the 1890s. British campaigners in Australasian colonies, pleading for the metropolitan waif, competed with local missionaries seeking compassion for Aboriginal people through these performances.
The chapter explores:
Visual and rhetorical strategies employed.
The emotional effects they aimed to evoke.
Their broader implications for imperial identities.
London-based Barnardo's orphanages successfully raised funds in Australian colonies through traveling performances. These aimed to elicit pity for the metropolitan poor by combining 'slum sensation with documentary force,' requesting white settler audiences to provide relief for the 'waifs of the Mother Country.'
These performers competed with Australian missionaries like John Brown Gribble, who traveled extensively to tell his mission story and raise funds for his new settlement, Yarrabah, in north Queensland. Gribble, however, was challenged on grounds of his outsider status, invoking the logic of 'telescopic philanthropy' (as explored in Chapter 5) to re-assert a racialist hierarchy and mock humanitarianism. This dynamic illustrates how emotional narratives simultaneously constructed imperial relations, debated national or cosmopolitan worldviews, and shaped both metropolitan and colonial culture.
Drawing an Emotional Line: The Susceptible Critic
Nicola Bown urges scholars to take the emotions they study seriously and acknowledge the impact of historical narratives on the present. However, scholars often resist this due to the traditional opposition between reason and emotion, which demands a declaration for the former. Scholarly protocols reinforce this stance, prioritizing critique that exposes the 'credulous' and assures academics ''
Paul Ricoeur's 1970 concept of 'hermeneutics of suspicion' – a modern interpretive style revealing concealed, uncomfortable truths – became dominant. His alternative, 'hermeneutics of faith' (restoring meaning), remained unfashionable, perhaps seeming '' As Rita Felski asks, ''
Critique itself is characterized by cynicism, an emotional counterpart to sentimentality's desire to believe in human goodness. This cynicism, a morally inflected distrust of others' motives, colors academic detachment and makes it difficult to write about emotions 'from the inside.' The persistence of these oppositions has led to various distancing strategies:
Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867): Predicted the monarchy would become a 'dignified' ceremonial institution after losing political power. Sociologist Michael Billig notes Bagehot's use of oratio obliqua (oblique voice) to distance himself when depicting the 'superstitious royalism' of the masses, appearing a 'cool and rational observer.' Yet, Bagehot associated himself with 'Englishness' and the monarchy's national importance, allowing him to argue for the royal family's significance without personal implication.
Thomas Dixon's history of weeping in Britain: Dixon signals distance with the confession, '' His ironic tone and humor maintain an 'emotional line,' asserting his self-control and authority while contrasting his own susceptibility with more restrained responses.
Costs of Scholarly Detachment and Gendered Emotions
Maintaining scholarly and public detachment comes at a cost. Cultural anthropologist Talal Asad argues that such a posture ''
Long-standing divisions opposing reason and emotion continue to relegate emotion to the domain of the female, primitive, and excessive, constraining contemporary political culture where specific emotional expressions are dismissed and denigrated. However, Julie Ellison points out that Western political cultures have always been shaped by a masculine sensibility, with a long Anglo-American tradition of 'masculine tenderheartedness' originating in debates about parliamentary manhood.
The Australian Republic Debate and Indigenous Claims
The book, especially Chapter 4 (addressing the Stolen Generations), seeks to take these feelings seriously as a force animating public debate. Chapter 7, 'The Republican Debate and Popular Royalism: “a Strange Reluctance to Actually Shout at the Queen”,' examines how gendered emotional oppositions characterize Australian political culture and its scholarly analysis. Debates about Australia's relationship with Britain inevitably lead to proposals for an Australian Republic, envisioning independence – the political counterpart of Macaulay's New Zealander. While Macaulay's New Zealander represented a spectre of future decay urging metropolitan reform, the republic offers a counter-vision of 'descendant maturity.' Mark McKenna (1996) suggested a republic was always seen as '' Yet, the notion of inevitability has been used to both delay and urge its arrival for over two centuries.
While the concept of a republic has been elastic and emotional, it has not always implied anti-British sentiment; Australian nationalism and imperialism have often been intertwined and mutually supportive. This chapter explores emotional ties and the affective power of the Royal Family, which represents a domestic ideal inspiring loyalty, admiration, and love. However, popular royalism and the gendered meanings of the monarchy are often overlooked or disparaged in Australian political discourse. This emotional configuration highlights a 'double bind' for women who wish to challenge masculine spheres but are expected to act in stereotypically female ways.
This lack of serious consideration for cultural meanings significantly limits the republican movement's ability to engage Australians still attached to the monarchy. Moreover, this binary undermines Indigenous claims, which are frequently dismissed as 'too emotional.' Today, many believe that a national future requires reconciliation with Indigenous people and that Australia must recognize and address Indigenous views on constitutional change. These relations and identities, as argued throughout the study, have been defined by the movement of empathy between critical emotional communities – the imperial relationship, the Australian nation, and Aboriginal people – continuing to structure debates about identity and the future.
The Power of Emotional Narratives: Home, Family, and Children
Many powerful emotional narratives that created and sustained imperial ties and furthered invasion, conquest, and settlement were built upon the comforting bonds of home and family. Broadly, these relations were signaled by Britain as the 'Mother Country' and the colony as her child. 'Home' symbolized British culture – often narrated as domestic, female, and white – with colonization presented as making colonial space 'homelike.' Anxieties and fears were expressed through depictions of the 'wild masculine space of the frontier,' which violently defeated the 'primitive culture of Indigeneity.' Missionaries who dared to challenge this martial stance increasingly asserted their own 'muscular Christianity,' positioning themselves as 'fathers to the child-like Aborigine.'
Among the most potent emotional narratives were those expressing concern for children who might die or be lost to immorality. This theme was applied to define racialized, gendered, and often competing objects of compassion and their perceived human value.
Little Eva's death in Uncle Tom's Cabin (due to sorrow for black slaves) was contrasted with that of Jo the Crossing-sweep in Bleak House, whose neglect highlighted missionary hypocrisy.
Conversely, the little-mourned Aboriginal children whose 'happy' deaths justified mission work were succeeded by the pitiful 'little victims of assimilation policies' now known as the Stolen Generations.
The author has selected particularly revealing instances of the formation of imperial emotional communities and their specific affective logic, noting the participation of Aboriginal people while acknowledging that this is primarily a study of relationships created by whiteness. The author expresses an increasing unwillingness to speak for Aboriginal people and history, but hopes that by understanding how communities have been defined as more-or-less human and valuable, the continuing power of these processes in cultural politics can be revealed. Exciting new research has begun to analyze the emotional experience and expression of Aboriginal people, especially in early encounters and cultural exchange.