Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Postcolonial thinking has offered ‘new imperial’ historians productive avenues to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British Empire. Questions of territory and sovereignty have, however, often been seen as secondary in these new histories of the citizen-subject of liberalism. From an Antipodean perspective, this seems a remarkable elision. Through an examination of the ideas of liberals in colonial Victoria, this article explores whether we might consider sovereignty as a ghost in the machine of everyday liberalism and asks whether these questions should remain safely on the imperial margins. Drawing on theorisations of settler-colonialism that have emerged in Antipodean historical research, this article proposes to read the political subject of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal imagination as both effecting and an effect of sovereignty.This article has been peer reviewed.
Source: History Australia
Author: Leigh Boucher
Institution: Macquarie University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Royal Society
OpenAlex ID: W2463626719