This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government, as lobbyists, settlers and missionaries also developed personal connections to advance their causes.

This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government ruled a more diverse empire than ever before, and the Colonial Office responded by cultivating strong personal links with governors and colonial officials through which influence, patronage and information could flow. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government, as lobbyists, settlers and missionaries also developed personal connections to advance their causes. However, the successive crises in the 1830s exposed these complicated networks of connection to hostile metropolitan scrutiny. This book challenges traditional notions of a radical revolution in government, identifying a more profound and general transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

Examines the rising numbers of free settlers from the 1820s to the 1860s, their dependence on Aboriginal, immigrant, and convict under-paid laborers, and the slow development of representative government.

A new perspective on the nineteenth-century imperial world through one family's history across North America, the Caribbean and United Kingdom. Revealing how these figures demonstrate complicated historical trajectories of empire and nation, Adele Perry illustrates how gender, intimacy, and family were key to making and remaking imperial politics.

How the imposition of Crown rule across the British Empire during the Age of Revolution corroded the rights of British subjects and laid the foundations of the modern police state. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire responded to numerous crises in its colonies, from North America to Jamaica, Bengal to New South Wales. This was the Age of Revolution, and the Crown, through colonial governors, tested an array of coercive peacekeeping methods in a desperate effort to maintain control. In the process these leaders transformed what it meant to be a British subject. In the decades after the American Revolution, colonial legal regimes were transformed as the kingÕs representatives ruled new colonies with an increasingly heavy hand. These new autocratic regimes blurred the lines between the rule of law and the rule of the sword. Safeguards of liberty and justice, developed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, were eroded while exacting obedience and imposing order became the focus of colonial governance. In the process, many constitutional principles of empire were subordinated to a single, overarching rule: where necessary, colonial law could diverge from metropolitan law. Within decades of the American Revolution, Lisa Ford shows, the rights claimed by American rebels became unthinkable in the British Empire. Some colonial subjects fought back but, in the empire, the real winner of the American Revolution was the king. In tracing the dramatic growth of colonial executive power and the increasing deployment of arbitrary policing and military violence to maintain order, The KingÕs Peace provides important lessons on the relationship between peacekeeping, sovereignty, and political subjectivityÑlessons that illuminate contemporary debates over the imbalance between liberty and security.

The years 1790 to 1830 saw Britain engage in an extensive period of war-waging and empire-building which transformed its position as an imperial state, established its reputation as a distinctive military power and secured naval preeminence. Despite this apparent success, Britain did not become a world super power in the conventional sense. Instead, as Professor Collins demonstrates, it operated as an enclave power, influencing or dominating many regions of the world without ever asserting global hegemony. Even in the 1820s, Britain still had to fight to maintain influence, and sometimes struggled to assert dominance on the borderlands of the empire. By locating naval and military power at the heart of Britain's relationship with the wider world, Bruce Collins offers an insightful reinterpretation of the interaction between military and naval war-making, the expansion of the empire, and the nature of the British regime. Using examples of conflicts ranging from continental Europe and Ireland to North America, Africa and India, he argues that the state’s effectiveness in war was crucial to its imperial expansion and gives new significance to British military conduct in an age of revolution and war.

Fragile Settlements compares the processes by which colonial authority was asserted over Indigenous people in south-west Australia and prairie Canada from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, there was an explosion of settler migration across the British Empire. In a humanitarian response to the unprecedented demand for land, Britain’s Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them subjects under British law. This book highlights the parallels and divergences between these connected British frontiers by examining how colonial actors and institutions interpreted and applied the principle of law in their interaction with Indigenous peoples on the ground. Fragile Settlements questions the finality of settler colonization and contributes to ongoing debates around jurisdiction, sovereignty, and the prospect of genuine Indigenous-settler reconciliation in Canada and Australia.