Despite the port’s prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime and urban space, port towns were sites of complex cultural exchanges. This book, the product of international scholarship, offers innovative and challenging perspectives on the cultural histories of ports, ranging from eighteenth-century Africa to twentieth-century Australasia and Europe. The essays in this important collection explore two key themes; the nature and character of ‘sailortown’ culture and port-town life, and the representations of port towns that were forged both within and beyond urban-maritime communities. The book’s exploration of port town identities and cultures, and its use of a rich array of methodological approaches and cultural artefacts, will make it of great interest to both urban and maritime historians. It also represents a major contribution to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of coastal studies.

Between 1860 and 1910, Australian governments sanctioned and then tried to stop the trafficking of South Sea Islanders ​to Queensland as forced labourers. Over 60,000 Islanders were lured from their villages: tricked, transported, forced to work in the harsh Queensland bush, and then repatriated. Most Islanders returned with little savings to find their communities deeply scarred by the blackbirding trade and the internecine tribal conflict it had provoked. Georges Baudoux (1865-1949) was brought up amongst the Islanders who experienced the raw and competing greed of French, British and Australian colonialism. Son of a French prison commander stationed in New Caledonia, Baudoux lead a colourful life amongst the Pacific islands and deep in the brousse (bush) before becoming an author and capturing the stories of his travels and, importantly, the experiences of friends and colleagues as life in the islands changed forever. In recognition of his work, he was awarded the esteemed Palmes Académiques, the French medal for literary and academic achievement. Jean M'Barai is one of his best works. Expertly translated by Dr Karin Speedy and published here in English for the first time, this book exposes the rich, complex and brutal world of a South Sea Islander caught up in the duplicitous trade that came to be known as Blackbirding. It is an exciting, provocative and often astonishing account, drawing on the lived experience of people known to the author. In her critical introduction, Dr Speedy uncovers not just the author and his intriguing life (a life that spanned the uprising of the Paris communards in 1870 to post-Second World War reconstruction in the Pacific), but also the challenges for scholars working in, and undertaking translations in, the Francophone/Anglophone colonial/postcolonial sphere. Here, where empires, languages and Pacific peoples collide, the nuances of culture and terminology really matter if we are to find meaning amongst the shifting tides of use. Accompanied by photographs, postcards, cartoons and maps, this is a book to read and re-read, to contemplate ingenuity and inhumanity and the price all cultures pay as they are tested by forces beyond their control. It is a story that still resonates today, as we reflect on the experiences and resilience of the Pacific South Sea Islanders who contributed to modern Australia: the many that left and the descendants of those who stayed.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiner - The Story of An African Farm (South Africa), Sara Jeannette Duncan - A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardson - The Getting of Wisdom (Australia). All three commence as conventional Bildungsromane, yet the plots of all diverge from the usual narrative structure, as a result of both their colonial origins and the clash between their aspirational heroines and the plots available to them. In an analysis including gender, empire, nation and race, Empire Girls provides new critical perspectives on the ways in which this dominant narrative form from the centre of empire performs very differently when taken out of its metropolitan setting.

The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the confluence of American and British (neo)imperalism in the Pacific, as represented in various forms of Pacific discourse including literature, ethnography, film, painting, autobiography, journalism, and environmental discourse. It investigates the alliances and rivalries between these two colonial powers during the crucial transition period of the early-to-mid twentieth century, also exploring indigenous Pacific responses to Anglo-American imperialism during and beyond the decolonization period of the late twentieth century. While the relationship between Britain and the US has been analyzed through prominent forms of economic and cultural exchange between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, there is to date no sustained study of the relationship between British and US colonial expansion into the Pacific, which became central to ideas of developing ‘European’ modernity in the late eighteenth century and has played a pivotal in the history of Anglo-American colonialism, from the establishment of plantation economies and settler colonies in the nineteenth century to various forms of military imperialism during and beyond the twentieth century. The wide range of discursive and expressive modes explored in this collection makes for a rich and multifaceted analysis of representations of, and responses to, Anglo-American imperialism, and is in keeping with the current interdisciplinary turn in postcolonial studies.

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific’s frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today’s Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant. Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured.