Invoking Empire: Imperial Citizenship and Indigenous Rights Across the British World, 1860-1900

Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860-1900, when each gained some degree of self-government yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. It applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers and Indigenous peoples who lived through these decades to make two main arguments. It argues that colonial subjects adapted imperial citizenship to both support and challenge settler sovereignty, revealing the continuing importance of imperial authority in self-governing settler spaces. It also posits that imperial citizenship was rendered inoperable by a combination of factors in both Britian and the colonies, highlighting the contingency of settler colonialism on imperial governmental structures and challenging teleological assumptions that the rise of settler nation states was an inevitable result of settler self-government.

Darren Reid is a Postdoctoral Fellow in History at McGill University