colonial and post colonial geographies

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Journal of Historical Geography , 29 , 2 (2003) 277±288

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0523

Review article

Colonial and postcolonial geographies

C ATHERINE H ALL , Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination(Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Pp. xviii 556. £ 19.99 paperback)

Introduction: metropole and colony

In this article, I want to at least try to do justice to a remarkable book by Catherine Hall,but I also want to range beyond its particular concerns to see how they intersect with, andperhaps help us re-envision, broader geographies of colonial and postcolonial culturalformations. [1 ] Since the publication of her White, Male and Middle Class in 1992,Catherine Hall has been elaborating a `new imperial history'. [2 ] Two features in particularmake Hall's work different from `traditional' imperial history. [3 ] The ®rst is her teasingout of the ways in which discourses of national identity, gender, sexuality, race and thefamily were all mutually constitutive. The second feature renders her work a departure

not only from traditional imperial history, but also from a contemporary geographyoften more interested in its own disciplinary associations with imperialism than in thegeographies of colonialism. This is a focus on the material and discursive connectionsbetween colonised and metropolitan spaces. It is this focus that allows us to consider theways in which different cultures in the colonies and within Britain were co-constituted.Although a number of scholars have advocated postcolonial histories and geographiesthat decentre Europe by writing its history ``from and for the margins'', [4 ] few haveactually researched colonial margins and European metropoles in equal depth. Manyhave claimed that their postcolonial analyses unsettle binaries between metropole andcolony, or centre and periphery, but such claims have rarely been substantiated withsustained and detailed empirical investigations of the wide-ranging transactions betweensites so categorised. [5] While many geographers working in and on the former colonial`margins' contribute a great deal to the analysis of local and regional histories, and arevery well aware of the impact on those histories of metropolitan intervention, [6] few haveexamined the reciprocal links between local and metropolitan developments. [7] By thesame token, among `metropolitan' geographers, there has been a general preference forfocusing on European understandings of what was occurring in colonies, rather thanwhat was taking place within speci®c colonies themselves. As a result, and as DanielClayton points out, much of our work has ``remained stuck in a nation-centred andEurocentric mould''. [8 ] Hall's research though, tells us as much about Jamaica andJamaicans as it does about Britain and Britons. It demonstrates more fully how thehistories of at least one `periphery' and one `centre' have been mutually constructed.

In this book, Hall moves across the ®xed categories of colony and metropole byholding in tension, on the one hand, a tightly focused `case study' of multiple and

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bi-directional transactions between men and women in Jamaica and Birmingham and, onthe other hand, a broader set of colonial and British linkages which encompassed andhelped to constitute those transactions. When her gaze is on metropolitan space (as it ispredominantly in the second half of the book), she focuses on the ways in which the`midland metropolis' of Birmingham, although not a town usually described as imperialin the sense that London or Glasgow could be, was still `ìmbricated with the culture of empire'', and in doing so, she shows ``how race [as well as class and gender] was lived atthe local level'' (p. 12). [9] Through her `case study', Hall works consistently around acentral paradox of metropolitan±colonial relations. On the one hand, places could onlybe managed as colonies through their connections with the metropole, and on the otherhand, metropolitan identity and power was dependent on maintaining the difference,the `gap', between the two spaces. There had to be distanceÐboth conceptual andphysicalÐbetween colony and metropole if me tr opolitan identity was to be framed inrelation to an Other constructed as peripheral. [10 ] For example, in Anthony Trollope'saccount of Jamaica, `àmbivalence regarding the mimicry which he observed both amongcreolised Africans and planters, both aspiring and failing in their different ways to beEnglish, marked the distance between the domestic and the colonial, that distance which

legitimated colonial rule'' (p. 221). Yet, this imperative for distanciation was always intension with the other imperative of imperial connection:

Jamaican commodities, Jamaican family connections, Jamaican property in enslavedpeople, did not stay conveniently over there; they were part of the fabric of England,inside not outside, raising the question as to what was here and what was there,threatening dissolution of the gap on which the distinction between colony and metropolewas constructed. Europe was only Europe because of that other world: Jamaica was onedomain of the constitutive outside of England (p. 10).

It is because of this continual slippage between ìnside' and the òutside' of themetropolitan nation, that Hall shares the desire of many postcolonial scholars todestabilise the discursive binaries that were and are constructed between metropole andcolony, in favour of ``more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking'' (p. 16). Hall's own`way of thinking' about Jamaica and Britain, I would suggest, touches repeatedly upon aparticular concern recently highlighted by a number of cultural and historical geogra-phers. This is an interest in the uneven geographies of `truth' that are built when placesand people become connected. [11 ] If metropole and colony were articulated by transac-tions of commodities, money, information and ideas and yet separated by a `rule of difference', they were also linked within an imperial regime of truth, but one that wassubject to spatial disjunctures as well as continuities. Hall's detailed exploration of theway that speci®c events, from the quotidian interactions of missionaries and membersof their `¯ock' to the explosive violence of the Morant Bay revolt were given credencedifferentially, ®rst by those òn the scene' in Jamaica, and then by those who

corresponded about these events at one remove in Birmingham, highlights how scaleand distance, space and place, matter, as Jane Jacobs puts it, `ìn determining the `truth'of a particular set of events in a speci®c locality''. [12 ] This insight is one to which I willperiodically return throughout this article.

`Race'

As with her earlier research, in this book Hall is especially concerned with the ways that`truths' about `race' intersected with, were affected by, and helped to inform, discoursesof national, class, sexual and gender difference. More particularly though, she locates

such `messy' discursive twists and turns within and between differentiated sites dispersedacross a trans-imperial terrain. Her analysis of the tremendously popular and in¯uentialwritings of Thomas CarlyleÐwritings which played a signi®cant role in undermininghumanitarian claims for universalismÐfor instance, shows an awareness of elements of

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his thought that were premised upon his metropolitan situation, but also of those traceswhich derived from colonial, and especially Jamaican spaces. It was through such traf®cbetween colonial and metropolitan sites that continual attempts were made to ``stabilisethe ®eld'' of racial discourse in Britain and its empire (p. 440). Hall is not content simplyto claim that at certain times and in certain circumstances, particular readings of `race'became hegemonic; from the apotheosis of humanitarianism in the early nineteenthcentury through to the inscription of biologically determinist notions in the 1860s, shetracks some of the personnel, the media and the more speci®c ideas involved in thatlabour. This tracking involves an awareness of the shaping of `whiteness' and its varyingcon¯ation with Englishness and Britishness, as much as it does `blackness' and its varyingcon¯ation with Àfricanness'. The de®ning characteristics of white, English and Britishpeople were contested within colonial discourse just as much as were the characteristics of black people and Africans, and white was not always right within metropolitan±colonialimaginaries. [13 ] Abolitionists and humanitarians felt that the behaviour of planters inJamaica, although it left them within the category of `white', disquali®ed them frombeing considered properly Ènglish': ``far from the `higher orders' providing a model for aproper bourgeois life, they offered instead a model of disorder, licentious sexuality,

illegitimacy, irregularity, with coloured mistresses kept openly, and concubinage acompletely accepted form. For the anti-slavery movement, formed in the crucible of theevangelical revival, deeply committed to the notion of the ordered Christian household asprototype of the family in Heaven, this was profanity indeed'' (pp. 73±74). Missionariesbelieved that the òrder of civilization' in the West Indies `had been turned upside down';those who claimed to be Englishmen ``were savages, and the enslaved and missionarieswere their victims'' (p. 112). David Lambert has this spatialised inversion of the moralranking of races in mind when he writes of the West Indies being turned into àberrantspaces' within anti-slavery discourse. [14 ]

However, such a conception of white/English aberration was, of course, preciselythatÐa straying from the path, an exception from the norm. Underlying it, even within

humanitarian thinking, there was always a ``deep rooted [assumption] about whitecivilisation which worked on the premise that the corruption of some white people couldbe redeemed by the action of others'' (p. 137). Thus, when James Phillippo published an`ànti-slavery version of English history'', which accepted and publicised ``the shame of the slave trade'', and which described the slaver Sir John Hawkins as being ``the ®rstEnglishman who thus dishonoured himself and his country'', he saw ` t̀he eminentphilanthropists Sharpe, Clarkson and Wilberforce'' as having redeemed their nation andtheir race's honour. Condemnation of certain Britons could thus be ``combined with thenotion of a `British lion' ever ready to take up the cause of freedom''. It was ``thedisarticulation between whiteness and Englishness which had ruined white Jamaicansociety'', rather than any inherent ¯aw in the English character (p. 185). It was muchharder for missionaries and anti-slavery activists to distinguish the innate characteristicsof blackness from those of Africanness (and, as we will see below, tropicality), than it wasto delineate between whiteness and Englishness. Of course, this is not to say that readingsof blackness and Africanness would remain static, nor that they were unconnectedwith readings of Englishness. As Hall makes clear, `Ìn the 1830s, respectable Englishmiddle-class men supported the anti-slavery movement and emancipation. To be asupporter of the weak and dependentÐwomen, children, enslaved people and animalsÐ constituted a part of the ìndependence' of middle-class masculinity'' (p. 27). By the1860s, though, this particular formulation of the link between Englishness, masculinityand blackness had changed. As David Brion DavisÐamong othersÐhas shown, and asHall's book reinforces, the aftermath of the emancipation of slaves in Britain's empirewas a critical moment in its reformulation: ``Where once visitors had gone to Jamaica to

see and report on slavery, now it was emancipation. Such travelers assumed the right tore¯ect on `the African': for the `nature' of the race was at the heart of the argu me nt overwhether or not black people were equipped for the status of citizens'' (p. 222). [15 ] By the

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1860s, debates over the ®tness of the African for freedom were beginning to crystalliseinto a new consensus. As Hall's book documents in a wealth of detail, `À structure of feeling dominated by the familial trope and a paternalist rhetoric had been displacedby a harsher racial vocabulary of ®xed differences. In the constant play between racism'stwo logics, the biological and the cultural, biological essentialism was, for the moment,in the ascendant, and race occupied a different place in the English common sense''(p. 440).

Abolitionist visions themselves, constructed in part to challenge more raciallydeterministic planter discourses, contained the seeds of their own disillusionment andprepared the way for the triumph of biological determinism in the latter part of thenineteenth century. The very nature, depth and extent of missionary expectation madethe ful®lment of their dreams on behalf of black people an impossibility. Britishmissionaries sought to prescribe every aspect of emancipated black people's behaviour.Every facet of their daily lives was to be modelled on a British bourgeois ideal, including,for instance, the composition of their family, the number and size of rooms in theirhouses, the furniture and its arrangement within them, and permissable decorations(see p. 134). As ever in Hall's work, the notions of femininity and masculinity as well as

Englishness with which such racialised visions were bound up, are teased out. Thus ``theperfect negro man'' in the abolitionist vision, would combine ``the independence whichwas so central to an English conception of manhood with patience and submission,characteristics more frequently associated with femininity in England, and marking thedistinction between white and black manhood'' (p. 189). Such a degree of prescriptionwas always going to be `à dream which fragmented as the missionaries came to realise, toa greater or lesser extent, that they could not control the destinies of others, or indeed of themselves'' (p. 21). The failure to control black bodies and minds, even within themissionary community, was demonstrated above all by black pastors breaking awayfrom the authority of white missionaries, gathering their own followings and appro-priating the message of the Bible (or even dispensing with it altogether), often in the face

of vehement opposition form white missionaries. Such ®ssures and disputes occasionallyled to violence against the property and persons of the white missionaries who hadimagined themselves father ®gures for their `¯ock'. While Hall remains focused largely onthe ìnternal' discussions of white Britons about such events, she demonstrates throughher detailed readings of these local disputes the ways in which the exercise of blackpeople's agency complicated missionary understandings of black infantilism, generatedvitriolic debates among missionaries more or less sympathetic to black aspirations, anddisrupted consensual missionary dreams. Such dissonance and disillusionment, of course, prepared the way for alternative discourses of racial difference to challenge thehedged universalism of the missionaries. It gave new recruits, both in Jamaica and inBritain, to the vision of irredeemable racial inequality propagated by ®gures such asCarlyle, and, particularly within Birmingham, George Dawson. By the mid 1860s it wastheir differentiated narratives of irredeemable racial difference and the proper constitu-tion of Englishness in relation to it, that were dominant. Because they had refused to liveout the ethnocentric, prescriptive and patronising missionary dream, ``[a] considerablebody of opinion had concluded that black people were, essentially, different from whites,and thus could not expect the same rights. British subjects across the Empire were not allthe same'' (p. 25). Hall's great contribution to our understanding of this shift in racialdiscourse during the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with her prologue on EdwardEyre's personal journey through the Empire and continuing with her close examinationof relations between ®gures in Jamaica and Britain, is to illustrate ``how racial thinkingwas made and re-made across the span of colony and metropole'' and through the agencyof both `white' and `black' people engaging within and across this span (p. 27). She

shows, in ways that can only inspire geographers, how the geographies of connectionbetween different people and places counted in the formulation and reformulation of discourse and practice at any one site.

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Geographical truths and metropolitan knowledges

As I indicated above, colonial knowledges and truths were different depending on wheresubjects were situated within imperial networks. For colonial agents `on the ground',engaged in the pursuit of various colonizing projects, not the least of which was personalsecurity, `native' knowledges and practices were immediate and inescapable. Through

complicity, accommodation and resistance, they circumscribed, informed, delimited,contested and transformed colonial projects. And yet, when we trace the discursive andmaterial connections that colonising subjects maintained with those in the governmentof®ces, military headquarters, boardrooms, missionary institutions and homes of metropolitan space, different knowledges were shapedÐones in which `native agency'was often reduced to a single dimension or erased entirely. [16] What Hall's work shows isthat it is not so much the scale of one's analysis which results in such different truthsabout colonial encounters and practices; it is more the different forms that knowledgeand truth take on as they travel across distance and between agents with particularhorizons and agendas in differently constituted places. [17] What this means for any studyof metropolitan±colonial connections is that we have to take on board not only the

complicated, messy, intersubjective relations of colonialism in a particular spot, but alsothe very different, but articulated understandings of such relations that were forged inmetropolitan and, indeed, other colonial spaces. [18 ]

Even if they haven't engaged much with the circuits supplying and translating colonialknowledges and truths to Britain, a number of geographers have recently been concernedwith the constitution of metropolitan imaginations of the colonial world in thenineteenth century, and in its postcolonial implications. Some of this work has focusedon cultures of exploration and travel. [19 ] Some has looked at imperial knowledge in themedia of popular entertainment and schooling. [20] As Hall points out in relation toresearch on metropolitan im ag es of empire in general, the focus has been largely on the production of representation. [21 ] Through her detailed examination of understandings of Jamaica and the wider empire in Birmingham, however, Hall herself endeavours tounderstand the ways in which the `cacophony' of different voices speaking about empirewas consumed and interpreted among differently situated members of `the public'. In fact,the dif®culty of obtaining evidence about `ordinary' individuals' world views means thatHall herself writes at least as much about the production of voices and images of empireas she does about their consumption, even if at a more local scale than most analysts. [22 ]

The sources of production that Hall examines include local newspapers and journals,institutions such as missionary and anti-slavery societies and lecturing, literary andphilosophical societies, public exhibitions, the theatre, public meetings and correspond-ence between family and friends in the colonies and in Birmingham. But while the weightof her analysis is still centred on the images conveyed through such media, Hall is able totap at least some sources of evidence relating to popular understandings of them, not

least through the records of a debating society based in a Birmingham pub. Hall's readingof such understandings is also usefully informed by a conception of the `public sphere'which is more gendered and differentiated than Habermas's original formulation (seepp. 292±293). [23 ] Furthermore, Hall has done more than most to connect discussions of race and empire with other contemporary metropolitan, and especially Birmingham,preoccupations. George Dawson, for instance, lectured in Brimingham during the 1840son the links between the hotly debated nationalist movements in Europe and the right of Britain to govern colonies further a®eld. Nationalism was leading to the reconstructionof Europe on racial lines, he argued, and this was a development connected to, and just asnatural as, the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race into the lands of other races who wereless ®tted than Europeans for survival (p. 365). In tracing such discursive connections,

which were obvious to commentators at the time, but which have since beencompartmentalised by historical scholarship, Hall illuminates a particular metropolitanplace and time in its own right, as well as highlighting its connections with Jamaica and

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the wider world. She has shown, in ways familiar to many historical geographers, howlocal, provincial identities were de®ned in relation to a far more extensive national,continental and global network of contacts.

East and West and postcolonial theoryHall sets herself the task of answering certain questions in particular about metropolitanknowledge: ``how was Jamaica produced for England, speci®cally in the anti-slaverynarratives of the 1830s and 1840s? What was the imagined geography of the abolitionist?How was the `travelling eye' riveted to the missionary endeavour? And what happenedwhen the traveller's tale was mapped on to the missionary story?'' (p. 175). Not the leastin¯uential of the `travelling eyes' which contested missionary stories belonged toAnthony Trollope, who sold narratives about imperial spaces by the bucket load duringthe mid-nineteenth century. As Hall writes:

His mapping of imperial places and peoples, utilising familiar language and images,brought Maori `cannibals', Jamiacan `Quashees' and energetic white Australian settlersright into the parlour. Difference was domesticated, and F F FThe English were reassuredthat it was their country's right to civilise. The sites of empire were represented by thequintessential English goodfellow, Anthony Trollope, in ways that English readers couldtake great pleasure in; for here was a favourite ®ctional writer transporting them toAustralia, Canada and the West Indies' and later, South Africa too (p. 211).

As the extract indicates, while Hall is especially concerned with images of Jamaica, thisis by no means to the exclusion of other sites. Through her study of geographicalimaginations of this particular colonial space, she exhorts us to pay more attention to thevery different ways in which various places and people of empire were constructed andimagined. There could be no such thing as a single metropolitan geographicalimagination of empire, when India, the West Indies, Australia and other sites wereregarded so differently, and when representations of each colonial environment and itspopulation were contested by so many different interests. Both metropolitan andemigrant colonial Britons were supplied with a vast array of images from around to globewith which to construct their characterisation of other people and landscapes. Bound upwith, and yet different from British imaginations of the West Indies, for instance, was aset of equally contested images of Africa. Hall discusses missionary attempts to sendwhite and black Jamaican preachers `back to Africa' to spread the post-emancipationmessage of Christianity and civilisation within the `dark continent'. In tracing theconnections that missionaries imagined enslaved people had with Africa, Hall establishesthat even abolitionists came close to the planters' assertion that the middle passage had insome way prepared Africans for civilisation. Abolitionist missionaries, too, seemed to

feel that the extraction of enslaved people from Africa was necessary in order to distancethem from the retarding in¯uence of a primeval environment. In this way, abolitionistsshared with the pro-slavery lobby a certain discourse of `tropicality', which is increasinglycoming to the attention of historical and cultural geographers, and increasingly beingdistinguished from the more notorious discourse of Orientalism. [24 ] However, once in theCaribbean, of course, abolitionists and planters disagreed over the proper route toAfricans' civilisation. Abolitionists were far from seeing slavery as the way to assistAfricans in overcoming the traits of animality associated with tropicality: ``For theabolitionists, emancipation offered the key which allowed black men and women thepossibility of entry into modernity; no longer locked in another time, archaic Africantime or the pre-modern time of slavery, they could enter the present, as infants'' (p. 186).

Aside from its attention to Africa, Hall's work gestures towards the great differencesbetween British visions of the East and West Indies, as well as addressing the moreuniversalising narratives that contained both within the same episteme. On the one hand,for instance, we have the Rev. William Brock speaking at a Baptist Missionary Society

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Jubilee celebration in 1842, of the ways in which Èast' and `West' had been united byBritish missionaries in `òne great social family'', in which the ``breaking up of caste, theabolition of infanticide and `suttee', the translation of the Bible and the annihilation of slavery'' were con¯ated achievements (p. 336). It is statements such as these that rendercolonial discourse such a universalising phenomenon and mean that it cannot be studiedthough `grounded' analyses of particular places at particular times alone. But suchstatements co-existed with very different pronouncements and agendas within and abouteach of these places, rendering grand theorisation about colonial discourse in isolationof more `grounded' studies equally problematic. We can take the tensions betweenevangelical humanitarian discourse's universalising and particular interventions in theÈast' and the `West' as a case in point. In the West Indies, during the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, humanitarians' main quarrel was with white slaveholders, andthey took the side of enslaved black people, whereas in India at the same time, theirquarrel was with àncient' indigenous practices and beliefs, and their support was lent toany attempt to eradicate such practices and beliefs through Christianisation (p. 307). Inthe light of exaggerated humanitarian reporting on, and condemnation of, practices suchas sati (the relatively restricted practice of a Hindu widow immolating herself on her

husband's funeral pyre), it is not surprising that many postcolonial theorists have seenhumanitarianism's main function as providing legitimation for broader colonial assaultson indigenous culture and the erasure of subaltern agency. But this does not mean that weshould overlook humanitarians' more oppositional, differentially implicated stancewithin colonial discourse elsewhere, and not only in slave-based societies, but also withinsettler colonies. [25 ]

By the same token, colonial governmentality and its postcolonial afterlife varied anddo vary between India and other spaces less intensively theorised by postcolonialscholars. India, along with parts of Africa in the late-nineteenth century, shared the `notyet' form of colonial governmentality. This was a colonial discourse that the subalternstudies group in particular has discussed, in which indigenous peoples were apparently

perpetually being trained for, but had never quite yet learned the responsibilities of,self-government. Independence involved an assertive claim of readiness that imperialgovernments could no longer resist. In the settler colonial spaces of Australia and NorthAmerica, though, aboriginal people experienced a `never at all' mode of governmentalitywhich, as Dan Clayton has argued, has its own, very different postcolonial afterlife, inwhich the `native', located in the `reserve', is imagined as ``never modern''. [26 ]

Postcolonialism tells us that all knowledge, and particularly that universalisingknowledge produced by Europe in the era of imperialism, is situated, but through suchconsiderations Clayton has attempted to draw attention to the ways in whichpostcolonial theory itself has been conditioned by its places of formation. His long-standing interest in a localised set of historical circumstances in British Columbia leadshim to identify both the potential and the limits of a body of contemporary postcolonialtheory emanating ®rst from Palestinian (Said) and then Indian (Bhabha and Spivak)conditions. [27 ] Should we not wonder, he asks, about the ways that the postcolonialcommitment to difference and multiplicity is in itself a universalising agendaÐone whicherases the different postcolonial predicaments of subjects in particular parts of Asia,North and South America, Africa and Australasia?

The personal and the political: life histories and life geographies

As we have seen, ` r̀elocating western narratives of progress in their wider colonialhistories and rethinking the `centre' by resituating it in its complex web of colonial

interconnections'' lies at the heart of a contemporary postcolonial scholarly agenda, andI would suggest that Hall has contributed to this agenda in various ways. [28 ] The ®nal wayin which she does so, and the last to which I want to draw particular attention, is throughher narratives of personal transition. The intention to tell broader stories through the life

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experiences of individuals is signaled right from the start of the book as Hall locates theconstitution of her own subjectivity within a set of trans-national exchanges. Herintroduction is an evocation of the personal and the political genesis of her researchagenda, dealing with her Baptist family background, her experiences of living in a townassociated with missionary enterprise and abolitionism in Jamaica, her feminist politicaland social circle and her relationship with Stuart Hall, which together prompted her ®rstmeaningful re¯ections on the constructs of gender and `race', and on the connectionsbetween Britain and Jamaica. While statements of the author's `positionality' have, onoccasion, become something of a trite `postcolonial' formula to establish the writer'spolitically correct credentials, Hall's introduction is far more than a gesture. It serves as aprecursor to the ways that the nineteenth century lives of her subjects are envisioned asbeing both private and enmeshed in broader public and political discourses; it enables usto access the very intimate ways in which global cartographies of connection can belived; it yields insight into the plotting of the ensuing narrative around questions of universalism and difference that have occupied Hall's imagination, and it highlights thepostcolonial afterlife of the exchanges that she traces throughout the book. Hall'sintention to treat individual personalities and trajectories seriously within a broader

narrative focused on shifting discourses, is signalled at the start of the book, where a`cast' of 20 `characters' is established, each of whose biographical details are sketched.For men such as William Knibb and James Phillippo and, as far as sources allow, forwomen whose lives similarly connected Birmingham and Jamaica, Hall shows howspeci®c experiences of colonialism shapedÐas Catherine Nash has put itÐ``differentmodes of belonging, place and identityÐnational, transnational, indigenous, settler,diasporic''. [29 ] For ìmperial men' such as Eyre, Hall claims, `ìdentities were ruptured,changed and differently articulated by place. Public metropolitan time was cross-cut withpublic colonial time; both were cross-cut again by familial time, private time, the time of birth, emigration, marriage, new homes and death. It was these cross-cutting patternswhich constituted ìmperial men', and out of which they made, and told, their stories''

(p. 65). In turn, those stories informed, indeed constituted, the aggregated discursiveshifts of which more impersonal histories are made. For example, the story of personaldisillusionment that Joseph Sturge had to tell about the formerly enslaved JamesWilliams was one strand in a web of similar stories that made Carlyle's and Trollope'sthinking on `race' seem `sensible' to many readers. Sturge had paid for Williams to travelfrom Jamaica to England to publicise the horrors of the apprenticeship system, butWilliams indulged more in the recreational opportunities afforded by his visit than Sturgehad anticipated, and an aggrieved Sturge called for him to be sent back to Jamaica beforehe could do too much damage to the cause in England. As Hall notes, ``when JamesWilliams proved to be something other than [Sturge] had imagined him to be, Sturge'sdisappointment was tangible. Paternalism had its other side, in forms of aggression andhostility'' (p. 321). The story of Sturge's and Williams's encounter, together with themany other stories of men and women who connected metropole and colony in their ownparticular ways in this book, demonstrates more powerfully than any impersonalnarrative could, how the humanitarian `àttempt to constitute black men, women andchildren F F Fwas doomed to failure; for it depended on stereotypes which could nevergrasp the full complexity or agency of other human beings'' (p. 321).

Conclusion

Catherine Nash has recently suggested that ``postcolonial geographies work through thetension between understanding colonialism as general and global, and particular and

local, between the critical engagement with a grand narrative of colonialism, and thepolitical implications of complex, untidy, differentiated and ambiguous local stories''. [30 ]

By now, it will be obvious that I see Catherine Hall's book as exemplary in tackling thisagenda. This is not, of course, to say that the book is without limitation. One could

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criticise, for example, Hall's relative lack of attention to the post-emancipation`globalization' of humanitarian intervention, and the contestation with other colonialinterests to which it gave rise, signalled by the 1836±1837 Select Committee onAborigines. But a full consideration of this would necessitate yet more contextualisationof the links between Jamaica and Britain, and a yet larger book. More importantly, onecould also question how much this book tells us about `subaltern' black Jamaicans'experiences of the British colonial discourses on which the book focuses, and about their`lived' effects. Not all black Jamaicans expressed their agency through the breakawaychurch factions that are documented in Hall's book. This is a question about thedif®culty of, on the one hand, avoiding speaking for but, on the other hand, attempting tolisten to, those whose representations are obscured in the historical record. This questionin particular is, of course, one that has exercised a number of postcolonial geographers,but, as Jane Jacobs notes, examples of it s overcoming, even in the broader literature oncolonial contact and discourse, are rare. [31 ] Attempts to incorporate pre-contact `native'knowledges, practices and agendas, for instance, often end up resorting to the use of ethnographies in which the pre-colonial past is ¯attened and rendered timeless. Thusnarratives of changeÐor `real' historyÐtend to begin yet again with the intrusion and

agency of Europeans. Even where oral histories are drawn upon and where a deliberateattempt is made to historicise and spatialise our accounts of precolonial and indigenoussocieties under colonialism, the exercis e of indigenous agency is often restricted tomale elites such as chiefs and headmen. [32 ] Hall's book itself, as we have seen, amplydocuments the disruption that black agency caused within humanitarian narratives of civilisation, but it does not (and, given its already substantial length, probably could not)aim to extend to an account of the broader histories of black Jamaican experience. WhatHall's book does do is exactly what Jane Jacobs has recently praised Dan Clayton's workfor doing: it connects the local tactics of missionaries and their enemies in Jamaica ``withthe global geopolitics of nation and empire'' and ``offers a template for geographers whowish to construct multiscaled geographies that properly account for the complex

articulations of place and space, the global and the local, the here and the there, the pastand the present''. [33 ] With its emphasis on the connected but situated histories of distantplaces and cultures, its tracing of classed, gendered and above all racialised subjectpositions in and between these places, its attention to the means by which particulargeographical imaginations were constructed `at home' and in the colonies, and itssophisticated interweaving of detailed life histories and broader discourse analysis, Hall'sresearch as a whole, and this book in particular, has much to say to historical and culturalgeographers.

University of Sussex A LAN L ESTER

AcknowledgementsMy thinking about this review has been greatly assisted through discussions with Dan Clayton andby a reading of inspirational unpublished writings with which he kindly supplied me.

Notes[1] For recent studies of such geographies, see Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (Eds),

Postcolonial Geographies (London forthcoming ); Daniel Clayton, Islands of Truth: TheImperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver 2000) and Colonialism, culture and the`postcolonial turn' in geography, in J. Duncan, N. Johnson and R. Schein (Eds), A

Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford forthcoming ); James Duncan, Complicity andresistance in the colonial archive: some issues of method and theory in historical geography,Historical Geography 27 (1999) 119±128; Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire : Postcolonialism and the City (London 1996); Catherine Nash, Cultural geography: postcolonial cultural

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geographies, Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002) 219±230; David Lambert, True loversof religion: Methodist persecution and white resistance to anti Eslavery in Barbados, 1823± 1825, Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002) 216±236; Alan Lester, Imperial Networks:Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London 2001); KarenMorin and Lawrence Berg, Gendering resistance: British colonial narratives of wartimeNew Zealand, Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001) 196±222 and James Sidaway,

Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay, Progress in Human Geography 24 (2000)591±612. For a concise summary of some of the concerns raised by this work, see reviews of Clayton's Islands of Truth by Jane Jacobs, David Demeritt, Sara Mills and Lawrence Berg,and Clayton's response, in Antipode 33 (2001) 730±751.

[2] Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History(Cambridge 1992). See also her Rethinking imperial histories: the Reform Act of 1867,New Left Review 208 (1994) 3±29; Histories, empires and the post Ecolonial moment, inI. Chambers and L. Curti (Eds), The Post EColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London 1996) 65±77 and Introduction: thinking the postcolonial, thinking theempire, in C. Hall (Ed.) Cultures of Empire: A Reader (Manchester 2000) 1±33.

[3] I would include here even the recent Oxford History of the British Empire series.[4] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton 2000) 16.[5] Exceptions might include Clayton, Islands of Truth ; Jacobs, Edge of Empire ; David Lambert,

The Master Subject: White Identities and the Slavery Controversy in Barbados, 1780±1834 ,(unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2002) and Lester, Imperial Networks . If there have been relatively few in Edepth studies of metropole and colony within a `singleanalytical ®eld' (the phrase, much quoted recently, is from Anne Stoler and Fred Cooper,Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in Fred Cooper and AnneStoler (Eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley andLondon 1997) 4), either within or outside of geography, there has certainly been substantialinterest among cultural and historical geographers in how particular constructions of race,class and gender travelled and were translated across imperial spaces, often through theembodied medium of the imperial traveller him or herself. See for example, Alison Blunt,Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (London and New York

1994); Gerry Kearns, The imperial subject: geography and travel in the work of MaryKingsley and Halford Mackinder, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 22 (1994)450±472; Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers inWest Africa (London 2000).

[6] One thinks, for instance, of A. J. Christopher in South Africa or Cole Harris in BritishColumbia.

[7] Exceptions in a South African context include studies by Alan Mabin, Susan Parnell andJennifer Robinson on the circulation and mutual reformulation of urban planningdiscourses. See Susan Parnell and Alan Mabin, Rethinking urban South Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (1995) 39±61 and Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid:State, Power and Space in South African Cities (Oxford 1996).

[8] Daniel Clayton, Georgian geographies `from and for the margins': `King George men' on thenorthwest coast of North America, in Miles Ogborn and Charles Withers (Eds), GeorgianGeographies: Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester forth-coming ). It is worth pointing out however, that calls for a decentring of our historicalanalyses tend to come predominantly from metropolitan locations (British and NorthAmerican universities). `Decentring the West' may be a concern for many scholars in theWest, but perhaps it is not such a great concern for those engaged in more immediate tasks,often of `applied' geographical research, elsewhere. This would seem to be the case at leastfor many South African historical geographers who are now attempting to grapple with thereconstruction imperatives of a post Eapartheid society.

[9] For the constitution of cities more conventionally associated with empire, see Felix Driverand David Gilbert (Eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester1999), the networked approach of which itself has helped to inform Hall's vision. For thepostcolonial role of Birmingham as a `global city', experiencing the recon®guration of the

transnational relations identi®ed in Hall's work, see N. Henry, C. McEwan and J. S. Pollard,Globalisation from below: BirminghamÐpostcolonial workshop of the world? Area 34(2002) 117±127.

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[10] In an in¯uential intervention, David Cannadine has recently suggested that the BritishEmpire was ``not exclusively (or even preponderantly) concerned with the creation of òtherness' on the presumption that the imperial periphery was different from, and inferiorto, the imperial metropolis; it was at least as much (perhaps more?) concerned with what hasrecently been called the `construction of af®nities' on the presumption that society on theperiphery was the same as, or even, on occasions superior to, society in the metropolis'':

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London 2001) xix . However, the strivingfor af®nity is premised on the recognition of a difference to be overcome, and Cannadineunderestimates the ways in which the persistence of difference continued to legitimateimperial distinctions. As Chaterjee argues in the case of India, British imperialism was``destined never to ful®l its normalizing mission because the premiss of its power was thepreservation of the alienness of the ruling group'': Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and itsFragments (Princeton 1993) 28.

[11] See Mike Heffernan, À dream as frail as those of ancient time': the in Ecredible geographiesof Timbuctoo, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001) 203±225 andCharles Withers Reporting, mapping, trusting: making geographical knowledge in the lateseventeenth century, Isis 90 (1999) 497±521.

[12] Jacobs, Touching pasts, 733. For geographers' engagement with this issue in a colonialcontext, see also Alison Blunt, Embodying war: British women and domestic de®lement inthe Indian `Mutiny', 1857±1858, Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000) 403±428;Clayton, Islands of Truth ; Lester, Imperial Networks , and Roderick Mitcham, A Cultural Geography of British Humanitarianism, 1884±1933 , unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Hollo-way, University of London (2002).

[13] See Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (London2000); Peter Jackson, Constructions of `whiteness' in the geographical imagination, Area 30(1998) 99±106; Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia (Durham, NC 1987); David Lambert, Liminal ®gures: poor whites,freedmen, and racial reinscription in colonial Barbados, Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 19 (2001) 335±350 and True lovers of religion.

[14] See David Lambert, The Master Subject: White Identities and the Slavery Controversy inBarbados, 1780±1834 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2002).

[15] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca 1966); Christine Bolt,Victorian Attitudes to Race (Toronto 1971); Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race,Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832±1938 (Baltimore 1992); Douglas Lorimer,Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid ENineteenthCentury (London 1978); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain,1800±1960 (London 1982); Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (ChapelHill 2000); Howard Temperley (Ed.), After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents(London 2000).

[16] For two attempts to examine colonial knowledges òn the ground' and their relation toknowledges àt home', see Clayton, Islands of Truth and Lester, Imperial Networks . On therelated removal or alteration of `native agency' speci®cally in narratives of exploration, seeClive Barnett, Impure and worldly geography: the Africanist discourse of the RoyalGeographical Society, 1871±1873, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 23(1998) 79±94 and Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire(Oxford 2001).

[17] See Derek Gregory, Cultures of travel and spatial formations of knowledge Erdkunde 54(2002) 297±309 and Miles Ogborn, Writing travels: power, knowledge and ritual on theEnglish East India Company's early voyages, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 27 (2002) 155±171.

[18] Dan Clayton uses the term `circumlocutory geographies' to describe this to Eing and fro Eingof ideas and information (personal communication). For a study of how colonial knowledgestravelled between New South Wales, the Cape Colony and New Zealand, as well as betweeneach colony and the British metropole, see Alan Lester, British settler discourse and thecircuits of empire, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002) 27±50.

[19] See, for example, Barnett, Impure and worldly geography; Driver, Geography Militant ;Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire.

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[20] For example, Andrew Crowhurst, Empire theatres and the empire: the popular geographicalimagination in the age of empire, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997)155±173; Teresa Ploszajska, Geographical Education, Empire and Citizenship: Geographical Teaching and Learning in English Schools, 1870±1944 (Historical Geography Research Seriesno. 35 1999).

[21] See John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester 1984) and Anne McClintock,

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York 1995).[22] Although, for a very detailed analysis of the consumption of a particular textÐand onewhich highlights the dif®cult labour involved in tracking such consumption, see James A.Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Author-ship of `Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' (Chicago 2001). My thanks to DavidLambert for pointing out this reference.

[23] Ju rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge 1992).[24] See Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton Tropicality, orientalism and French colonialism in

Indo EChina: the work of Pierre Gourou, 1927±1982, unpublished paper; Felix Driver andBrendah Yeoh (Eds), Special Issue, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000);Derek Gregory (Post)colonial and the production of nature, in Noel Castree (Ed.), Social Nature (Oxford 2002) 1±63; David Livingstone Tropical hermeneutics and the climaticimagination, in his Science, Space and Hermeneutics (Heidelburg 1992). Hall points to oneaspect of the discourse of tropicality that perhaps deserves more attention. This is the waythat, among those such as Trollope who saw clear distinctions in the capacity for civilisationamong black and white people, a tropical environment could nevertheless justify racialintermixture and the useful or even necessary `breeding' of a `coloured race' that could not be justi®ed in more temperate climes (see p. 219).

[25] See Alan Lester, Obtaining the ``Due Observance of Justice'': the geographies of colonialhumanitarianism, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002) 277±293.

[26] I owe this point to discussion with Dan Clayton and a reading of some of his unpublishedwork.

[27] Clayton, Islands of Truth , Colonialism, culture and the `postcolonial turn' and Absence,memory and geography, BC Studies 132 (2001/2002) 65±79.

[28] The quote is from Nash, Cultural geography, 222.

[29] Nash, Cultural geography, 224.[30] Nash, Cultural geography, 228.[31] Jane Jacobs, Touching Pasts Antipode 33 (2001) 730±734[32] There are, however, some exceptional works that analyze the intersections between `native'

and colonial discourses productively. Clayton does so in Islands of Truth and Brendah Yeohdevelops an excellent treatment of this problem in a particular context. Jane Jacobs has mademore persistent attempts than most to ®nd ways around it. JoAnn McGregor has recentlyproduced a paper on contested indigenous as well as settler discourses of the Victoria Fallswhich provides an object lesson in studying heterogeneous and contested `native' andcolonial representations within the same frame of reference. See Brendah Yeoh, Historicalgeographies of the colonised world, in Brian Graham and Catherine Nash (Eds), ModernHistorical Geographies (London 2000) 146±166; K. Gelder and J. M. Jacobs, `Talking out of place': authorising the Aboriginal sacred in postcolonial Australia, Cultural Studies 9 (1995)150±160 and Uncanny Australia, Ecumene 2 (1995) 173±185; Jane Jacobs, Earth honouring:western desires and indigenous knowledge, in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (Eds), WritingWomen and Space (New York 1994) 169±196, Difference and its other, Transactions of theInstitute of British Geographers 25 (2000) 403±408 and Touching pasts, and JoAnnMcGregor, The Victoria Falls: landscape, tourism and the geographical imagination insouthern Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies ( forthcoming ).

[33] Jacobs, Touching pasts, 734.

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colonial and post colonial geographies

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