<i>Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842</i> by Elizabeth Elbourne

This is an ambitious tour-de-force that spans a vast world of transimperial networks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a complex endeavor that requires flexible and capacious framing. Elbourne’s work joins recent scholarship that aims to trace the rise of British settler societies in the wake of the American Revolution.1 In this task Elbourne’s work most resembles that of Perry, a Canadian historian who specifically uses one family network—the Douglas-Conolly family—to understand the webs that connected British Columbia, the Caribbean, and Scotland. Elbourne’s aims are further ranging; following three alliterative families—the Brants, the Bannisters, and the Buxtons—she attempts to follow threads of identity, colonialism, and belonging across scenes of immense violence and claims of colonial settlement. As a result, this book traces colonial violence and Indigenous agency from North America to West Africa, to Australia and Southern Africa, and finally back to the metropole itself, offering a fascinating analysis of the multivalent webs of connection offered through kinship and belonging.The sizable book is divided into three parts revolving around the three family networks. The first section focuses on the Brant and Johnson families, primarily in North America in what is today claimed as both the United States and Canada. The Brant family—especially Joseph Brant and his sister Molly Brant—existed in a web of overlapping kinship networks that contained both Six Nations and British ancestry, identifications often in flux in that period. Situating this family relationship is crucial as it allows Elbourne to trace both Indigenous resistance and capacity for movement and self-articulation. It also allows her to maintain a laser-like focus on both the racial dynamics of imperial power and the subsequent betrayals of the British state to the Six Nations after the American Revolution.Empire, Kinship and Violence makes two main arguments. First, it compellingly argues for an understanding of the British colonial world that historicizes and contextualizes the creation of the categories of “white” and “native.” “The colonial economy was racialized and marked by a drive to racial exclusion,” Elbourne convincingly asserts. “It cannot, however, completely be understood in binary terms” (6). Elbourne depicts the fluidity of the Brant family identity across the lands of New York and Upper Canada as well as in their attempts to resist colonial incursions by appealing directly to London’s elites in person. She does the same when she follows the Bannisters and Buxtons to New South Wales, Sierra Leone, and the Cape Colony, and she deftly traces both racial ambiguity and the hardening of racialized categories through imperial intervention.Second, Elbourne offers a genealogy of what she terms “humanitarian colonialism,” a series of interventions made by British men and women critical of imperial overreach but nonetheless still wedded to and operating solely within the structure of colonial power. By focusing on the Bannister and Buxton families’ attempts to function both as whistle-blowers and true believers in the order and justice of imperialism, Elbourne offers a “case study of the interaction between liberalism and empire, which … proved eminently compatible in the early nineteenth century” (9).Elbourne draws from a diverse array of methodologies. She takes as a starting point the analytic work of settler colonial studies, particularly in the anthropological and ethnographical veins proposed by scholars like Wolfe and Veracini, which posit a unique functional and historical ambit for nineteenth-century spaces imagined as ostensible “New Britains.”2 The influence of this work is evident in Elbourne’s tracing of genocidal intent in colonial records and her casting of an imagined Indigenous disappearance as a quotidian form of violence. Yet, Elbourne’s work is further structured by a series of meaningful Indigenous studies critiques of the settler colonial field. She follows the work of Indigenous scholars in challenging the potential simplicity of a settler-Indigenous divide and making space for Indigenous world-fashioning and resistance outside the contours of settler domination.3Indeed, by weaving in locations like Sierra Leone and the eastern Cape Colony in southern Africa, Elbourne troubles the exclusive categories of settler colonialism and presents them as part of a larger continuum of imperial violence made amid counterclaims of belonging. Elbourne’s sources are pointedly varied as well. In addition to governmental archives and records, she draws upon oral histories, local gossip, memoirs, and family legends. This is a purposeful reading along the archival grain that then offers a rich trove from which to see Indigenous agency and livelihood, creating more than just a grand settler story.The result is a deeply and impressively researched history of transimperial networks that attempts to include Indigenous voices as concomitant and equal actors in these stories. Consequently, the book is impressive, but also overwhelming; its 431 pages offer so much detail, so much information, that they run the risk of straining Elbourne’s clearly demarcated themes in her central arguments.It is perhaps a minor quibble to argue that a book is too extensive in attempting to trace the vast violences of the early nineteenth-century imperial world. Empire, Kinship and Violence is a solid and impressive achievement that de-centers imperial claims to order and control while also prioritizing the multiplicity of voices that made up the multivalent networks of empire.

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