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… and more books
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted. I’m still busy collecting and reading relevant historiography. Just took a photo now of the latest arrivals. I’m also starting to frame up my first chapter. It’s been nice to see some ideas come together even though quite rough and tentative. In other history news, I was […]
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The politics of history… J G A Pocock
I’ve been reading J G A Pocock, a New Zealander with an international reputation in the world of humanities. Initially a professor of political science at Canterbury University in the 1960s, he has become a leading scholar on the history of Western political thought, particularly of the 17th and 18th centuries. He is now Emeritus Professor at John Hopkins University, being for many years […]
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Coffee and Colonialism
… of course there is an important imperial or post-colonial discourse that can be written about the relationship of coffee to colonialism. Right now I’m reading Partha Chatterjee and drinking coffee in sight of parliament. Then off to Archives to read the Edinburgh Review…
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My anthropological and post-colonial turn?
I seem to be collecting a lot of anthropological and post-colonial literature at the moment. My shelf (below) is the evidence: Bernard S Cohn, Nicholas Thomas, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, and a slice of Peter Burke. I can feel my mind expanding in different directions and assuming new hues. At the same time I’m building […]
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Conversations about land, war, etc
H T Kemp was a native interpreter and Crown purchase agent in the 1840s and 50s. He was a son of early missionary James Kemp. His 1870 English and Māori grammar fascinated me, including the way he starts with enumerating the various ‘tribes of the North Island’ from the 1870 census, and his ‘conversations’ including […]
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From the Archives…
My MA thesis of 2007-08 on New Zealand parliamentary debates of the 1850s-60s emphasized the way history imbued the consciousness of the Victorians. In particular, when conceptualizing the history of the indigenous people Victorian New Zealanders encountered, they placed them in their own civilizational history: as Europe’s history had once been peopled by savages and barbarians who were […]
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Reading… Thomas Babington Macaulay
If any Briton represents the image of the statesman-scholar of the nineteenth century, it is Thomas Babington (“T B”) Macaulay. Son of the anti-slave trade campaigner, Zachery Macaulay, he was a pre-eminent man of letters of the Victorian age, a parliamentarian and orator acclaimed by many, a Cabinet minister, and for a time an administrator […]
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imperial projects
Another couple of interesting ‘imperial projects’ currently in progress: Alan Lester is leading a project called ‘Snapshots of Empire’ based at the University of Sussex. This project will analyse in detail three separate years of correspondence (1838, 1857, 1879) coming in and going out of the Colonial Office and East India Company/ India Office to see how the empire […]
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Reading… C A Bayly
So I’m reading Christopher Bayly at the moment. When he passed away last year he was one of the leading historians of British India, the British empire generally, and also of a new global history. Richard Drayton gave a nice write-up of Bayly’s work in his obituary in the Guardian. I’ve been reading his 1998 […]
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Books
My first books have arrived by courier from the fantastic Massey Library Distance Service! Here’s the list: Origins of nationality in South Asia: patriotism and ethical government in the making of modern India / C.A. Bayly Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780-1830 / C.A. Bayly The Maori and New Zealand politics: talks […]
NZHistorian: a blog about Aotearoa New Zealand history in global contexts
Diocese of New Zealand
map, dated 1843
Samuel D Carpenter 