Whingeing settlers: Darren Reid, Invoking Empire: Imperial citizenship and Indigenous rights across the British World, 1860–1900, Manchester University Press, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Whingeing settlers: Darren Reid, Invoking Empire: Imperial citizenship and Indigenous rights across the British World, 1860–1900, Manchester University Press, 2025

30Aug25

Description: Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860 and 1900, when each of these colonies gained some degree of self-government, yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. The book applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers, Indigenous peoples, and metropolitan Britons who lived through these decades, to make two main arguments. First, Invoking Empire argues that colonial subjects articulated their imperial citizenship through a humanitarian lens to both support and challenge the rise of settler colonialism, revealing the complex entanglement of imperial and settler governmental authority as well as the multifarious uses and meanings of humanitarian discourses in the late nineteenth century. Second, the book argues that such humanitarian articulations of imperial citizenship were often rendered inoperable by a combination of imperial and settler governmental structures, emphasizing the multifaceted and overlapping barriers that prevented the realization of political rights guaranteed by imperial citizenship. By attending to continuities of imperial political subjectivities within self-governing colonies, as well as by showing that the rise of settler sovereignty was often contingent upon the many and repeated failures of imperial citizenship, Invoking Empire challenges teleological assumptions that the rise of the settler nation states was an inevitable or immediate result of winning responsible government.

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