Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
As well as providing descriptions of life in Port Jackson in his An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, David Collins also documented the expansion of British imperial and colonial interest from the initial Sydney Cove settlement into other areas of Australia and New Zealand. The first volume of the Collins text included a report from the lieutenant-governor of the British settlement at Norfolk Island, Phillip Gidley King, providing his assessment of two Māori men he ordered to be kidnapped from New Zealand in 1793 to assist with the production of flax which grew on Norfolk Island. Collins also documented the expansion of the British settlement from Port Jackson to the ‘frontier’ region around the Hawkesbury River from 1794, and the conflict between the British settlers and Aboriginal communities that resulted. British expansion in the region created a number of new ‘nodes’ of imperial activity, as the British began to operate at different sites within a Tasman world. In each of these nodes we can discern very different modes of connection with local indigenous peoples, shaped by both the reaction of the particular indigenous peoples to British incursion, the varied modes of British intervention in the region, and the racially informed ideas which the British brought to each encounter.
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- Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 , pp. 83 - 98Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014