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FAMILY LIFE UNDER IMPERIAL RULEEXAM NOTES
period 4
WEEK 1
“Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in 18th British Frontiers” K.
Wilson
Examining the practices of governance in three frontiers of the British empire— Fort Marlborough
(Sumatra), St. Helena, and Jamaica—can help revivify a cultural perspective on the arts and strategies of
colonial state-making in the long eighteenth century (1660–1820). It puts into play a different notion of state
power, one that was performative rather than rigidly institutional and that focused on the organization of
social life and national affiliation among colonizers and colonized alike.
we can build on 2 strands of exciting work on European empires and colonization
1. demonstrated the centrality of white male privilege, marital strategy, and concubinage to the
establishment and legitimization of European authority in colonies and outposts across the globe;
executed by feminist scholars
2. looked at the colonial governmentalities through which hybrid forms of local authority were used to
manage everyday social and intimate relationships, sometimes with a view to inducing their targets to
monitor themselves
these lines of inquiry can be brought together in pursuit of a set of related issues
1. how problems of governance, discipline, and population permeated early modern forms of colonial rule
almost a century before they are usually acknowledged to have done so.
2. questions about the long- established historiographical division of the eighteenth-century British Empire
into “first” (characterized by the mercantile “empire of the seas” of trading posts and settler colonies)
and “second” (the sprawling territorial empire of rule over large numbers of non-British people) periods
It suggests, instead, significant continuities in techniques and targets of rule over the period, the “first” stage
in British expansion incorporating significant numbers of alien peoples and quantities of authoritarian rule,
and the “second” taking cues from the peripheries about the tenor and reach of reconstituted British
authority.
Using governmentality as an optic, the case studies of Fort Marlborough, St. Helena, and Jamaica illustrate
important moments of transition from early modern to modern forms of colonial governance, a transition
marked by the movement between governmental modes of treating subjects like family and apprehending
them as population.
when “government” referred not only to political organization but also to problems of self-control,
household management, and even spiritual guidance, juridical paradigms of sovereignty and law were being
redirected by newer paradigms of virtue and manners that sought to render populations and things
commensurate in the burgeoning global systems of commercial capitalism
Crucially, according to Foucault, the recognition of population as an entity also had the effect of
transforming the significance of the family from a model or analogy of the state to an instrument of
governance of use to that state or its surrogates, becoming the crucial “segment” through which population
could be accessed, regulated, or reformed and sexuality managed.
Local examples from across the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds demonstrate how the arts of
governance, moving continually between the familial and the demographic, embraced a rationality that
linked a well-governed colony with well-governed families and self-governing individuals.22 Using
governmentality as an optic, and so considering each site from the perspective of a general economy of
power, will bring into focus similarities as much as differences in the practices of rule, be- ginning with these
colonies’ shared status, from the metropolitan perspective, as marchlands of Britishness, where national
social and cultural forms refused to take hold.
Because he (a guy that was used as an example) was an East India Company servant, his idea of subjectship,
whether “natural” or acquired, clearly derived from established English models that analogized the polity and
the family, with the father as the primary authority. his self-proclaimed status as “natural sovereign” was
calibrated according to the sensibilities of his charges:
he was an “absolute prince” to the Malays (an attribution that incorporated European fantasies of
“Oriental” despotism);
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, an imperial overlord to the “proper” subjects of the Bugis and Chinese, pseudo-feudal tenants toiling for
the East India Company;
a paterfamilias to the “English” in Company service (which included European and Eurasian men and
their kin), an ersatz “national” community among whom he administered peace and order
Collet used his dominion as governor of the East India fort to perform state- making functions that
extended the rights and privileges of Englishmen beyond those he could claim, as a Baptist, within England.
Collet’s zeal for good governance engaged not only with the larger “civilizing” impulses of early modern
British imperialism, but also with metropolitan reform campaigns. Again, the imperative to regulate and
reform worked symbiotically through self and other, reshaping individual and collective intimate practices
and household organization. Collet enacted a version of “patriarchy” that made family constitution and
sexual practice both models and instruments of po- litical authority, social order, and indigenous reclamation
Collet, then, engaged in the project of nation-making and nation-marking through techniques of
administration in which he made himself both subject and object. His state-making practices were presciently
invested in both the intersection and the regulation of population, sexual relations, and commercial interests,
moving between the familiar and the abstractedly collective in order to pursue appropriate kinds of
exchanges.
st helena: The Englishness of the island was also displayed in the ungovernable nature of its inhabitants —>
From the mutiny of 1683 that resulted in the murder of the governor, to the sedition and riots of the next
century, the islanders maintained a penchant for resistance and disorder
the regulations of a distant Court of Directors proved to be ineffective in reining in the intractable
inhabitants —> the local love of pleasure, which extended from music, dancing, and theater to drink- ing,
whoring, and fighting, became famous among voyagers of all descriptions
Faced with such disorder and incontinence, the councilors twinned good governance with patriarchy.
In their rulings, they supported the privileges and authority of male heads of household as they attempted to
rein in female influence: on an island with a significant proportion of woman-headed households, the
Council ordered widows and single women to be supervised or overseen by male relatives or councilmen.
They also established a pattern of paternal care for protection of children and servants as well as the poor,
infirm, or orphaned, adjudicating lineage and inheritance, protecting minors from avaricious guardians, and
even sending home aged slaves who asked to be returned. The array of transgressions and legal and extra-
legal remedies testified to the need for a continuous delineation of the boundaries of civil and domestic
spheres and for vigilant enforcement of prescribed cultural norms.
The condition of slaves provided another case in point. Their cruel treatment shocked observers.
Flogging, branding, amputation, castration, and execution were the escalating punishments for a range of
offenses, from insolence to striking a white person and murder.62 Slaves retaliated with plots, poisonings,
obeah, suicide, and, when possible, desertion onto visiting ships.63 But the planters, men and women, all too
often exceeded even these harsh sanctions.
As with the amelioration of slavery and the enforcement of “civilized” standards of behavior, it also
fell to local colonial authorities to craft some agricultural and ecological order on the island. The scarcity of
wood and the English preferences of the planters resulted instead in the establishment of common lands and
some scattered indigo and coffee farms.67 Local governors meanwhile turned their attention to shaping
policies that could actually reverse deforestation and other blights.
St. Helena thus provides a crystalline example of the kind of social and cultural engineering and
instrumentalization of family life that local governors were forced to incorporate into their techniques of
administration—techniques crafted on an island periphery and ultimately influencing policy from the center.
The population and familial strategies that governors were impelled to adopt suggest how the ex- igencies of
rule in a distracted outpost could anticipate or reinforce “the policing of sexuality in modern Europe.”73
Disordered families, degraded forms of Englishness, agricultural mismanagement and ecological crisis, loose
women and licentiousness: all earned st helena international notoriety
jamaica
The native Taino had mostly vanished by 1700, and slaves, predominantly imported Africans, began their
disproportionate climb to the point at which they outnumbered whites by at least ten to one at midcentury,
and by as much as twenty-five to one in some locales. Population, its categorization, increase, and
management, was from the start a critical social and political issue.
The white population failed to grow between 1680 and 1756, undermined by tropical diseases, the
shift to large-scale sugar monoculture. The black enslaved population was also notorious for being unable to
reproduce naturally —> Indies, was also notorious for being unable to reproduce naturally. It is claimed that
this “demographic failure” retarded the development of the kind of settler institutions and culture established
in continental plantation colonies, and sealed the is- land’s reputation as a vortex of social disorder and
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, rebellion —> BUT rather than a “failed settler so- ciety,” it was possible to see Jamaica as a unique
constellation of black culture and white domination that shared many sensibilities with the English metropole
The majority population of black Jamaicans meanwhile imposed their own syncretic lifeways on the
island in a semi-autonomous existence, and thus carried the bulk of creole culture and consciousness, the
self-proclaimed Britishness of which seems to elude most historians’ attention.
White dominance on the island was uneasily maintained through theatrical per- formances of
privilege and terror. The conspicuous consumption, grandiose hospitality, and notorious brutality of Jamaican
planters were integral to the performance of power that enacted the distinctions of rank, caste, and class on
the island. These theaters of terror were supplemented and reinforced by a steadily increasing military
presence, celebrated in militia review. All were integral to the performance of rank, nationality, and
entitlement upon which the plantation system depended, as the paternalism of the masters performed through
grandiose hospitality and consumption was reinforced by the retaliatory terror of the whip, the stake, and the
gallows.
Jamaican law attempted to codify these performative distinctions of class, race, and caste, marking
inhabitants on the basis of a racialized nationality:
“white” people could claim the protections of British rights and liberties, including trial by jury;
black people existed beyond the bounds of this protection;
free people of color lay in between, some having special privileges granted by private acts of assembly,
but most not possessing such privileges.
Laws, however, could not eliminate the intimate practices that continually challenged and collapsed
these distinctions. Almost every white man on the island had a black or mulatto mistress, and most had
several illegitimate mixed-race children, practices that the colonial assembly hypocritically attempted to
control through sumptuary regulations as well as the inheritance legislation. These vast households of mixed-
blood families, surrogates of proper “English” kin, provide a model of family structure and cross-blood
alliance that is radically different from metropolitan models —> in some ways, their house- holds resembled
Roman patriarchal models of a family as “the collection of slaves and freed slaves attached to a married
couple
The exalted household position of the black or mulatto mistress; white women’s use of enslaved wet
nurses, whose “blood may be corrupted” from their own sexual freedoms; and the intimacy with which
legitimate and illegitimate children of a family mixed, each attested to a miscegenated social formation that
constituted “a violation of all decency. Here the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to individual
sexual choice
Interestingly, the high rate of concubinage was also blamed on resident white women’s
insufficiencies—their vulgar manners, indolence, and “early and habitual licentiousness” brought on by the
tropical climate and examples set by their slaves. They conspicuously failed, in other words, to perform that
Englishness requisite for a socially successful colonial project.88 Marriage was considered the key
technology to social reformation, but for this the men needed a pool of attractive partners. White women
were problematic not just as desired objects but also as desiring subjects, so that their everyday lives were
monitored, surveyed, and reported on by their slaves, servants, and neighbors, as well as imperial authorities.
The deployment of alliance and of sexuality here con- verged, as family formation was put to the task of
managing sexuality.
The enslaved were not exempted from such surveillance. Here “family,” real and fictive, forged
through bonds of descent or experience on the slave ship, was considered a major obstacle to the creation of
a tractable labor force, as Orlando Patterson pointed out some time ago.
The result (of the planters not being able to “manage their slaves”) was that the enslaved had
considerable freedom to engage in their forms of self-fashioning and family formation.
The specters of anti-slavery and abolition raised the stakes on slaves’ intimate and fictive kin
relations, making them objects of metropolitan scrutiny. English reformers who envisioned making “an
empire without slaves” saw proper Christian marriage and the protection of its sacred duties and obligations
as the first step toward “civilizing” people of African descent into British subjects
in the colonies themselves, allowing slaves to make legitimate families was a concern only of
reformers and missionaries. And pro-slavery planters had long argued that the enslaved were “the King’s
subjects” in order to prove that slavery operated as a civilizing instrument that gave blacks access to the
magistrate and the law, arguments that the enslaved themselves began to repeat as a remedy for mistreatment
once the winds of abolitionism began to blow.
IN THREE FRONTIERS OF British identity and authority itinerant, settler, and hybrid populations engaged
in everyday life at great distances from the imperial state. Despite differences in economic purpose and
political structure, they shared in an economy of power that took as its object the organization of family and
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