images of empire, contests of conscience: models of colonial domination in South Africa

Abstract

The image of colonialism as a coherent, monolithic process can no longer be sustained: indeed, the very nature of colonial rule was, and is, often the subject of struggle among colonizers—as well as between ruler and ruled. This study examines 19th‐century South Africa, where settlers, administrators, and evangelists contested the terms of European domination. It does so through the “gaze” of Protestant missionaries. Being the moral consciences of empire and the “dominated fraction of the dominant class,” their perspective—shaped in the age of revolution in Britain—gives unusual insight into the tensions and contradictions of colonialism; contradictions that sometimes had the effect of revealing, to the colonized, the hidden structures of command.[South Africa, colonialism, consciousness, missionaries, representation, “imaginative sociology”]

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