Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain

Abstract

A number of analysts, both postcolonial and materialist in orientation, have now begun to recover the complex ways in which ‘knowledge’ traversed these imperial circuits of information, impacting upon both Britain and each of its colonies. However, colonial and metropolitan sites were articulated discursively as well as materially, and through the same kinds of network infrastructure that serviced a global commerce. While each different site within the imperial network had ‘its own possibilities and conditions of knowledge’ these differentiated knowledges were connected by the communicative circuits of empire, and could thus be mutually affecting. In the nineteenth century then, the eastern Cape was one among other imperial sites in which contests were being waged over relationships between the propertied and propertyless, whites and blacks, and men and women. In the 1830s, a consideration of metropolitan and colonial conditions within a single frame of reference had held out positive agendas for reform at both kinds of site.

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