published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation examines the workings of various colonial discourses in the texts of Captain James Cook’s third Pacific voyage. Specifically, it focusses on the month spent at Nootka Sound (on the west coast of Vancouver Island) in 1778. The textual discrepancies between the official 1784 edition by Bishop Douglas, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and J.C. Beaglehole’ s scholarly edition of 1967, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780, reveal that Cook’s Voyages present not an archive of European scientific and historical knowledge about the new world but the deployment of colonial discourses. Examining this relatively specific moment as discourse expands a critical sense of the importance of Cook’s Voyages as cultural documents, for the twentieth century as well as for the eighteenth. Chapters One and Two consider the mutually interdependent discourses of aesthetics and science: based upon assumptions of “objectivity,’ they distance the observing subject from the object observed, in time as well as in space. Chapter Three traces the development of the trope of cannibalism and argues that this trope works in the editions of Cook’s third voyage to further distance the Nootka from Europeans by textually establishing what looked like savagery. Chapter Four examines the historical construction of Cook as imperial culture hero, for eighteenth-century England, Western Europe, and the settler cultures that followed in his wake. Taken separately and together, these colonial discourses are employed in the accounts of Cook’s month at Nootka Sound to justify and rationalise England’s claim to appropriation of the territory. The purpose of these colonial discourses is to fix meaning and to present themselves as natural; the purpose of my dissertation is to disrupt such constructions. I therefore disrupt my own discourse with a series of digressions, signalled by a different typeface. They allow me to pursue lines of thought related tangentially to the main arguments and thus to investigate the wider concerns of the culture that produced Cook’s voyages, They also give me the opportunity to interrogate my own critical methodology and assumptions. Ultimately I aim not to create another, more convincing construction of Cook and his month at Nootka Sound, but to illuminate a cultural process, a way of making meaning that is part of his intellectual legacy.

The movement in India to abolish indentured emigration to tropical colonies (particularly Fiji, Trinidad, British Guiana and Natal) had its origins in the "Moderate" era of Indian nationalism and the politics of G. K. Gokhale. It began with the concern of the Indian middle class that their status in the British Empire was denigrated by that of their "coolie" compatriots. However, as the details of the indenture system were brought to light, the anti-indenture movement came to encompass almost every group in India, from village to metropolitan centre, from the conservative, orthodox Marwaris of Calcutta to the westernized Parsi elite of Bombay. The issue joined the era of Gokhale to the era of Gandhi, and was the vehicle for Gandhi's transition from overseas politician to a major political figure in India. The issue came to be seen by most Indians--and many imperialists--as a direct struggle between Indian national honour and the capitalist interests of colonial entrepreneurs. When indentured emigration was finally halted in 1917 it was in response, not to a moderate constitutional effort, but to India-wide political agitation and a threatened satyagraha movement. In the process, the confidence of Indian citizens in both imperial equality and the efficacy of constitutional methods was undermined at a crucial point in the development of Indian nationalism and the evolution of Empire into Commonwealth.

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Within the research field of colonial violence, scholars focused on wars of conquest or independence and tended to picture counterinsurgency campaigns as an exceptional deployment of state violence in the face of peculiar threats. In colonial Kenya, the British repression of the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s has been the object of extensive and thorough analysis, contrasting with the lack of research on colonial punishment during the preceding decades. Yet the unleashing of state violence during the 1950s actually has a much longer history, lurking in the shadows of the criminal justice system that British powers introduced in the colony in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to previous scholarship, this study shows how ordinary colonial violence - although massively scaled up during the 1950s - was progressively normalised, institutionalised and intensified throughout the colonial experience of the 1930s and 1940s, laying the ground for the deployment of a counterinsurgency campaign against Mau Mau fighters.

The Council of Advice first emerged as a constitutional device for colonial rule in colonies captured by Britain during the wars against France between 1793 and 1814. The search for some new form of government for colonies of conquest had been necessitated by the difficulty generally experienced in assimilating formerly foreign colonies into the traditional British pattern of representation. Experience in Quebec between 1764 and 1791 had led to the gradual recognition of conciliar government as a workable substitute to bridge the gap between military rule and the grant of representative institutions. Between 1794 when a Council of Advice was first introduced in the island of San Domingo, and 1825, when the Cape of Good Hope was granted a council of this type, the composition, function and scope of such councils was gradually defined and elaborated. There was a continual interplay of precedent and example from one colony to another, facilitated by the growth of the Colonial Office in London during the early decades of the 19th Century. Councils of Advice were also introduced into some a-typical colonies of settlement, notably New South Wales, where the particular circumstances of the colony gave rise to the further development of the conciliar pattern of government, influenced by the practical experience in Quebec prior to 1791. Thus the Council of Advice at the Cape of Good Hope from 1825-1834 was but one example of an instrument of government which was being widely used in the British empire, and which was still developing in form and function during the period under consideration. The Council of Advice at the Cape reflects this fluidity. The composition of the council was altered on several occasions during the nine years of its existence; the degree of independence allowed to council members was a question which arose on several occasions, especially in relation to discussion of policy decisions taken in London; moreover, the council met at the discretion of the governor and four different men held this office during the period 1825-34, each with his own individual idea of the function and value of a council of advice. Preface, p. 1-2.

This dissertation examines the workings of various colonial discourses in the texts of Captain James Cook’s third Pacific voyage. Specifically, it focusses on the month spent at Nootka Sound (on the west coast of Vancouver Island) in 1778. The textual discrepancies between the official 1784 edition by Bishop Douglas, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and J.C. Beaglehole’ s scholarly edition of 1967, The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780, reveal that Cook’s Voyages present not an archive of European scientific and historical knowledge about the new world but the deployment of colonial discourses. Examining this relatively specific moment as discourse expands a critical sense of the importance of Cook’s Voyages as cultural documents, for the twentieth century as well as for the eighteenth. Chapters One and Two consider the mutually interdependent discourses of aesthetics and science: based upon assumptions of “objectivity,’ they distance the observing subject from the object observed, in time as well as in space. Chapter Three traces the development of the trope of cannibalism and argues that this trope works in the editions of Cook’s third voyage to further distance the Nootka from Europeans by textually establishing what looked like savagery. Chapter Four examines the historical construction of Cook as imperial culture hero, for eighteenth-century England, Western Europe, and the settler cultures that followed in his wake. Taken separately and together, these colonial discourses are employed in the accounts of Cook’s month at Nootka Sound to justify and rationalise England’s claim to appropriation of the territory. The purpose of these colonial discourses is to fix meaning and to present themselves as natural; the purpose of my dissertation is to disrupt such constructions. I therefore disrupt my own discourse with a series of digressions, signalled by a different typeface. They allow me to pursue lines of thought related tangentially to the main arguments and thus to investigate the wider concerns of the culture that produced Cook’s voyages, They also give me the opportunity to interrogate my own critical methodology and assumptions. Ultimately I aim not to create another, more convincing construction of Cook and his month at Nootka Sound, but to illuminate a cultural process, a way of making meaning that is part of his intellectual legacy. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.