Indigeneity and the British World

First and foremost, the editors would like to thank our volume’s contributors for producing a wonderful collection of chapters. We have learned so much from you during our work on this edited collection and it has been a pleasure working with you all in bringing this volume to completion. We also greatly appreciate the support of the editorial team at Peter Lang Publishing in facilitating our efforts on the edited collection.

Finally, and as ever, we are most indebted to John and Josh, for their patience and unwavering support during the editing of this book.

Dr Alison Clark

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Dr Jatinder Mann

Reading, England, United Kingdom

Jatinder Mann and Alison Clark

In the last five years the United Kingdom (UK) has seen a radical, and necessary, shift in the way that the historiography of the British Empire is taught, discussed and presented, both in Universities and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Yet conversely or in response to this, far right politics have become more mainstream. The “Culture Wars” as it became known by the British media emerged, in part, due to the combined effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The protests and debates that took place during this period, focused on national identity politics and revealed a cacophony of opinions in relation to how the Authorised Heritage Discourse1 in the UK was presented. This changing political landscape is not unique to the UK and is reflected in regressive policies put forward by right-wing governments in settler colonial states including Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. For example in November 2024 the Aotearoa New Zealand Parliament in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand saw a hīkoi (protest march) of tens of thousands of Māori and their allies from across the country expressing their strong opposition to a bill introduced by the current right-wing government in Aotearoa New Zealand to weaken the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi), the country’s founding document, in the nation. The 2024 hīkoi was evocative of the great Māori Land March of 1975 led by the late Whina Cooper.2 The hīkoi followed an act of defiance by the youngest member of parliament, Te Pāti Māori (The Māori Party) MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke leading a haka in protest the first reading of the bill. The video of Maipi-Clarke and her fellow Te Pāti Māori colleagues as well as others in Parliament and the public gallery above went viral on the internet and drew international attention to the controversial bill and the wider thrust of the new government’s moves to diminish the hard-won rights of Māori in the country.3 The October 2024 visit of King Charles III to Australia also saw a protest by Djab Wurrung-Gunnai-Gunditjmara First Nation Senator Lidia Thorpe expressing her opposition to King Charles being considered the head of state of Australia and drawing attention to the role of the British Crown in the genocide of First Nations in Australia.4 All of the above highlight that exploring settler colonialism, resistance, and self-determination are not things of the past but are instead very much current and topical issues. The legacy of settler colonialism is still very much alive today and Indigenous peoples’ resistance and fight for self-determination also continues. The Voice Referendum in Australia (although unsuccessful) and the recent adoption of a Treaty in the state of Victoria between the First Nations in that territory and the settler colonial state are a good illustration of this. While the United States of America (USA) is only briefly covered by this book (as most scholars do not consider it a part of the British World), the rapid degradation of human rights under the 2025 Trump Administration may yet impact on Canada and those Indigenous Nations whose land sits across the settler colonial-imposed borders between the USA and Canada. At a time when the rights of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states are increasingly threatened due to the rise of policies which attempt to undo years of work in the rightful recognition of Indigenous rights, the chapters in this volume feel very timely.

The term “British World” emerged amongst historians in the late 1990s and as Iain Johnston-White and Jatinder Mann have discussed the “concept of a British World” is useful in making global connections between these previous sites of Empire.5 From Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis’ ground-breaking 2005 publication Rediscovering the British World to Mann and Johnston-White’s 2022 publication Revisiting the British World, the British World has been reflected upon and ideas of what it means to be “British” both in the UK and in former settler colonies interrogated. The study of the British World has been criticised in the past for ignoring power relationships, especially when it comes to those between Indigenous peoples and settler populations during and since the colonial period.6 The chapters in this volume respond to this historiography of the “British World” by problematising the term, providing a much-needed focus on Indigeneity within former British settler colonies, presenting examples of resistance and resilience both during the colonial era and in the present day and across all aspects of society.

The origins of scholarship on the history of the British World can be traced to a series of articles by Canadian historian Douglas Cole in the early 1970s, “Canada’s ‘Nationalistic’ Imperialists,” “The Crimson Thread of Kinship” and “The Problem of ‘Nationalism’ and ‘Imperialism’ in British Settlement Colonies.”7 In Aotearoa New Zealand, J. G. A. Pocock asked us to reconsider the history of “neo-Britains” within an imperial framework.8 This was soon followed by Australian historian Neville Meaney’s The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14.9 Canadian historian Phillip Buckner raised the subject in 1992 with his article “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?”10 Meaney subsequently published a seminal article on the subject entitled “Britishness and Australian Identity.”11 Meaney’s work on the subject influenced some of his PhD students, colloquially known as the “Meaney School.” We can see this influence in Stuart Ward’s Australia and the British Embrace and James Curran’s The Power of Speech.12,13