Victorian liberalism and the effect of sovereignty: a view from the settler periphery. Issue 1 (2nd January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Boucher, Leigh
• Is Part Of: History Australia. Volume 13:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 35
• Page End: 51
• Publication Date: 2016-01-02
• Subjects: Liberalism -- reform -- selfgovernment -- settler colonialism -- reform -- sovereignty; Australia -- History -- Periodicals; Australia; History; Periodicals; 905
• DOI: Http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/14490854.2016.1156142
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1449-0854

Abstract

Abstract: Postcolonial thinking has offered 'new imperial' historians productive avenues to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British Empire. Questions of territory and sovereignty have, however, often been seen as secondary in these new histories of the citizen-subject of liberalism. From an Antipodean perspective, this seems a remarkable elision. Through an examination of the ideas of liberals in colonial Victoria, this article explores whether we might consider sovereignty as a ghost in the machine of everyday liberalism and asks whether these questions should remain safely on the imperial margins. Drawing on theorisations of settler-colonialism that have emerged in Antipodean historical research, this article proposes to read the political subject of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal imagination as both effecting and an effect of sovereignty. This article has been peer reviewed.