Journal of Historical Geography, 29, 2 (2003) 277±288

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0523

Review article

Colonial and postcolonial geographies

CATHERINE HALL, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination
(Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Pp. xviii ‡ 556. £19.99 paperback)

Introduction: metropole and colony

In this article, I want to at least try to do justice to a remarkable book by Catherine Hall,
but I also want to range beyond its particular concerns to see how they intersect with, and
perhaps help us re-envision, broader geographies of colonial and postcolonial cultural
formations.[1] Since the publication of her White, Male and Middle Class in 1992,
Catherine Hall has been elaborating a `new imperial history'.[2] Two features in particular
make Hall's work different from `traditional' imperial history.[3] The ®rst is her teasing
out of the ways in which discourses of national identity, gender, sexuality, race and the
family were all mutually constitutive. The second feature renders her work a departure
not only from traditional imperial history, but also from a contemporary geography
often more interested in its own disciplinary associations with imperialism than in the
geographies of colonialism. This is a focus on the material and discursive connections
between colonised and metropolitan spaces. It is this focus that allows us to consider the
ways in which different cultures in the colonies and within Britain were co-constituted.
Although a number of scholars have advocated postcolonial histories and geographies
that decentre Europe by writing its history ``from and for the margins'',[4] few have
actually researched colonial margins and European metropoles in equal depth. Many
have claimed that their postcolonial analyses unsettle binaries between metropole and
colony, or centre and periphery, but such claims have rarely been substantiated with
sustained and detailed empirical investigations of the wide-ranging transactions between
sites so categorised.[5] While many geographers working in and on the former colonial
`margins' contribute a great deal to the analysis of local and regional histories, and are
very well aware of the impact on those histories of metropolitan intervention,[6] few have
examined the reciprocal links between local and metropolitan developments.[7] By the
same token, among `metropolitan' geographers, there has been a general preference for
focusing on European understandings of what was occurring in colonies, rather than
what was taking place within speci®c colonies themselves. As a result, and as Daniel
Clayton points out, much of our work has ``remained stuck in a nation-centred and
Eurocentric mould''.[8] Hall's research though, tells us as much about Jamaica and
Jamaicans as it does about Britain and Britons. It demonstrates more fully how the
histories of at least one `periphery' and one `centre' have been mutually constructed.
In this book, Hall moves across the ®xed categories of colony and metropole by
holding in tension, on the one hand, a tightly focused `case study' of multiple and
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bi-directional transactions between men and women in Jamaica and Birmingham and, on
the other hand, a broader set of colonial and British linkages which encompassed and
helped to constitute those transactions. When her gaze is on metropolitan space (as it is
predominantly in the second half of the book), she focuses on the ways in which the
`midland metropolis' of Birmingham, although not a town usually described as imperial
in the sense that London or Glasgow could be, was still ``imbricated with the culture of
empire'', and in doing so, she shows ``how race [as well as class and gender] was lived at
the local level'' (p. 12).[9] Through her `case study', Hall works consistently around a
central paradox of metropolitan±colonial relations. On the one hand, places could only
be managed as colonies through their connections with the metropole, and on the other
hand, metropolitan identity and power was dependent on maintaining the difference,
the `gap', between the two spaces. There had to be distanceÐboth conceptual and
physicalÐbetween colony and metropole if metropolitan identity was to be framed in
relation to an Other constructed as peripheral.[10] For example, in Anthony Trollope's
account of Jamaica, ``ambivalence regarding the mimicry which he observed both among
creolised Africans and planters, both aspiring and failing in their different ways to be
English, marked the distance between the domestic and the colonial, that distance which
legitimated colonial rule'' (p. 221). Yet, this imperative for distanciation was always in
tension with the other imperative of imperial connection:
Jamaican commodities, Jamaican family connections, Jamaican property in enslaved
people, did not stay conveniently over there; they were part of the fabric of England,
inside not outside, raising the question as to what was here and what was there,
threatening dissolution of the gap on which the distinction between colony and metropole
was constructed. Europe was only Europe because of that other world: Jamaica was one
domain of the constitutive outside of England (p. 10).
It is because of this continual slippage between `inside' and the `outside' of the
metropolitan nation, that Hall shares the desire of many postcolonial scholars to
destabilise the discursive binaries that were and are constructed between metropole and
colony, in favour of ``more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking'' (p. 16). Hall's own
`way of thinking' about Jamaica and Britain, I would suggest, touches repeatedly upon a
particular concern recently highlighted by a number of cultural and historical geogra-
phers. This is an interest in the uneven geographies of `truth' that are built when places
and people become connected.[11] If metropole and colony were articulated by transac-
tions of commodities, money, information and ideas and yet separated by a `rule of
difference', they were also linked within an imperial regime of truth, but one that was
subject to spatial disjunctures as well as continuities. Hall's detailed exploration of the
way that speci®c events, from the quotidian interactions of missionaries and members
of their `¯ock' to the explosive violence of the Morant Bay revolt were given credence
differentially, ®rst by those `on the scene' in Jamaica, and then by those who
corresponded about these events at one remove in Birmingham, highlights how scale
and distance, space and place, matter, as Jane Jacobs puts it, ``in determining the `truth'
of a particular set of events in a speci®c locality''.[12] This insight is one to which I will
periodically return throughout this article.

`Race'
As with her earlier research, in this book Hall is especially concerned with the ways that
`truths' about `race' intersected with, were affected by, and helped to inform, discourses
of national, class, sexual and gender difference. More particularly though, she locates
such `messy' discursive twists and turns within and between differentiated sites dispersed
across a trans-imperial terrain. Her analysis of the tremendously popular and in¯uential
writings of Thomas CarlyleÐwritings which played a signi®cant role in undermining
humanitarian claims for universalismÐfor instance, shows an awareness of elements of
 REVIEW ARTICLE 279

his thought that were premised upon his metropolitan situation, but also of those traces
which derived from colonial, and especially Jamaican spaces. It was through such traf®c
between colonial and metropolitan sites that continual attempts were made to ``stabilise
the ®eld'' of racial discourse in Britain and its empire (p. 440). Hall is not content simply
to claim that at certain times and in certain circumstances, particular readings of `race'
became hegemonic; from the apotheosis of humanitarianism in the early nineteenth
century through to the inscription of biologically determinist notions in the 1860s, she
tracks some of the personnel, the media and the more speci®c ideas involved in that
labour. This tracking involves an awareness of the shaping of `whiteness' and its varying
con¯ation with Englishness and Britishness, as much as it does `blackness' and its varying
con¯ation with `Africanness'. The de®ning characteristics of white, English and British
people were contested within colonial discourse just as much as were the characteristics of
black people and Africans, and white was not always right within metropolitan±colonial
imaginaries.[13] Abolitionists and humanitarians felt that the behaviour of planters in
Jamaica, although it left them within the category of `white', disquali®ed them from
being considered properly `English': ``far from the `higher orders' providing a model for a
proper bourgeois life, they offered instead a model of disorder, licentious sexuality,
illegitimacy, irregularity, with coloured mistresses kept openly, and concubinage a
completely accepted form. For the anti-slavery movement, formed in the crucible of the
evangelical revival, deeply committed to the notion of the ordered Christian household as
prototype of the family in Heaven, this was profanity indeed'' (pp. 73±74). Missionaries
believed that the `order of civilization' in the West Indies `had been turned upside down';
those who claimed to be Englishmen ``were savages, and the enslaved and missionaries
were their victims'' (p. 112). David Lambert has this spatialised inversion of the moral
ranking of races in mind when he writes of the West Indies being turned into `aberrant
spaces' within anti-slavery discourse.[14]
However, such a conception of white/English aberration was, of course, precisely
thatÐa straying from the path, an exception from the norm. Underlying it, even within
humanitarian thinking, there was always a ``deep rooted [assumption] about white
civilisation which worked on the premise that the corruption of some white people could
be redeemed by the action of others'' (p. 137). Thus, when James Phillippo published an
``anti-slavery version of English history'', which accepted and publicised ``the shame of
the slave trade'', and which described the slaver Sir John Hawkins as being ``the ®rst
Englishman who thus dishonoured himself and his country'', he saw ``the eminent
philanthropists Sharpe, Clarkson and Wilberforce'' as having redeemed their nation and
their race's honour. Condemnation of certain Britons could thus be ``combined with the
notion of a `British lion' ever ready to take up the cause of freedom''. It was ``the
disarticulation between whiteness and Englishness which had ruined white Jamaican
society'', rather than any inherent ¯aw in the English character (p. 185). It was much
harder for missionaries and anti-slavery activists to distinguish the innate characteristics
of blackness from those of Africanness (and, as we will see below, tropicality), than it was
to delineate between whiteness and Englishness. Of course, this is not to say that readings
of blackness and Africanness would remain static, nor that they were unconnected
with readings of Englishness. As Hall makes clear, ``In the 1830s, respectable English
middle-class men supported the anti-slavery movement and emancipation. To be a
supporter of the weak and dependentÐwomen, children, enslaved people and animalsÐ
constituted a part of the `independence' of middle-class masculinity'' (p. 27). By the
1860s, though, this particular formulation of the link between Englishness, masculinity
and blackness had changed. As David Brion DavisÐamong othersÐhas shown, and as
Hall's book reinforces, the aftermath of the emancipation of slaves in Britain's empire
was a critical moment in its reformulation: ``Where once visitors had gone to Jamaica to
see and report on slavery, now it was emancipation. Such travelers assumed the right to
re¯ect on `the African': for the `nature' of the race was at the heart of the argument over
whether or not black people were equipped for the status of citizens'' (p. 222).[15] By the
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1860s, debates over the ®tness of the African for freedom were beginning to crystallise
into a new consensus. As Hall's book documents in a wealth of detail, ``A structure of
feeling dominated by the familial trope and a paternalist rhetoric had been displaced
by a harsher racial vocabulary of ®xed differences. In the constant play between racism's
two logics, the biological and the cultural, biological essentialism was, for the moment,
in the ascendant, and race occupied a different place in the English common sense''
(p. 440).
Abolitionist visions themselves, constructed in part to challenge more racially
deterministic planter discourses, contained the seeds of their own disillusionment and
prepared the way for the triumph of biological determinism in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. The very nature, depth and extent of missionary expectation made
the ful®lment of their dreams on behalf of black people an impossibility. British
missionaries sought to prescribe every aspect of emancipated black people's behaviour.
Every facet of their daily lives was to be modelled on a British bourgeois ideal, including,
for instance, the composition of their family, the number and size of rooms in their
houses, the furniture and its arrangement within them, and permissable decorations
(see p. 134). As ever in Hall's work, the notions of femininity and masculinity as well as
Englishness with which such racialised visions were bound up, are teased out. Thus ``the
perfect negro man'' in the abolitionist vision, would combine ``the independence which
was so central to an English conception of manhood with patience and submission,
characteristics more frequently associated with femininity in England, and marking the
distinction between white and black manhood'' (p. 189). Such a degree of prescription
was always going to be ``a dream which fragmented as the missionaries came to realise, to
a greater or lesser extent, that they could not control the destinies of others, or indeed of
themselves'' (p. 21). The failure to control black bodies and minds, even within the
missionary community, was demonstrated above all by black pastors breaking away
from the authority of white missionaries, gathering their own followings and appro-
priating the message of the Bible (or even dispensing with it altogether), often in the face
of vehement opposition form white missionaries. Such ®ssures and disputes occasionally
led to violence against the property and persons of the white missionaries who had
imagined themselves father ®gures for their `¯ock'. While Hall remains focused largely on
the `internal' discussions of white Britons about such events, she demonstrates through
her detailed readings of these local disputes the ways in which the exercise of black
people's agency complicated missionary understandings of black infantilism, generated
vitriolic debates among missionaries more or less sympathetic to black aspirations, and
disrupted consensual missionary dreams. Such dissonance and disillusionment, of
course, prepared the way for alternative discourses of racial difference to challenge the
hedged universalism of the missionaries. It gave new recruits, both in Jamaica and in
Britain, to the vision of irredeemable racial inequality propagated by ®gures such as
Carlyle, and, particularly within Birmingham, George Dawson. By the mid 1860s it was
their differentiated narratives of irredeemable racial difference and the proper constitu-
tion of Englishness in relation to it, that were dominant. Because they had refused to live
out the ethnocentric, prescriptive and patronising missionary dream, ``[a] considerable
body of opinion had concluded that black people were, essentially, different from whites,
and thus could not expect the same rights. British subjects across the Empire were not all
the same'' (p. 25). Hall's great contribution to our understanding of this shift in racial
discourse during the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with her prologue on Edward
Eyre's personal journey through the Empire and continuing with her close examination
of relations between ®gures in Jamaica and Britain, is to illustrate ``how racial thinking
was made and re-made across the span of colony and metropole'' and through the agency
of both `white' and `black' people engaging within and across this span (p. 27). She
shows, in ways that can only inspire geographers, how the geographies of connection
between different people and places counted in the formulation and reformulation of
discourse and practice at any one site.
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Geographical truths and metropolitan knowledges

As I indicated above, colonial knowledges and truths were different depending on where
subjects were situated within imperial networks. For colonial agents `on the ground',
engaged in the pursuit of various colonizing projects, not the least of which was personal
security, `native' knowledges and practices were immediate and inescapable. Through
complicity, accommodation and resistance, they circumscribed, informed, delimited,
contested and transformed colonial projects. And yet, when we trace the discursive and
material connections that colonising subjects maintained with those in the government
of®ces, military headquarters, boardrooms, missionary institutions and homes of
metropolitan space, different knowledges were shapedÐones in which `native agency'
was often reduced to a single dimension or erased entirely.[16] What Hall's work shows is
that it is not so much the scale of one's analysis which results in such different truths
about colonial encounters and practices; it is more the different forms that knowledge
and truth take on as they travel across distance and between agents with particular
horizons and agendas in differently constituted places.[17] What this means for any study
of metropolitan±colonial connections is that we have to take on board not only the
complicated, messy, intersubjective relations of colonialism in a particular spot, but also
the very different, but articulated understandings of such relations that were forged in
metropolitan and, indeed, other colonial spaces.[18]
Even if they haven't engaged much with the circuits supplying and translating colonial
knowledges and truths to Britain, a number of geographers have recently been concerned
with the constitution of metropolitan imaginations of the colonial world in the
nineteenth century, and in its postcolonial implications. Some of this work has focused
on cultures of exploration and travel.[19] Some has looked at imperial knowledge in the
media of popular entertainment and schooling.[20] As Hall points out in relation to
research on metropolitan images of empire in general, the focus has been largely on the
production of representation.[21] Through her detailed examination of understandings of
Jamaica and the wider empire in Birmingham, however, Hall herself endeavours to
understand the ways in which the `cacophony' of different voices speaking about empire
was consumed and interpreted among differently situated members of `the public'. In fact,
the dif®culty of obtaining evidence about `ordinary' individuals' world views means that
Hall herself writes at least as much about the production of voices and images of empire
as she does about their consumption, even if at a more local scale than most analysts.[22]
The sources of production that Hall examines include local newspapers and journals,
institutions such as missionary and anti-slavery societies and lecturing, literary and
philosophical societies, public exhibitions, the theatre, public meetings and correspond-
ence between family and friends in the colonies and in Birmingham. But while the weight
of her analysis is still centred on the images conveyed through such media, Hall is able to
tap at least some sources of evidence relating to popular understandings of them, not
least through the records of a debating society based in a Birmingham pub. Hall's reading
of such understandings is also usefully informed by a conception of the `public sphere'
which is more gendered and differentiated than Habermas's original formulation (see
pp. 292±293).[23] Furthermore, Hall has done more than most to connect discussions of
race and empire with other contemporary metropolitan, and especially Birmingham,
preoccupations. George Dawson, for instance, lectured in Brimingham during the 1840s
on the links between the hotly debated nationalist movements in Europe and the right of
Britain to govern colonies further a®eld. Nationalism was leading to the reconstruction
of Europe on racial lines, he argued, and this was a development connected to, and just as
natural as, the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race into the lands of other races who were
less ®tted than Europeans for survival (p. 365). In tracing such discursive connections,
which were obvious to commentators at the time, but which have since been
compartmentalised by historical scholarship, Hall illuminates a particular metropolitan
place and time in its own right, as well as highlighting its connections with Jamaica and
282 REVIEW ARTICLE

the wider world. She has shown, in ways familiar to many historical geographers, how
local, provincial identities were de®ned in relation to a far more extensive national,
continental and global network of contacts.

East and West and postcolonial theory

Hall sets herself the task of answering certain questions in particular about metropolitan
knowledge: ``how was Jamaica produced for England, speci®cally in the anti-slavery
narratives of the 1830s and 1840s? What was the imagined geography of the abolitionist?
How was the `travelling eye' riveted to the missionary endeavour? And what happened
when the traveller's tale was mapped on to the missionary story?'' (p. 175). Not the least
in¯uential of the `travelling eyes' which contested missionary stories belonged to
Anthony Trollope, who sold narratives about imperial spaces by the bucket load during
the mid-nineteenth century. As Hall writes:
His mapping of imperial places and peoples, utilising familiar language and images,
brought Maori `cannibals', Jamiacan `Quashees' and energetic white Australian settlers
right into the parlour. Difference was domesticated, and . . . The English were reassured
that it was their country's right to civilise. The sites of empire were represented by the
quintessential English goodfellow, Anthony Trollope, in ways that English readers could
take great pleasure in; for here was a favourite ®ctional writer transporting them to
Australia, Canada and the West Indies' and later, South Africa too (p. 211).
As the extract indicates, while Hall is especially concerned with images of Jamaica, this
is by no means to the exclusion of other sites. Through her study of geographical
imaginations of this particular colonial space, she exhorts us to pay more attention to the
very different ways in which various places and people of empire were constructed and
imagined. There could be no such thing as a single metropolitan geographical
imagination of empire, when India, the West Indies, Australia and other sites were
regarded so differently, and when representations of each colonial environment and its
population were contested by so many different interests. Both metropolitan and
emigrant colonial Britons were supplied with a vast array of images from around to globe
with which to construct their characterisation of other people and landscapes. Bound up
with, and yet different from British imaginations of the West Indies, for instance, was a
set of equally contested images of Africa. Hall discusses missionary attempts to send
white and black Jamaican preachers `back to Africa' to spread the post-emancipation
message of Christianity and civilisation within the `dark continent'. In tracing the
connections that missionaries imagined enslaved people had with Africa, Hall establishes
that even abolitionists came close to the planters' assertion that the middle passage had in
some way prepared Africans for civilisation. Abolitionist missionaries, too, seemed to
feel that the extraction of enslaved people from Africa was necessary in order to distance
them from the retarding in¯uence of a primeval environment. In this way, abolitionists
shared with the pro-slavery lobby a certain discourse of `tropicality', which is increasingly
coming to the attention of historical and cultural geographers, and increasingly being
distinguished from the more notorious discourse of Orientalism.[24] However, once in the
Caribbean, of course, abolitionists and planters disagreed over the proper route to
Africans' civilisation. Abolitionists were far from seeing slavery as the way to assist
Africans in overcoming the traits of animality associated with tropicality: ``For the
abolitionists, emancipation offered the key which allowed black men and women the
possibility of entry into modernity; no longer locked in another time, archaic African
time or the pre-modern time of slavery, they could enter the present, as infants'' (p. 186).
Aside from its attention to Africa, Hall's work gestures towards the great differences
between British visions of the East and West Indies, as well as addressing the more
universalising narratives that contained both within the same episteme. On the one hand,
for instance, we have the Rev. William Brock speaking at a Baptist Missionary Society
 REVIEW ARTICLE 283

Jubilee celebration in 1842, of the ways in which `East' and `West' had been united by
British missionaries in ``one great social family'', in which the ``breaking up of caste, the
abolition of infanticide and `suttee', the translation of the Bible and the annihilation of
slavery'' were con¯ated achievements (p. 336). It is statements such as these that render
colonial discourse such a universalising phenomenon and mean that it cannot be studied
though `grounded' analyses of particular places at particular times alone. But such
statements co-existed with very different pronouncements and agendas within and about
each of these places, rendering grand theorisation about colonial discourse in isolation
of more `grounded' studies equally problematic. We can take the tensions between
evangelical humanitarian discourse's universalising and particular interventions in the
`East' and the `West' as a case in point. In the West Indies, during the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, humanitarians' main quarrel was with white slaveholders, and
they took the side of enslaved black people, whereas in India at the same time, their
quarrel was with `ancient' indigenous practices and beliefs, and their support was lent to
any attempt to eradicate such practices and beliefs through Christianisation (p. 307). In
the light of exaggerated humanitarian reporting on, and condemnation of, practices such
as sati (the relatively restricted practice of a Hindu widow immolating herself on her
husband's funeral pyre), it is not surprising that many postcolonial theorists have seen
humanitarianism's main function as providing legitimation for broader colonial assaults
on indigenous culture and the erasure of subaltern agency. But this does not mean that we
should overlook humanitarians' more oppositional, differentially implicated stance
within colonial discourse elsewhere, and not only in slave-based societies, but also within
settler colonies.[25]
By the same token, colonial governmentality and its postcolonial afterlife varied and
do vary between India and other spaces less intensively theorised by postcolonial
scholars. India, along with parts of Africa in the late-nineteenth century, shared the `not
yet' form of colonial governmentality. This was a colonial discourse that the subaltern
studies group in particular has discussed, in which indigenous peoples were apparently
perpetually being trained for, but had never quite yet learned the responsibilities of,
self-government. Independence involved an assertive claim of readiness that imperial
governments could no longer resist. In the settler colonial spaces of Australia and North
America, though, aboriginal people experienced a `never at all' mode of governmentality
which, as Dan Clayton has argued, has its own, very different postcolonial afterlife, in
which the `native', located in the `reserve', is imagined as ``never modern''.[26]
Postcolonialism tells us that all knowledge, and particularly that universalising
knowledge produced by Europe in the era of imperialism, is situated, but through such
considerations Clayton has attempted to draw attention to the ways in which
postcolonial theory itself has been conditioned by its places of formation. His long-
standing interest in a localised set of historical circumstances in British Columbia leads
him to identify both the potential and the limits of a body of contemporary postcolonial
theory emanating ®rst from Palestinian (Said) and then Indian (Bhabha and Spivak)
conditions.[27] Should we not wonder, he asks, about the ways that the postcolonial
commitment to difference and multiplicity is in itself a universalising agendaÐone which
erases the different postcolonial predicaments of subjects in particular parts of Asia,
North and South America, Africa and Australasia?

The personal and the political: life histories and life geographies
As we have seen, ``relocating western narratives of progress in their wider colonial
histories and rethinking the `centre' by resituating it in its complex web of colonial
interconnections'' lies at the heart of a contemporary postcolonial scholarly agenda, and
I would suggest that Hall has contributed to this agenda in various ways.[28] The ®nal way
in which she does so, and the last to which I want to draw particular attention, is through
her narratives of personal transition. The intention to tell broader stories through the life
284 REVIEW ARTICLE

experiences of individuals is signaled right from the start of the book as Hall locates the
constitution of her own subjectivity within a set of trans-national exchanges. Her
introduction is an evocation of the personal and the political genesis of her research
agenda, dealing with her Baptist family background, her experiences of living in a town
associated with missionary enterprise and abolitionism in Jamaica, her feminist political
and social circle and her relationship with Stuart Hall, which together prompted her ®rst
meaningful re¯ections on the constructs of gender and `race', and on the connections
between Britain and Jamaica. While statements of the author's `positionality' have, on
occasion, become something of a trite `postcolonial' formula to establish the writer's
politically correct credentials, Hall's introduction is far more than a gesture. It serves as a
precursor to the ways that the nineteenth century lives of her subjects are envisioned as
being both private and enmeshed in broader public and political discourses; it enables us
to access the very intimate ways in which global cartographies of connection can be
lived; it yields insight into the plotting of the ensuing narrative around questions of
universalism and difference that have occupied Hall's imagination, and it highlights the
postcolonial afterlife of the exchanges that she traces throughout the book. Hall's
intention to treat individual personalities and trajectories seriously within a broader
narrative focused on shifting discourses, is signalled at the start of the book, where a
`cast' of 20 `characters' is established, each of whose biographical details are sketched.
For men such as William Knibb and James Phillippo and, as far as sources allow, for
women whose lives similarly connected Birmingham and Jamaica, Hall shows how
speci®c experiences of colonialism shapedÐas Catherine Nash has put itÐ``different
modes of belonging, place and identityÐnational, transnational, indigenous, settler,
diasporic''.[29] For `imperial men' such as Eyre, Hall claims, ``identities were ruptured,
changed and differently articulated by place. Public metropolitan time was cross-cut with
public colonial time; both were cross-cut again by familial time, private time, the time of
birth, emigration, marriage, new homes and death. It was these cross-cutting patterns
which constituted `imperial men', and out of which they made, and told, their stories''
(p. 65). In turn, those stories informed, indeed constituted, the aggregated discursive
shifts of which more impersonal histories are made. For example, the story of personal
disillusionment that Joseph Sturge had to tell about the formerly enslaved James
Williams was one strand in a web of similar stories that made Carlyle's and Trollope's
thinking on `race' seem `sensible' to many readers. Sturge had paid for Williams to travel
from Jamaica to England to publicise the horrors of the apprenticeship system, but
Williams indulged more in the recreational opportunities afforded by his visit than Sturge
had anticipated, and an aggrieved Sturge called for him to be sent back to Jamaica before
he could do too much damage to the cause in England. As Hall notes, ``when James
Williams proved to be something other than [Sturge] had imagined him to be, Sturge's
disappointment was tangible. Paternalism had its other side, in forms of aggression and
hostility'' (p. 321). The story of Sturge's and Williams's encounter, together with the
many other stories of men and women who connected metropole and colony in their own
particular ways in this book, demonstrates more powerfully than any impersonal
narrative could, how the humanitarian ``attempt to constitute black men, women and
children . . . was doomed to failure; for it depended on stereotypes which could never
grasp the full complexity or agency of other human beings'' (p. 321).

Conclusion
Catherine Nash has recently suggested that ``postcolonial geographies work through the
tension between understanding colonialism as general and global, and particular and
local, between the critical engagement with a grand narrative of colonialism, and the
political implications of complex, untidy, differentiated and ambiguous local stories''.[30]
By now, it will be obvious that I see Catherine Hall's book as exemplary in tackling this
agenda. This is not, of course, to say that the book is without limitation. One could
 REVIEW ARTICLE 285

criticise, for example, Hall's relative lack of attention to the post-emancipation

`globalization' of humanitarian intervention, and the contestation with other colonial
interests to which it gave rise, signalled by the 1836±1837 Select Committee on
Aborigines. But a full consideration of this would necessitate yet more contextualisation
of the links between Jamaica and Britain, and a yet larger book. More importantly, one
could also question how much this book tells us about `subaltern' black Jamaicans'
experiences of the British colonial discourses on which the book focuses, and about their
`lived' effects. Not all black Jamaicans expressed their agency through the breakaway
church factions that are documented in Hall's book. This is a question about the
dif®culty of, on the one hand, avoiding speaking for but, on the other hand, attempting to
listen to, those whose representations are obscured in the historical record. This question
in particular is, of course, one that has exercised a number of postcolonial geographers,
but, as Jane Jacobs notes, examples of its overcoming, even in the broader literature on
colonial contact and discourse, are rare.[31] Attempts to incorporate pre-contact `native'
knowledges, practices and agendas, for instance, often end up resorting to the use of
ethnographies in which the pre-colonial past is ¯attened and rendered timeless. Thus
narratives of changeÐor `real' historyÐtend to begin yet again with the intrusion and
agency of Europeans. Even where oral histories are drawn upon and where a deliberate
attempt is made to historicise and spatialise our accounts of precolonial and indigenous
societies under colonialism, the exercise of indigenous agency is often restricted to
male elites such as chiefs and headmen.[32] Hall's book itself, as we have seen, amply
documents the disruption that black agency caused within humanitarian narratives of
civilisation, but it does not (and, given its already substantial length, probably could not)
aim to extend to an account of the broader histories of black Jamaican experience. What
Hall's book does do is exactly what Jane Jacobs has recently praised Dan Clayton's work
for doing: it connects the local tactics of missionaries and their enemies in Jamaica ``with
the global geopolitics of nation and empire'' and ``offers a template for geographers who
wish to construct multiscaled geographies that properly account for the complex
articulations of place and space, the global and the local, the here and the there, the past
and the present''.[33] With its emphasis on the connected but situated histories of distant
places and cultures, its tracing of classed, gendered and above all racialised subject
positions in and between these places, its attention to the means by which particular
geographical imaginations were constructed `at home' and in the colonies, and its
sophisticated interweaving of detailed life histories and broader discourse analysis, Hall's
research as a whole, and this book in particular, has much to say to historical and cultural
geographers.

University of Sussex ALAN LESTER

Acknowledgements
My thinking about this review has been greatly assisted through discussions with Dan Clayton and
by a reading of inspirational unpublished writings with which he kindly supplied me.

Notes
[1] For recent studies of such geographies, see Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (Eds),
Postcolonial Geographies (London forthcoming); Daniel Clayton, Islands of Truth: The
Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver 2000) and Colonialism, culture and the
`postcolonial turn' in geography, in J. Duncan, N. Johnson and R. Schein (Eds), A
Companion to Cultural Geography (Oxford forthcoming); James Duncan, Complicity and
resistance in the colonial archive: some issues of method and theory in historical geography,
Historical Geography 27 (1999) 119±128; Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and
the City (London 1996); Catherine Nash, Cultural geography: postcolonial cultural
286 REVIEW ARTICLE

geographies, Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002) 219±230; David Lambert, True lovers
of religion: Methodist persecution and white resistance to anti-slavery in Barbados, 1823±
1825, Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002) 216±236; Alan Lester, Imperial Networks:
Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London 2001); Karen
Morin and Lawrence Berg, Gendering resistance: British colonial narratives of wartime
New Zealand, Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001) 196±222 and James Sidaway,
Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay, Progress in Human Geography 24 (2000)
591±612. For a concise summary of some of the concerns raised by this work, see reviews of
Clayton's Islands of Truth by Jane Jacobs, David Demeritt, Sara Mills and Lawrence Berg,
and Clayton's response, in Antipode 33 (2001) 730±751.
[2] Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History
(Cambridge 1992). See also her Rethinking imperial histories: the Reform Act of 1867,
New Left Review 208 (1994) 3±29; Histories, empires and the post-colonial moment, in
I. Chambers and L. Curti (Eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided
Horizons (London 1996) 65±77 and Introduction: thinking the postcolonial, thinking the
empire, in C. Hall (Ed.) Cultures of Empire: A Reader (Manchester 2000) 1±33.
[3] I would include here even the recent Oxford History of the British Empire series.
[4] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton 2000) 16.
[5] Exceptions might include Clayton, Islands of Truth; Jacobs, Edge of Empire; David Lambert,
The Master Subject: White Identities and the Slavery Controversy in Barbados, 1780±1834,
(unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2002) and Lester, Imperial Networks. If
there have been relatively few in-depth studies of metropole and colony within a `single
analytical ®eld' (the phrase, much quoted recently, is from Anne Stoler and Fred Cooper,
Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in Fred Cooper and Anne
Stoler (Eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and
London 1997) 4), either within or outside of geography, there has certainly been substantial
interest among cultural and historical geographers in how particular constructions of race,
class and gender travelled and were translated across imperial spaces, often through the
embodied medium of the imperial traveller him or herself. See for example, Alison Blunt,
Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (London and New York
1994); Gerry Kearns, The imperial subject: geography and travel in the work of Mary
Kingsley and Halford Mackinder, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 22 (1994)
450±472; Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in
West Africa (London 2000).
[6] One thinks, for instance, of A. J. Christopher in South Africa or Cole Harris in British
Columbia.
[7] Exceptions in a South African context include studies by Alan Mabin, Susan Parnell and
Jennifer Robinson on the circulation and mutual reformulation of urban planning
discourses. See Susan Parnell and Alan Mabin, Rethinking urban South Africa, Journal of
Southern African Studies 21 (1995) 39±61 and Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid:
State, Power and Space in South African Cities (Oxford 1996).
[8] Daniel Clayton, Georgian geographies `from and for the margins': `King George men' on the
northwest coast of North America, in Miles Ogborn and Charles Withers (Eds), Georgian
Geographies: Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester forth-
coming). It is worth pointing out however, that calls for a decentring of our historical
analyses tend to come predominantly from metropolitan locations (British and North
American universities). `Decentring the West' may be a concern for many scholars in the
West, but perhaps it is not such a great concern for those engaged in more immediate tasks,
often of `applied' geographical research, elsewhere. This would seem to be the case at least
for many South African historical geographers who are now attempting to grapple with the
reconstruction imperatives of a post-apartheid society.
[9] For the constitution of cities more conventionally associated with empire, see Felix Driver
and David Gilbert (Eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester
1999), the networked approach of which itself has helped to inform Hall's vision. For the
postcolonial role of Birmingham as a `global city', experiencing the recon®guration of the
transnational relations identi®ed in Hall's work, see N. Henry, C. McEwan and J. S. Pollard,
Globalisation from below: BirminghamÐpostcolonial workshop of the world? Area 34
(2002) 117±127.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 287

[10] In an in¯uential intervention, David Cannadine has recently suggested that the British
Empire was ``not exclusively (or even preponderantly) concerned with the creation of
`otherness' on the presumption that the imperial periphery was different from, and inferior
to, the imperial metropolis; it was at least as much (perhaps more?) concerned with what has
recently been called the `construction of af®nities' on the presumption that society on the
periphery was the same as, or even, on occasions superior to, society in the metropolis'':
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London 2001) xix. However, the striving
for af®nity is premised on the recognition of a difference to be overcome, and Cannadine
underestimates the ways in which the persistence of difference continued to legitimate
imperial distinctions. As Chaterjee argues in the case of India, British imperialism was
``destined never to ful®l its normalizing mission because the premiss of its power was the
preservation of the alienness of the ruling group'': Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its
Fragments (Princeton 1993) 28.
[11] See Mike Heffernan, `A dream as frail as those of ancient time': the in-credible geographies
of Timbuctoo, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001) 203±225 and
Charles Withers Reporting, mapping, trusting: making geographical knowledge in the late
seventeenth century, Isis 90 (1999) 497±521.
[12] Jacobs, Touching pasts, 733. For geographers' engagement with this issue in a colonial
context, see also Alison Blunt, Embodying war: British women and domestic de®lement in
the Indian `Mutiny', 1857±1858, Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000) 403±428;
Clayton, Islands of Truth; Lester, Imperial Networks, and Roderick Mitcham, A Cultural
Geography of British Humanitarianism, 1884±1933, unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Hollo-
way, University of London (2002).
[13] See Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (London
2000); Peter Jackson, Constructions of `whiteness' in the geographical imagination, Area 30
(1998) 99±106; Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and
Southern Rhodesia (Durham, NC 1987); David Lambert, Liminal ®gures: poor whites,
freedmen, and racial reinscription in colonial Barbados, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 19 (2001) 335±350 and True lovers of religion.
[14] See David Lambert, The Master Subject: White Identities and the Slavery Controversy in
Barbados, 1780±1834 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge 2002).
[15] David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca 1966); Christine Bolt,
Victorian Attitudes to Race (Toronto 1971); Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race,
Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832±1938 (Baltimore 1992); Douglas Lorimer,
Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (London 1978); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain,
1800±1960 (London 1982); Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott, Beyond
Slavery Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel
Hill 2000); Howard Temperley (Ed.), After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents
(London 2000).
[16] For two attempts to examine colonial knowledges `on the ground' and their relation to
knowledges `at home', see Clayton, Islands of Truth and Lester, Imperial Networks. On the
related removal or alteration of `native agency' speci®cally in narratives of exploration, see
Clive Barnett, Impure and worldly geography: the Africanist discourse of the Royal
Geographical Society, 1871±1873, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 23
(1998) 79±94 and Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire
(Oxford 2001).
[17] See Derek Gregory, Cultures of travel and spatial formations of knowledge Erdkunde 54
(2002) 297±309 and Miles Ogborn, Writing travels: power, knowledge and ritual on the
English East India Company's early voyages, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 27 (2002) 155±171.
[18] Dan Clayton uses the term `circumlocutory geographies' to describe this to-ing and fro-ing
of ideas and information (personal communication). For a study of how colonial knowledges
travelled between New South Wales, the Cape Colony and New Zealand, as well as between
each colony and the British metropole, see Alan Lester, British settler discourse and the
circuits of empire, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002) 27±50.
[19] See, for example, Barnett, Impure and worldly geography; Driver, Geography Militant;
Cheryl McEwan, Gender, Geography and Empire.
288 REVIEW ARTICLE

[20] For example, Andrew Crowhurst, Empire theatres and the empire: the popular geographical
imagination in the age of empire, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997)
155±173; Teresa Ploszajska, Geographical Education, Empire and Citizenship: Geographical
Teaching and Learning in English Schools, 1870±1944 (Historical Geography Research Series
no. 35 1999).
[21] See John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester 1984) and Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York 1995).
[22] Although, for a very detailed analysis of the consumption of a particular textÐand one
which highlights the dif®cult labour involved in tracking such consumption, see James A.
Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Author-
ship of `Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' (Chicago 2001). My thanks to David
Lambert for pointing out this reference.
[23] J
urgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge 1992).
[24] See Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton Tropicality, orientalism and French colonialism in
Indo-China: the work of Pierre Gourou, 1927±1982, unpublished paper; Felix Driver and
Brendah Yeoh (Eds), Special Issue, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (2000);
Derek Gregory (Post)colonial and the production of nature, in Noel Castree (Ed.), Social
Nature (Oxford 2002) 1±63; David Livingstone Tropical hermeneutics and the climatic
imagination, in his Science, Space and Hermeneutics (Heidelburg 1992). Hall points to one
aspect of the discourse of tropicality that perhaps deserves more attention. This is the way
that, among those such as Trollope who saw clear distinctions in the capacity for civilisation
among black and white people, a tropical environment could nevertheless justify racial
intermixture and the useful or even necessary `breeding' of a `coloured race' that could not be
justi®ed in more temperate climes (see p. 219).
[25] See Alan Lester, Obtaining the ``Due Observance of Justice'': the geographies of colonial
humanitarianism, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002) 277±293.
[26] I owe this point to discussion with Dan Clayton and a reading of some of his unpublished
work.
[27] Clayton, Islands of Truth, Colonialism, culture and the `postcolonial turn' and Absence,
memory and geography, BC Studies 132 (2001/2002) 65±79.
[28] The quote is from Nash, Cultural geography, 222.
[29] Nash, Cultural geography, 224.
[30] Nash, Cultural geography, 228.
[31] Jane Jacobs, Touching Pasts Antipode 33 (2001) 730±734
[32] There are, however, some exceptional works that analyze the intersections between `native'
and colonial discourses productively. Clayton does so in Islands of Truth and Brendah Yeoh
develops an excellent treatment of this problem in a particular context. Jane Jacobs has made
more persistent attempts than most to ®nd ways around it. JoAnn McGregor has recently
produced a paper on contested indigenous as well as settler discourses of the Victoria Falls
which provides an object lesson in studying heterogeneous and contested `native' and
colonial representations within the same frame of reference. See Brendah Yeoh, Historical
geographies of the colonised world, in Brian Graham and Catherine Nash (Eds), Modern
Historical Geographies (London 2000) 146±166; K. Gelder and J. M. Jacobs, `Talking out of
place': authorising the Aboriginal sacred in postcolonial Australia, Cultural Studies 9 (1995)
150±160 and Uncanny Australia, Ecumene 2 (1995) 173±185; Jane Jacobs, Earth honouring:
western desires and indigenous knowledge, in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (Eds), Writing
Women and Space (New York 1994) 169±196, Difference and its other, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 25 (2000) 403±408 and Touching pasts, and JoAnn
McGregor, The Victoria Falls: landscape, tourism and the geographical imagination in
southern Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies ( forthcoming).
[33] Jacobs, Touching pasts, 734.