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Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial
Studies Series

Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History, King’s College London, London, UK

Saul Dubow
Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection

of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures
which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational,
comparative and connective studies, and studies which address where
particular regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in
the past the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth,
in its current incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human
history or part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we
particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we
also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome
collections of essays with a strong thematic focus. The series includes
work on politics, economics, culture, literature, science, art, medicine,
and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on
world history with an imperial theme.
More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​
gp/​series/​13937
Eva Bischoff

Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-

Century Australia
Quaker Lives and Ideals
Eva Bischoff
Department of International History, Trier University, Trier, Germany

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

ISBN 978-3-030-32666-1 e-ISBN 978-3-030-32667-8
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32667-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive

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Acknowledgements
This project was supported by theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
within the framework of the project on “Siedlerimperialismus in
Nordamerika und Australien: Gouvernementale Ordnungsansä tze,
Kleinstereignisse und Mikropraktiken an der Frontier in der ersten
Hä lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” a Postdoc Scholarship on “Colonialism &
Colonial History” granted by the German Historical Institute London,
and a Postdoctoral Fellowship granted by the Martin Buber Society of
Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hebrew University
Jerusalem. I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the generous
support of my research.
In addition, I hereby would like to thank all the librarians and
archivists across the globe, who supported my research with great
competence, endless patience, and valuable advice. Many of them put in
extra hours to assist the travelling historian. This book would be
impossible without their dedication and help! I also would like to thank
my colleagues at home and abroad for being such supportive and
wonderful kindred spirits, especially Ulla Lehmkuhl and Norbert
Finzsch. Also, a big shout out to my students in Trier for putting up with
my almost constant jet lag and archive-induced absences.
And, of course, many thanks to theIncredible Bold !
Abbreviations
AKJV Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible
APS Aborigines Protection Society
CEN Census Commission
CMS Church Missionary Society
CON Convict Department
CSO Colonial Secretary’s Office
CUS Customs Department
DL Dixon Library
FHL Friends House Library
Gov. Governor
HRA Historical Records of Australia
IOR Independent Order of Rechabites
LMS London Missionary Society
LSD Land and Surveys Department
Lt. Lieutenant
Lt.-Col. Lieutenant-Colonel
Lt.-Gov. Lieutenant-Governor
MfS Meeting for Sufferings
ML Mitchell Library
MM Monthly Meeting
MP Member of Parliament
NL Canberra National Library of Australia, Canberra
NSW New South Wales
POL Launceston Police
PYMIC Indian Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
QM Quarterly Meeting
RGD Registrar-General’s Department
RS Royal Society of Tasmania Collection
RSA Royal Society of Tasmania
SL NSW State Library of New South Wales
SL South Australia State Library of South Australia
SRSA State Records South Australia
TAHO Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office
TUA Tasmania University Archives
Utas University of Tasmania
VDL Van Diemen’s Land
WMS Wesleyan Missionary Society
YM Yearly Meeting
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Violence and Pacifism:​Writing the History of the Anglo-world
from Within
2.​1 Playing Scales or Writing the Microhistory of the Anglo-
World
2.​2 Connecting Research Contexts and Conversations
New Imperial History and the British World
Settler Colonial Studies
Imperial Humanitarianism
Genocide Studies
3 A Peculiar People:​Quakers and the Atlantic World Around 1800
3.​1 Inner Light and Worldly Matters:​Quaker Abolitionism
From Germantown to London:​Becoming an Abolitionist
Movement
The Caring Power of Evangelical Quakerism
3.​2 Strategies of Conflict Resolution:​Between Peace Testimony
and Diplomacy
From Revolutionaries to Law-Abiding Subjects
The Lamb’s War and Its Consequences
Quaker Peace Principles and Settler-Indigenous Relations
in Colonial Pennsylvania
3.​3 A Translocal Community:​Quakers and Migration
Travelling under Concern:​Ministers Abroad
Flows of Books and Friendly Affection:​The Circulation of
Knowledge
Friends Overseas:​Certificates and Networks
4 Quakers in Early Nineteenth-Century Van Diemen’s Land
 4.​1 Those Assembled for Worship and Discipline:​Founders of
Hobart MM
Quakers of Convict Background
Free Quaker Settlers
4.​2 Practices of Belonging:​Quaker Identity in the Antipodes
Particular Colonists:​Everyday Questions of Practising
Quakerism
Finding a Suitable Companion:​Marriage Networks
Living in a Masculinist Society:​Quaker Men
4.​3 Transferring the Quaker Way to the Antipodes
Establishing a Familiar Discipline:​Organisation and
Structure
Nourishing Minds and Teaching Principles:​Quaker Books
and Schools
5 The Case of James Backhouse and George W.​Walker:​Quaker
Ministers and Colonial Governmentality, 1834
6 Being at Home:​Van Diemen’s Land as a Quaker Settler Space
6.​1 Taking the Land:​Material Practices and Production of
Settler Colonial Knowledge
TransformingPalawa Country into Settler Agricultural
Space
Producing Settler Colonial Knowledge:​Botany and
Anthropology
Settler Architecture:​Improving the Land and Building
Prestige
6.​2 Colonial Governance and Quaker Domesticity
The Quaker Home and the Vandemonian Penal System
The Quaker Home and Cultural Genocide
7 The Case of Francis Cotton and George F.​Story:​Quaker Settlers
and the Tasmanian Frontier, 1829–1831
8 Removal, Reform, Protection:​Building a Humanitarian Empire
8.​1 Transmissions:​Settler Experiences and Humanitarian
Discourse
Journals and Committees:​Quaker Routines
Quaker Settler Experiences Converted
Establishing the Cornerstones of Humanitarian Discourse
Filters and Nets:​Transmitting and Connecting Knowledge
8.​2 Imagined Common Grounds:​William Penn in Australia?​
An Example to Follow:​Penn in Humanitarian Discourse
Becoming Quaker:​Imagining Settler Space|Time in 1830s
Van Diemen’s Land
9 Tasmanian Lessons:​Translation of Quaker Experiences and
Concepts, 1836–1843
9.​1 A Second Pennsylvania?​South Australia and Quaker
Settlers
9.​2 A Slender Basis:​Quaker Settlers and Aboriginal People
Coming in But Staying Out:​The Etiquettes of Interaction
Local Politics:​Between Retaliation and the Prevention of
Extinction
9.​3 South Australian Quaker Voices in Quaker Humanitarian
Discourse
The Benevolent Coloniser Speaks:​John Barton Hack
Shifting from Amelioration to Anthropology:​William May
10 Conclusion
10.​1 Building the Anglo-World from Within
10.​2 The Benevolent Coloniser
 10.​3 Sounds of Silence or Narrating Genocide the Quaker Way
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Edward Hicks,The Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1834). (Oil on Canvas,
74.5 × 90.1 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

Fig. 3.2 Benjamin West,The Treaty of Penn with the Indians (1771–
1772). (Oil on Canvas, 190 × 274 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts, Philadelphia)

Fig.​4.​1 Quakers in Australia, 1852–1854.​(Frederick Mackie and Robert

Lindsey, List of Members of Society of Friends in Australia (1852–
1856), n.​d.​, Port 8/​1, Friends House Library, London)

Fig. 4.2 Quaker migration to Australia before 1862. (William Oats.

1985.Question of Survival: Quakers in Australia in the Nineteenth
Century . St. Lucia: University of Queensland University Press, p. 31)

Fig.​4.​3 Population Tasmania, 1803–1861.​(Generated from:​Australian

Bureau of Statistics.​“Population by Sex, States and Territories, 31
December, 1788 onwards (Table 1.​1),” 3105.​0.​65.​001—Australian
Historical Population Statistics, 2014:​Population Size and Growth,
released 18 September 2014, http://​www.​abs.​gov.​au/​AUSSTATS/​abs@.​
nsf/​DetailsPage/​3105.​0.​65.​0012014?​OpenDocument, last access 20
January 2017)

Fig.​4.​4 Female population Tasmania, 1803–1861 (in per cent).​

(Generated from:​Australian Bureau of Statistics.​“Population by Sex,
States and Territories, 31 December, 1788 onwards (Table 1.​1),” 3105.​0.​
65.​001—Australian Historical Population Statistics, 2014:​Population
Size and Growth, released 18 September 2014, http://​www.​abs.​gov.​au/​
AUSSTATS/​abs@.​nsf/​DetailsPage/​3105.​0.​65.​0012014?​OpenDocument,
last access 20 January 2017)

Fig.​4.​5 Members and persons connected to the Religious Society of

Friends, Hobart, 20 September 1833.​(Generated from:​Society of
Friends, Records of Hobart Regional Meeting, Minute Books Hobart
Monthly Meetings (20 September 1833–3 December 1857), S 1/​A/​1,
Vol.​1 (1833–1835), 20 September 1833, pp.​9–10, Tasmania University
Archives, Hobart)

Fig.​4.​6 Francis Cotton (1801–1883) and Anna Maria Cotton (1800–

1882, née Tilney).​(Photographs, Special and Rare Collection, Tasmania
University Archives, Hobart)

Fig.​4.​7 George Fordyce Story (1800–1885).​(Photograph, George

Fordyce Story seated in Garden, Tasmania, c.​1850–1855, Special and
Rare Materials Collection, Tasmania University Archives, Hobart)

Fig. 4.8 Kelvedon (“F. Cotton”), 1839. (Detail from: George Frankland.
1839.This Map of Van Diemen’s Land, is Dedicated to the Land Holders of
the Colony. London: J. Cross. Map coloured, mounted on linen, 128 × 83
cm, Special Collections MAP F 862, National Library of Australia,
Canberra)

Fig. 4.9 (a ) Sarah Benson Walker (1812–1893, née Mather) and (b )

George Washington Walker (1800–1859). (Photographs, Special and
Rare Materials Collection, Tasmania University Archives, Hobart)

Fig.​4.​10 Marriage Connections between the May, Coleman, Cotton, and

Mather Families.​(Data collated from:​Marjorie and William Oats.​1982.​
“A Biographical Index of Quakers in Australia before 1862”, Hobart, pp.​
62–63, 69–72, 166–67, 271–72)

Fig. 6.1 Police districts and military posts, 1826. (Lyndall Ryan.
2012.Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 . Crows Nest: Allen &
Unwin, p. 81)

Fig. 6.2 Oyster Bay Nation. (Lyndall Ryan. 2012.Tasmanian Aborigines: A

History Since 1803 . Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, p. 19)

Fig.​6.​3 Layout of garden at Kelvedon, April 1831.​(Detail from:​Farm

Memoranda (April 1830–February 1831), Francis Cotton and Family
Papers, DX 19/​B/​22, entry 14 April 1831, Tasmania University
Archives, Hobart)

Fig.​6.​4 Rocky Hills Grant and Leases, c.​1850s–1860s.​(Francis Cotton

and Family Papers, DX 19/​A/​12, 1, Tasmania University Archives,
Hobart)

Fig.​6.​5 Artefacts of Story Collection (Postcard).​(Papers relating to

George F.​Story’s career in Van Diemen’s Land and copied extracts from
his journal, Crowther Library, CRO.​P610.​92 STO, Tasmanian Archives
and Heritage Office, Hobart)

Fig. 6.6 Frederick Mackie,Kelvedon, Francis Cotton’s (1853).

(Lithograph: 10.2 × 12 cm, Rex Nan Kivell Collection, MS 9947, National
Library of Australia, Canberra)
Fig. 6.7 Frederick Mackie,Kelvedon, Swan Port, Francis Cotton’s
Residence (1853). (Lithograph: 20 × 19.8 cm, Rex Nan Kivell Collection,
MS 9947, National Library of Australia, Canberra)

Fig.​7.​1 Governor Davey’s (actually Governor Arthur) Proclamation to

the Aborigines, 1816 (actually c.​1828–30).​(Oil painting on Huon Pine
board, 35.​7 × 22.​6 × 1 cm, SAFE/​R24, State Library of New South Wales,
Sydney)

Fig. 8.1 Quaker committees and their members’ activity in the APS,
1831–1840. (Data collated from: Records of the Meeting for Suffering,
Minutes (1700–1857), Vol. 43 (1823–1831), 30 May 1831, p. 634; Vol.
44 (1831–1839), 2 September 1831, p. 15, 17 November 1832, pp. 91–
92, 3 January 1834, p. 172, 5 June 1837, p. 394, 7 July 1837, pp. 419–20;
Vol. 45 (1840–1848), 7 August 1840, p. 48, Friends House Library,
London; Aborigines Protection Society. 1838.First Annual Report.
Presented at the Meeting in Exeter Hall, May 16th, 1838 . London: P.
White & Son, front matter)

Fig. 9.1 Migration to South Australia, 1836–1857. (Douglas Pike.

1967.Paradise of Dissent. South Australia 1829–1857 . London:
Melbourne University Press, p. 517)

Fig.​9.​2 Aboriginal “visits” at Fairfield, Mt.​Barker, 1844.​(Data collated

from:​Letters Margaret May to Maria Morris in 1844, May and Coleman
Families, 1839–1906, PRG 131/​2/​2–3, State Library of South Australia,
Adelaide)
About the Author
Eva Bischoff
teaches International History at Trier University, Germany. Her
research interests include Colonial and Imperial History, Postcolonial
Studies, Settler Colonial Studies as well as Gender/Queer Studies.
© The Author(s) 2020
E. Bischoff, Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Cambridge Imperial
and Post-Colonial Studies Series
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32667-8_1

1. Introduction
Eva Bischoff1

(1) Department of International History, Trier University, Trier,

Germany

Eva Bischoff
Email: bischoff@uni-trier.de

Dazed by the bright sunlight and a twenty-six-hour flight I am standing

in the centre of modern-day Sydney facing a monument. Made from
sandstone, it brings together three silhouettes, carved into the material,
leaving three moulds behind. The stone panels lean together and form a
walkable triptych, one of the most prominent forms in Christian
pictorial tradition. It is called “First Impressions” and was unveiled in
1979. Commissioned from the artist Bud Dumas by the Sydney Cove
Redevelopment Authority, and supported by the Fellowship of First
Fleeters, it was erected to commemorate the first generation of
immigrants to the continent. It depicts the founding mothers and
fathers of white Australia: the soldiers, convicts, and settler families
that lived in or close to the area the memorial is standing in today. In
colonial times this area was known as “The Rocks,” the commercial hub
of the city infamous for its debauchery and high crime rates. The
triptych marks the end of the 1970s struggle of a group of local
residents against an aggressive redevelopment scheme who proudly
referred to their ancestry reaching as far back as the 1800s. It also
stands at the beginning of the burgeoning interest in Australian convict
history, which today celebrates tremendous successes, especially
economically. The Port Arthur Historic Site, which is one of eleven
UNESCO World Heritage sites across Australia, received more than
300,000 visitors in 2014/15 alone.1
Celebrating the resilience and assertiveness of European
immigrants, the monument does not depict those who already lived in
the area when the British arrived in 1788: the Gadigal people, the
traditional owners of this land, whose resilience and adaptability are
similarly impressive, if not more so. Facing unknown diseases,
confronted with strangers who aggressively transformed the ecological
conditions by introducing new species and new forms of land usage, the
Gadigal survived and their descendants lived and continued to live in
Sydney until today. Their story, as that of many other Aboriginal people
in Australia, had not been told in academic historiography until the late
twentieth century and is not as easily embraced by the general
Australian public as the nation’s convict past.2 Colonial violence and
genocide, Aboriginal dispossession and “Stolen Generations” stand at
the heart of a (by now cold but still very powerful) “history war” in
which scholars, activists, and politicians struggle to establish a
hegemonic version of the nation’s (post)colonial memory. As such, this
controversy is a deeply political one: After the end of the “White
Australia Policy,” the country transformed into a multicultural society.
Yet, confronted with a tenacious Aboriginal rights movement, it still
struggles to come to terms with its settler past.3
As a German historian trained in the aftermath of another
“Historikerstreit” which had focused on the evaluation and
interpretation of genocidal Nazi policies, but one who is also interested
in colonial history, the void left by the Sydney monument strikes a
chord with me that is strangely familiar, or unheimlich.4 For many
decades, the critical investigation and processing of Nazi Fascism took
precedence in (West) German historiography. Colonial history, though
closely intertwined with the development of Nazi extermination
policies and the expansionist war in Eastern Europe, was clouded by
the notion that the colonial encounter had only a negligible impact on
German society as a whole.5 Until today, activists struggle to integrate
German colonial history into public discourse.6
 Sensitised by the cognitive dissonance resulting from these uncanny
dis/similarities, an outsider’s view on current Australian
historiography reveals that until very recently, soldiers, convicts,
settlers, and Aboriginal Australians did not share the same disciplinary
space.7 Instead, their histories were divided into separate areas or
departments, social history on the one hand and anthropology or
Aboriginal Studies on the other, mirroring the traditional colonial
separation between “people without history” and “proper” history,
namely the history of European men.8 Interestingly, both strands of
scholarly research refer to the same place about 1000 kilometres
southwest of Sydney: the island of Tasmania, in colonial times known as
Van Diemen’s Land (VDL). Here, the encounter between settlers and
Indigenous people culminated in a short, yet violent, war and the
genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Their fate constituted the
spectre of imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.9 Herbert G. Wells, to name one of many examples, wrote in
War of the Worlds (first published in 1898):

we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own

species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the
vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races.
The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely
swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by
European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.10

The colonial war against Aboriginal Tasmanians was part of Raphaël

Lemkin’s deliberations on the modern history of genocide in the
1940s.11 His thoughts were, in turn, informed by a particular string of
settler colonial discourse to which members of the Religious Society of
Friends, also known as Quakers, had contributed to in a decisive
manner.12 As such, local Tasmanian Aboriginal history is deeply
embedded in global discourses about the interconnectedness of
imperial expansion and the physical and/or cultural annihilation of
Indigenous peoples. Their fate also stands at the centre of Australian
national debates, namely the aforementioned “history war,” since one of
its protagonists, Keith Windschuttle, attempted to disavow the
genocidal impact of European settlement on Australian Indigenous
peoples.13 His thesis has been refuted expertly and repeatedly.14 His
challenge, however, stimulated an even deeper engagement with the
primary material available. As a result, scholars today know more
about Aboriginal-settler relations in early nineteenth-century Tasmania
than ever before.15
Not far from the triptych monument on Playfair Street, on 17
November 1836, a young convict named Abraham Davy found “two
New Zealanders lying without shelter in a yard, exposed to the rain, and
very ill.” He acted immediately and “obtained medical assistance for
them.” Alas, only one of the two Maori men lived; the other “died before
morning.” The survivor was offered a place at the local “benevolent
Asylum, to which, however, he declined going.”16 Davy, born in 1809 to
a Quaker family, had been transported to VDL in 1831 for theft and
embezzlement.17 Rediscovering his faith in prison, he arrived in the
colony a changed man. When he met James Backhouse and George
Washington Walker, two Quaker ministers, in 1832, he became strongly
attached to them and their mission “to visit in the love of the Gospel of
our Lord Jesus Christ, the Inhabitants of the British Colonies and
Settlement, in New Holland , Van Diemens [sic] Land, and South
Africa.”18 He was assigned to Backhouse as his “servant” in 1836 and
accompanied him on his journey through New South Wales (NSW) and
back to VDL.19 The penal colony’s Lieutenant-Governor (Lt.-Gov.)
himself had prompted this transfer to remove him from wardens,
masters, and fellow convicts, who would be inconsiderate to his
religious sentiments and thus inhibit his moral improvement.
Davy’s spontaneous act of compassion exemplifies that Europeans
and Indigenous peoples interacted in many different ways and spaces,
following more than one agenda and to varying results. A short glimpse
of his background also indicates that violence and suffering were part
of everyday life in the colonies, affecting the lives of all human beings
on various levels. This study reconstructs a section of this multilayered
history by focusing on the everyday life of the members of the
protestant congregation Abraham Davy belonged to: the Religious
Society of Friends.
Quakers have been part of the Australasian colonial project from its
very beginning.20 Many of them arrived as convicts; others immigrated
as free settlers, forming a socially diverse but nevertheless tightly knit
group. In contrast to the first Quaker colonists who went to North
America , the Quakers that went for Australia neither emigrated in
groups nor were endowed with a particularly strong sense of
community. Australian Friends gradually formed new congregations,
establishing new social bonds while sometimes (especially in the case
of ex-convicts) shedding the old. As colonisers, voluntarily or
involuntarily, their everyday actions contributed to the network of
micro-level practices which slowly but continuously displaced and
annihilated Indigenous communities. Simultaneously, early nineteenth-
century Quakers were members of a religious community characterised
by pacifism and the unwavering activism of its members in world-
encompassing humanitarian efforts, namely the abolitionist and the
prison reform movements.
Previous research has demonstrated the decisive role members of
the Religious Society of Friends have played in establishing and
maintaining these networks and discourses.21 The reconstruction of
their role in the colonies, however, has been neglected in scholarly
debates so far. Existing studies on the history of Quakerism in
Australasia concentrate on the development of single communities,22
particular individuals,23 or reconstruct the history of Quaker
institutions such as the Friends’ School in Hobart .24 There are only two
publications in existence today that provide an overview of the history
of Australian Quakerism : Charles Stevenson’s With an Unhurried Pace,
published in 1973, and William N. Oats’ A Question of Survival,
published in 1985.25 Typically, these studies operate within the
national paradigm and neglect Australasian connections, as do their
counterparts looking at the history of Friends in Aotearoa /New
Zealand .26 Although invaluable due to their eye for detail and insight
into Quaker networks, their insiders’ perspective, and, at times, open
adoration of Quaker settlers as pioneers, these studies stand at odds
with early twenty-first-century historiography and its critical stance on
the settler imperial invasion of the continent, its more impartial view
on convict history, and its interest in transimperial or global networks.
In contrast to these traditional studies on Quakerism in Australia, I
am interested in the ways and means by which the mundane lives, the
everyday experiences and practices of Quakers in the Australian
colonies were integrated into the global humanitarian discourses on
penal reform and the civilisation and protection of Aboriginal people on
the one hand and the processes of settler imperialism on the other. My
investigation follows a set of interrelated questions: What were the
everyday, micro-practices of white settler society, which Quakers
condoned or participated in that contributed to the genocidal processes
of settler imperial expansion? In which ways did Friends try to
implement their pacifist and humanitarian values into their daily lives?
Did their local experiences shape the articulation of global
humanitarian discourses in turn? And if so, how? How did the
knowledge of Quaker involvement in earlier or other (ongoing) colonial
projects influence their actions? What role did the particularities of the
Australian colonial situation, namely its status and organisation as a
convict colony, play in this context?
In order to answer these questions, I examine a multiplicity of
sources, which fall into three larger categories. The first group consists
of administrative documents and records of the Vandemonian colonial
administration, including official correspondence of high- or low-
ranking colonial administrators, land deeds, ledger books, reports,
passenger lists, and convict records at the Tasmanian Archives and
Heritage Office of Tasmania (TAHO), Hobart. In addition to documents
of the colonial administration, this study draws upon the official
records of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain, including the
minutes of the organisation’s administrative committee (the Meeting
for Sufferings , MfS) as well as a number of its subcommittees (e.g. the
Continental Committee ). These are complemented by their reports to
the London Yearly Meeting and the epistles, circulars, addresses, and
letters circulating amongst these institutions and their members, all of
them preserved in the Library of the Religious Society of Friends (also
Friends House Library, FHL), London.
Non-governmental documents form the empirical centrepiece of my
analysis. They comprise of a set of private papers from Quaker families
who migrated to the Australasian colonies at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Donated by their descendants to public institutions
such as the Morris Miller Library of the University of Tasmania (Utas),
Hobart (where they form the Quaker special collection in conjunction
with the records of the Tasmanian Quaker community), or the State
Library of South Australia (SL South Australia), Adelaide , these
documents range from diaries, business records, and farm journals to
children’s common place books. Most of all, however, these collections
of historical documents preserve the private letters of Quaker settlers,
namely of the Cotton, Mather , and May families.
The contents as well as the existence of these private collections
reflect the middle-class background of these families and the significant
amount of cultural capital these men and women carried with them.
This results in a double class bias: As members of a protestant
congregation, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was
strongly influenced by the evangelical imperative to “keep record” of
their personal lives,27 they diligently noted down their daily activities in
diary form or in a series of letters directed to friends, relatives, or
fellow Quakers.28 These people left a strong and varied paper trail. In
contrast to Crown prisoners, whose history in VDL can often be
reconstructed only through the condescending eyes and pens of their
middle-class brethren or the cold stare of administrative records, the
memory and documents of these Quakers have been cherished and
preserved because they were free settlers.
All these materials, governmental and non-governmental alike, have
their own particularities, silences, and idiosyncrasies. Most notably,
they all originate from a situation coloniale and are structured by
unequal relationships of power. In her study “Colonial Archives and the
Arts of Governance,” Laura Ann Stoler argues that scholars “should
view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge
production.”29 Accordingly, Stoler encourages us to read not “against”
but Along the Archival Grain and focus on its characteristics and the
productivity. Stoler refers in her work explicitly to the archive as an
institution and identifies it as not only a repository but also a
technology of the imperial state, a means to regulate and control the
colonised and the coloniser.30 In my investigation, I will apply her
suggestion to read “along the grain” also to other, non-governmental
documents, combining the evaluation of a source’s content with the
analysis of its structure, the relationships of power that pervade it, and
its productivity in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions.
Bibliography
Books and Pamphlets
Backhouse, James. 1838c. Extracts from the Letters of James Backhouse. Now Engaged
in a Religious Visit to Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, Accompanied by George
Washington Walker. Third Part. London: Harvey & Darton.

Backhouse, James. 1838d. Extracts from the Letters of James Backhouse. Now Engaged
in a Religious Visit to Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, Accompanied by George
Washington Walker. Fourth Part. London: Harvey & Darton.

Backhouse, James. 1843. A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies. London:

Hamilton Adams & Co.

Collections, Editions, Reprints

Banks, Joseph. 1998. In The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks: The Australian Journey,
ed. Paul Brunton. Pymble: Harper Collins in Association with the State Library of
New South Wales.

Research Literature
Attenbrow, Val. 2010. Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and
Historical Records. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Augstein, Rudolf, et al. 1987. “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um

die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung. Mü nchen: Piper.

Barta, Tony. 2001. Discourses of Genocide in Germany and Australia: A Linked

History. Aboriginal History 25: 37–56.

Bennett, Michael J., Gillian Ward, and Zoë McKay. 2007. Quaker Life in Tasmania: The
First Hundred Years. Hobart: University of Tasmania.

Bonnell, Andrew G., and Martin Crotty. 2004. An Australian ‘Historikerstreit’? Review
Article. Australian Journal of Politics & History 50 (3): 425–433.

Braithwaite, William C. 1961a. The Beginnings of Quakerism. Cambridge: University

Press.

Brodie, James, and Audrey Brodie. 1993. Seeking a New Land: Quakers in New Zealand:
A Volume of Biographical Sketches. Quaker Historical Manuscripts 3. Wellington:
Beechtree Press.

Brodie, James, and Audrey Brodie. 1999. Keeping Track: Quakers in Nineteenth Century
New Zealand. Quaker Historical Manuscripts 5. Wellington: Beechtree Press.

Conrad, Sebastian. 2002. Doppelte Marginalisierung. Plädoyer fü r eine transnationale

Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (1): 145–169.

Cotton, Frances. 1987. Kettle on the Hob: A Family in Van Diemen’s Land, 1828–1885.
Orford: Joan Roberts.

Curthoys, Ann. 2005. Raphael Lemkin’s ‘Tasmania:’ An Introduction. Patterns of

Prejudice 39 (2): 162–169.

Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1997. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Routledge.

Durrant, Chris, and Mathews I. Hack. 2013. Chequered Lives: John Barton Hack and
Stephen Hack and the Early Days of South Australia. Kent Town: Wakefield Press.

Eckert, Andreas, and Albert Wirz. 2002. Wir nicht, die Anderen auch. Deutschland
und der Kolonialismus. In Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in
den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria,
372–392. Frankfurt: Campus.

Edmonds, Penelope. 2012. Travelling ‘Under Concern:’ Quakers James Backhouse and
George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1832–41. Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (5): 769–788.

Elliott, Bruce S., David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds. 2006. Letters Across
Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Evans, Vaughan, and Halcyon Evans. 1982. Sydney Friends: A Short History of the
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Sydney, 1834–1982. Chatswood: Religious
Society of Friends.

Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. 2016. Nazifying Colonialism: Settler Colonialism and the Fate
of Germany’s Colonial Chronotope. Settler Colonial Studies 6 (1): 23–44.

Goodall, Heather. 2008. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South
Wales, 1770–1972. Sydney: Sydney University Press.

Harman, Kristyn. 2012. Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan, and Maori Exiles.
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Johnston, Anna, and Mitchell Rolls. 2008b. Reading Friendly Mission in the Twenty-
First Century: An Introduction. In Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly
Mission, ed. Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, 13–25. Hobart: Quintus Publishing.

Jones, Maldwyn. 1973. The Background to Emigration from Great Britain in the
Nineteenth Century. Perspectives in American History 7: 3–92.

Kü hne, Thomas. 2013. Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and
Complexities. Journal of Genocide Research 15 (3): 339–362.

Laidlaw, Zoë. 2004. ‘Aunt Anna’s Report:’ The Buxton Women and the Aborigines
Select Committee. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32 (2): 1–28.

Laidlaw, Zoë. 2007. Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of
Missions and Anti-Slavery. History Workshop Journal 64 (1): 133–161.

Lawson, Tom. 2014a. The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania. London: I.B.
Tauris.

Lemkin, Raphael. 2005b. Tasmania. Edited by Ann Curthoys. Patterns of Prejudice 39

(2): 170–196.

Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clark. 2003. The History Wars. Carlton: Melbourne
University Press.

Manne, Robert, ed. 2003. Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal

History. Melbourne: Black Inc Agenda.

Morphett, George C. 1943. John Barton Hack: A Quaker Pioneer. Adelaide: Pioneers’
Association of South Australia.

Northcott, Cecil. 1978. James Backhouse: A Yorkshire Quaker in South Africa (1838–
1840). Quaker History 67 (2): 105–111.

Oats, Marjorie, and William N. Oats. 1982. A Biographical Index of Quakers in Australia
Before 1862. Hobart: M. and W. Oats.

Oats, William N. 1979. The Rose and the Waratah: The Friends’ School Hobart,
Formation and Development, 1832–1945. Hobart: The Friends’ School.

Oats, William N. 1981. Backhouse and Walker: Quaker View of the Australian Colonies,
1832–38. Hobart: Blubber Head Press.
Oats, William N. 1982. Quakers in Australia in the Nineteenth Century. PhD diss.,
University of Tasmania.

Oats, William N. 1985. A Question of Survival: Quakers in Australia in the Nineteenth

Century. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Rolls, Mitchell. 2010. Why Didn’t You Listen: White Noise and Black History.
Aboriginal History 34: 11–33.

Ryan, Lyndall. 2012. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Crows Nest: Allen &
Unwin.

Stevenson, Charles. 1973. With Unhurried Pace: A Brief History of Quakers in Australia.
Toorak: Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia.

Stevenson, Charles. 1987. The Millionth Snowflake: The History of Quakers in South
Australia. North Adelaide: The Religious Society of Friends Adelaide Meeting.

Stevenson, Charles. 2000. Germs of Good: The Growth of Quakerism in Australia.

Journal of the Friends Historical Society 59 (1): 55–66.

Stoler, Ann L. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2:
87–109.

Walker, Peter B. 1968. All That We Inherit: Being Family Memorials of the Walkers and
Mathers of Hobart, and the Reminiscences and Memories of James Backhouse Walker,
and Sarah Benson Walker, the Wife of George Washington Walker, Banker, both of Early
Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land. Hobart: J. Walch & Sons.

Wells, Herbert G. 1991. The War of the Worlds. Oxford: Heinemann.

West, Margaret, and Ruth M. Fawell. 1973. The Story of New Zealand Quakerism 1842–
1972. Auckland: Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Windschuttle, Keith. 2003. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Vol. 1: Van Diemen’s
Land, 1803–1847. Sydney: Macleay Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 2010. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Individual Websites
Kopp, Christian. 2016. Wen wir ehren. In deutschen Städten heißen Straßen immer
noch nach Kolonialverbrechern und Sklavenhändlern. Warum? Zeit Online, Published
24 March 2016. Last Access 20 January 2017. http://​www.​zeit.​de/​2016/​12/​
strassennamen-deutschland-kolonialismus-rassismus.

Footnotes
1 On 31 July 2010, eleven Australian Convict Sites were inscribed on the UNESCO
World Heritage List (“Australian Convict Sites,” Australian Government, Department of
the Environment and Energy, http://​www.​environment.​gov.​au/​heritage/​places/​
world/​c onvict-sites, last access 20 January 2017). Visitors’ numbers retrieved from
“Annual Report 2014–15,” 12, Port Arthur History Sites, http://​portarthur.​org.​au/​wp-
content/​uploads/​sites/​2/​2007/​03/​PArthur-Annual-Report-2014-15.​pdf, last access
20 January 2017.

2 Rolls 2010. On Sydney’s Aboriginal history see: Attenbrow 2010.

3 Macintyre and Clark 2003; Bonnell and Crotty 2004; Goodall 2008.

4 Augstein et al. 1987; Barta 2001.

5 Conrad 2002, p. 148; Eckert and Wirz 2002, pp. 374–75. Complexities of the
relationship between Holocaust, expansion in Eastern Europe, and colonial
genocide(s) still not fully explored. For a window into the most recent debates, see
Kü hne 2013 and Fitzpatrick 2016.

6 One of many examples is the initiative to rename the streets of the so-called
“Afrikaviertel” (“African quarter”) in Berlin: Kopp 2016.

7 One of the very few exceptions to this rule: Harman 2012.

8 Wolf 2010.
9 Lawson 2014a.

10 Wells 1991, p. 3.

11 Curthoys 2005 and Lemkin 2005b.

12 “Quaker” was originally a derogative term bestowed upon members of the sect by
a magistrate during prosecution in 1647. It was soon appropriated by Friends, who
turned the intended insult into an honorific indicating their fear of God. Early
Quakers called themselves “Children of the Light.” The self-designation “Religious
Society of Friends” was first mentioned in 1665 (Braithwaite 1961a, pp. 57, 45, 307).

13 Windschuttle 2003, pp. 2–3.

14 Manne 2003; Ryan 2012.

15 Johnston and Rolls 2008b, p. 14.

16 Backhouse 1838d, p. 26. The text does not mention the names of the two Maori
men involved.

17 Oats and Oats 1982, pp. 82–84.

18 “Certificates of James Backhouse and George Washington Walker,” in: Backhouse

1843, pp. i–v, i (quote).

19 Backhouse 1838c, p. 67.

20 The Quaker Joseph Banks was employed as a botanist on James Cook’s Endeavour
(voyages 1768–1771), hence participating in the explorative journey that would
supply crucial intelligence in deciding for Australia as location for convict
settlement (Banks 1998).

21 Edmonds 2012; Laidlaw 2004, 2007.

22 Evans and Evans 1982; Bennett et al. 2007; Stevenson 1987.

23 Morphett 1943; Durrant and Hack 2013; Oats 1981; Northcott 1978; Walker
1968; Cotton 1987.

24 Oats 1979.

25 Stevenson 1973, 2000; Oats 1985. The study derived from the author’s doctoral
thesis (Oats 1982). He also prepared, in collaboration with his wife Marjorie, the
“Biographical Index of Quakers in Australia before 1862” (Oats and Oats 1982).

26 West and Fawell 1973; Brodie and Brodie 1993, 1999.

27 Davidoff and Hall 1997, p. 88.

28 The most prominent examples in the collections at hand are the letters
exchanged between Francis Cotton and his son-in-law Joseph Benson Mather (TUA,
DX 20/2088-2106). Considering these and other collections, it is important to keep
in mind that the majority of them were not emigrants’ letters, that is,
communications to relatives of friends left behind, which form the basis for many
classic studies of migration history. See for example Jones 1973, p. 16; Elliott et al.
2006.
29 Stoler 2002, p. 87.

30 Ibid., pp. 1–53.

© The Author(s) 2020
E. Bischoff, Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Cambridge Imperial
and Post-Colonial Studies Series
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32667-8_2

2. Violence and Pacifism: Writing the

History of the Anglo-world from Within
Eva Bischoff1

(1) Department of International History, Trier University, Trier,

Germany

Eva Bischoff
Email: bischoff@uni-trier.de

The first official Quaker meeting in the Australasian colonies was

established in Hobart on 20 September 1833. Abraham Davy joined on
4 April 1834.1 He sat in silent worship among businessmen and
housewives, merchants and pastoralist farmers, a medical doctor, and
travelling Quaker ministers. Some of them arrived, like him, as Crown
prisoners, others as free immigrants. As members of a dissident
religious group, they all belonged to a small minority among those
convicts and settlers that came to Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) in the
1820s.2 This study focuses on this group of people. Their experiences
were “normal exceptions,” that is, statistically speaking, not
representative; but these people and their experiences nevertheless
provide an entry point to investigate the interconnectedness of local
practices and global processes, all of which shaped and structured the
face of the British imperial world at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.3
Geographically speaking, my investigation concentrates on early
nineteenth-century VDL and South Australia between the late 1820s
and early 1850s. It examines a critical phase in the British imperial
project, namely the nodal point between the “Old Colonial System” of
the Atlantic world and the so-called “Second British Empire,”
characterised by “the massive expansion of British dominion” and the
emergence “of techniques of governance” which by some scholars are
considered the “origin of contemporary international order.”4 However,
in order to reconstruct the entangled histories of Quaker everyday lives,
my study also transgresses these immediate temporal and geographical
boundaries. It adopts different historical perspectives in terms of width
and length, zooming in and out as it were (jeux d’échelles ),5 and
combines them to capture the complexities of the topic at hand.
The study begins with mapping the social, religious, political, and
economic location of early nineteenth-century Tasmanian Quaker
settlers (Chap. 3). For many individuals among them, this was the first
encounter with the Antipodes. On a community level, however, Quakers
maintained a collective memory of transatlantic migratory movements
and cherished these experiences as part of their identity. As such,
Friends arrived on the island with a particular mindset, expectations,
and an established set of practices which structured their everyday
lives in the colony. It characterises the Religious Society of Friends as a
translocal community which emerged as part and parcel of the British
Atlantic, but which also set the organisational and mental framework
for Friends in nineteenth-century Australia. As a result, this section
adopts a perspective of longue durée, considering seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Quaker history along the Atlantic Rim.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 concentrate on the Tasmanian Quaker
community and explore the form and structure of the Quaker
community VDL: how its members changed the colony and how (and in
which ways) they were changed in turn. Chapter 4 gives an overview of
the Quaker community in Tasmania , its social composition, and its
internal differentiation along the lines of social categories such as
gender and free/unfree status.
The fifth chapter complements the enquiry of everyday Quaker life
in the colony with a case study, zooming in two central actors, the
travelling ministers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker.
It examines how the teachings of these Quaker ministers helped to
devise, strengthen, and maintain a specific type of colonial governance.
In doing so, it juxtaposes the reconstruction of Quaker everyday
practices with the analysis of the impact itinerant Quaker migrants had
on the colony. Just like Chap. 6, it discusses Friends’ practices and
interventions in relation to key characteristics of early nineteenth-
century Quakerism, namely domesticity, the “caring power” exercised
by Quaker men and women, and its evangelical tenets.
Chapter 6 investigates the everyday life of Quakers in 1830s and
1840s VDL in close detail. It focuses on the Quaker home as a socio-
ecological space and illuminates the manifold and intricate ways in
which Friends’ lives were intertwined with the settler colonial project
on two levels: by annexing and transforming Aboriginal land into a part
of the imperial economic system and by establishing and maintaining a
hierarchically structured, gendered, and racialised settler society. It
shows that, apart from the voluntary or involuntary participation in the
dispossession of the Aboriginal population, an important part of this
life was interaction with transported convicts.
Chapter 7 again zooms in on two historical actors, namely the
settlers Francis Cotton and George Fordyce Story. This second case
study reconstructs the practices and experiences of key members of the
Tasmanian Quaker community during the “Black War” and considers
their actions and decisions in the light of Quaker pacifism.
After the detailed reconstruction of Tasmanian Quaker settler
experiences, the study shifts its perspective to investigate how these
local experiences influenced imperial humanitarian discourses, colonial
policies as well as the lives of other Australian Quaker settlers. Chapter
8 examines the relationship between Quaker experiences at the
colonial Tasmanian frontier and the world-encompassing humanitarian
debates during the 1830s and 1840s. It traces the lines of
communication along which these experiences were translated into
imperial humanitarian discourse. It demonstrates the key role of
established Quaker networks and organisational structures in this
process and it considers the gaps and silences created along the way.
Building on these results, Chap. 9 discusses how this discourse
influenced Quaker notions of settlerism on the one hand and Quaker
self-concepts on the other. By looking at the example of South Australia
and its emerging Quaker community, I study the double impact of the
Tasmanian Quaker experience, as it was perceived by Friends in Britain,
on abstract and on a practical level. In addition, I demonstrate how
South Australian Quaker voices, well versed in contemporary
humanitarian thinking, in turn informed metropolitan debates, and
thereby created a discursive feedback loop.
Thus, following the metal maps of early nineteenth-century
Quakers, their travels as well as their writings, my investigation travels
from seventeenth-century Pennsylvania to nineteenth-century South
Australia . It reveals those political, religious, social, and economic
connections and practices that created the “Anglo-world” as a space or
espace, to use a term coined by Michel de Certeau.6 In this manner, I put
microhistorical flesh on the bones of Belich’s macro-historical concept,
an endeavour whose undertaking has been called for repeatedly.7
Violence and contemporary notions thereof stand at the centre of
the material I am investigating. Colonial administrators, politicians,
humanitarians, and settlers constantly argued about violence,
contested its exercise, its goals and limits. As a result concepts of
violence not only varied but also changed over the course of time. In
reconstructing the everyday life of Quaker settlers in colonial Australia,
I trace these changes. Consequently I regard violence as neither an
analytical category nor an anthropological constant, but instead an
inherent trait of the human species, that is, a social phenomenon with
its own history.8 Whether or not meting out cane strokes on a child, for
instance, constitutes a legitimate disciplinary measure or abuse
depends on historical and cultural context. Moreover, not every person
involved will agree on the same set of principles. As anthropologists
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois have argued, “violence is
in the eye of the beholder. What constitutes violence is always mediated
by an expressed or implicit dichotomy between legitimate/illegitimate,
permissible or sanctioned acts.”9 Which act is (or is not) considered
violent is always contested.
This perspective does not deny the existence of acts that inflict
physical or psychological trauma or even killing. Instead, I consider
colonial settler violence “part of the normative fabric of social and
political life” while acknowledging that the boundary between those
who were allowed to exert violence and those who were legitimately
subjected to it was crucial in establishing colonial order.10 By adhering
to pacifist principles and humanitarian values, Quakers questioned
methods and approaches of British colonialism, but not necessarily the
exertion of violence—for example, in self-defence or by representative
of the government itself.11 At the same time if not caused by the abuse
of power, individual suffering from a Quaker perspective could entail a
spiritual dimension that had to be embraced to allow for personal
growth.12 Thus, it is crucial to determine Quaker notions of normality
and the threshold between the exertion of legitimate and illegitimate
use of force. As such, violence and pacifism is not a pair of binary
concepts along which my analysis will progress, but a part of the object
of my historical investigation. I will determine their meaning and
relationship to each other pragmatically and inductively, following a
microhistorical approach which I will outline in the section below.
Opening up a window into everyday Quaker lives and experiences in
early nineteenth-century VDL and its “entangled history” in the manner
described above rests upon a particular set of primary sources.13 This
study also harnesses methodological considerations about the
interconnectedness of local and global processes and the ways and
means to analyse this connection. In addition, my analysis connects to
ongoing historiographical debates on the role of British emigration to
the colonies, the relationship between settler colonialism and genocide
as well as to global humanitarian movements at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. I will briefly introduce all three of these aspects
before progressing to the study’s main chapters.

2.1 Playing Scales or Writing the Microhistory of

the Anglo-World
How to write the history of everyday Quaker lives and its relation to a
world-encompassing process such as the emergence of the Anglo-
world? What is the relationship between the local and the global? In
answering these questions, I take a cue from some of the
methodological considerations put forward by scholars who work in
Atlantic history, transnational or global history. These historians argue
that microhistorical analysis provides for a deeply reflected and
multilayered reconstruction of interconnected processes that constitute
the local, the regional, and the global.14
Microhistorians have rarely “outlined a uniform and coherent
theory,”15 yet some of them have attempted to summarise their
approach, most prominently the Italian historian Giovanni Levi.
Microhistory, according to Levi, includes four steps: first, the detailed
and systematic analyses of the actions and behaviour of historical
actors. Secondly, and by proceeding from the findings of step one, the
reconstruction of the social relationships of the historical figures being
studied, as well as their roles and the structures they created and were
involved in. Thirdly, microhistory entails critical reflection on the
narrative structure of both the historical material itself, but also the
form in which scholars present their findings. Here, particular
emphasis is placed on tracing discontinuities, omissions, and ruptures.
Fourth, and most importantly in the context of the respective research
problem at hand, microhistory includes the so-called “play with
scales.”16 Starting from the premise that each scale will allow for a
different aspect of a phenomenon to become accessible for historical
consideration, microhistorians suggest combining a multiplicity of
perspectives in a play of scales, a jeux d’échelles (Revel).17 Scholars have
to choose wisely, as Brad Gregory argues, with regard to potential
applications of microhistory and global history:

it is a mistake to hand someone an architectural blueprint if he

or she wants to drive to another city. The key is knowing which
map we need in a particular instance, and how to combine
harmoniously maps of different scales.18

Taking seriously the microhistorical methodological approach

Revel’s play of scales relies upon requires an even more careful course
of action than what Gregory proposes. Instead of choosing a map or
scale offhand to cut the historical material into pieces that fit
conveniently into a pre-decided narrative, that is, to play the role of a
builder, we have to carve out those social practices that constituted the
mental maps and lived spaces of the historical actors in the first place
(i.e. be an artist or sculptor). In other words, just as we reconstruct
their social relationships, we have to retrace how they created these
spaces in their various temporal and geographical dimensions.19 It is
therefore paramount to accept the critical potential of microhistory—
namely, its ability to question grand narratives—while not abusing it
for injecting “global themes, mostly read through a biographical lens,
into microhistorical narrative,” as Francesca Trivellato has pointed
out.20
This constitutes an ambitious research programme, which relies on
a form of reflexivity, which Michael Werner and Bénédicte
Zimmermann have described in developing their concept of histoire
croisée .21 In addition to the two traditional approaches of transnational
history (as well of global and imperial histories we might want to add),
namely comparison and reconstructions of transfers, Werner and
Zimmermann propose to employ an “investigative mechanism in which
the objects, categories, and analytical schemes are adjusted in the
course of research” called “pragmatic induction.”22 This methodology
aims specifically at tracing entanglements from synchronic and
diachronic perspectives. It also involves rigorous reflection on not only
the mental maps, notions, and world views of the historical actors, but
also on the historian’s “concepts and analytical instruments.”
Microhistorical methodology thus recognises concepts and analytical
instruments “as the result of a complex process of intercrossing in
which national and disciplinary traditions have been amalgamated in
varying configurations, and to reintroduce the corresponding
viewpoints into the inquiry.”23 Writing as a historian trained in the
aftermath of twentieth-century German “history war” with a
background in German colonial history becomes thus not only a third
(or outsider) position,24 but a resource in the process of historical
enquiry in its own right. A short reflection on one of the central terms
of Settler Colonial Studies—the concept of the “frontier”—helps clarify
this.
The notion of the colonial “frontier” has structured scholarly
research since Frederick Jackson Turner gave his presentation to the
American Historical Society in 1893.25 On a figurative level, it is
imagined as a line separating wilderness and civilisation, the latter
driven forward by each step the settlers took as depicted in John Gast’s
famous painting American Progress (1872).26
 It also entails a “teleological expectation of irreversible
transformation.”27 As a result “frontier” can also be regarded as mode of
self-description of settler societies. Numerous studies of US colonial
history (and other colonial contexts) have demonstrated that this
reductionist notion of the “frontier” can only be called fictitious.28
Scholars have repeatedly argued that the colonial encounter can be
more accurately described by referring to the spatial metaphor of the
“contact zone.”29 In settler colonies this zone encompassed,
geographically speaking, an area in which newcomers and Indigenous
people unevenly shared resources. Temporally speaking, as we will see
with regard to the history of VDL, this zone was also a fragile, in
hindsight transitory, state (“pre-frontier”) in which colonists and
Aboriginal people exchanged knowledge and formed social bonds by
trade and/or marriage.30
However the concept of the “frontier” is not only an analytical
category, inapt as it might be. On a narrative level, the term is described
as a third, transitional state between the old and the new home—a
“phase made up in succession by entrance into a district, battling the
land, community building, and, eventually, by the ‘closing in’ of the
frontier.”31 Nineteenth-century settler discourse reverberates with
these notions, and the “frontier” is part of a common cultural heritage
of the settler societies of the Anglo-world. This last aspect, the
imaginative potential of the term “frontier,” is most prominent from the
aforementioned outsider perspective. It extended well beyond the
Anglophone world and inspired other colonial projects. German
colonial discourse, characterised by a “fantasmagorical mode,” the
result of a brief active phase in relation to a long pre- and postcolonial
situation, was particularly receptive to its possibilities.32 Taking all
these considerations into account I use the term “frontier” in the
following chapters as shorthand to mean a multilayered, complex, and
shifting contact zone.

2.2 Connecting Research Contexts and

Conversations
History is, to borrow an analogy from Natalie Zemon Davis, a
conversation between “at least two persons talking, arguing, always
listening to the other as they gesture[d] at their books.”33 This study is
part of many conversations. It connects to four distinct, yet interrelated,
debates or fields of research: New Imperial History, Settler Colonial
Studies, the history of humanitarianism, and Genocide Studies. The
following chapters draw on the results of these research areas to
different degrees and intensities. The findings of this study, in turn,
contribute to each of them from the peculiar insider|outsider
perspective characterised above, listening to the echoes of the eerily
familiar questions of violence and historical responsibility.

New Imperial History and the British World

Imperial history has been a burgeoning field of research for more than
two decades. Inspired by postcolonial critique and a growing interest in
the historical relationship between imperialism and globalisation, a
rich and continuously growing body of literature emerged.34 Some
scholars even speak of an “imperial” or “colonial turn” cutting through
multiple national histories almost simultaneously.35 The history of the
British Empire has undergone a particularly turbulent transformation
in this respect. Following and building upon earlier studies of British
popular culture, a New Imperial History developed, investigating the
impact of imperialism not only on the colonised, but on the colonisers
themselves.36 This New Imperial History is prominently known for the
ensuing debate on British “absent mindedness” in contrast to the deep
entanglement of British society with the imperial project.37 Yet New
Imperial History offers many additional insights beyond the question to
what extent Britain, its society and culture were infused with
imperialist discourse or colonial commodities. With regard to the
investigation of the history of Quaker settlers in early nineteenth-
century Australia these include two aspects in particular, namely the
relationship between religion and empire and the emigration of British
citizens to the colonies.
The former has been investigated within the Atlantic world as well
as beyond. Since the Religious Society of Friends was, from the time of
its foundation, part and parcel of the British Atlantic, my study benefits
greatly from these investigations. They allow me to take a perspective
of the longue durée on the history of Quakerism as well as reveal the
link between religion and colonialism,38 which, in turn, brings the
multiple transformations of Quaker faith and practice into view.
Focusing on nineteenth-century history, I am also deeply indebted to
Hilary Carey’s study Religion and Colonialism in the British World.39
Quakers, as I discuss in the following chapters, did not establish
missionary stations of their own in Australasia. Yet their activities,
especially those of so-called ministers “travelling under concern,” were
closely intertwined with missionary networks. The latter provided
crucial material and intellectual support to travelling Quaker ministers,
who sought to uplift the inhabitants of the Australasian colonies
morally and ended up supporting contemporary efforts to protect the
Indigenous populations of the British Empire from settler brutality. To
explore these connections, I draw on a set of publications that focus on
the role of missionaries and their ambiguous roles as colonial
collaborators on the one hand and enablers of cultural resilience and
anti-colonial struggle on the other—a field of research that has
flourished ever since Jean and John Comaroff’s study on colonial
Southern Africa.40 With regard to Australian history, Anna Johnston’s
work on missionary discourse and Jessie Mitchell’s pioneering
investigation into missionary work in Australia provide important
signposts.41
Missionaries (and religious humanitarians for that matter) were
organised in world-encompassing, imperial networks, as eminent
scholars such as Cathrine Hall, Alan Lester, and Tony Ballantyne have
demonstrated.42 Their investigations show that “the British empire was
a dynamic web-like formation, a complex and shifting assemblage of
connections” that ran not only between the metropole and what is often
described as periphery but “directly between the colonies.”43 Generally
speaking, analyses of imperial networks reconstruct the impact of
colonialism on culture and society of the mother country, thereby
liquefying the categories of metropole and periphery. As a result, this
approach demonstrates how these “entanglements, […] wove
previously disparate groups into new relationships of
interdependence.”44
 Tracing networks, be they familial or economic, is also increasingly
employed by researchers interested in the complexities of the British
Empire. Emma Rothschild’s account of the intricate history of the
Johnstones siblings is one of the primary examples of this genre.45
Others focus more on individuals whose lives transcended national
boundaries by (forced) migration, trade, or vocational choice.46 They
follow a narrative which disrupts established dichotomies, for instance
the one between colonisers and colonised.47 Yet, this approach,
especially when focusing on one individual biography, implies its own
risks: larger or far-reaching processes and structures move out of focus.
Conceptually, biographies rest on a modern European concept of the
individual and its identity (and one that emerged in the time period
studied here), an approach which favours continuity and coherence
over discontinuities, ruptures, or nonlinearities.48 This characteristic
becomes especially problematic if individual stories are employed
merely as a device to illustrate historical phenomena.49 Nevertheless,
these studies provide important insights into how to employ
microhistorical tools for a deeply reflected and multilayered
reconstruction of interconnected processes that constituted the local,
the regional, and the global.
Reconstructing business or kinship networks also provides an
important tool for many historians interested in the history of
migration within the circumference of the Empire and the emergence of
a “British World.” The systematic investigation of this conceptualisation
of the British World originates from a series of conferences, the first of
which were held in 1998 and 2002 in London and Cape Town, and their
subsequent proceedings.50 Two leading proponents, Carl Bridge and
Kent Fedorowich, emphasise that the British World is not simply on an
“empire of the mind,” but a very material and tangible phenomenon:

a world whose peoples were connected by a series of

interlocking networks, webs and information flows, which
ranged from family and community affiliations, to commercial,
scientific and professional bodies, to educational, philanthropic,
religious and labour groups—associational and organisational
ties which, if anything, strengthened over time.51
 To describe the communities of British citizens who temporarily or
permanently relocated to the colonies, scholars often use the term
“diaspora,” and, indeed, this idea “has become an increasingly
‘diasporic’ concept” itself.52 Originally referring to the forced,
involuntary dispersal of Jewish people across the Greek Mediterranean
world during the third century BCE,53 the term “diaspora” (διασπορά )
has been appropriated and redeployed since the 1990s to signify
involuntary migratory experiences in general. Starting with Paul
Gilroy’s landmark study The Black Atlantic, more and more scholars
began to investigate the links between identity, space, and belonging
from this perspective.54
As a concept, diaspora remains contested today.55 There is, however,
a set of shared premises on what characterises diasporic
communities56: People living within diasporas develop a particular
relationship to an actual or imagined homeland. The existence of
diasporic communities questions rigid notions of identity and
destabilises the link between nation and territoriality. Those who live in
and comprise diasporas represent minorities in their new environment,
and their members have to negotiate acculturation and are confronted
with discrimination and marginalisation. In contrast to other forms of
migration, diaspora originally “connotes flight following the threat of
violence rather than freely chosen experiences of displacement.”57 Yet,
the majority of studies focus on British emigrants who left their homes
voluntarily and, although numerically a minority compared to other
ethnic groups present in a territory or individually marginalised due to
their sexual orientation, religious belief, or class, all of them benefited
from a colonial dividend.58 They formed an “imperial diaspora,” to use a
term coined by Kim Butler. Within the context of the British World,
diaspora can be considered a “mode of conquest.”59
It is important to keep this in mind while considering the British
World as an analytical framework for reconstructing the history of
Quaker settlers in early nineteenth-century Tasmania . It limits its
usefulness considerably for two reasons. First, as I demonstrate in
Chap. 3, Quakers were not a diasporic community, religious prosecution
in England or other territories notwithstanding. Britain was not
imagined as the Quaker “homeland” in the sense that Friends saw
themselves exiled and expected to return in the (near or distant) future.
Instead, as early as the 1670s, colonial Quaker communities established
meetings in their own right, albeit regulated by London YM (as was any
other meeting). They were included in Quaker networks of spiritual
and intellectual exchange following protocols originally established to
guarantee the coherence and doctrinal uniformity of the church during
the restoration period.
These practices established what has been described as the “Quaker
Atlantic.”60 Quakers were thus a translocal community , to borrow a
term from the work of Ulrike Freitag and other scholars of the Zentrum
Moderner Orient, Berlin. Translocality “investigates the tensions
between movement and order.”61 It functions as both a research tool
and a critical perspective to describe and conceptualise phenomena
resulting “from a multitude of circulations and transfers” which
transgressed spatial, social, and political boundaries while
simultaneously creating new ones.62 As a translocal community,
Quakers were mobile as migrants, exchanged goods and ideas, shared
their spirituality, and built kinship and business networks across
existing borders. Simultaneously, however, in transgressing
“boundaries between very different scale and type,”63 they created an
ordered, regulated, and differentiated space of their own as a specific
response to the challenges frequent movement and a multiplicity of
experiences posed to the church’s coherence. These included practices
that structured time and physical space alike by determining a schedule
for prayer and reading as well as creating meeting-houses and setting
aside plots as burial grounds. These practices, explained in Chap. 4,
extended in a rhizomatic fashion through the southern hemisphere
following the first Quaker meeting held in 1833.
Secondly, the notion of the British World, as it has been developed in
the course of existing studies so far, tends to neglect questions of
representation and power. Although as Bridge and Fedorowich claim,
more and more scholars have been investigating how Britishness was
adopted by people from multiple ethnic backgrounds64; where more
recent studies have brought other, hyphenated forms of belonging into
view,65 the field and its research conceptually rest upon the idea of
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 The Tariff Speech of Samuel J. Randall.

Delivered in the House of Representatives, May 18, 1888.

He opened by referring to the President’s recent message, in which
the Executive advised Congress that the surplus in the Treasury by
the 30th of June, at the end of the current fiscal year, would be
expected to reach the sum of $140,000,000, including prior
accumulations; or more closely stated, the sum of $113,000,000,
apart from prior accumulations, over and above all authorized
expenditures, including the sinking fund for the current year.
He then quoted from the President’s message defining his position
on the tariff and internal revenue questions, and said that, from the
utterances of the President, he understands the Executive to be
adverse to any reduction of the internal taxes, as that mode of
taxation afforded, in the opinion of the President, “no just complaint,
and that nothing is so well able to bear the burden without hardship
to any portion of the people.”
The President further said that the tariff law was a vicious and
illegal source of inequitable tax, and ought to be revised and
modified, and the President had urged upon Congress the immediate
consideration of this matter to the exclusion of all others. The
President had asserted in substance that the reduction necessary
should be made by additions to the free list, and by the lowering of
the rates of duty.
In the presence of such language, emanating from the Executive,
authorized by the direction of the Constitution to communicate and
from time to time give to Congress information on the state of the
Union, and recommend such measures as he should judge necessary,
it was imperatively required of the representatives of the people to
give fair, intelligent, and prompt attention to the suggestions made.
He had done so.
 He had introduced and had referred to the Committee on Ways
and Means a bill to reduce and equalize duties on imports and to
reduce the internal revenue taxes, and some provisions of that bill
showed that the remedies he would apply were at variance with those
recommended by the President. The President sought to prevent the
continuation of the surplus revenue by resorting to changes in the
customs duties only.
The remedy he (Randall) proposed was through the repeal of
internal revenue taxes as well as by a full revision of the tariff, as
promised to the people by the Democratic Convention of 1884. The
reduction provided for in his bill aggregated $77,000,000 on
internal taxes.
Those taxes had always been the last to be levied, and the first to
be repealed when no longer necessary.
Jefferson had given the death-blow to excise taxes, that most
vicious of all taxes, and among the things he received the thanks of
the Legislature of his native State for doing, was for having the
internal taxes abolished. The first tax also to be repealed after the
War of 1812 had been the excise tax, which was recommended by
Madison, and was the first law enacted under the administration of
Monroe. The Democratic Convention of 1884 declared that internal
revenue was a war tax, and this declaration, taken in connection with
the other declarations of the platform, clearly established the fact
that the opinion of the Convention was that some of the internal
revenue taxes should first go, and that they should all go whenever a
sufficient sum was realized from custom-house taxes to meet the
expenses of the Government economically administered.
The country was practically in such a condition now, and the true
response to those declarations warranted the repeal of the internal
revenue taxes to the extent proposed by his bill. He favored now, as
he had always done, a total repeal of the internal revenue taxes.
In the bill which he introduced he proposed to sweep all these
taxes from the statute books, except a tax of fifty cents on whiskey,
and he would transfer the collection of that tax to the customs
officials if that was found to be practicable.
With Albert Gallatin, he regarded excise taxes as offensive to the
genius of the people, tolerated only as a measure of emergency, and
as soon as the occasion for them had passed away they should cease
to exist.
Gallatin and Jefferson had secured the repeal of the internal taxes,
and relieved the people from their annoyances and the hordes of
officials clothed with dangerous power. If this internal revenue
system was abolished to-day we would have no surplus revenue to
scare the country, while the administration of public affairs would be
rendered purer and better. His bill proposed a revision of the tariff
on the principle believed to be in harmony with the authorized
declarations of the Democratic party in their last convention.
Those declarations clearly recognized the fact that a difference
existed in the cost of production of commodities in this and other
countries on account of a higher rate of wages in the United States,
and declared for a duty ample to cover that difference. There was a
cardinal principle which must cover every intelligent revision of the
tariff. Labor in this country received a much larger share of what was
annually produced than in any other country, and this advantage to
labor could only be maintained by giving to the industries protection
equal to that difference.
He quoted from Edward Atkinson that since the end of the Civil
War, and yet more since the so-called panic of 1873, there had been
greater progress in the common welfare among the people of the
United States than ever before. The statements of Mr. Atkinson
would seem to settle the question as to whether we should adhere to
the benevolent policy of protecting home manufactures. It
demonstrated unmistakably the truth that, to increase wages,
products must be increased, for in the end wages were but the
laborer’s share of products.
While a dollar might buy more in another country than here, a
day’s labor here would obtain more of the comforts of life than
anywhere else. Under free trade this advantage to labor disappeared.
It was impossible it should be otherwise. If the tariff itself did not
give higher wages to the laborer, it did preserve from foreign
competition the industries from which the laborer received his
wages. He wished to refer to a few fundamental propositions which
had been maintained throughout this debate, and which appeared to
exercise and control influence over the opinion of men.
 First. That the duties were always added to the price to the
consumer.
On articles not produced in this country, this doubtless was true as
a general rule, and measurably true on articles in part produced in
this country, but not in sufficient quantities to supply the home
market. But on all commodities produced in sufficient quantities to
supply the home market, a different principle controlled. In these
things competition determined the price, and the foreign producer
came into this market, where the prices were fixed, and the duties
were what he paid for the privilege of coming into the market.
Another erroneous proposition was that duties on articles produced
in this country were a tax or bounty which the consumer paid to the
manufacturer, by means of which the manufacturer derived large
profits. If this were true, it was not easy to see what justification
there was for the committee bill any more than for the present tariff
law. But that it was erroneous seemed apparent on a closer
examination of the laws of trade. Adam Smith long ago had laid
down the proposition that larger profits in one industry than in
another could not long prevail in the same country. The United
States formed a world of its own. Would it be possible that one class
of consumers would pay a perpetual tax to another?
Suppose last year we had manufactured $1,000,000,000 worth of
products less than we actually did, and had gone abroad to supply
our deficiency, expecting to pay for the goods with our agricultural
products—we had sold Europe last year all of the wheat and corn the
continent could take—who could tell what prices Europe would have
paid if we had thrown upon her markets $1,000,000,000 worth of
agricultural products in excess of the quantity we had sold. The
farmer and manufacturer in this country must depend almost
exclusively upon our home market.
Any other policy would mean ruin and bankruptcy to the country.
The greater the producing power of the people the more independent
and wealthy would the country be.
Mr. Randall next entered into an explanation of the principles
upon which his bill had been constructed. He said that in fixing the
duties the rates had been adjusted as nearly as possible to cover the
difference in the margin of cost of production here and abroad. In
working out the details of the bill it had been his purpose to lower
duties wherever possible.
Between the extreme free trader on one hand and a prohibitory
tariff on the other there were intermediate positions. One of them
was to fix a revenue line on imports just high enough to realize a
sufficient revenue for the needs of the Government. Another was to
make the tariff sufficiently high to cover the difference of cost of
production in this country and other countries. To lower the rate of
duty when that line was passed must be to increase the revenue. To
raise the rate of duty when the line of maximum revenue was
reached would result in a decrease of duty.
Any computation that did not take these facts into account would
be utterly worthless. It might safely be assumed that when the
importation of any line of merchandise steadily increased from year
to year, and there was no good reason why those goods could not be
produced in this country, and the result of the increased
importations had been to suppress our manufactures, it was proof
positive that the duty should be increased.
Otherwise it might be assumed that the duties were quite high
enough. And when the duties were high enough to permit the
existence of trusts to raise the prices of the commodity, the duty
should be reduced as closely as possible to the line. He stated
distinctly that if it could be made to appear in any case that the
measure he proposed conferred more protection than was needed to
cover the cost of production, he was ready to lower it. If in any
instance the rate was too low to cover that cost, he was ready to raise
it.
Monopolies existed without the tariff. The standard oil trust, the
whiskey trust, and the cotton-seed oil trust, and others that he could
mention—the greatest trusts in the whole country—were not
protected by the tariff. He was for the protection of labor, not in one
State merely, but in all States.
He was for the protection and maintenance of that system that
allows to labor a larger proportionate share of its products than was
realized in any other country or under any other system.
The late Secretary Manning had signalized his accession to the
control of the Treasury Department by a more thorough examination
of the economic questions of the day than had been made by any of
his predecessors. His reports and public utterances were marvels of
honest, conscientious, and effective labor.
He had strongly urged the necessity for the substitution of specific
for ad valorem duties. The Custom House officers charged with the
collection of the revenues had given valuable and emphatic
testimony in favor of the change. The present Secretary of the
Treasury had taken the same grounds. (At this point Mr. Randall
quoted extensively from Secretary Fairchild’s utterances on the
subject. He then proceeded with his description of the objects of his
own bill.) Certain provisions of the metal schedules, he said, had
been very sharply assailed, and he devoted some time to answering
the speakers who had attacked his measure.
He took up the schedules relating to steel rails, and quoted figures
at length to sustain his action in fixing the duties at the rates he
proposed in his bill. The duty on cotton ties, he said, was one of the
inconsistencies of the present tariff. It was only fair that they should
pay a duty as hoop iron and as an article of manufacture. The present
law was a positive discrimination against the home manufacturer
and in favor of the foreign producer. The rate of wages in England in
cotton tie manufactories was hardly one-half of the wages paid in
such manufactories in Pittsburg.
He then proceeded to a criticism of the committee bill as follows:
A declared purpose of this bill is to secure “free raw materials to
stimulate manufactories.”
In execution of this idea, the bill places on the free list a large
number of articles which are really manufactured articles, such as
salt, sawed and dressed lumber, glue, various oils and chemicals,
china, clay, etc. These constitute the products of large and useful
industries throughout the United States in which many millions of
capital are invested, and employing many thousands of working
people. At the same time the bill leaves or puts upon the dutiable list,
lead, iron, zinc and nickel ores, and coal, which might be called raw
materials. Further than this, the bill not only makes so-called “raw
materials” free, but places on the free list the manufactured products
of these materials. Thus the manufacture of such articles is made
impossible in this country, except by reducing American labor to a
worse condition than that of labor in Europe. It goes even further,
and places or leaves dutiable certain so-called raw materials, such as
iron ore, lead, coal, paper, paints, etc., while placing on the free list
articles made from these materials, such as hoop iron and cotton
ties, tin plates, machinery, books and pamphlets, etc.
In other words, the bill leaves or makes dutiable the raw material
and puts on the free list the articles manufactured from it; thus not
only placing an insurmountable barrier in the way of making such
articles here, but actually protecting the foreign manufacturer and
laborer against our own, and imposing for their benefit a burden
upon the consumer in this country. Again, the bill places lower rates
on some manufactured articles than on the raw materials used in
making them. For instance, type metal, 15 per cent.; pig lead, 44 per
cent.; carpets, 30 per cent.; yarns used in their manufacture, 40 per
cent.
It leaves an internal revenue tax of more than 100 per cent. on
alcohol used in the arts, amounting to as much as the entire amount
of duty collected on raw wool. This article enters as a material into a
vast number of important and needful articles which the committee
have either made free or have so reduced the rates thereon that the
duty would be less than the tax on the alcohol consumed in their
manufacture.
In some cases, the difference between the duty imposed by the bill
on the so called raw materials and the articles made from them is so
small as to destroy these industries, except upon the condition of
levelling the wages of home labor to that of Europe. This was so in
the case of pig lead and red lead, which is made from it, and of pig
iron and steel blooms and steel rails.
Such legislation would leave the ore in the mines, or the pig lead in
the smelting works, or the pig iron to rust at the furnaces, while
foreigners would supply our markets with these manufactured
products. In a large number of articles throughout the schedules the
reductions proposed by the bill are so large that the effect must be to
destroy or restrict home production and increase enormously foreign
importations, thus largely increasing customs revenue instead of
reducing it, as claimed by the advocates of the bill. Particular
mention in this connection is made of earthen and chinaware, glass,
leaf tobacco, manufactures of cotton, flax, hemp, and jute, carpets,
brushes, leather, gloves, manufactures of India rubber, and pipes.
 Mr. Randall asserted that instead of the bill reducing customs
revenues $64,000,000, as was claimed, it would be fair to estimate
that its effect would be to largely increase the revenue, instead of
reducing it, while the amount of material wealth it would destroy is
incalculable.
Those supporting the bill, he said, hold themselves out as the
champions of the farmer, while they take from him the protection
duties on his wool, hemp, flax, meats, vegetables, etc. And what do
they give him in return. They profess to give the manufacturer better
rates than he now has. If this be so, how is the farmer to be benefited,
or where does he get compensation for the loss of his protective
duties?
Much has been said about removing taxes on necessaries and
imposing them upon luxuries. What does this bill propose? It gives
olive oil to the epicure and taxes castor oil 95 per cent.; it gives free
tin plates to the Standard Oil Company and to the great meat-
canning monopolies, and imposes a duty of 100 per cent. on rice; it
gives the sugar trust free bone-black and proposes prohibitory duties
on grocery grades of sugar; it imposes a duty of 40 per cent. on the
“poor man’s” blanket and only 30 per cent. on the Axminster carpet
of the rich; it admits free of duty the fine animals imported by the
gentlemen of the turf, makes free the paintings and statuary of the
railway millionaire and coal baron.
Mr. Randall said he yielded to no man on his side of the House in
his desire for continued Democratic control in the administration of
the Federal Government. He did not believe the adoption of the
committee’s bill would make such result certain, and added:
“I cannot be coerced into any particular action upon economic questions by the
direction of party caucus. The period of the political caucus has departed never to
return, and yet we should confer and have unity, if it is possible.
“In these matters I speak only for myself. My convictions on the tariff are strong,
and founded, as I think, upon principle, and upon information and intelligent
comprehension of the subject. When any one here enters upon the task of invoking
caucus power or other modes of coercion, I can only say to him, if he acts with
good purpose, that it will prove a fruitless undertaking; or if with ill motive, then I
consign him to all the natural contempt which such self-constituted
superciliousness deserves.”
In conclusion, Mr. Randall quoted from the earliest statesmen in
support of his views upon the tariff, and said:
 “If Jackson could say he was confirmed in his opinions by the opinions of
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, how much more am I confirmed in my opinions
by his great authority added to that of the founders and builders of the Democratic
party? I warn the party that it is not safe to abandon principles so fundamental to
our institutions and so necessary to the maintenance of our industrial system;
principles which attest the wisdom of those who established them by the fruits they
have borne, the full fruition of which, however, can only be realized in the
extension of diversified industries to all parts of the country, not in the North and
East alone, but in the South and West as well. A new era of industrial enterprise
has already dawned upon the South; no section of the country possesses greater
natural advantages than the South, with her genial climate, her limitless raw
materials, her mines of coal and iron, with abundant labor ready to develop them.
Considering what has been there achieved in a single decade, what may not a
century bring forth from her under a system calculated to favor the highest
industrial development? When I read the history of my country and consider the
past and present, and reflect on what is before us, I cannot believe that the idea
that went down in the convulsions of 1861 will ever again dominate the destinies of
the Republic.”
 Tariff Speech of Major Wm. McKinley, Jr.,

Member of Congress from Ohio.

In the great tariff campaign of 1888 the two most distinguished
Republican speakers were Mr. Blaine and Major McKinley. The latter
was invited by the Chautauqua Society of Georgia to explain the
doctrine of Protection, and did so in the following comprehensive
speech:

Fellow-citizens: I make my acknowledgments to the Piedmont

Society for the courtesy and cordiality of its invitation, which has
given me the opportunity to meet, for the first time, an assemblage of
the citizens of Georgia.
I have come, upon the suggestion of the committee, to address you
upon a public question of great national import, which concerns not
only the prosperity of one section, but of all sections of our common
country, and which is of commanding interest to our sixty millions of
people. It is no new subject which I propose to consider. It is as old
as government by men. Taxation, with few exceptions, has been the
chief and absorbing issue for more than a century of the republic.
A revenue tariff is such a one as will produce the largest revenue
from the lowest duty. The lowest rate of duty will encourage
importations, diminish home production, and inevitably increase the
revenue. It will, of necessity, check competition at home, and send
our merchants abroad to buy; it affords no protection, not even
incidental, for the very instant that you discover that such duty
favors the home producer, that instant you discover that
importations and revenue are checked, and that our own producers
are able to control the home market or a part of it. Then at once the
advocate of a revenue tariff reduces the duty, brings it down to the
true revenue standard, for it must not be overlooked, according to
the free trade maxim, “where protection begins, revenue ends,” and
the question of revenue is always controlling. A revenue tariff is
inconsistent with protection; it is intended for a wholly different
purpose. It loses its force and character as a genuine revenue tariff
when it becomes to any extent protective. It has but one object. It can
have but one effect—that of opening up our markets to the foreign
producer—impoverishing the home producer and enriching his
foreign rival.
England is more nearly a free trade country than any other, and
her system of taxation furnishes an unmistakable example of the
practice and principle of a revenue tariff. Her import duties are
imposed almost exclusively upon articles which cannot be produced
by her own people upon her own soil. Tobacco, snuff, cigars, chicory,
cocoa, currants, figs, raisins, rum, brandy, wine, tea, and coffee—
these are the articles from which her customs revenue is derived—
articles, in the main, not produced in England, but which must be
supplied from abroad; while, practically, all competing products of
foreign make and production are admitted through her custom-
house free of duty.
A brief statement of the dutiable imports of Great Britain will not
be without interest.
It will be observed that her duties are more largely imposed upon
the peculiar American products than upon any others. The duty upon
tobacco is, according to moisture, from 84 to 92 cents per pound for
the raw or unmanufactured article; and, if manufactured, it pays a
duty of from $1.04 to $1.16 per pound. The manufactured article is
made dutiable at 20 cents a pound greater than the raw product,
which, with all of England’s boasted free trade, is intended as a
protection to those engaged in the manipulation of tobacco. It is
almost prohibitive to Americans who would export manufactured
tobacco. The ad valorem equivalent of the duty on tobacco is nearly
2000 per cent. Cigars pay a duty of $1.32 per pound, and from
tobacco and snuff over $43,000,000 of duties are collected annually.
The duty on tea is 12 cents a pound. How would the Americans enjoy
paying such a duty upon this article of everyday use? The duty
collected from this source is over $18,000,000 annually. Coffee pays
a duty of 3 cents a pound; but, if ground, prepared, or in any way
manufactured, it must pay a duty of 4 cents a pound—another
example of where England protects those engaged in manufacture.
Cocoa pays a duty of 2 cents a pound, but if it is in any form
subjected to manufacture it pays 4 cents a pound, the duty on the
manufactured article being double that on the raw material.
Besides the articles named, there are about ninety or a hundred
others, chiefly of American production, patented and other
medicines, which are dutiable at $3.36 per gallon. More than
$96,000,000, or nearly one-fourth of the British revenues, are
raided from customs duties.
You will note the character of taxation to which the revenue
reformer invites the people of the United States. Both the breakfast
table and the sick room are made to bear a large part of the burden
under the British system of taxation. It is not without significance
that the nearer we approach this system the more generous the
bestowal of British commendation. Every step we take in that
direction, every enlargement of the free list of competing foreign
products, every reduction of duty upon such products is hailed as a
vindication of Cobden and a beneficence to British interests. It is in
vain for the British statesman to assure us that their system is best
for us. We are not accustomed to look to our commercial rivals for
disinterested favors. “It is folly,” said Washington in his farewell
address, “for one nation to look for disinterested favors from
another; that it must pay, with a portion of its independence, for
whatever it may accept under that character. There can be no greater
error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to
nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, and which a just
pride ought to discard.” We are not insensible to the good opinion of
mankind and of the English-speaking race, but when it is to be had
only at the expense of our industrial independence, at the sacrifice of
the dignity and independence of labor and the destruction of
national prosperity, we must regard it with supreme suspicion, and
turn from it as the eulogy of selfish interest and the commendation
of interested greed.
The other theory of taxation, and the one which I believe to be
essential to American development and national prosperity, is based
upon an exactly opposite principle. It permits all articles of foreign
production, whether of the field, the factory, or the mine, except
luxuries only, which we cannot produce in the United States, to enter
our ports free and unburdened by custom-house exactions. The duty
is to be imposed upon the foreign competing product; that is, the
product which, if brought into this country, would contend with the
products of our own soil, our own labor, and our own factories, in
our own markets. Under this system, if the foreign producer would
enter our market with a competing product, he must contribute
something for the privilege which he is to enjoy, and this something,
in the form of duties, goes into the Treasury, furnishing revenue to
the Government; and these duties operate to protect the joint
product of labor and capital against a like foreign product.
This mode of levying duties answers a double purpose. It produces
revenue to the Government, and at the same time fosters and
encourages the occupations of our own people, promotes industrial
development, opens up new mines, builds new factories, and
sustains those already established, which in turn furnish
employment to labor at fair and remunerative wages. A revenue tariff
accomplishes but a single purpose—that of raising revenue; it has no
other mission; while a protective tariff accomplishes this and more—
it brings revenue to the American treasury and discriminates in favor
of the American citizen. A revenue tariff invites the product of
foreign labor and foreign capital to occupy our markets free and
unrestrained in competition with the product of our own labor and
capital. A protective tariff invites the product of foreign labor and
foreign capital which are necessary to the wants of our people (which
we cannot produce in the United States) to occupy our markets and
go untaxed to the people, but insists that every foreign product which
is produced at home, or can be, successfully, in quantities capable of
supplying the domestic consumption, shall, whenever necessary to
maintain suitable rewards to our labor, bear a duty which shall not
be so high as to prohibit importations, but at such a rate as will
produce the necessary revenues and, at the same time, not destroy
but encourage American production. It says to the world of
producers: “If you want to share with the citizens of the United
States their home market, you must pay for the privilege of doing it.
Your product shall not enter into free and unrestrained competition
with the product of our own people, but shall be discriminated
against to such an extent as to fully protect and defend our own.”
 It is alleged as a serious objection to protective duties that the tax,
whatever it may be, increases the cost of the foreign as well as the
domestic product to the extent of such tax or duty, and that it is
wholly paid by the consumer. This objection would be worthy of
serious consideration if it were true; but, as has been demonstrated
over and over again, it is without foundation in fact. Wherever the
foreign product has successful competition at home, the duty is
rarely paid by the consumer. It is paid from the profits of the
manufacturer, or divided between him and the merchant or the
importer, and diminishes their profit to that extent. Duty or no duty,
without home competition the consumer would fare worse than he
fares now. There is not in the long line of staple products consumed
by the people a single one which has not been cheapened by
competition at home, made possible by protective duties. There is
not an article that enters into the everyday uses of the family, which
is produced in the United States, that has not been made cheaper
and more accessible as the result of home production and
development, which was to be secured only by the sturdy
maintenance of the protective system. While this is true of protective
tariffs, exactly the opposite is true of revenue tariffs. They are always
paid by the consumer. When a duty is put on a foreign product the
like of which is not produced at home, and which enters our markets
free from home competition, the cost to the American consumer is
exactly the foreign cost with the duty added, whatever that may be,
much or little. Supposing, for example, there was a tax upon tea and
coffee. There being no production of these articles in the United
States, and therefore no competition here, the cost to the American
public would be the cost abroad and the duty added. We imported
last year 526,489,000 pounds of coffee. A duty of 10 cents a pound
would have produced to the Government over $52,000,000, which
would have been paid by the 12,000,000 families of this country,
consumers of this article; 87,584,000 pounds of tea were imported
last year; at 10 cents a pound, $8,000,000 and upward would have
gone into the Treasury, every dollar of which would have been paid
by our own people. Take sugar as another example. We produced last
year in this country about eight per cent. of what our people
consumed. The duty collected from imported sugar amounted to
$58,000,000. The domestic production was so inconsiderable as
compared with the domestic consumption as to have had little, if
any, appreciable effect upon the price to the consumer, and therefore
this sum was almost wholly paid by our own citizens, and the cost of
sugar to the American consumer, because of the inadequate home
supply, is practically the foreign price, duty added, the domestic
production being so small contrasted with the domestic demand that
it in no wise controlled or influenced the price.
The revenue tariff periods of our history have been periods of
greatest financial revulsions and industrial decadence, want, and
poverty among the people, private enterprises checked and public
works retarded. From 1833 to 1842, under the low tariff legislation
then prevailing, business was at a standstill, and our merchants and
traders were bankrupted; our industries were paralyzed, our labor
remained idle, and our capital was unemployed. Foreign products
crowded our markets, destroyed domestic competition, and, as
invariably follows, the prices of commodities to consumers were
appreciably raised. It is an instructive fact that every panic this
country has ever experienced has been preceded by enormous
importations. From 1846 to 1861 a similar situation was presented
under the low tariff of that period.
Contrast this period with the period from 1860 to 1880, the former
under a revenue tariff, the latter under a protective tariff. In 1860 we
had 163,000,000 acres of improved land, while in 1880 we had
287,000,000, an increase of 75 per cent. In 1860 our farms were
valued at $3,200,000,000; in 1880 the value had leaped to
$10,197,000,000, an increase of over 300 per cent. In 1860 we
raised 173,000,000 bushels of wheat; in 1880, 498,000,000. In
1860 we raised 838,000,000 bushels of corn; in 1880, 1,717,000,000
bushels. In 1860 we produced 5,000,000 bales of cotton; in 1880,
7,600,000 bales, an increase of 40 per cent. In 1860 we
manufactured cotton goods to the value of $115,681,774; in 1880 the
value reached $211,000,000, an increase of upward of 80 per cent.
In 1860 we manufactured of woollen goods $61,000,000; in 1880,
$267,000,000, an increase of 333 per cent. In 1860 we produced
60,000,000 pounds of wool; in 1880, 240,000,000 pounds, an
increase of nearly 300 per cent. In 1860 we mined 15,000,000 tons
of coal; in 1880, 79,000,000 tons, an increase of over 400 per cent.
In 1860 we made 987,000 tons of pig iron; in 1880, 3,835,000 tons.
In 1860 we manufactured 235,000 tons of railroad iron, and in 1880,
1,208,000 tons. In 1860 our aggregate of national wealth was
$16,159,000,000; in 1880 it was $43,000,000,000.
From 1848 to 1860, during the low tariff period, there was but a
single year in which we exported in excess of what we imported. The
balance of trade during twelve of the thirteen years was against us.
Our people were drained of their money to pay for foreign purchases.
We sent abroad, over and above our sales, $396,216,161. This vast
sum was drawn from the United States, from its business, from the
channels of trade, which would have been better employed in
productive enterprises, and thus supplied our wants for which we
were compelled to go abroad. During the last thirteen years, under a
protective tariff, there was but one year that the balance of trade was
against us. For twelve years we sold to our foreign customers in
excess of what we bought from them $1,612,659,755.
This contrast makes an interesting exhibit of the work under the
two systems. You need not be told that the government and the
people are most prosperous whose balance of trade is in their favor.
The government is like the citizen; indeed, it is but an aggregation of
citizens; and when the citizen buys more than he sells, he is soon
conscious that his year’s business has not been a success.
Our wealth increases $875,000,000 every year, while the increase
of France is $375,000,000, Great Britain $325,000,000, and
Germany $200,000,000. The total carrying capacity of all the vessels
entered and cleared from American ports during the year 1886–7 in
the foreign trade was 28,000,000 tons. The amount of freight
transported by the railroads of the United States was alone
482,000,000 tons during the same period.
The sum of our industries exceeds that of any other people, or
tribe, or nationality. Mulhall, the English statistician, places the
industries of the United States at $11,405,000,000 annually, which
is $2,205,000,000 greater than those of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain, nearly twice those of France or Germany, nearly three
times those of Russia, and almost equal to the aggregated industries
of Austria, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Australia, Canada, and
Sweden and Norway.
This advancement is the world’s wonder. The nations of the earth
cannot furnish such a splendid exhibition of progress in any age or
period. We defy a revenue tariff policy to present such an exhibition
of material prosperity and industrial development. Art, science, and
literature have held their own in this wonderful march. We are
prosperous to-day beyond any other people. The masses are better
cared for, better provided for, more self-respecting, and more
independent than ever before in our history, which cannot be said of
the masses of other countries.
One of the striking differences between a revenue tariff and a
protective tariff is that the former sends the money of its people
abroad for foreign supplies and seeks out a foreign market. The latter
keeps the money at home among our own people, circulating through
the arteries of trade, and creates a market at home, which is always
the best, because the most reliable.
Surely a new era of industrial development has come to the South.
Nothing should be permitted to check or retard it. To her nature has
been most prodigal with her gifts. Her hills and valleys have been
made the storehouses of richest treasure. Coal and iron mines wait
impatiently the touch of labor and capital, and tempt both with the
promise of lavish profit.
Raw materials are found at every turn to invite the skilled artisan
to transform them into the finished product for the highest uses of
man. She possesses the fibres in rich abundance; her skilled labor
should weave the fabric.
It is said that there is nothing grown in any of the States, except
Florida, that Georgia cannot profitably produce. She has coal, iron
deposits, marble and building stone, cotton and the cereals. Nothing
but her own folly, nothing but blindness to her highest and best
interests can keep her from the front rank of the industrial States of
the Union.
Whether we discuss this question from principle, from statistics,
or experience, we must reach the same conclusion; all lead to the
same conviction.
One of the chief complaints against the protective system is its
alleged hindrance to foreign trade and a foreign market for our own
products. It is argued that if we could import raw material from other
countries free, and manufacture such raw material into products for
use, we could export them at great profit, and thus secure a standing
in the markets of the world. This theory is wholly, as I believe,
illusory. It is without substance. We have an example of free raw
material in a certain line of manufactures—that of leather for boots,
shoes, etc. In 1872 hides and skins were made free, so that our
manufacturers could import them without custom-house burdens.
They have had “free trade” in their raw material now for sixteen
years. This industry has been an exceptionally successful one, and yet
you cannot avoid being surprised when I say to you that in these
sixteen years we have been able to export but two per cent. of the
leather production of this country.
But if free raw material be necessary to secure an export trade and
the foreign markets, then I answer that our manufacturers to-day
have substantial free trade in foreign raw materials which they make
into the finished product in the United States, provided they export
it. Sections 3019, 3020, 3021, and 3022 of the United States Statutes
provide for the remission of duties on all foreign materials used in
manufacturing for the export trade. The law is positive that all
articles manufactured for export from imported materials upon
which duties have been paid, shall, when exported, be entitled to a
drawback of 90 per cent. of the duties paid on such raw materials.
Some use has been made of these laws. The remission of duties in
1884 paid upon imported material manufactured for foreign markets
amounted to $2,256,638. On some articles the drawback is equal to
the duty paid, but in no instance where articles are imported to be
manufactured here and sent abroad is the duty to exceed 10 per cent.
And yet we are gravely told by the tariff reformers that we cannot
reach foreign markets on account of the high tariff on the raw
material, when, in fact, for foreign trade foreign raw materials are
practically free. This principle was recognized as early as the
administration of George Washington, and has been enlarged and
made applicable to all imported materials, the drawbacks varying
from 60 to 100 per cent. What becomes, then, of the cry for free raw
materials in the presence of this fact? The truth is, we are not so
much concerned about the foreign market as we are about the home
market. The latter is the best, and we have not yet been able to
control it, and, until we do, that should be our chief concern. But if
any of our people are sighing for a foreign market, and value it more
highly than our own, they can import foreign raw material practically
free of duty, and after advancing it into the higher forms of
manufacture, can go out and possess the world’s markets. Taxed raw
materials do not stand in their way, and it is hypocrisy to claim
otherwise.
“The markets of the world,” in our present condition, are a snare
and a delusion. We will reach them whenever we can undersell
competing nations, and not sooner. Tariffs do not keep us out, and
free trade will not make it easier to enter them.
Upon what terms can we adopt a revenue tariff system in this
country? In one way only; by accepting European conditions, and
submitting to all the discomforts and disadvantages of our
commercial rivals. The chief obstruction in the way of a revenue
tariff are the wages paid American workingmen, and any return to
that policy involves a reduction of the cost of labor. We cannot afford
to have cheap labor in the United States. Cheap labor means cheap
men and dear money. I would rather elevate and improve the
condition of my fellow-citizens than increase the value of money and
the power of “money-bags.” This is a republic of free and equal
citizenship. The government is in the hands of the masses, and not of
the few. This is our boast, and it is a proud one. The condition of the
masses, their well-being, their intelligence, their preparation for the
civil duties which rest upon them, depend largely upon the scale of
industrial wages. It is essential, therefore, that the best possible
wages attainable shall be secured and maintained. This is vital and
fundamental. We cannot, without grave danger and serious
disturbance—we ought not under any circumstances—adopt a policy
which would scale down the wages and diminish the comforts of the
American workingmen. Their welfare and independence, their
progress and elevation are closely related to the welfare and
independence and progress of the republic. We have got no
pampered class in this country, and we want none. We want the field
kept open. No narrowing of the avenues, no lowering of our
standard. We want no barriers raised against a higher and better
civilization. The gateway of opportunity must be open to all, to the
end that they may be first who deserve to be first, whether born in
poverty or reared in luxury. We do not want the masses excluded
from competing for the first rank among their countrymen and for
the nation’s greatest honors, and we do not mean they shall be.
 Free trade, or a revenue tariff, will, of necessity, shut them out. It
has no respect for labor. It holds it as the mere machinery of capital.
It would have cheap men that it might have cheap merchandise.
With all of its boasted love for the struggling millions, it is infinitely
more interested in cutting down the wages of labor than in saving
twenty-five cents on a blanket; more intent in reducing the
purchasing power of a man’s labor than the cost of his coat. Things
are not always dearest when their price is nominally the highest. The
price is not the only measure, but the wherewith to buy it is an
essential factor. Few men before me but have found in the course of
their lives more than once that that which was cheapest when
measured by mere price was the dearest when they were without
money and employment, or when their products could find no
market, and, finding it, commanded no price at all commensurate
with the labor required to produce them. Primarily, it is labor which
is interested most in this question of protection. The man with
money can seek other avenues of profit and investment, or can wait
for his dividends, but the laborer cannot wait for his dinner, and the
United States do not want citizens who make presidents, and
senates, and the house of representatives, to be in a condition of
dependence and destitution. That is not the sort of citizenship we
want.
We are different from any other nation, and it is that difference
which makes us the best. Our political system rests upon a principle
different from that of any other. It is founded upon the consent of the
people. If we had wanted it otherwise we would not have left home,
but would have remained the obedient child of an imperious parent.
We would not have turned away from the mother country. We would
have remained one of her dependencies. We would not have fought
our way through blood and sacrifice to independence. We separated
to set up for ourselves a free and independent political society, and
that policy is the best for us which best subserves the purposes of our
organization, our citizenship and civilization. It is ours to work out
our own destiny, and, in doing so, furnish an example of a free and
progressive people, whose industrial policy has made it possible to
satisfy the best and highest aspirations of men, and which closes no
field to human endeavor. We would wish for all mankind the
beneficence of our system and the opportunities which it presents.
We bid them level their condition up to ours; we will not level ours