{"id":39603,"date":"2015-01-21T20:07:42","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T20:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39603"},"modified":"2015-01-21T20:16:08","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T20:16:08","slug":"racial-crossings-race-intermarriage-and-the-british-empire-paterson-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39603","title":{"rendered":"Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the British Empire [Paterson Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the British Empire [Paterson Review]<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The British Scholar Society<\/a>
\nBook of The Month<\/a>
\nNovember 2014<\/p>\n

Lachy Paterson<\/strong><\/a>
\nUniversity of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand<\/em><\/p>\n

Salesa, Damon Ieremia, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire<\/em><\/a> (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 308 pp. $US 45 (paperback).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Race has always been an important preoccupation in New Zealand<\/a> society. In the country\u2019s popular imagination, its past is predicated on national myths that it had the best race relations in the world, and that its M\u0101ori<\/a> citizens were the best treated of all indigenous peoples. Intermarriage between M\u0101ori and the P\u0101keh\u0101<\/a> settlers, a practice encouraged even prior to formal colonisation, was often given as evidence for such claims. Damon Salesa\u2019s<\/a> Racial Crossings<\/em> is an exciting investigation of the theories, discourses and policies that underpinned intermarriage, and the broader colonial project of racial amalgamation.<\/p>\n

The volume\u2019s subtitle, Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire<\/em>, is a little misleading. The book is not a social history of intermarriage: indeed the story concerns itself more with the discourses of racial crossing, than the lives of the actual people doing the crossing. Its focus is on roughly four decades of New Zealand history, one preceding the Treaty of Waitangi<\/a> (1840) and the three following. A reader will find little detail on the policies and practice of intermarriage of colonial India, Canada, Australia or South Africa, or even of New Zealand in the last three decades of Victoria\u2019s<\/a> reign. As Salesa notes, power was generally devolved to colonial governors, whose actions and policies were shaped by local conditions. Although conditions may have been localised, ideas flowed more freely around the Empire<\/a>. New Zealand\u2019s pertinence to \u201cimperial\u201d studies is that it was colonised when humanitarianism was flourishing. After earlier examples of destructive colonisation, Britain sought to protect New Zealand\u2019s promising \u201caborigines\u201d through civilisation and amalgamation. Although missionaries, officials both in Britain and New Zealand, intellectuals and settler politicians may have had differing (and sometimes competing) agenda, a general consensus prevailed that intermarriage would benefit both M\u0101ori and colonisation…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the British Empire [Paterson Review] The British Scholar Society Book of The Month November 2014 Lachy Paterson University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Salesa, Damon Ieremia, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 308 pp. $US 45 (paperback). Race has always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,4405],"tags":[19125,4766,4765,4767,19123,1000,19124],"class_list":["post-39603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-oceania","tag-british-scholar-society","tag-damon-i-salesa","tag-damon-ieremia-salesa","tag-damon-salesa","tag-lachy-paterson","tag-new-zealand","tag-the-british-scholar-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}