Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism

Kirsty Reid was a senior lecturer in history at the University of Bristol, UK, for many years. In 2011 she moved home to the north of Scotland and became part of the team at the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She now lives and works in northern Scotland. Her research has primarily focused on convict transportation and unfree labour within the British Empire. She is the author of Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester, 2007) and co-editor with Fiona Paisley of Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (London, 2014). Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian at Griffith University, Australia. She works on progressive debates concerning the reform of settler colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Her recent books are The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra, 2012) and Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu, 2009). Her current projects include a study of internationalism in the Pacific and Australian public opinion, and anti-slavery discourse and settler colonialism in interwar Australia.

List of figures

List of contributors

Introduction
Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley

PART I

1 – Democratising the photographic archive
Jane Lydon

2 – Archival detours: sourcing colonial history
Penny Edwards

3 – Decolonizing the archives: a transnational perspective
Victoria Haskins

PART II

4 – Archiving Algeria: power, violence and secrecy
Abdelmajid Hannoum

5 – Colonial knowledge and subaltern voices: the case of an official enquiry in mid-nineteenth-century Java
G. Roger Knight

6 – Making people countable: analyzing paper trails and the imperial census
Alexandra Widmer

PART III

7 – Institutional case files: insanity’s archive
Catharine Coleborne

8 – Gender, geopolitics and gaps in the records: women glimpsed in the military archives
Vera Mackie

9 – Entanglement of oral sources and colonial records
Maria Nugent

10 – Living empire
Fiona Paisley

Index