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Dan Horner defends Cecilia Morgan, Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 

Travellers through Empire is a book about mobility, about people far from home. It is about journeys taken and their transformative possibilities. I will argue, in the following paragraphs, that this is a compelling book and an important one for a number of reasons.

Cecilia Morgan grapples with the experiences of Indigenous peoples with roots in British North America who travelled across the Atlantic Ocean over the course of the long nineteenth century. Their reasons for doing so were diverse. Some visited London to advocate for the political and property rights of their people. Others were invited to Britain by Christian organizations thirsty for tales of how their religion was in the midst of civilizing the colonial frontier. Some were brought over by promoters to give paying audiences a taste of the “authentic Indian.” Finally, there were children from the fur trading regions of the northwest shipped over to England to receive an education. No matter the purpose of their visit or the cultural climate in which it was undertaken, these travellers shared a common experience. They had no choice but to grapple with a host society that placed them under intense scrutiny because of their racial background, stemming from preconceived notions surrounding the character traits of British North America’s Indigenous peoples.

Travellers through Empire is an important book because it pushes us to reflect on how ideas about race were being constructed during the long nineteenth century. Some of the book’s greatest insights can be found in its rich descriptions of the broader culture of this period – how ideas circulated, how the subjects of empire forged affiliations with each other, and how they made sense of their surroundings. Ideas about race were in a state of flux here. An early nineteenth-century confidence that indigenous peoples could be reformed and shaped into British subjects was increasingly cast into doubt by the close of the century, as notions of biological determinism took hold in British drawing rooms, in classrooms and dormitories, in anthropological museums, and in the distant administrative outposts of empire. The author identifies some important ideas about the relationship between imperialism, power, and space that will surely inspire further historical inquiry. Morgan is careful to remind us that the social relations that lay at the root of empire were forged not only in parliament and the clubs of high society, but also in dingy provincial assembly rooms and in the domestic realm. Important connections were formed through very public forms of social activism, but also through the romantic connections that were forged on a number of occasions during these journeys.

The experiences of these travellers, some of which were extensively documented in the era’s leading periodicals, created a forum in which observers on both sides of the Atlantic could work through what race meant to them. They grappled with archetypes like the noble savage, and they reflected on the civilizing process in ways that were implicitly and explicitly racialized. This thinking about race across the nineteenth century would prove to have a defining impact on twentieth and twenty-first century Canada.

What is particularly rich about Morgan’s analysis throughout the book is that it never shies away from nuance. Rather than crafting a tidy narrative that would weave together a century long history of these travellers’ experiences, Morgan persistently reminds us that the specific contexts of each of these journeys matter significantly. The background of each traveller, including everything from their gender, their class, their social status, and the nature of their religiosity shaped their interaction with the British public, and shaped the extent to which their words would resonate on the imperial stage. The subjects of this book tended to have some secondary identifying feature – a fluency in Christian rhetoric, a record of military heroism, or an ambiguous racial background – that provided sufficient cover for them to engage in public life in ways other Indigenous people would not have been able to. What emerges time and again throughout the book is the craftiness of these travellers. In a society where little value was placed on their perspective, they were able to identify and act upon narrow opportunities to makes their voices heard. There was often a theatrical element to this, dressing either in traditional garb in order to perform the role of an authentic “Indian” or, conversely, dressing in the British fashions of the day so as to appear rational or civilized. These travellers developed an expertise in giving audiences what they wanted, be it a certain kind of dress or demeanour. As representatives of people in the midst of being battered by the process of colonialism, Morgan identifies how these travellers created and nurtured fleeting opportunities to not only defend the interests of their people, but to actually launch sustained critiques of the society who wished to silence them. There was a receptive audience for this, not only in London but across England and Scotland. In this vibrant public sphere sketched so effectively by Morgan we find another rebuke to the idea that the sheer brutality of colonialism was somehow not a deeply contentious endeavour in the nineteenth century. For this reason alone, Travellers through Empire makes an important contribution to our historiographical conversation.

Travellers through Empire also serves as an important reminder of the multitude of experiences that British imperialism afforded during this period. Included here are examples of imperialism at its loudest – delegations of Anishinaabe performers holding court in London, being written up in the popular press, and enjoying audiences with members of the royal family. We also, however, catch glimpses of imperialism in its quieter guises, such as the Indigenous children of Scottish fur traders slumped in awkward silence at the back of an English boarding school, half a world away from nearly everyone they knew. Some of the figures here are larger than life, like Peter Jones, the Mississauga Chief and prominent Methodist who made high profile and richly documented trips to England in the 1830s. Others prove more elusive to the historian’s gaze, like Duncan McTavish, the Indigenous son of a fur trader from the northwest territory who, after being educated in Britain, boarded a ship to Australia to make a new life for himself as a police chief in Victoria. We have no way of knowing if he maintained contact with his Indigenous mother back in the wilds of British North America. Watching Morgan masterfully piece together these very different kinds of narratives is a joy for all of us who labour in the writing of history. The content of this book is compelling, but it resonates because of Morgan’s knack for storytelling.

Morgan carefully reminds us throughout the book that this is a story of exceptional experiences. At a moment where the subjects of Travellers through Empire are employing mobility as a strategy for personal and collective advancement, the Canadian state was increasingly restricting the mobility of its Indigenous population in order to accelerate the process of colonization. The nineteenth-century British Empire was constructed and maintained through social networks rooted in militarism, kinship, religion, and humanitarian activism. Occasionally these networks provided a fleeting opportunity for mobility, but these were rare. Travellers through Empire, however, is an example of how a story from the fringe can do a great deal to help us understand what is unfolding at the centre. In the experiences of the Indigenous peoples who set out on these global journeys, we catch glimpses of the sorts of assertions that were increasingly being made to legitimize the subjugation of those who remained in place.

Finally, Travellers through Empire makes an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century British North America by virtue of disrupting our notion of the parameters of public life. It draws our attention to the complicated ways that people and ideas circulated across the globe through official and unofficial imperial networks. Finally, it pushes us to reflect on how deeply rooted the process of constructing ideas about race was in modernity. People across the British world were grappling with these ideas in the context of an accelerating scale of circulation, both of ideas and people. For all of these reasons, Travellers through Empire is an important book, a nuanced reflection on the British world of the nineteenth century and how its ideas fostered the sorts of inequalities that continue to mark our society in the twenty-first century.

Photo of Dan HornerDan Horner is an historian who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at Ryerson University, where he teaches courses on public space and social regulation. He researches and writes about politics, public life, political violence, and the urban experience in nineteenth-century Montreal.

 

Be sure to join us tomorrow for Carmen Nielsen’s defense of E. A. Heaman’s Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in our CHA Reads Series!!

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