Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire by Damon Ieremia Salesa (review)

Damon Ieremia Salesa’s Racial Crossings joins a robust historiography in the history of interracial sex and marriage in settler colonies (as opposed to colonies of conquest) of the British Empire. In recent years, books such as Katherine Ellinghaus’s Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (2006) and Margaret D. Jacobs’s White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (2009) have highlighted the ways in which colonizers and indigenous societies came together through intimate heterosexual relationships between indigenous or native women and European men, forging a complex colonial society in which race, gender, and class hierarchies emerged from a situation of relative equality in political and social power.

To the existing scholarship, Salesa brings a detailed case study of New Zealand during the Victorian era, starting with the sporadic, late eighteenth-century traffic of European or Pakeha sealers and shore whalers among various indigenous groups to the settlement of the North and South Islands by the New Zealand Company in the 1830s, through the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and ending shortly after a series of wars in the 1860s and 1870s. This mid-century moment compressed a great number of racial and imperial crises around the globe—rebellions in Canada, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, and the Maori wars—and troubled the classic liberal presumptions emanating from well-known British thinkers such as J. S. Mill and Thomas Macaulay, and lesser-known figures such as George Grey, John Lambton (Lord Durham), and Herman Merivale. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002) demonstrated the ways in which reformist ideals of conversion encountered racism in Jamaica. Salesa draws from arguments that detail liberalism’s exclusions to show the ways in which another mid-century liberal British colonial project, racial amalgamation (the promotion of interracial sex and racial crossing), fell far short of the mark in New Zealand.

The history of New Zealand is crucial to this historiography because it is often perceived as a success story of assimilating non-white indigenous populations to British norms and practices. As Salesa notes, New Zealand exemplifies the “durable idea that a favourable disposition toward interracial marriage was indicative of a softer, more humane colonial encounter” (18). Interracial and interethnic relationships proliferated across the Empire—in Canada, South Africa, Australia—but New Zealand is often represented as a softer version of racist policies. Salesa challenges these presumptions by noting that although policies of race amalgamation were central to several generations of British policy makers, colonial officials, and missionaries, the condition of being fully amalgamated was quite specific, and carefully indexed to how half-caste subjects performed their attachments to the colonial establishment.

Salesa excavates the multivalent history of racial amalgamation to provide a fine-grained account of the ways in which the colonial officials put in charge by the British colonial office after the Treaty of Waitangi attempted to think of amalgamation as an improvement in British practices of settling a territory. Salesa notes that “even after 1840, when the British government had come to the region, the balance of power was still in indigenous hands,” yet British officials behaved as if they had control over New Zealand (74). For Merivale, undersecretary at the Colonial Office and a professor of political economy at Oxford, the reproduction of a mixed-race Anglo-Maori colonial society was a way to avoid mistakes the British had made elsewhere, such as in the Americas and Australia (with the extermination of aborigines or an inability to fully civilize the natives). His vision proposed to undo the humanitarian crisis brought about by the massive depopulation of indigenous societies through famine, disease, and, no doubt, colonial wars. If...