Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth Century Imperial World by Adele Perry (review)

Colonial Relations provides a detailed appraisal of the intriguing and unusual history of an iconic Canadian family. By tracing the Douglas-Connolly clan, Adele Perry goes wider, mapping the circulation of societies across changing political and imperial landscapes. The key characters, James Douglas and Amelia Connolly Douglas, bring into conversation the histories of Creole people from the plantation world of Demerara, Guyana, and the bourgeois Metis people of the Canadian fur trade. “A creole sort of colonizer,” James Douglas played key roles in a society with a large Indigenous population that moved from the authority of the Hudson Bay Company to a more complex settler-governed society (180).

It was not unusual for a man in the Hudson Bay Company to marry an Indigenous or Metis woman from the region. It was more unusual for him to be openly married to her when his station rose to that of governor, the highest local colonial authority. It was more unusual again that his racial origins likely included a mixed Caribbean ancestry.

Starting with a consideration of how James Douglas is key to the memory fabric of both Guyana and Canada, aided by archive stories from three continents, Perry unravels mythology. The chapters are structured according to categories of people. The book starts out with reflections on a variegated archive of empire and family. It moves onto the subject of housekeepers and wives and then free people and servants. It examines marital unions and the creation of family. It constantly explores relations between colony, nation, and metropole. It ends with a chapter discussing strategic marriage strategies and stories of descendants.

James Douglas preferred the form of British imperialism practised by the Hudson Bay Company and derided the “unprincipled American population” that later arrived in British Columbia. He accused the American newcomers of being prejudiced and nationalistic. Moreover, their lack of real interest in the Indigenous people and their consequent lack of “useful ties” meant that they never shared the “absorbing spirit of participation in a country” (119). This exemplifies his belief in an enmeshed colonizer socio-politics based upon marital, kin, and family ties.

Douglas saw the importance of marriage. He spoke of the significance of his own wedding day and the joy he felt in his family. Other men’s children suffered due to hierarchical colonial marital arrangements. Indigenous women who were not married in Christian ritual could be punished. In Red River in the mid-nineteenth century, “marriage had become the terrain upon which women’s reputations were made and unmade” (100).

Yet relationships were “spatialized” or space-specific, with most British men considering their local wives and children disposable, especially upon return to their places of origin. Indeed, the spatial separation of fur trade marriages belies belief: “Here, marriage is wielded as a particular kind of social state, one that is associated with metropolitan society and Whiteness. Men might live with, father children by, and express genuine affection for Indigenous women and still see themselves as bachelors” (36). This particular aberration also applied on Australian frontiers, but unions were generally more secretive and, in the lead up to federation, soon criminalized in several jurisdictions.

While we only gain occasional clues into the emotions of their shared lives, the interaction and fluidity across categories of race, authority, class, and gender in different socio-political contexts emerge in all their changing complexity. Perry also pays keen attention to economics: “The connections that bound Scots merchant capitalism to the Caribbean also bound it to the North American fur trade. As in Guyana, their labor was often unfree,” albeit, as she points out, of a different order to Caribbean or North American slavery (67).

In many ways, Colonial Relations is primarily a study of marriage and family across time. Amelia Connolly is a key character in this history. Amelia maintains her own cultural and political space and does not fall in line with imperial expectations of the...