Building Better Britains?: Settler Societies in the British World, 1783–1920 by Cecilia Morgan (review)

Cecilia Morgan's Building Better Britains?: Settler Societies in the British World, 1783–1920 is an ambitious and wide-ranging study that examines the many competing and contradictory aspects of British settler colonialism in the long nineteenth century. Morgan offers a comparative and thematic approach to her careful and nuanced study of settler colonial societies in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. A sustained and compelling critical study of these four Anglophone settler polities throughout the long nineteenth century is no easy task, but Morgan's thoughtful and detailed analysis is largely successful, although a study of such scope inevitably suffers from flattening historiographical details.

Building Better Britains? builds on analyses of nineteenth-century British settlement in such works as James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (2009), Alan Lester's Imperial Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (2001), and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008). Morgan effectively argues that while the settler colonies were part of the wider British imperial system, they shared specific differences that make them significant spaces for inquiry apart from colonies of non-settlement, such as India or the Gold Coast. For Morgan, settler territories were imagined by colonists as spaces of European domination and indigenous removal (a fate achieved in each polity except for South Africa, where it remained an important aspiration). "This development," Morgan argues, "had serious political, social, and cultural implications for both colonized and colonizer" (xxii).

While it would be relatively easy to write a study that either focuses on the relation between the metropole and these settler colonies or that exclusively privileges settler narratives, Morgan skillfully avoids both fates. She does so by contending that these settler colonial spaces had "histories [that] were affected by other worlds and other sets of networks" beyond that of the simple metropole-colony binary (xxiii). "Settler societies' constitution over the nineteenth century is best explored … from multiple perspectives," asserts Morgan, "so that we can appreciate the dynamic interplay between them and the wider worlds to which they were linked," as "this dynamism was a significant part of their histories" (xxiii).

It is this multivalent, networked approach that sustains Building Better Britains? as it threads through the book's five thematic chapters, which explore indigenous-newcomer relationships, migration and mobility, economy and labor, civil society, and settler national identity, respectively. Such an approach allows Morgan to assert the nuanced differences between each colonial space while emphasizing that colonialism and nineteenth-century imperial power created comparable experiences. While indigenous activism and responses to imperial encroachment differed in each colony, they each "were confronted with similar problems over the course of the nineteenth century, ones that revolved around questions of land and governance and that frequently involved military and settler violence" (3). Likewise, as Morgan argues, "while by the end of the nineteenth century settler colonies may have shared much in their legal structures and methods of policing, these developments also were influenced by local conditions and particular historical contingencies" (39). This multivalent view allows Morgan to pivot between sites, simultaneously acknowledging difference while underlining colonial continuities in each location.

Morgan's analysis echoes much of the ostensible new imperial turn in British studies, particularly in its refreshing focus on histories of gender and race as ultimately constituent parts of the imperial story rather than hasty additions. Settler identities were "profoundly gendered," Morgan argues, and Building Better Britains? provides ample analysis of convict women, interracial relationships, missionary moralizing, and the establishment of educational institutions in order to back these claims (xxvii). Creating settler colonies was a complex and multivalent process that involved numerous conflicts—over nation, indigeneity, gender, power, and, ultimately, belonging—and Morgan demonstrates this in a well-crafted narrative.

While Morgan's argument is convincing and...