Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press by Kenton Storey (review)

This challenging and creative study explores press representations of Aboriginal peoples in 1850s and 1860s Vancouver Island and New Zealand. It focuses principally on a handful of newspapers in Victoria and, correspondingly, New Plymouth. It then seeks to compare and contrast reportage as it simultaneously aims to ground its content analysis in the two colonies' discrete, yet interrelated, contexts of humanitarianism.

The study identifies two kinds of humanitarianism – rhetorical and evangelical – yet is careful to note that "humanitarians of all stripes spoke a dialect of imperialism in that they all defended the British Empire's providential role in the world." And it ultimately concludes that "through the use of humanitarian language, colonial newspapers crafted idealized representations of public opinion while, at the same time, forwarding the narrow political and economic interests of their owners and editors." Yet the stories here are anything but uncomplicated, and the author, Kenton Storey, capably and with much nuance manages to distinguish and explicate tangled narratives.

By turn, seven chapters methodically introduce brief histories of the two colonies, provide introductions to humanitarianism in the colonies, then turn to consider the news depictions set against a fluid background, including colonial violence (and imagined violence), shifting and divergent attitudes towards humanitarianism, the imagined metropolitan gaze, and the settler population growth. Because of the study's comparative nature, the results effectively tease close readings from the variety of sources employed. Further, Storey writes: "My central premise is that New Zealand's and Vancouver Island's divergent locations within networks of imperial information transmission mediated the metropolitan interpretation of news from each region." And, indeed, Storey follows this tack relentlessly.

The text excels first, in particular, by grounding its approach in a deep and careful reading of the scholarly literature, which is in turn reflected in confident prose. Likewise, Storey employs traditional sorts of archival materials (that is, letters) in addition to news content. Not surprisingly, press reports cast Natives disparagingly in both colonies, rife with colonial tropes alleging Indigenous savagery and championing white civilization.

The book faces a significant challenge. It is the matter of how best to parse news coverage for the reader. It is a nearly thankless task because the value of employing extended quotes invariably comes at a cost – fewer sources and vice versa. It requires a delicate balance, in short. The author tends to favour lengthier quotations, which may not be to every reader's liking, given that it may appear to limit the breadth of voice. Further, in this way, it may raise the question of just how representative the press was in its presentation of the titular "colonial anxiety." The outcome constitutes a minor weakness of the study, which might have been addressed by a more robust and reflexive discussion of the work's application of media and audience reception theory. Missing too is an engagement with scholarship that explores news imagery of Aboriginal peoples, including the work of Robert Harding. Further, although the book endeavours to illustrate that newspapers were widely read and, thus, expressed a kind collective colonial feeling, the corresponding wide influence of news content penned by and for business and government elites is assumed more than demonstrated. And it may well be that there is no way of knowing with any degree of certainty, it simply is not as clear as it might be.

Nonetheless, the book's striking success also reveals the need for further study. For example, several of the editors of Victoria newspapers were either American or had spent long periods working or being trained as journalists in the United States before moving to Victoria. How did their experiences gained in the United States mediate representation in the Victoria press? Is it possible that the Vancouver Island press reflected as much influences of American coverage of all things Indigenous, which itself is an understudied field, as it did local concerns? This is not intended as an...