Elizabeth Elbourne
D Phil (Oxford)
MA (University of Toronto)
As a historian interested in histories of empire and settler colonialism, I seek to move between the local and the global, with attention to the many tensions and questions raised by these shifts. I have had the privilege of researching in South Africa, Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. My current research interests include British settler colonialism between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries, including linkages and comparisons between southern Africa and North America. I am more specifically interested in the complex history of humanitarianism and human rights; gender and colonialism; religion in various guises, including the history of missions; the histories of borderland and frontier zones; Haudenosaunee history; Khoekhoe history. My most recently published book, Empire, Kinship and Violence, explores kinship and violence on British settler colonial frontiers from the 1770s to 1840s, including struggles over Indigenous claims to land and humanity. My current project considers debates about the human rights and sovereignty claims of hunter gatherers, focusing on British-San interaction in Southern Africa and Victorian Britain in the nineteenth century, including the display of San people in Britain. I also have a developing side interest in the history of rent and social reform in Britain and in settler colonies.
I am concerned with the history of labour coercion and have co-edited with my colleague Gwyn Campbell a collection on the intersections of histories of sexuality and of slavery. My earlier book, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853, won the Joel Gregory Prize, Canadian Association of African Studies (2003/4) and the 2002 Wallace Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Society (2002) as well as being short-listed for what was then the Herskovitz Prize of the [American] Association of African Studies. I was the co-editor with my colleague Brian Cowan of the Journal of British Studies from 2010 to 2015. I am currently co-editing with Dr. Shino Konishi of the University of Western Australia volume 3, on the period 1750-1914, of the Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization, edited by Christopher Lee and Kris Manjapra. In 204-25, I will be a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge.
I have also carried out research in conjunction with colleagues on the impact of Qu茅bec's Law 21, particularly on students in Law and Education. A summary of ongoing work is here: . I am also providing historical context as part of another team further investigating the impact of this secularism law (banning the wearing of visible markers of religious identity by teachers, among others) on young Muslim women in Qu茅bec public high schools.
Summer 2024: by appointment
Fall 2024 and Winter 2025: on sabbatical. Please email.
Books:
Elizabeth Elbourne. Empire, Kinship and Violence : Family histories, Indigenous rights and the making of settler colonialism, 1770-1842. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (eds.), Sex, Power and Slavery. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014.
Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853. Montreal and Kingston: 苹果淫院-Queen鈥檚 University Press, 2002. edition 2008.
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Some selected recent articles:
Elizabeth Elbourne, "Promises remembered and erased: Treaties, land and commemoration in the aftermath of the American Revolution" in Pamela Klassen et al (eds), Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties, and Covenants in Multi-jurisdictional and Multi-religious Societies (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)
Elizabeth Elbourne. 鈥淧eace, genocide and empire: The London Missionary Society and the San in early nineteenth-century southern Africa鈥� in Geoffrey Troughton (ed), Pacifying Missions: Christianity, Violence and Empire in the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2023, pp. 24-54听
Elizabeth Elbourne, 鈥淩ace and the making of South African Christianity鈥�. In Daniel Magaziner (ed), Oxford Handbook of South African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 (rolling publication dates)听
Elizabeth Elbourne, 鈥淩ights, Interpersonal Violence and Settler Colonialism in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: Thomas Pringle and Scottish Colonialism at the Cape, 1820-1834鈥�, Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 5(2), 2021, pp. 185-214听
"Africa", in Jeremy Gregory (ed), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, volume II: Establishment and Empire, 1662-1829. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017
鈥淰iolence, moral imperialism and colonial borderlands, 1770s-1820s: Some contradictions of non-violence鈥�, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, special issue on colonialism and non-violence, 2016.
鈥淢anaging Alliance, Negotiating Christianity: Haudenosaunee Uses of Anglicanism in Northeastern North America, 1760s-1800s鈥�, in Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton (eds), Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016.听
鈥淎 Complicated Pity: Emotion, Missions and the Conversion Narrative鈥�, in Claire McKlisky, Daniel Midena and Karen Vallgarda (eds.), Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 123-150.
鈥淏roken alliance: Debating Six Nations land claims in 1822鈥�, Cultural and Social History, special issue on Indigenous modernity, 9(4), 2012, 497-525
"Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence, Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1810-1836鈥�, Canadian Journal of African Studies. 45(2), 2011
For a full list of publications, please see 'Publication Files' below.
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18th-19th-century Britain; British empire; settler colonialism; 19th-century South Africa;听history of humanitarianism; history of missions.
