By Penny Russell, Nigel Worden
Honourable Intentions? compares the importance and strategic use of ‘honour’ in colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, among 1750 and 1850. The cellular populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and infantrymen, retailers and investors, slaves and convicts who surged into and during those areas usually are not frequently linked to rules of honour. yet in either societies, competing and contradictory notions of honour proved crucial to the ways that colonisers and colonised, unfastened and unfree, defended their prestige and insisted on their correct to be taken care of with recognize. in the course of those occasions of flux, strategies of honour and standing have been substantially reconstructed.
Each of the 13 chapters considers honour in a specific sphere - criminal, political, non secular or own - and in several contexts made up our minds through the particular and altering matrix of race, gender and sophistication, in addition to the differences of unfastened and unfree prestige in every one colony. Early chapters within the quantity convey how and why the political, ideological and ethical stakes of the idea that of honour have been quite very important in colonial societies; later chapters glance extra heavily on the social behaviour and the acquisition of honour between particular teams. jointly, the chapters express that there has been no transparent contrast among political and social existence, and that honour crossed among the private and non-private spheres.
This fascinating new assortment brings jointly new and tested historians of Australia and South Africa to spotlight thought-provoking parallels and contrasts among the Cape and Australian colonies that might be of curiosity to all students of colonial societies and the idea that of honour.