Between 1876 and 1901, there was a push to open new telegraphic cable routes between the British colonies in Australia and Britain via the Indian Ocean. The six Australian colonies were initially connected to the outside world through a single existing route that ran through Java in the Netherlands East Indies and the British colonies of Singapore and India. This route was privately owned, expensive, unreliable, and passed through non-British territory, leaving the Australian colonies and the British colony of New Zealand with few options for their communications link to Britain. Initial advocacy for new telegraphic cable routes came from colonial-appointed officials, elected politicians and private commercial companies; however, many of these ideas and proposals did not translate into any new cables until the Eastern Extension Australia and China Telegraph Company, the private cable company that had dominated Far Eastern communications, built the South Africa to Australia cable, which was opened in October 1901. Drawing on primary source material from Australian and British archives, this article demonstrates that the cable across the Indian Ocean represented a genuinely all-British Imperial cable route between Australia and Britain – an achievement that is not often highlighted in the historiography that instead tends to focus on the other cable that connected Australia to Britain, the Pacific cable, which was completed the following year.
This article revisits the Port Canning project in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century Bengal delta – a scheme to establish a new port on the Matla River as an alternative to Calcutta. Rather than a story of colonial arrogance or speculative mania, this article demonstrates that the project is better understood as a co-evolutionary history between colonial intervention and the more-than-human landscape of the Sundarbans. Driven by anxieties over the perceived ecological deterioration of the Hooghly River, the project was simultaneously constrained by local tenant cultivators, marauding wildlife, shifting sandbanks and river channels, and cyclones. Henry Piddington's warnings about storm waves at the proposed port site proved accurate, yet his arguments were actively contested rather than simply ignored. Diverging perceptions of a volatile landscape, compounded by growing fiscal disagreements, drove the colonial government and private enterprise from initial collaboration towards eventual rupture. The project was formally abandoned in 1872 – a process in which the 1867 cyclone played an important but not decisive role. Although proposals for Port Canning persisted thereafter, it was ultimately the ecological deterioration of the Matla River itself – long assumed to be superior to the Hooghly – that foreclosed the colonial vision of developing the site. Instead of emphasising how Piddington's warnings went unheeded, this article argues that greater attention should be paid to how local communities’ environmental knowledge was systematically overlooked by colonial authorities. Ultimately, neither ‘deterioration’ nor ‘uncertainty’ was inherent properties of the Bengal delta, but instead products of colonial political, commercial, and technical ways of seeing.
British and Anglo-Canadian Protestant missionaries to Saskatchewan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed strong sentimental feeling to church audiences of their ‘love,’ ‘compassion,’ and ‘pity’ for Indigenous children in Indian Residential Schools. Within these institutions, missionaries positioned themselves as alternate parents promising emotional richness, warmth, and familial belonging, making colonialism seem like a humanitarian undertaking on the Canadian prairies. Yet, reimagining affective ties between Indigenous children and parents became contested terrain among Protestant missionaries in Saskatchewan. As missionaries maneuvered in the emotional lives of Indigenous peoples, breaking up family units for the sake of ‘civilizing’ and Christianizing, they wrestled over the management of how best to weaken children’s affective longings and whether they should be severed completely. This paper examines the emotionality of Protestant missionaries in Saskatchewan in their execution of ‘affective violence’ and analyzes how invading the intimate realm of Indigenous families impacted missionaries’ own relationships to their children. For missionary parents, rearticulating affective desires for Indigenous children sparked racial anxieties over their own children living at the schools and on mission sites. Lastly, this study interrogates how church and state officials managed missionaries’ emotions in the mission ‘field.’ Sentimentality had its limits in Saskatchewan and if emotional rhetoric veered into practical demands for change to the colonial order for the emerging Canadian nation state, missionaries were either silenced or ignored.
