Citizen of Empire: A Transnational Archaeology of James William Robertson
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Citizen of Empire: A Transnational Archaeology of James William Robertson Peter Davies 1
& Susan
Lawrence 1 & Angela Middleton 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Transnational mobility of people, goods, ideas, and capital was a key feature of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century, as millions of migrants created new colonial societies at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Archaeological biographies of individuals provide crucial insight into these wider processes of social, material and environmental transformation. James William Robertson (1823–76) was an agent of change in this imperial-colonial domain. In 1852 he migrated from his birthplace of New Brunswick, Canada to the gold rush colony of Victoria, Australia where he developed interests in mining, water control and sawmilling. A decade later Robertson departed for the mining boom in Otago, New Zealand, where he expanded his business interests and entered public service as mayor of Queenstown and a provincial legislator. This paper uses the archaeology and history of Robertson’s life to trace his role as an agent of change at local, regional and international scales. His story links distant corners of the British Empire into a global story of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental change. Keywords Biography . Gold rush . Transnational . Australia . New Zealand
Introduction Individual mobility has been crucial to a modernizing world in the past 500 years. Human movement and migration have meant lives lived across geographies and between cultures. Transnational histories emphasise these connections and networks at local, regional and global scales, as individuals crossed oceans to pursue work, business, relationships, and families, or else were compelled by servitude (Deacon et al.
* Peter Davies [email protected]
1
Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia
2
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
2010; Perry 2015). Gender, class and race influenced their experience, while all settler migration was at the expense of Indigenous peoples. In the nineteenth-century Age of Empires, however, fortunate migrants could find energy, inspiration, opportunity, and attachment in these new and wider horizons. Individuals’ identities and attachments were shaped by their engagement with diasporic communities and transnational experiences, each person contributing to and creating diverse and complex social and material worlds (Belich 2009). Through the lives of such individuals we see the significance of the larger stories of which they were part and which help explain the world in which they lived. It is within this framework that archaeological biographies of people and households have emerged with vigor in recent years, exploiting the overlapping temporal, social, and archaeological scales of the human lifespan. These approaches range from a focus
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