Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance

Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His first book was From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa. It was reviewed as 'without doubt the best historical geography of South Africa to date'. Although his work over the next five years remained centred on southern Africa, it focused on the range of connections between the Cape colonial frontier and other sites of British colonization. With Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain, he helped to pioneer the spatial turn in colonial studies. Catherine Hall wrote that the book 'provides a model which others would do well to follow' and John Darwin concluded that it 'opens up a very promising avenue towards a reinvigorated imperial historiography'. Excerpts are included in the New Imperial Histories Reader, Stephen Howe crediting Lester with being 'the pioneer' of 'a key concept much used in recent 'new imperial history' writing … that of the imperial network'. Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, co-edited with David Lambert, showed how personal trajectories combined with movements of material, capital, commodities and ideas continually to reconfigure colonial and metropolitan places. Antoinette Burton described the book as developing 'fresh insight and a lot of intellectual energy as well', and it has been further reviewed as 'demonstrat[ing] what biography at its best can do'.

Fae Dussart is Adjunct Lecturer in Modern British and Imperial History for the University of North Carolina Study Abroad Program and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. She has published on histories of domestic service in Britain and India, and with Alan Lester on humanitarian and settler discourses in New Zealand and Australia.