Three Rebellions: Canada 1837-1838, South Wales 1839 and Victoria, Australia 1854
It is always important to see comparative history, not least for the crucial counterfactual light it sheds on explanations, and Richard Brown's well-written and insightful work is particularly valuable because it brings together three rebellions hitherto treated in isolation and, in doing so, casts considerable light on each of them. Brown's scholarship is first rate and he ably demonstrates his case that there is a common theme of popular constitutionalism, one that was linked to British radicalism, specifically Chartism. As such, this book offers an instructive insight on the tensions to which the British empire was subject and the requirements, alongside careful management, for the use of force. The latter theme is important also for military historians, notably of Britain, as many have underplayed this element. A first-rate study that is to be followed by another on subsequent rebellions. Clio Publishing is a new company that is to be welcomed.'
Jeremy Black from The Historical Association website
Famine, Fenians and Freedom 1840-1882, Richard Brown, Clio Publishing, Southampton, 2011, paperback, 581 pp., £27.95, ISBN 978095569878
Richard Brown's engagingly cryptic, alliterative title to this second volume of his Rebellions Trilogy inadequately conveys the extent and depth of his wide-ranging contextual analysis of this formative period of Irish history in the four decades before the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. Indeed, his in-depth study encompasses both the transatlantic origins of Fenianism in the USA and the impact of its export via a world-wide Irish diaspora resulting from the Great Famine of 1845-49, into neighbouring Canada and beyond to the continents of Africa and Australasia. He explains the attempts in the 1840s by Young Ireland and in the 1850s and 1860s by the Fenians to achieve Irish independence from British rule through rebellion and the efforts of ‘the populist and parliamentarian constitutionalist Repeal Association and campaign for Home Rule to achieve devolved government' in the period up to 1882.
He then explores the nature of sporadic resistance and rebellion during the Chartist era in Britain and also in Canada and Australia. He assesses astutely the roles of key figures including Daniel O'Connell, ‘the central figure in Irish politics' during his own lifetime, and other significant figures such as Isaac Butt, James Stephens, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell. He understates, perhaps, the impact of his concluding episode, the murder of Cavendish ‘an amiable and unassuming Liberal politician', which Brown recognises was a ‘public relations disaster for the Irish Republican Brotherhood', on the British mainland when the assassination provoked serious anti-Irish riots at Brighouse within Cavendish's Yorkshire constituency and inspired his memorialisation in both the Yorkshire and Derbyshire Dales. The book's user friendly, clearly differentiated index enhances the book's appeal, counterbalancing some rather indistinct map reproductions in the opening pages.
John A. Hargreaves from The Historical Association website
Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire 1600-1980, Richard Brown, Clio Publishing, 2013, paperback, 626 pp., £27.95 ISBN 9780955698385
Susan England of Clio, in an unusual, but entirely appropriate, appreciation of the author by the publisher in a foreword to this final volume of Richard Brown's remarkable trilogy of studies of resistance and rebellion in the British Empire, completed since his retirement from full-time teaching, observes that the recent recognition by the High Court in London in October 2012 of the case of three veteran survivors of the ‘systematic torture, incarceration and killing' allegedly meted out by the British colonial powers in Kenya during the seven-year Mau-Mau rebellion in the 1950s, provides an ever-present reminder of the continuing resonance of the experience of empire in our world today.
This final volume of Brown's epic trilogy breaks the chronological mould of volumes 1 and 2, which focused predominantly on developments in Britain, Canada and Australia in the six decades extending from the 1830s to the 1880s. By contrast to its predecessors, it ‘explores a diverse range of anti-colonial rebellions within the British Empire from a broader chronological and geographical perspective' utilising case studies from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries drawn from a gazetteer encompassing America, Australia, Cyprus, Kenya, Mauritius, New Zealand, Sierra Leone and South Africa, including some names more familiar to philatelists than to many students of history, all of which challenged at some point British imperial rule. The rebellions are crisply categorised as convict, migrant, fiscal, millenarian, nationalist and even a rum rebellion.
This latter, ‘very British rebellion', occurring unusually within the colonial elite, and so-called because rum had become the substitute for currency in the barter-based economy of New South Wales, is particularly memorable since it challenged the authority of Captain William Bligh, the survivor of the mutiny of the Bounty in 1789 led by Fletcher Christian, the ship's first mate. Bligh who in this later episode, lucidly and meticulously reconstructed by Brown, mainly from the contemporary evidence of Bligh's correspondence and worthy perhaps of a cinematic sequel, was imprisoned from 1808 to 1810 by mutinous soldiers, but later exonerated of all blame and promoted admiral on his retirement in 1811. Brown's characteristically trenchant analysis of Bligh's conduct, however, reveals that even before his arrival as governor of the New South Wales penal colony, his style of governance had led to problems with his subordinates on the voyage, and that soon after his arrival he replaced many of the officials with military experience with his own appointments which ‘did not play well in a small community and did not endear him to the corps'. Indeed, he then proceeded to antagonise not only influential figures in the colony but also some of the less wealthy government leasehold tenants within Sydney, challenging their property rights and also gaining a reputation for ‘his abusing and confining' the soldiers of the New South Wales Corps ‘without the smallest provocation'. This prompted John Harris, the corps' surgeon who had been dismissed from his positions of naval officer and magistrate to compare his exercise of authority to that of Robespierre or the Terror or even the Roman emperor, Caligula, who ‘never reigned with more despotic sway than he does'. Meanwhile, in Sydney a verse was circulating, invoking the Bounty mutiny, appealing: ‘Is there no Christian in New South Wales to put a stop to the Tyranny of the Governor'.
Brown's vivid analytical narrative, here as elsewhere, illuminates a relatively obscure episode of imperial history within a broader, carefully researched, wide-ranging study of anti-colonial resistance and rebellion. The publisher Clio and author Richard Brown are to be congratulated on producing such a wide-ranging concluding volume to a stimulating series in such an attractive format, which has the potential to engage with a wider student and general readership than might previously have been attracted to the study of British imperial history.
John A. Hargreaves from The Historical Association website
Richard Brown, Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882, Authoring History, second edition, 2017, £20.37, paperback, ISBN 978-1540352231; Richard Brown, Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia, Authoring History, second edition, 2016, £19.72, paperback, ISBN 978-1539455707
The opportunity to revise and update the original texts as both these publications move into their second editions testifies to the success of previous print and electronic editions in helping to create markets for some of the less well trodden pathways of modern British and world history which have rarely featured so prominently in texts aimed at students in tertiary and higher education. In both instances the significance of the selected themes is succinctly explained in new prefaces. The new edition of Famine Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882 takes its overall length from 582 to 602 pages and is now offered as the second volume of a quartet on resistance and rebellion in the British Empire. It examines the Irish dimension in Britain’s Empire through attempts especially by Young Ireland and the Fenians to achieve Irish independence through rebellion and by the populist and parliamentarian constitutionalist Repeal association and campaign for Home Rule to the achievement of devolved government. The book looks at the nature and impact of the Great Hunger in its global context in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia and explains why, how and whither the Irish emigrated and how they settled into their new communities. The cover features Fenians at the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866, a victory, which the accompanying text argues ‘occurred too late to have any significant effect on the Confederation process’ though ‘it did play a major role in emotionally connecting the Canadian public to the idea of Canada’. However, the reader is warned in a cryptic caption that the book’s cover illustration amounts to a far from accurate depiction, though it might have helped some readers had this intriguing caption been elaborated and more of its provenance been revealed.
By contrast, the riveting cover illustration of the companion volume, focusing upon three rebellions in Canada, South Wales and Australia is extensively contextualised. Unusually, we discover, that it was painted by Katherine Jane Ellice, the daughter-in-law of the local seigneur, a prosperous fur trader, who was taken prisoner by the Patriotes at Beauharnois, near Montreal, in November 1838. Ellice described her captors as ‘the most Robespierre-looking ruffians, all armed with guns, long knives and pikes’. Their expressions and weapons are vividly captured in the watercolour. Moreover, Brown’s gripping account of the action and its significance is characteristically engaging and stimulating. He concludes that the rebellions in the Canadas, South Wales and Victoria were each a failure of popular constitutionalism to deliver political change and the unwillingness of the authorities to concede that change was necessary.
As the relationship of the United Kingdom with Europe and the wider world is re-defined post-Brexit, some of the global themes hitherto neglected but explored here with such insight, rigour and enthusiasm may perhaps again appeal to a widening readership.
John A. Hargreaves from The Historical Association website