Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2011"

Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia's Stolen Generations

Abstract: Collective forgetting and denial of injustices perpetrated against Indigenous people have a long history in white Australia. This was evident in public response to the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report , concerning the systematic removal of generations of Indigenous children from their families. Emotions of shock, anguish and guild, as well as angry denial, suggested a long held secret finally exposed. Yet on numerous previous occasions, some quite recent, exposure had provoked similarly passionate debate. This paper addresses this puzzling phenomenon by drawing on recent research on forgetting, ignorance, and race to understand how these social processes help to construct dominant identities and histories that include and exclude, and that normalize unequal treatment to the point that dominant groups fail to recognize the discriminatory conditions of others or understand their own role in producing them. Several historical case studies document how knowledge of child removals emerged into public awareness and controversy and then subsided back into forgetfulness and ignorance, leaving issues of injustice against the Stolen Generations unresolved. The paper argues that, despite an emotive national apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, this may also be the fate of the Bringing Them Home Report .

Within salvation: girl hawkers and the colonial state in development era Lagos.

Abstract: On October 6, 1946, the Lagos Daily Service newspaper published an unsigned letter from one of its readers who wrote in to complain about a controversial new Lagos Township ordinance, the Children and Young Person’s Ordinance of 1943. Although the law had been passed three years prior, it had gone un-enforced pending the end of the Second World War. When it was finally put into effect, contemporaries observed that it featured two fundamental innovations in child welfare legislation for colonial Lagos.

Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880

Abstract: Tribe, Race, History examines American Indian communities in southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction, when Indians lived in the region's socioeconomic margins, moved between semiautonomous communities and towns, and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites. Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. He analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War. Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England.

Between the Voices of the State and the Human Rights Movement: Never Again and the Memories of the Disappeared in Argentina

Abstract: In December 1983, Argentine President Raul Alfonsin created the "National Commission on the Disappeared" (CONADEP). The Commission investigated the fates of those who disappeared under the political repression in the country in the 70's. In 1984, the Commission published a report, Nunca Mas (Never Again), in which it established that 8,960 persons, most of them left-wing political activists, had been disappeared. More than half a million copies of this report have been sold from 1984 to 2010. It has been translated into several languages, became an influential model for other reports developed by "Truth Commissions" in Latin America about human rights violations committed by dictatorships in the continent and had strong impact in the field of transitional justice policies. In this article, I analyze the narrative strategies of this report, paying particular attention to the categorization of historical actors that were involved in this violent past. I examine how the narrative of the report differs from other narratives offered by the State or by civil society about the period of political violence under the dictatorship and I explore how the report has had a long-lasting impact on how people in Argentina have conceptualized and remembered political violence under the dictatorship.

"Mulata, Hija de Negro y India": Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early Colonial Mexico

Abstract: Since the fifteenth century, the term "mulato" has been used to describe individuals of mixed African and European ancestry. Through an examination of mulatos from sixteenth century New Spain this piece complicates our understanding of the usage and implication of this socio-racial ascription. Both demographic and anecdotal evidence suggests that in the early colonial period mulato frequently described individuals of mixed African-indigenous ancestry. Moreover, these individuals may have represented the majority of individuals so named. Additionally this piece uses several case studies to demonstrate that Afro-indigenous mulatos formed frequent and long-term connections to indigenous society and culture. Through acculturation and familial ties, early mulatos helped to encourage interethnic unions and may have played a key role in the growth of a highly varied, multi-ethnic colonial population in Mexico. By highlighting these important trends, this study challenges our traditional assumptions concerning the category of mulato and suggests that we must avoid the homogenizing tendency inherent in such terminology.

Introduction to marginal centers : writing life histories in the Indian Ocean world

Abstract: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Social History following peer review The definitive publisher-authenticated version Journal of Social History, 2011, 45 (2), pp 335-344 is available online at: http://jshoxfordjournalsorg/content/45/2/335extract

Social Memories in (Post)colonial France: Remembering the Franco-Algerian War

Abstract: This article examines social memories in France over the last 10 years. There has been a significant amount of 'memory work' during this period, concerning various aspects of French history, including the World Wars, but predominantly postcolonial issues: the Algerian War, the legacy of slavery, memories of Empire and memories of Immigration in particular. The 'devoir de memoire' (duty to remember) and 'work of memory' (Paul Ricoeur) have taken on greater, and controversial, proportions. While President Jacques Chirac was for some the 'president du devoir de memoire' (President who championed the duty to remember), President Nicolas Sarkozy seems intent on ending what he sees as the trend towards 'repentance'. After a discussion of the wider memory culture in France, this article focuses on collective and social memories of the Franco-Algerian War (1954-62) Through an analysis of various 'vectors of memory' (Henry Rousso) it argues that the recent upsurge in 'memory work' in France is very much anchored in the present postcolonial social context in France. That memory work is however largely symbolic and in some ways unsatisfactory. It shows that much of the recent work of memory has been only belatedly and partially undertaken by the State, and with civil society in some ways yet to follow.

Kemalism on the Catwalk: The Turkish Hat Law of 1925

Abstract: In Turkey today, the issue of what to wear or not to wear is once more on top of the political agenda. On June 5, 2008, the Constitutional Court ruled that the Turkish Parliament had violated the constitutional principle of secularism by lifting the headscarf ban in universities. This article, however, is concerned with an earlier chapter in the biography of headgear. Considered an important tool by Mustafa Kemal in his attempts to modernize Turkish society, a new dress code was enacted in 1925 that required traditional headgear be replaced by the western hat. In subsequent days, 808 people were arrested for violating the law, 57 of whom were executed. By this legislation of sartorial westernization the individual head became a political site, fusing social and political history in terms of identity construction. The motivations behind, reactions to, and consequences of the Hat Law were recorded in a variety of contemporary sources generated in different social areas. By integrating these images, it is possible to analyze and map the main tendencies of identity formation, a process that went beyond and above a dichotomous Orientalist discourse of East vs. West, revealing lines of conflict that continue to scar the face of modern Turkey.

Marie Rozette and Her World: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Mauritius

Abstract: In 1790, Marie Rozette, a freedwoman of Indian origin on Mauritius, executed a series of notarial acts which revealed that she possessed a small fortune in cash assets as well as slaves and substantial landed property in one of the island’s rural districts. The life of this former slave between 1776, when she first appears in the archival record, and her death in 1804 provides a vantage point from which to gain a subaltern perspective on aspects of Mascarene social and economic history, as well as developments in the wider Indian Ocean world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Marie Rozette’s life history challenges the notion that free persons of color in Mauritius were little more than an “unappropriated” people, and invites us to consider how supposedly marginalized individuals were able to cross various socio-economic and cultural boundaries. More specifically, her life affords an opportunity to consider the ways in which class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as race, interacted to create a distinctive Creole society in Mauritius, the nature and dynamics of which bear directly on our knowledge and understanding of the free colored experience elsewhere in the European colonial slave plantation world.

The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: Toward an Integrative Theory of Collective Violence

Abstract: Studies of race riots have identified several underlying conditions that contribute to their onset. This study builds on previous research and introduces an integrative approach for examining riots that includes the role of population characteristics, contextual factors, and cultural ideologies. An integrative approach is applied through a case study of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. In addition to highlighting relevant structural and contextual under pinnings, this approach also emphasizes the role of racial frames, or lenses through which racial groups view and interpret events and conditions differenctially.

Between Egyptian "national purity" and "local flexibility": prostitution in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in the first half of the 20th century.

Abstract: This article traces prostitution in al-Mahalla in the first half of the 20th century as a regulated urban practice until the trade was outlawed in Egypt in 1949 Studying prostitution during this period of exceptionally rapid growth and transformation not only provides a window on a particular type of illicit sexuality and public morality in a colonial context, it also gives us a hint as to gender relations and inter-communal relations on the invisible marginalized part of a provincial local community, and how it was socially transformed I argue that the regulation of prostitution in Egypt in 1882 and 1905 created a sphere for a power contest between the colonial state and the local community, between nationalist discourse and the local way of life, and between public morality and private space While nationalist discourse constructed one virtuous nation, the local community accepted the licensed prostitution quarter, and resisted secret prostitution The people of the town actively and continually shifted boundaries on what was public and what was private, what was the state's responsibility and what was communal liability

Women and mass consumer society in postwar France

Abstract: Introduction 1. Consumers for the nation: women, politics, and citizenship 2. The productivity drive in the home and gaining comfort on credit 3. For better and for worse: marriage and family in the consumer society 4. 'Can a man with a refrigerator make a revolution?': redefining class in the postwar years 5. The salon des arts menagers: learning to consume in postwar France Epilogue.

Electrifying Speeches: Emotional Control and the Technological Aesthetic of the Voice in the Early 20th Century US

Abstract: The 1920s saw the emotionally dramatic practice of elocution replaced by a more restrained model of public speaking. During this period, the “Pronunciphone” Company sold phonographs designed to teach the appropriate pronunciation of words alongside psychologist Carl Seashore’s phonophoto-graphic images of scientifically defined beautiful vocal performances. As these and other thinkers produced technologies to measure, manipulate, and improve the voice, speech acquired a technological aesthetic—something demonstrated particularly well by the speech of the radio announcer. Good speech was to be controlled, controlling, and efficient, much like the technologies through which it could be captured and broadcast. Looking at this history sheds an important light on a variety of ways in which technologies are used in speech, exposing the rhetorics of technology and emotion that underlie both past and present discourses of speech technologies.

Before and After Crime: Life-Course Analyses of Young Offenders Arrested in Nineteenth-Century Northern Sweden

Abstract: This article combines sources to expand our view of offenders. Prison records are investigated to identify young people in Sweden who were arrested during the period 1840–1880. Their demographic ch ...

Writing Indigenous women's lives in the Bay of Bengal: cultures of empire in the Andaman Islands, 1789-1906.

Abstract: This article explores the lives of two Andamanese women, both of whom the British called “Tospy.” The first part of the article takes an indigenous and gendered perspective on early British colonization of the Andamans in the 1860s, and through the experiences of a woman called Topsy stresses the sexual violence that underpinned colonial settlement as well as the British reliance on women as cultural interlocutors. Second, the article discusses colonial naming practices, and the employment of Andamanese women and men as nursemaids and household servants during the 1890s–1910s. Using an extraordinary murder case in which a woman known as Topsy-ayah was a central witness, it argues that both reveal something of the enduring associations and legacies of slavery, as well as the cultural influence of the Atlantic in the Bay of Bengal. In sum, these women's lives present a kaleidoscope view of colonization, gender, networks of Empire, labor, and domesticity in the Bay of Bengal.

The Australian Frontier in the Museum

Abstract: Historians have suggested that in Australia we now live in a "memorial culture" in which a public consciousness of history is stronger than ever. If this is so, how much is it visible in relation to the history of the colonial frontier? When the new National Museum of Australia opened in 2001 at the height of the History Wars debates, the controversy it attracted around questions of national history and identity indicated the kinds of constraints that still seem to exist for national museums in representing contested histories. It could be argued that regional museums are not encumbered in the same way by expectations of a unified story of national identity. This essay will consider the place of frontier history in the contemporary Australian museum; in particular, it will look at some examples of regional museums established in the decade of the history wars which engage a localized story of early European settlement, in order to ask how much they challenge the national historical orthodoxy of a "great Australian silence" on the history of frontier conflict and Aboriginal dispossession.

The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory

Abstract: In today's Russia the whole-scale rehabilitation of the Soviet regime and specifically of the figure of Stalin co-exists with a vast and widely available archive of the historical and testimonial literature exhaustively chronicling Stalin's crimes against his own people. This paper argues that to make sense of the complex convergence of the cultures of remembering and forgetting in the post-Soviet Russian society, we must turn our attention to the relationship between memory and affect under totalitarianism.

Under the Radar of Empire: Unregulated Travel in the Indian Ocean

Abstract: Travel and travel writing in imperial spaces force a re-evaluation of the old binaries of colony and empire, home and the world, metropole and periphery, highlighting previously unexpected and undiscovered connections and relationships between spaces that previously seemed discrete. They show that relationships of power do not disappear, but rather subject peoples are able to subvert them in ways that blur those categories, making them contingent and relational. Travel and contact are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity 1 and “Euroimperial travel,” according to Inderpal Grewal, became incorporated into the lives of colonized people as part of the disciplinary apparatus of colonial modernity in the nineteenth century. 2 At this time, Australians, Canadians, Egyptians, and South Asians began their own grand tours to and through the centers of empire. Accounts of their travel reveal preoccupations similar to those of imperial travelers. Their descriptions of alien landscapes, climate, politics and society offer us some interesting comparisons between the colonized gaze and the imperial one, or what we might like to call a peripheral vision. For example, in In an Antique Land, anthropologist Amitav Ghosh describes how the men of the village in a “quiet corner” of the Nile Delta had “the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge.” Their grandparents, relatives and ancestors were migrants with titles originating in the Sudan, the Levant or Turkey. Later on in the book, Ghosh has a shouting match with an Imam about whose country is more advanced and modern, and which boils down to the simple fact of who has more bombs. Ghosh says in despair, “Despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both traveling–in the West.” 3

Censorship in Inter-War Britain: Obscenity, Spectacle, and the Workings of the Liberal State

Abstract: ��� Some people are made by censorship and some are broken. James Joyce argued that he “ought to be given the Nobel Prize for Peace” for uniting “Puritans, English Imperialists, Irish Republicans, [and] Catholics” against Ulysses. 1 Radclyffe Hall decided to martyr herself for the cause of sexual inversion. Preparing for the next day's publication of The Well of Loneliness, she had her lover read Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol aloud to her. 2 D. H. Lawrence wrote three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover in preparation for the charges of obscenity, each more explicit than the last. The British government acted as expected and banned Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. And as expected, the censorship of these works fed outrage, bolstered arguments for free speech, and allowed Joyce, Hall, and Lawrence to place themselves at the behest of Art. 3 In contrast, censorship ruined the lives of many others. Mr. Bonnaire, a wholesaler of books and postcards, was found guilty of obscenity and charged ten guineas costs for the trial, even though members of the Home Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions agreed that Mr. Bonnaire did not intend to break the law. The judge even gave back four obscene books and seven obscene postcard series so that he could return them for reimbursement because of the accidental nature of his offense. Bonnaire, however, foresaw bankruptcy as a result of the trial and the court

Rebuilding St. Margaret's: Parish Involvement and Community Action in Late Medieval Westminster

Abstract: Historians of the late medieval English parish have debated the level and quality of parishioner involvement. Some see the parish as dominated by the local elite, others argue for broader participation. These debates are hampered by the disconnect between the expectations of medieval clerics charged with regulating parish life and the surviving sources. Historians tend to equate participation and interest with financial support, because the sources that most frequently survive document these practices. Medieval bishops, on the other hand, looked to attendance and reception of the sacraments as signs of Christian commitment carried out in the context of the parish. This article looks at the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster and argues that broad participation was key to the parish’s successful financing of their new church, built between 1487 and 1523. The unusually detailed parish records allow us to see that the urban gentry, married and unmarried women, non-elite men, and possibly even the poor all contributed time, money, and interest to the parish’s construction project. While St. Margaret’s cannot stand in for all parishes, the experience of this parish calls into question assumptions about the limited involvement of parishioners in the late Middle Ages.

Who were his peers? The social and professional milieu of the provincial surgeon-apothecary in the late-eighteenth century.

Abstract: The social standing of the surgeon-apothecary cannot be determined by reference to professional life alone, yet few such men left social documents. The lower middling sort was typically reticent about evaluations of their own social position in any source genre. This article uses a unique archive, and the concept of community connectedness, to investigate the status of Thomas Higgins, surgeon-apothecary and man-midwife of north Shropshire. Higgins embodied the traditional practitioner who relied on local knowledge and his 'friends' for advancement, in contrast to alternative modes of rising professionalism. He was demonstrably a trusted man at the heart of his home town, but his reliance on the 'partiality' of his neighbors brought him into conflict with his colleagues.

"The Indignation of Freedom-Loving People": The Caning of Charles Sumner and Emotion in Antebellum Politics

Abstract: This essay illuminates the role of emotion in antebellum American politics and political culture through an analysis of the indignant northern response to the May 1856 caning of Charles Sumner. It begins by situating indignation in its antebellum cultural context, showing that popular beliefs about indignation's sympathetic and moral nature made it a uniquely respectable and highly valued type of anger. Indignation enjoyed additional political power when expressed collectively in a so-called "indignation meeting," a staple of antebellum American politics. This political ritual brought like-minded citizens together to respond to public problems and to influence elected officials. Scores of the meetings convened throughout the free states following the Sumner assault. As they met to express their shared indignation against Sumner's assailant and to demand retaliation against the southern slave power, many northerners experienced an intense feeling of sectional unity which appeared to bridge partisan and ideological divisions. This perceived unity, coupled with widespread belief in the need for northern unity against southern aggression, decisively aided the rise of he Republican Party. By appealing rhetorically to northern indignation, and by holding their own partisan indignation meetings, the Republicans harnessed northern indignation to their cause, an opportunity missed by their political rivals.

Hearing the Consumer? The Laboratory, the Public, and the Construction of Food Safety in Brussels (1840s–1910s)

Abstract: This paper addresses the role of consumers in food safety between 1850 and 1914, taking the chemical laboratory of the city of Brussels (1856) as a case study. It questions the presence of "the public" in the discourse of the city council, as well as the consumers' actual participation in the food control system (the inhabitants of Brussels were invited to bring food samples to the laboratory). Despite very frequent and loud appeals by the city's administration from 1870 on, the public reacted with weak, and diminishing, enthusiasm: the number of food samples submitted by private persons gradually declined up to 1914. This paper suggests various reasons, but advocates that the establishment of a modern public service, which was embedded in an appropriate discourse, created trust. The paper uses police archives, contemporary brochures, and reports of municipal meetings.

Textiles as social texts: syphilis, material culture and gender in golden age Spain.

Abstract: Whereas traditional social and health histories have viewed the garments of early modern patients accessing hospital care as evidence of their poverty, this article reinterprets the meaning of patient clothing in the context of a venereal disease hospital in Toledo, Spain, in the seventeenth century. Patients carefully selected what they wore as they entered the hospital to produce certain effects on local audiences. Thus, these choices can be understood as body scripts meant to be read in certain ways rather than mere reflections of actual social status. In a context of gendered and social pressures associated with women's sexuality, female syphilitic patients wore garments meant to emphasize respectability and thereby avoid a loss of reputation.

Fragments of an Indian Ocean Life: Aristide Corroller Between Islands and Empires

Abstract: Born on Ile de France in late 1799 to a French father and a free mixed-race mother from Fort-Dauphin in southeast Madagascar, Aristide Corroller gained an education at Port-Louis but departed to pursue a political career in Madagascar after 1815. Corroller first assisted his maternal uncles to capture the sovereignty of Madagascar’s central eastern coast (Ivondro-Tamatave-Foulpointe) but then entered the service of King Radama of Imerina. He rose through the ranks of Radama’s service to become commander-in-chief of Antananarivo’s armed forces and the second most powerful man of that independent kingdom. His fortunes soured with the death of Radama in July 1828, however. He was placed under house arrest for a time and then returned to govern Tamatave, but died there with frustrated ambitions in late 1835, leaving a written account of his achievements on which this article is substantially based. I employ Corroller’s writings found in a library in New Zealand not only to trace his career but to discuss the strategies of his island-hopping family—particularly his maternal ancestors from Madagascar who moved to Ile de France and his maternal uncles who returned to Madagascar—and the careers of European administrators of empire who collected and pored over his work. Corroller’s career, mixed-race family, and labors illuminate the contours of life in the western Indian Ocean islands of his time, bringing their migrations, commerce, colonial constraints and opportunities, as well as human interconnections and racial structures, into conversation.

The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (review)

Abstract: and focuses on the “filmic arc of white acceptance” (119) from 1928 until 1933, which of course ignores the zenith of Jazz on film after 1935 during the swing era. The final chapter focuses on the cultural acceptance of the music rooted in the “growing tensions and divisions created by the ambivalence embedded in the introduction of new standards of productively, morality, and consumption.” (130) The book ends with Benny Goodman’s successful Carnegie Hall performance, where Goodman and the band not only wow the crowd but also provide it a history lesson on the evolution of jazz. In this way then, the concert serves as the apogee of this first phase of Jazz, serving to break with the creative tension of the past and introduce the commercial realities of the future. Cuttin’ Up is a well-written and interesting tour of the first third of the twentieth century and the development and rise of Jazz in America. It serves as an excellent synthesis of existing scholarship, and for those seeking more in depth analysis of specific instances—like the role of New Orleans, Chicago, New York or Jazz’s cultural and historical connection to any of the eras covered—the bibliography is first rate. Carney has written a very concise book and should be sought out by those seeking an introduction to Jazz as a historical phenomenon and certainly for undergraduate courses in American Studies, cultural history, and Twentieth century studies.

Lost to Public Commemoration: American Veterans of the "Forgotten" Korean War

Abstract: Although the Korean War is an important part of contemporary history, the American veterans of that conflict, until recently, have been rendered invisible in the national pantheon of war commemoration. This analysis identifies the conjunction of factors that caused those who supported the memorialization of the contribution of American veterans in other foreign conflicts to remain silent when confronted with the war in Korea. This essay argues that experience of these Korean War veterans offers a case study that can shed an important light on the paradigms that underpin current memory studies.

Reading the Power of Printed Orality in Afghanistan: Popular Pashto Literature as Historical Evidence and Public Intervention

Abstract: How can one use folk and popular evidence for non-western and non-elite rural social history in periods that are sparsely documented by other forms of evidence? That is, what if oral literature is the majority of what there is? While oral literatures contain a great deal of information for historians, this claim is not necessarily premised on a transparent reading of explicit information in specific works. How might we see processes of written mediation and transmission of (originally) oral literature as providing us with more information, rather than as distorting a primary source? And how might we productively approach heavily stylized lyric genres which provide seemingly little social information? Through the intertwined analysis of rural poetry and biodata related to eastern Afghanistan in the late 1940s and 1950s, provided in a genre of biographical directory called tazkira , I argue for a dynamic reading of popular literatures as documentary evidence and as political weapons that were designed to create social change and catalyze new types of political awareness. I argue that the historian’s attention to changes in literary genres and changing construals of the “ideal addressee” in these texts can illuminate social change.

Identity Fraud: Interrogating the Impostures of “Robert de Bruce Keith Stewart” in Early Nineteenth-Century Penang and Calcutta

Abstract: This study evaluates a transported convict, Robert Stewart, and his serial-invented identities. They culminated in him creating much sympathetic support among Calcutta’s white residents, as the honorable, romantic, and well-connected natural son of an aristocratic admiral. While not denying that he had escaped from Sydney by participating in the spectacular piratical seizure of the brig Harrington , he deluded his Calcutta supporters that his transportation offence was no mean felony but a crime of honour. Stewart’s “identity frauds” destabilized the (often fragile) claims to gentlemanly status of colonial elites. The Harrington affair plus his two, or possibly three, prior attempts to escape from transportation by piracy open up a wider issue, little considered hitherto in the academic literature on early colonial Australia. In brief, piratical seizures in Australian havens are revealed as a major escape practice among Australia’s transported convicts, contributing alongside stowing away and illicitly engaging as merchant seamen, to an escaped convict presence scattered across many maritime locations from Cape Town to Chile. These included Calcutta, which supplied many of the consumption needs and desires of early New South Wales and Van-Diemen’s Land—and a considerable sector of these colonies’ shipping resources. Two major archive collections of letters and petitions by Stewart, one from his time in Newgate in 1801–2, the other from his 5 months’ incarceration in Calcutta, are among sources interrogated and deconstructed to reveal a tricky but formidable man. Fittingly, in ex-convict memory in Australia, he long remained a liberational figure.