The Long Shadow of the British Empire

  • Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton
Chapter

Abstract

More than 25 years ago, my cousin Spencer Bloomfield stirred my interest in our English ancestor, Dr. Sidney Spencer Kachalola Broomfield.1 Both Spencer and I were curious about Broomfield’s imperial and colonial role in Northern Rhodesia. Broomfield is the archetypical European male, whose life story (as a result of his imperial career across the British Empire) is found in the British official archive in both the empire and the metropole. Broomfield’s life story has all the elements of the white male transnational traveler’s tales about adventure, hunting, exploration, and discovery in culturally diverse and remote geographical locations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Broomfield traveled, explored, pioneered, and “careered” in varying sites of the European Empire. My initial fascination with Broomfield was his “absent” presence within my family history in Zambia.2 Since then, though, my interest in Broomfield has broadened to encompass his “haunting” presence in the wider British Empire, particularly in Zambia—the former British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia—and in Australia.

Keywords

Archival Document Elephant Grass National History Personal Memory Imperial Site 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    See Juliette Milner-Thornton, “Absent White Fathers: Coloured Identity in Zambia,” in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Burdened By Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: Cape Town University Press, 2009), 185–207;Google Scholar
  2. Juliette Milner-Thornton, “Kachalola Broomfield and Absentee White Fathers in Zambia from an Australian Migrant Perspective,” Honours Dissertation, Griffith University, 2003. The earlier versions of parts of this chapter and the following chapter were previously published as Juliette Milner-Thornton, “A Feather Bed Dictionary: Colonialism and Sexuality,” History Compass Journal, online, Oxford Blackwell-Synergy (2007).Google Scholar
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  37. 61.
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  48. 84.
    Broomfield’s story and his representation of Black Women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction in Chapters 2 and 3 are gleaned from an earlier version of an article I published online in History Compass in 2007. See J. B. Milner-Thornton, “A Feather Bed Dictionary: Colonialism and Sexuality,” History Compass: Blackwell Synergy, 5 (2007), pp. 1111–1135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  49. 86.
    Ibid., 170, 240. For racial science and the collection of Aboriginal remains and their impacts on racial discourse in Australia, see Paul Turnbull, “British Anatomists, Phrenologists and the Construction of the Aboriginal Race, c. 1790–1830,” History Compass 5 (2007): 26–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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  51. Paul Turnbull, “Rare Work for the Professors: The Capture of Indigenous Skulls within Phrenological Knowledge in Early Colonial Australia,” in Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn (eds.), Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific (New York: Pluto Press, 2001), 3–23.Google Scholar
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    Brelsford, Generation of Men, 69; see also Hector Croad and Cyril D. Hoste, “Northern Rhodesia,” The Geographical Journal 11(6) (1898): 617–628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  53. 117.
    Bridges and Tiltman, Recent Heroes of Modern Adventure, 37; for a discussion on blackbirding from the South Sea Islands for labor in Queensland’s sugar plantations, refer to Clive Moore, Kanaka: A History f Melanesian Mackay (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 1985), pp. 337–340. Moore dispels the myth about the excesses of blackbirding to the Queensland sugar plantations. Although he does acknowledge that blackbirding did occur before 1880, it was not so prevalent because the Queensland government instituted laws to safeguard the interests of South Sea Islander laborers.Google Scholar
  54. 118.
    For a nuanced description of Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean and the experiences of indentured laborers in the Caribbean, see Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton
    • 1
  1. 1.BrisbaneAustralia

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