Introduction: Emotions and Empire

Summary

This book explores changing ideas about who to feel for and with across the British empire, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the role of the compassionate emotions, today glossed as empathy, in imperialism, focusing on relations between Britain and her Australasian colonies, and between settlers and Indigenous people. This chapter reviews the history of the emotions across the period of Britain’s colonial expansion from the eighteenth century, and the contrasts drawn between home and other, domestic and cosmopolitan priorities that shaped imagined Antipodean ‘homes’. The discourse of sensibility was deployed on behalf of a range of reforms, including the British movement to abolish slavery, and the missionary movement, but by the 1840s had become the focus of contestation, and a mid-century ‘backlash’ re-defined humanitarianism along racial lines. Ideas of ‘home’, gender and race, governed the movement of empathy between imperial subjects, white settlers and Aboriginal people, and continue to structure debates about the future.