Empire Calling: Administering Colonial Australasia and India

Emerging from an interdisciplinary conference at Osmania University, Hyderabad, the essays deal with the diaspora of Australasia and India in particular. They examine the ways in which administration in Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn Island and India governed in colonial times, controlling and employing the information it collected to further its colonial imperial agenda. They deal with administration of Aborigines and control of convicts in the British colonies. They throw light on exemplary figures like Sher Mohamad, an immigrant in Australian, who successfully managed to negotiate the system and examining colonial administrators, such as A. O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, and Alfred Domett who ran the New Zealand colony. An essay analyses the working of the machinery of colonial justice taking up two complaints of assault. The writings comment on the role of native scholars in the production of colonial knowledge.