Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Jul 27, 2017 - History - 310 pages
A study of the lived history of nineteenth-century British imperialism through the lives of one extended family in North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The prominent colonial governor James Douglas was born in 1803 in what is now Guyana, probably to a free woman of colour and an itinerant Scottish father. In the North American fur trade, he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. Adele Perry traces their family and friends over the course of the 'long' nineteenth-century, using careful archival research to offer an analysis of the imperial world that is at once intimate and critical, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Perry engages feminist scholarship on gender and intimacy, critical analyses about colonial archives, transnational and postcolonial history and the 'new imperial history' to suggest how this period might be rethought through one powerful family located at the British Empire's margins.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2017)

Adele Perry is Professor of History and Senior Fellow at St John's College, University of Manitoba. She has taught there since 2000 and held the Canada Research Chair in Western Canadian Social History from 2003 to 2014. Perry is the author of On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1846-1871 (2001), which won the Canadian Historical Association's Clio Award for the best book published on the history of British Columbia, co-won the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Prize, and was short-listed for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciencesè Raymond Klibanksy prize for the best English-language book in the humanities. On the Edge of Empire has been reprinted six times. Perry is also co-editor of three editions of Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History (2003, 2006, 2010). She has been awarded the Jensen-Miller prize for the best article in Western American Women's History and the Hilda Neatby Award awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women's History. Perry was co-chair of the 2014 Berkshires Conference on the History of Women. Since 2008 she has been book reviewer for the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

Bibliographic information