Zoë Laidlaw
Biographic Data
| ID | 3792571 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zoë Laidlaw |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zoë |
| FAMILY NAME | Laidlaw |
| SIGNATURE | LAIDLAW Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5256-6722 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 41 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The ethics of university truth-telling
Capital, Agents and Absentees
The Antipodean Laboratory
National biographies and transnational lives
Inaccuracies, especially in the age of the internet, are also often quickly and widely replicated
Roundtable
Protecting the Empire's Humanity
Rooted in the extraordinary archive of Quaker physician and humanitarian activist, Dr Thomas Hodgkin, this book explores the efforts of the Aborigines' Protection Society to expose Britain's hypocrisy and imperial crimes in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodgkin's correspondents stretched from Liberia to Lesotho, New Zealand to Texas, Jamaica to Ontario, and Bombay to South Australia; they included scientists, philanthropists, missionaries, systemat…
Taking Liberty
Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890." Australian Historical Studies, 50(3), pp. 381–382
Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers
This intriguing collection probes the meaning of ‘conciliation’ in colonial encounters, and demonstrates how significantly the present informs our reading of the past. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds bring together a diverse array of contributors, who in turn interrogate an impressive variety of evidence; embrace comparative geographies; and consider chronologies ranging from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first centuries. Each chapt…
Settler Society in the Australian Colonies
Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture." Australian Historical Studies, 47(1), pp. 161–162
Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism
The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that
The Making of New Zealanders, by Ron Palenski
Health, Medicine, and the Sea
Genteel Women
Journal Article Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1970, by Dianne Lawrence Get access Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1970, by Dianne Lawrence (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2012; pp. xviii + 262. £65). Zoé Laidlaw Zoé Laidlaw 1Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 540, October 2…
General editor’s introduction
A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal m…
Conclusion
This chapter provides an overview the key themes discussed in the previous chapters of this book. The book considers how new visual and statistical conceptualisations of empire took hold in the Colonial Office really affected colonial governance. Through its examination of early nineteenth-century networks of personal connection, the book has suggested one way in which the British colonial experience, and the operation of imperial and colonial ru…
Dedication
Traffic
This chapter examines the motivations, mechanisms and effects of private correspondence between colonial officials and the metropolitan government. Unofficial correspondence between colonial civil servants and members of the metropolitan Colonial Office was one of the most important strands in the web that constituted colonial governance. Colonial officials and their families extended and consolidated their networks of metropolitan contacts outsi…
The isolation of governors
Abbreviations
Appendices
A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal m…
An information revolution
This chapter examines the change in the Colonial Office's approach to the task of colonial governance at the end of the 1830s. It demonstrates that the challenges of controlling an ever-expanding empire, when combined with personal politics, and metropolitan intellectual movements, forced the Colonial Office to reassess the means by which imperial influence was exerted. Demands for colonial information emerged during metropolitan debates about co…
Colonial lobbyists
Edward Macarthur, like all the colonial lobbyists and officials, regarded metropolitan influence as critical for colonial concerns. This chapter considers lobbyists campaigning on the Cape Colony or New South Wales, demonstrating that lobbyists who dealt with quite different issues nevertheless shared an understanding of colonial power and how it might be manipulated. As the networks of colonial lobbyists overlapped one another, the chapter looks…
Asserting metropolitan control
This chapter examines the response of the metropolitan government to the challenges posed by the British Empire, and specifically to New South Wales and the Cape Colony, between 1815 and 1836. It emphasises the Colonial Office's concern simultaneously to control the governors of crown colonies, to limit their power, while maintaining their authority. The Colonial Office's response to the contemporary enthusiasm for good government can be seen in …
Index
Networking the empire
Networks of personal connections were of critical importance to colonial governance in the early nineteenth century. The networks which had most influence in colonial governance transmitted information, position and power via well-developed links to high-profile individuals in Britain, and particularly London. Trans-colonial networks encouraged the transmission of ideas, and experience, through the empire. While there were important bonds between…
Colonial connections, 1815–45
1. Introduction I - Metropolitan concerns 2. Networking the Empire 3. Asserting metropolitan control: the Colonial Office 1815-36 II - Colonial struggles 4. The isolation of governors 5. Traffic: the unofficial correspondence of colonial officials 6. Colonial lobbyists: tactics and networks III - Agendas for imperial reform 7. An information revolution 8. Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index
Aunt Anna's Report’
Investigating Empire
In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, British debates about colonial rule and, in particular, the treatment of subject peoples brought practical, financial and religious concerns together. As a means of addressing these problems, the British government despatched a series of travelling commissions to survey and reform the governance of its empire. British-based humanitarians and abolitionists drew on anxieties about the corrupting influence of empi…
Breaking Britannia's Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain's Imperial Historiography
Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire's impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’…
Networks of Empire. Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
The British Empire
This rewarding collection is a sophisticated and idiosyncratic companion to recent research on the British Empire, rather than an introduction to imperial history or its historiography. Several essays are worthy of applause; others are provocative, if not conclusive. Although some critical debates are excluded (notably, a sustained discussion of gender and empire; the omission justified by the subject's ubiquity) and other ‘themes’ are still in t…
Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery
This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British cam…
Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines
Journal Article Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin's Critique of Missions and Anti-slavery Get access Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw lectures in history at Royal Holloway University of London. Her book, Colonial Connections 1815–43: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, was published by Manchester University Press in 2005. [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic G…
Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism
The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that
Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession
Imperial Citizenship
Daniel Gorman's new study argues for a reassessment of the relationship between the Dominions and Britain and a reassertion of its significance, through a consideration of the British Empire's ideological foundations. Gorman wants to disrupt the assumptions of post-colonial scholarship, which, he claims, have unduly homogenised the category of coloniser and falsely attributed to Britons ‘a common imperial motive’. Certainly, Gorman's study of com…
Settler Society in the Australian Colonies
Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture." Australian Historical Studies, 47(1), pp. 161–162
Empire and Globalisation
This commendable work re-examines long-standing debates about the economics of the nineteenth-century British Empire in the light of cultural considerations. Bravely perhaps, Magee and Thompson move from statistical analysis to ruminations on the role of identity and, in particular, ‘Britishness’, in the increasing interpenetration of the globe. Introductory essays on the British World and networked conceptions of empire are followed by three cha…
Modernizing Nature
S. Ravi Rajan's book demonstrates that imperial forestry was profoundly shaped by continental European methods and foresters, rather than being ‘merely a product of colonial expediency’. Rajan identifies a series of historiographical gaps, including the neglect of scientific communities, institutions and the discipline of forestry; insufficient consideration of the ‘historical baggage of agendas’ stemming from the science of forestry's European p…
Briefing
Journal Article Briefing: Rhodes House and the Rhodes House Library: An Historical Survey of the Intentions of the Rhodes Trust, 1925–1929 Get access Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 401, 1 October 2001, Pages 641–651, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/100.401.641 Published: 01 October 2001
Aunt Anna's Report’
The Routledge Companion to Decolonization, by Dietmar Rothermund
Journal Article The Routledge Companion to Decolonization, by Dietmar Rothermund Get access The Routledge Companion to Decolonization, by Dietmar Rothermund. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. xii + 365 pp. £60.00 (hardback), £17.99 (paperback). ISBN 9-780-41535-632-9 (hardback), ISBN 9-780-41535-633-6 (paperback). Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African…
Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines
Journal Article Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin's Critique of Missions and Anti-slavery Get access Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw lectures in history at Royal Holloway University of London. Her book, Colonial Connections 1815–43: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, was published by Manchester University Press in 2005. [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic G…
The British Empire
This rewarding collection is a sophisticated and idiosyncratic companion to recent research on the British Empire, rather than an introduction to imperial history or its historiography. Several essays are worthy of applause; others are provocative, if not conclusive. Although some critical debates are excluded (notably, a sustained discussion of gender and empire; the omission justified by the subject's ubiquity) and other ‘themes’ are still in t…
Modernizing Nature
S. Ravi Rajan's book demonstrates that imperial forestry was profoundly shaped by continental European methods and foresters, rather than being ‘merely a product of colonial expediency’. Rajan identifies a series of historiographical gaps, including the neglect of scientific communities, institutions and the discipline of forestry; insufficient consideration of the ‘historical baggage of agendas’ stemming from the science of forestry's European p…
Imperial Citizenship
Daniel Gorman's new study argues for a reassessment of the relationship between the Dominions and Britain and a reassertion of its significance, through a consideration of the British Empire's ideological foundations. Gorman wants to disrupt the assumptions of post-colonial scholarship, which, he claims, have unduly homogenised the category of coloniser and falsely attributed to Britons ‘a common imperial motive’. Certainly, Gorman's study of com…
Books
Networks of Empire. Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
Empire and Globalisation
This commendable work re-examines long-standing debates about the economics of the nineteenth-century British Empire in the light of cultural considerations. Bravely perhaps, Magee and Thompson move from statistical analysis to ruminations on the role of identity and, in particular, ‘Britishness’, in the increasing interpenetration of the globe. Introductory essays on the British World and networked conceptions of empire are followed by three cha…
Colonial Voices
Journal Article Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840–1940, by Joy Damousi Get access Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840–1940, by Joy Damousi (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2010; pp. 315. £55). Zoë Laidlaw Zoë Laidlaw Royal Holloway, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXVII, Issue 524, February 20…
Investigating Empire
In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, British debates about colonial rule and, in particular, the treatment of subject peoples brought practical, financial and religious concerns together. As a means of addressing these problems, the British government despatched a series of travelling commissions to survey and reform the governance of its empire. British-based humanitarians and abolitionists drew on anxieties about the corrupting influence of empi…
Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery
This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British cam…
Breaking Britannia's Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain's Imperial Historiography
Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire's impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’…
Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession
General editor’s introduction
A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal m…
Conclusion
This chapter provides an overview the key themes discussed in the previous chapters of this book. The book considers how new visual and statistical conceptualisations of empire took hold in the Colonial Office really affected colonial governance. Through its examination of early nineteenth-century networks of personal connection, the book has suggested one way in which the British colonial experience, and the operation of imperial and colonial ru…
Dedication
Traffic
This chapter examines the motivations, mechanisms and effects of private correspondence between colonial officials and the metropolitan government. Unofficial correspondence between colonial civil servants and members of the metropolitan Colonial Office was one of the most important strands in the web that constituted colonial governance. Colonial officials and their families extended and consolidated their networks of metropolitan contacts outsi…
The isolation of governors
Abbreviations
Appendices
A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal m…
An information revolution
This chapter examines the change in the Colonial Office's approach to the task of colonial governance at the end of the 1830s. It demonstrates that the challenges of controlling an ever-expanding empire, when combined with personal politics, and metropolitan intellectual movements, forced the Colonial Office to reassess the means by which imperial influence was exerted. Demands for colonial information emerged during metropolitan debates about co…
Colonial lobbyists
Edward Macarthur, like all the colonial lobbyists and officials, regarded metropolitan influence as critical for colonial concerns. This chapter considers lobbyists campaigning on the Cape Colony or New South Wales, demonstrating that lobbyists who dealt with quite different issues nevertheless shared an understanding of colonial power and how it might be manipulated. As the networks of colonial lobbyists overlapped one another, the chapter looks…
Asserting metropolitan control
This chapter examines the response of the metropolitan government to the challenges posed by the British Empire, and specifically to New South Wales and the Cape Colony, between 1815 and 1836. It emphasises the Colonial Office's concern simultaneously to control the governors of crown colonies, to limit their power, while maintaining their authority. The Colonial Office's response to the contemporary enthusiasm for good government can be seen in …
History (36 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Political science (26 works) · Colonialism (24 works) · Australian History and Society (22 works) · History (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Archaeology (20 works) · Empire (19 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (17 works)