Esme Cleall
Biographic Data
| ID | 782733 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Esme Cleall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Esme |
| FAMILY NAME | Cleall |
| SIGNATURE | CLEALL E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9745-6711 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Culture Talks: Attenborough Arts Centre and the Institute for Advanced Studies join in dialogue with artist Sabrina Tirvengadum at the University of Leicester, 11 March 2025
In Search of Ned: A Zulu Man in Mid-Victorian Britain
This article takes a micro-history approach, focusing on the life of a man identified only in the British records as “Ned” in order to illuminate the complexity and slipperiness of categories of “race.” Ned had lived in the Zulu Kingdom and, after fleeing a civil war there, became employed in Natal by an English colonist-settler, Thomas Handley. Ned traveled with the Handley family to England in 1859, and during this time, unexpectedly “disappear…
Disability and postcolonialism
Imperial optics and colonial disability: Missions to blind and deaf children in 'the East', c. 1880-1939
This article explores missions to blind and deaf children in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, Sri Lanka, and China which were established by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. Manly staffed by women, these missions can be seen as innovative in the colonial treatment of disability in South and East Asia, pioneering the use of sign languages, tactile alphabets, and oralism as methods of special education in what they…
The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts and ‘Southern Circulations’
This book explores the emergence of ‘Australasia’ as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. ‘Australasia’ emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian c…
Global Histories of Disability, 1700-2015: Power, Place and People
Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and Its Empire, c. 1800–1914
Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic…
Disability as a Problem of Humanity in Scottish Enlightenment Thought
This article makes a case that disability, particularly visual, hearing, and speech impairments, played a significant role in Scottish Enlightenment thought. Focusing on the work of Dugald Stewart, and in particular on his essay ‘Some account of a boy born blind and deaf’, we argue that disability was a deep preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who used it as a test case for various important philosophical questions including those co…
Europe After Empire: Decolonisation, Society and Culture
Europe After Empire: Decolonisation, Society and Culture." Cultural and Social History, 15(2), pp. 290–291
From Divine Judgement to Colonial Courts: Missionary ‘Justice’ in British India, c. 1840–1914
‘Justice’ is a word scattered through missionary writings. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries connected themselves with like-minded communities of opinion with labels such as ‘friends of justice and humanity’, the protectors of ‘kindness and justice’, or ‘friends of justice, humanity and religion’. In their published writings, missionaries wrote of the ‘justice [and] beneficence’ of British rule in India and of missionary work as eff…
Civilising Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe, ed. Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim
This collection, edited by Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim, is a conceptual history of the emotions bound up in ideas about civilisation and civility across a broad geographical area. It is a theoretical work that takes seriously the task of understanding the epistemological and semantic roots of the concepts around which it is based, and unpicking them in the tradition of intellectual history. The book bills itself as a ‘global history’, but, …
Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire
This article explores an emigration scheme envisioned by Jane Groom, a deaf woman, whereby deaf working-class people from the East End of London would be relocated to Manitoba. During the 1880s and 1890s about fifty families emigrated under Groom’s auspices. This article has three aims. Firstly, recovering the life of Jane Groom enables us to think about disabled activism and agency in a global arena: her activities were widely discussed both in …
Silencing Deafness: Displacing Disability in the Nineteenth Century
This article traces the way in which the language of displacement and silence were used in nineteenth-century discussions of deafness and connects this tendency to the marginalised place deaf experience occupies historically. Throughout the nineteenth century, a period which saw the consolidation of ‘the deaf and dumb’ as a social category, the word ‘forgetting’ crept into numerous discussions of deafness by both deaf and hearing commentators. So…
Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, southern Africa, 1850-1890
Mission Station Christianity is a social anthropology of Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book explores two features of Norweg
Deaf Connections and Global Conversations: Deafness and education in and beyond the British Empire, ca. 1800-1900
This article argues that, despite strong metaphorical ties between deafness and the inability to connect, nineteenth-century deaf networks provide an excellent example of how ideas and identities circulated through transnational and transcolonial networks. Educational institutions facilitated the spread of signing. Deaf pedagogies were developed and contested across multiple sites. Ideologies of ableism (the privileging of the young non-disabled …
Orientalising deafness: Race and disability in imperial Britain
This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impair…
Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-East India, by Andrew May
Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism tells the story of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) and its work in the Khasi Hills of north-east India. The Khasi Hills
Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 by Dianne Lawrence (review)
Reviewed by: Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 by Dianne Lawrence Esme Cleall Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 By Dianne Lawrence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. When thinking of colonial elites, images of verandas, many-layered dresses apparently out of place in their sultry surroundings, or pianos carefully transplanted to overseas sitting rooms, come readily to mind, bu…
Deaf to the Word’: Gender, Deafness and Protestantism in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and Ireland
Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire
In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that “[o…
Emancipation, Slave-Ownership and the Remaking of The British Imperial World, University College London, 29-31 March 2012
This conference came out of the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project (LBS) at University College London. Since April 2009 the LBS group has been investigating the legacies of British slavery, and in particular, the afterlife of the £20 million paid to slave-owners in compensation for the loss of their ‘property’ on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Nick Draper has been exploring the financial and economic …
Illness on the Mission Station: Sickness and the Presentation of the ‘Self’
In the previous chapter, I explored how missionaries responded to sickness overseas and how they developed a framework that powerfully linked sickness, ‘heathenism’ and ‘otherness’. In claiming a healing role for missionaries, they indirectly aligned themselves with ‘healthiness’. In this chapter, I ask how, given this framework, missionaries responded to their own illnesses and those of their friends and colleagues in the ’foreign field’. In doi…
Pathologising Heathenism: Discourses of Sickness and the Rise of Medical Missions
In both missionary discourse, and wider imperial imagery, Africa was constructed as a ‘sick continent’, a ‘wound’ or a ‘sore’ upon the earth. As Megan Vaughan writes: ‘From Livingstone onwards, reports from Central and Eastern Africa insisted that the continent was “sick” and suffering from the evils of the slave trade, from paganism and the creeping forces of Islam’, images she suggests were important in demarcating Africans as people to be piti…
Introduction: Difference and Discourse in the British Empire
When Richard Lovett came to write a history of the London Missionary Society (LMS) on its centenary in the 1890s, he prefaced his two-volume work with three quotations. The first was taken from the Book of Mark (Mark, iv, 30-32): ‘How shall we liken the Kingdom of God?’ ‘Like a mustard seed’, came the scriptural reply, from which, despite its small appearance, great branches could flourish.1 It was the LMS itself, of course, that Lovett saw as th…
Re-Making Homes: Ambiguous Encounters and Domestic Transgressions
There is no doubt that families exercise strong social, economic and psychic binds, pulling their members together and suggesting shared identity and belonging. By presenting families as set types, missionaries exaggerated, almost reified, this commonality in their writing. But families are fluid constructs, whatever the illusion of fixity. Family members come and go, not least in missionary families where birth rates and death rates were high. B…
Orientalising deafness: Race and disability in imperial Britain
This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impair…
Disability and postcolonialism
Silencing Deafness: Displacing Disability in the Nineteenth Century
This article traces the way in which the language of displacement and silence were used in nineteenth-century discussions of deafness and connects this tendency to the marginalised place deaf experience occupies historically. Throughout the nineteenth century, a period which saw the consolidation of ‘the deaf and dumb’ as a social category, the word ‘forgetting’ crept into numerous discussions of deafness by both deaf and hearing commentators. So…
Deaf to the Word’: Gender, Deafness and Protestantism in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and Ireland
Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire
In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that “[o…
In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice, Principles of Righteousness’: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900
This article explores the controversy around the suppression of the Langeberg Rebellion and subsequent punitive indenture of the ‘Bechuana rebels’, a serious episode of colonial violence which, like many others, has been forgotten. In recovering this episode, I argue that such controversies were crisis points in wider attitudes towards empire and colonial relationships. The article focuses on what the debate reveals about the articulation of four…
Rethinking the History of Feminism
With the British Women's Liberation Movement celebrating its 40th anniversary this spring, we have seen a proliferation of thinking about the history of feminism: reflections, reminiscences and nos
The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain 1858–1914
Reconfiguring the British' Seminars and Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, January-March 2007, London
As meeting-place for historians in London, the Institute for Historical Research (IHR) hosts a number of seminar series where people present and discuss their research. The ‘Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World’ seminar meets fortnightly, and is concerned with thinking about British history in its wider imperial and global contexts. The seminar marked 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave-trade, by pausing to reflect on …
Reconfiguring the British' Seminars and Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, January-March 2007, London
As meeting-place for historians in London, the Institute for Historical Research (IHR) hosts a number of seminar series where people present and discuss their research. The ‘Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World’ seminar meets fortnightly, and is concerned with thinking about British history in its wider imperial and global contexts. The seminar marked 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave-trade, by pausing to reflect on …
The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain 1858–1914
Missionaries, Masculinities and War: The London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, c.1860–1899
This article will explore the representation of missionary masculinities in London Missionary Society (LMS) periodicals. Despite the increasing numbers of single female missionaries sent by the LMS to the ‘East’ during the nineteenth century, the southern African mission field remained, for the most part, resolutely male. Yet, to date, there has been little consideration of the male missionary as a gendered subject. This paper seeks to explore ho…
Rethinking the History of Feminism
With the British Women's Liberation Movement celebrating its 40th anniversary this spring, we have seen a proliferation of thinking about the history of feminism: reflections, reminiscences and nos
Illness on the Mission Station: Sickness and the Presentation of the ‘Self’
In the previous chapter, I explored how missionaries responded to sickness overseas and how they developed a framework that powerfully linked sickness, ‘heathenism’ and ‘otherness’. In claiming a healing role for missionaries, they indirectly aligned themselves with ‘healthiness’. In this chapter, I ask how, given this framework, missionaries responded to their own illnesses and those of their friends and colleagues in the ’foreign field’. In doi…
Pathologising Heathenism: Discourses of Sickness and the Rise of Medical Missions
In both missionary discourse, and wider imperial imagery, Africa was constructed as a ‘sick continent’, a ‘wound’ or a ‘sore’ upon the earth. As Megan Vaughan writes: ‘From Livingstone onwards, reports from Central and Eastern Africa insisted that the continent was “sick” and suffering from the evils of the slave trade, from paganism and the creeping forces of Islam’, images she suggests were important in demarcating Africans as people to be piti…
Introduction: Difference and Discourse in the British Empire
When Richard Lovett came to write a history of the London Missionary Society (LMS) on its centenary in the 1890s, he prefaced his two-volume work with three quotations. The first was taken from the Book of Mark (Mark, iv, 30-32): ‘How shall we liken the Kingdom of God?’ ‘Like a mustard seed’, came the scriptural reply, from which, despite its small appearance, great branches could flourish.1 It was the LMS itself, of course, that Lovett saw as th…
Re-Making Homes: Ambiguous Encounters and Domestic Transgressions
There is no doubt that families exercise strong social, economic and psychic binds, pulling their members together and suggesting shared identity and belonging. By presenting families as set types, missionaries exaggerated, almost reified, this commonality in their writing. But families are fluid constructs, whatever the illusion of fixity. Family members come and go, not least in missionary families where birth rates and death rates were high. B…
Conclusion: Thinking with Missionaries, Thinking about Difference
Writing in the Chronicle in July 1886, the Reverend W. Pierce reflected on a letter he had received from someone he described as ‘a dusty-skinned man, born in the midst of heathenism, but now addressing us in the terms of Christian fellowship’. The letter had renewed Pierce’s confidence in the ‘universality of the kingdom of Christ’, a vision with which many in the 1880s were becoming disillusioned. And it was not surprising, Pierce felt, that fa…
Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History . By Emma Robertson
Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism
Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (2011), xix + 381 (Duke University Press, Durham and London, £67.00/$94.95, paperback £16.99/$25.95). What r
In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice, Principles of Righteousness’: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900
This article explores the controversy around the suppression of the Langeberg Rebellion and subsequent punitive indenture of the ‘Bechuana rebels’, a serious episode of colonial violence which, like many others, has been forgotten. In recovering this episode, I argue that such controversies were crisis points in wider attitudes towards empire and colonial relationships. The article focuses on what the debate reveals about the articulation of four…
Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900
Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 by Dianne Lawrence (review)
Reviewed by: Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 by Dianne Lawrence Esme Cleall Genteel Women: Empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910 By Dianne Lawrence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. When thinking of colonial elites, images of verandas, many-layered dresses apparently out of place in their sultry surroundings, or pianos carefully transplanted to overseas sitting rooms, come readily to mind, bu…
Deaf to the Word’: Gender, Deafness and Protestantism in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and Ireland
Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire
In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that “[o…
Emancipation, Slave-Ownership and the Remaking of The British Imperial World, University College London, 29-31 March 2012
This conference came out of the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project (LBS) at University College London. Since April 2009 the LBS group has been investigating the legacies of British slavery, and in particular, the afterlife of the £20 million paid to slave-owners in compensation for the loss of their ‘property’ on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Nick Draper has been exploring the financial and economic …
Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-East India, by Andrew May
Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism tells the story of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) and its work in the Khasi Hills of north-east India. The Khasi Hills
Silencing Deafness: Displacing Disability in the Nineteenth Century
This article traces the way in which the language of displacement and silence were used in nineteenth-century discussions of deafness and connects this tendency to the marginalised place deaf experience occupies historically. Throughout the nineteenth century, a period which saw the consolidation of ‘the deaf and dumb’ as a social category, the word ‘forgetting’ crept into numerous discussions of deafness by both deaf and hearing commentators. So…
Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, southern Africa, 1850-1890
Mission Station Christianity is a social anthropology of Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book explores two features of Norweg
Deaf Connections and Global Conversations: Deafness and education in and beyond the British Empire, ca. 1800-1900
This article argues that, despite strong metaphorical ties between deafness and the inability to connect, nineteenth-century deaf networks provide an excellent example of how ideas and identities circulated through transnational and transcolonial networks. Educational institutions facilitated the spread of signing. Deaf pedagogies were developed and contested across multiple sites. Ideologies of ableism (the privileging of the young non-disabled …
Orientalising deafness: Race and disability in imperial Britain
This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impair…
Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire
This article explores an emigration scheme envisioned by Jane Groom, a deaf woman, whereby deaf working-class people from the East End of London would be relocated to Manitoba. During the 1880s and 1890s about fifty families emigrated under Groom’s auspices. This article has three aims. Firstly, recovering the life of Jane Groom enables us to think about disabled activism and agency in a global arena: her activities were widely discussed both in …
From Divine Judgement to Colonial Courts: Missionary ‘Justice’ in British India, c. 1840–1914
‘Justice’ is a word scattered through missionary writings. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries connected themselves with like-minded communities of opinion with labels such as ‘friends of justice and humanity’, the protectors of ‘kindness and justice’, or ‘friends of justice, humanity and religion’. In their published writings, missionaries wrote of the ‘justice [and] beneficence’ of British rule in India and of missionary work as eff…
Civilising Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe, ed. Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim
This collection, edited by Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim, is a conceptual history of the emotions bound up in ideas about civilisation and civility across a broad geographical area. It is a theoretical work that takes seriously the task of understanding the epistemological and semantic roots of the concepts around which it is based, and unpicking them in the tradition of intellectual history. The book bills itself as a ‘global history’, but, …
History (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Political science (18 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Empire (15 works) · Ancient history (14 works) · Colonialism (12 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (11 works)