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Power that Hurts: Harriet Gore Browne and the Perplexities of Living Inside Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Charlotte Macdonald
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Abstract

Facing the crisis of a colony at war, Harriet Gore Browne experienced a crisis of mind as the wife of a governor heavily criticized for acting unjustly and illegally in provoking a racial conflict. Analysing the intimacies of power, the article depicts the doubts, pain and haunting pressure of violence on those proximate to as well as subject to imperial authority. Harriet Gore Browne’s intense scrutiny of her own and her husband’s actions expose an interior questioning of the legitimate use of force against indigenous resistance. The pain running through Harriet Gore Browne’s journals, tormenting her days and nights, speaks to the centrality of race, emotion and the intimate in colonial rule.

Keywords

Intimacyracial conflictaffectpowerinteriority
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule , April 2018 , pp. 16 - 32
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Charlotte Macdonald is Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her publications include Strong, Beautiful and Modern (2011); Women Writing Home (2006), ‘My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates’ with Frances Porter (1995). She is currently working on garrison and empire in the mid-nineteenth century (www.soldiersofempire.nz).

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