The British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century had many reasons to be anxious. Rebellions, uprisings and wars proliferated across the outposts of empire, from the “mutiny” in India and revolt in Ceylon to cattle killing in the Eastern Cape and rebellion in Jamaica. It has been argued that these crises on the periphery precipitated an ideological crisis in the metropolis. In the face of widespread unrest, humanitarianism—a powerful influence in the administration of empire, particularly with the abolition of slavery—came under attack and was eventually overcome by the pseudoscience of essentialized racial difference. Consequently, so the argument goes, the “civilizing mission” of the early nineteenth century gave way to a much harder-edged version of imperialism.

Kenton Storey's new book, Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press, questions this conventional narrative. Using two settler outposts—New Zealand and Vancouver Island—as case studies, Storey argues that discourses of humanitarianism did not fade away. Rather, the familiar, evangelically based version inspired a newer, “often cynical,” “rhetorical” humanitarianism (8). This rhetorical version was far from a spent force. Instead, wielded by the fledgling settler colonies themselves, it was used in forging that harder-edged imperialism. Storey tracks the use of this discursive form by analyzing the colonial press, pamphlets, and guidebooks. As his study reveals, settlers used rhetorical humanitarianism as both rationale and camouflage for their punitive actions against indigenous populations, whether justifying evictions from Vancouver Island or war in Taranaki. Newspapers in Victoria argued that evicting local indigenous groups would ultimately help them become civilized (58). At the same time, papers in New Zealand ingeniously argued that war would end Māori isolationism and speed up the civilizing process, by “compelling them to embrace all aspects of British culture” (72). In the best humanitarian style, a local paper argued it was “because we cannot help regarding the Māori race as fellow men … that we would desire to see the British flag flying over every pā [Māori community] though the islands” (72).

Vancouver Island and New Zealand are an unusual, but not illogical, pairing. Both were British colonies, both were settled comparatively late, and both had large, but not overwhelming, indigenous populations. By adopting a comparative approach, Storey is able to make a case for the endless flexibility of rhetorical humanitarianism. He suggests that in both cases, settler anxieties—over land, violence, and even the nature of “British” masculinity—fueled the continued use of a humanitarian-seeming discourse. But comparison also allows him to distinguish between his chosen locales. While New Zealand and Vancouver Island shared these anxieties, contrasting colonial contexts meant that they played out differently. In particular, Storey draws our attention to each colony's connection with the metropolis, suggesting that the nature of these links affected the ways in which humanitarianism was deployed. The New Zealand press, for example, was conscious of needing imperial support for the Taranaki War. Knowing its stories would be reprinted in metropolitan newspapers, it deployed respectable-sounding humanitarian arguments accordingly. It also engaged in print skirmishes with a few old-style evangelical humanitarians who were also putting their metropolitan connections to work. Victoria's editors, with weaker communications links to the metropolis, did not have London looking over their shoulder. Without a metropolitan audience to appease, the rhetorical strategy of emphasizing indigenous “progress” toward “civilization” gave way to much harsher arguments about “wretched” and “lazy” Indians, undercutting the place of First Nations people in the colony.

The unevenness of imperial press coverage is the subject of its own chapter. This is welcome: at times, some of the earlier chapters referred to metropolitan influence without analyzing or quantifying it. Vancouver Island did not garner much in the way of imperial press coverage, so here most of the analysis on metropolitan attitudes comes via guidebooks. But New Zealand's war in Taranaki was a different matter, earning regular coverage. The Times published 37 articles on a war that lasted exactly a year. Yet there was no single dominant interpretation of events. Storey suggests that the diverse journalism of this moment was very different from reporting on the Indian Rebellion, for instance, and gives a number of plausible reasons for this, including the wide range of colonial connections generating news about New Zealand. However, it is also possible that some of the ambivalence reflects the distance of these connections. India may simply have been of more interest to more readers than a confusing and remote conflict in a small colony. Here, it would have been interesting to compare news volumes.

Attention to the nature of colonial connection speaks to other important historiographical debates beyond the putative demise of humanitarianism. First, Storey's painstaking tracing of connections within and between the colonies and the metropolis is guided by Tony Ballantyne's idea of empire as web (indeed, the book began its life as a PhD thesis supervised by Ballantyne). By carefully considering the relevance of each connection, Storey does not give any thread in this web more weight than it can bear. Second, by working with two settler outposts, he not only helps overcome the former white-settler colonies’ tendency to study themselves in splendid isolation, but he also contributes to shifting the imperial historiography's center of gravity away from the metropolis and out toward its still lesser-considered settler edges. Storey's reinterpretation of humanitarianism illustrates the potential benefits of this double decentering, away from both nation and metropolis, though there may be questions about whether the discourse he analyses, being humanitarian in form rather than function, might then actually support the older narrative of mid-century decline. Finally, he contributes to a growing literature on the nature of imperial press culture, adding New Zealand and Vancouver Island as evidence of its uneven interaction and influence in the mid-nineteenth century. These interventions mean this study of an odd couple at opposite edges of the Pacific will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars.