"Conciliate their affections": An intellectual history of conciliation in British colonial governance in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This thesis undertakes an analysis of the phrase, “to conciliate their affections” as it appeared in Governor Phillip’s Instructions in 1788 and argues it should not simply be equated, as it has regularly been in Australian historiography, to friendship. The thesis provides an intellectual history of conciliation to recover a more nuanced meaning of the phrase. This method combines an examination of the use of the phrase in a range of colonial texts, with an exploration of its practice in two British colonial contexts in the eighteenth century – British North America and the colony of New South Wales. The longer history of ideas of friendship in European thought are also examined; particularly those that relate to relations with non–Europeans. These ideas form the intellectual backdrop against which decisions of practical governance were taking place in the colonies. By examining conciliation in this way, we gain insights into the disjuncture between the rhetoric of conciliation devised in the metropole, and the practice of conciliation in the colonies. By looking at two geographically diverse but temporally adjacent colonial contexts in this way we also gain insight into the continuity of conciliation as a strategy of colonial governance. This intellectual historical and colonial contextualisation of conciliation complicates understandings of Australia’s colonisation as being unique in Britain’s Empire. Historians of Australia have frequently claimed that Phillip’s Instruction to conciliate was an ‘Enlightened’ and ‘humanitarian’ attempt to forge friendship and was opposed to the exercise of violence against Indigenous peoples. In this thesis it is argued that conciliation was a strategy of colonial government incorporating a range of techniques including violence, as well as the ‘civilizing’ of Indigenous peoples through the inculcation of European ideas and modes of living. These techniques were premised on the superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans and relied on a series of justifications for the expansion of empire and the restriction of Indigenous peoples’ rights. Furthermore, conciliation was a strategy that primarily considered the furtherance of Britain’s colonial interests. In concluding the thesis, I consider the implications of this interpretation of conciliation for current debates about Australia’s settler colonial past, and its legacy in the present.