As Patrick Wolfe has explained, settler colonialism is a unique colonial formation wherein settlers seek to ‘replace’ natives on their land. Unlike in plantation colonies, in settler colonies Europeans sought a permanent stake in the land, rather than the more detached opportunity simply to exploit its resources.^[28] Accordingly, in the Caribbean colonies, Britain’s interest lay in securing a cheap labour force (initially through slavery but, post-emancipation in 1834, through waged labour), but in the Australian colonies, the priority was wresting exclusive control of the land.^[29] Within this comparative structural framework, Eyre’s administrations highlight the central issues at stake in the colonial governance of settler and plantation economies.

In the Australian case, Eyre’s writings demonstrate how the Indigenous population’s claims to sovereignty could threaten British intentions if they could not be suitably diminished. That is, while his Journals of Expeditions of Discovery^[30] put forth the case for Aboriginal sovereignty, his later pronouncements outline a system for ensuring its rapid demise. In the remote desert regions, Eyre came to depend on Aborigines for his very survival. While some explorers might have been less willing to expose themselves in this way,^[31] Eyre’s openness to expressing his vulnerability led him to seek other ways of knowing the land, enabling him to survive in extraordinarily harsh circumstances by locating mounds of edible eggs among the desert dunes, for example, or collecting early morning dew from native bushes. It was during this period that Eyre came to appreciate more fully Aboriginal peoples’ attachments to land and the ‘injustice…of the white man’s intrusion upon [their] territory’. Explaining their actions in defending their sovereign presence, Eyre asserted that ‘our being in their country at all is, so far as their ideas of right and wrong are concerned, altogether an act of intrusion and aggression’.^[32] In recognising that ‘our presence and settlement, in any particular locality, do, in point of fact, actually dispossess the aboriginal inhabitants’, Eyre makes a further plea against settler violence against them:

Eyre openly dismissed the universalist pretensions of the law of nations (as international law was then known) as ‘a law that provides not for the safety, privileges, and protection of the Aborigines, and owners of the soil, but which merely lays down the rules for the direction of the privileged robber in the distribution of the booty of any newly discovered country’.^[34] Once he became Resident Magistrate and Protector, however, Eyre soon reined in the troubling implications of his earlier outspokenness. In assuming more direct responsibility for colonial interests, Eyre not only set about ‘pacifying’ the overland route so that more and more settlers could arrive from the east. He also wrote a companion volume to his journals entitled Manners and Customs of Aborigines and the State of their Relations with Europeans.^[35] In contrast with his earlier criticisms, Eyre now sought to bolster British sovereignty in two key ways: through the discursive containment of Aboriginal claims and the administrative regulation of their lives and culture.

Eyre explained that only the elders were legitimate sovereigns. While lamenting the ‘fatal and melancholy effect which contact with civilisation seems ever to produce upon a savage people’,^[36] only Aborigines ‘in their natural state’ could retain a sovereign presence in the Australian colonies. It was ‘a matter of deep regret’, he continued, ‘to see them gradually dwindling away and disappearing before the presence of the Europeans’.^[37] Meanwhile, those Aborigines who were no longer able to live a traditional lifestyle would be subject to management by the State, whose ‘duty’ was to break down Aboriginal culture: ‘I cannot persuade myself, that any real or permanent good will ever be effected, until the influence exercised over the young by the adults be destroyed, and they are freed from the contagious effects of their example.’^[38] State control of Aboriginal people could be achieved through their isolation on reserves. If found in Adelaide without permission, they ‘should be taken up by the police and slightly punished’, although they would be rewarded for sending their children to school or for giving up ‘the performance of any of their savage or barbarous ceremonies upon their children’.^[39]

In their entirety, Eyre’s Australian writings indicate that British and Aboriginal claims to sovereignty—understood as exclusively European under international law—were incommensurable.^[40] His ultimate rejection of Aboriginal sovereignty was based on the idea of an authentic Aboriginality that racialised Indigenous peoples in such a way as to reduce their challenge to British interests. As others have also elaborated, this powerful notion still informs the operations of race in the Australian context, where recent recognition of native title favours the state by limiting eligibility to those who can prove continuous attachments to land and culture after generations of dispossession.^[41] Eyre’s recommendations for encouraging cultural breakdown, meanwhile, were eventually reflected in the type of bureaucratic regulation that would characterise Aboriginal peoples’ lives in Australia well into the twentieth century and beyond.^[42] Laced here and there with a menacingly mundane coercion, such procedures made a mockery of Britain’s claim that, no matter their lack of political rights, Aborigines were British subjects who were nevertheless entitled to the equal force and protection of the law.

Eyre’s quite different understanding of the challenge to British sovereignty in the Caribbean, on the other hand, reflects the structural distinctions between colonies of settlement and colonies of exploitation. As observed above, in plantation economies, British economic interest lay in controlling the labour rather than the land of the colonised population. Moreover, whereas the urgency to defend British sovereignty in settler colonies such as Australia commonly diminished over time, as settler hegemony increased, the end of slavery in the middle decades of the nineteenth century served to further destabilise governments in the Caribbean. Emancipation had not only required Europeans to reformulate labour relations, it meant facing the fact that while Europeans had always been outnumbered in the Caribbean, the people they had once enslaved had been notionally transformed into free, fully sovereign individuals who could potentially vote them out at the ballot box. A history of riots and rebellions had long unnerved the local elite, but once freedpeople (as ex-slaves were known) could no longer be openly coerced, their demographic strength had to be reckoned with in different ways.

When Eyre arrived on St Vincent in 1854, 20 years after emancipation, it was clear that freedom meant little more than a simple release from servitude. There were few changes in the political order, while freedpeople who wanted to establish themselves as an independent peasantry were forced by colonial governments to labour for wages in the faltering plantations. Eyre’s sensitivity to the need to entrench British rule, already well honed through his experiences in Australia and New Zealand,was heightened by evidence of growing discontent in the community and his consciousness that Europeans formed such a small minority. As conditions worsened, Eyre decided that exercising his authority at the least sign of resistance would not only demonstrate his worthiness as a representative of the British Crown, it might be the only way to stem a more generalised rebellion that risked bringing down British sovereignty altogether. Throughout his administrations in the Caribbean, as we have already seen in the Australian case, the limits of a disinterested, universal rule of law would once again be tested and race would similarly be deployed in the defence of British interests.

When Eyre became responsible for governing the larger and more volatile colony of Jamaica in 1862, tensions were already widespread. In the next few years, economic depression exacerbated the hardships of the people. Eyre extended sentences for poverty-related crimes such as theft and vagrancy, authorised the use of whipping and the treadmill, and established voluntary militias ‘which could at any time be called out in aid of the civil power to suppress any riot or disturbance’.^[43] Eyre’s relentless enforcement of his authority, however, ironically reduced its effectiveness, openly displaying to a disaffected population the government’s ultimate dependence on force. Public opposition to Eyre’s repressive measures gathered momentum.

Eyre’s growing insecurity was also evident in the way he spoke of freedpeople. In 1864, he described ex-slaves as a peasant ‘class’ who would be eligible for equality once they could demonstrate ‘civilised’ values. He trusted that with help from the missionaries they would soon become ‘as industrious as honest as truthful as virtuous as are the peasantry of any other Country’.^[44] By the next year, however, as protests about social conditions in Jamaica increased, Eyre described them as a ‘race’ of people ‘only just emerging from…a state of barbarism’, whose antisocial behaviour appeared impervious to reform. Accordingly, their economic distress—and Jamaica’s decline—might well be due not so much to external circumstances as to ‘something very wrong and defective both in the habits and the character of the people’.^[45] This shift from the social category of class to the biological category of race indicated that freedpeople’s inferiority, which had once been evident in their slavery, was now considered to be immutable, effectively reinstating their susceptibility to repression.

The British Government and the local elite supported Eyre’s administration despite protests by some clergy and missionaries that the widespread distress in the colony had to be addressed by other measures. By October 1865, in Morant Bay, when armed protesters burnt down the court house, liberated prisoners and murdered local officials, the European population’s long-held fears of a widespread rebellion prompted Eyre’s declaration of martial law. Once the extended display of deaths, floggings and house burnings could no longer be condoned in England, however, Eyre relied yet again on race to justify his actions. In evidence to the Royal Commission, he described freedpeople as ‘a race little removed in many respects from absolute savages’.^[46]

By the time Eyre left the colony early the next year, prospects for more a democratic social order in Jamaica seemed more remote than ever. In the aftermath of Morant Bay, the assembly had decided to stem once and for all the uncertainties of representative government post emancipation, by voting to revoke its own powers and revert to the perceived safety of crown colony rule.

The disinterested principles of the rule of law purported to distinguish the British Empire from the more brutal undertakings of its rivals. When analysing the ‘transnational’ dimensions of Eyre’s career within the comparative framework adopted above, however, Eyre’s writings in Australia and the Caribbean appear consistent in their defence of interests that were far from universal.

As I have argued elsewhere, calls to suspend the rule of law for Aborigines alone accompanied the spread of pastoralism throughout the Australian continent.^[47] Indeed, colonial law helped shore up British sovereignty and secure the transfer of the land by countenancing a host of discriminatory provisions otherwise condemned in law. These consisted not only of the types of bureaucratic repression outlined above, they included legislation that made Aborigines subject to summary justice with no rights of appeal, the banning of testimony and the condoning of exemplary executions, and even outright declarations of martial law—and all of this quite apart from the unregulated violence of the frontier.

Meanwhile, although Eyre’s apparently exceptional resort to maximal repression in Jamaica has tended to dominate historical inquiry into his Caribbean administrations, a comparative approach places such so-called ‘emergencies’ in a global historical context and demonstrates their relative ubiquity in colonial situations.^[48] Such an analysis identifies the real extent of racialised violence that was deployed in upholding British interests throughout the empire, while also directing attention to the very notion of emergency—no less now than in the past—in justifying the suspension of the rule of law and the use of discriminatory procedures.

Eyre’s participation in these broader practices attests to his awareness of the strategic significance of law and race in supporting British sovereignty and authority at critical points of colonial development. In Australia, his use of the notion of ‘authenticity’ underscored his proposals to deny Aboriginal peoples’ culture and sovereignty and authorise their subjection to British rule. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, his construction of the alleged ‘immutability’ of freedpeople’s inferiority helped deliver them up for renewed repression, thereby reconciling their troubling sovereign subjecthood to the demands of the plantation economy in the post-emancipation era.

Moreover, while the capacity of the rule of law to tolerate exceptional provisions on the basis of race is particularly clear in the colonies, such techniques of governance are, of course, by no means confined to the past. In the Australian case, in recent years, race and law have once again acted as prominent signals of discrimination against Indigenous peoples,^[49] asylum-seekers, refugees and other minority groups in the defence of the national interest. Similarly, Eyre’s abandonment at the hands of the British Government, which had condoned his actions in Jamaica until his exposure of the law’s violence was no longer tolerable domestically, is also telling in the present. As Terry Eagleton recently observed in relation to the demonising force of the notion of ‘terrorist’, for example, the classic idea of the ‘scapegoat’ makes it possible for the law, and the nation’s citizens who put their faith in that law, to turn a blind eye to structural injustice:

Finally, analysing the relationship between biography and history with reference to the concepts of race and the rule of law helps clarify the European-ness of present-day understandings of sovereignty, whose lineage is enmeshed not merely in the British context we have discussed here, but in centuries of broad-based Western expansion. As long as sovereignty’s history as a ‘discourse of conquest’^[51] can still be transcended in law, and its exclusivist claims remain unchallenged, nation-states will continue to call on its legitimising force to deny the aspirations of Indigenous peoples, and other minority groups, to exercise their sovereignty. We need look no further than the refusal of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, to understand the contemporary import that questions of indigenous sovereignty still hold for settler states. By seeking to look beyond the self-serving confines of nationalist frameworks, however, it becomes possible to appreciate just how comprehensively, and for how long, indigenous disadvantage has been manufactured to serve the interests of others.