Dr Elizabeth Elbourne
Elizabeth Elbourne is a historian of Britain, the British empire, South Africa and colonial North America.
She has particular interests in the history of settler colonialism; the history of transnational humanitarianism and debates about Indigenous rights; comparative Indigenous history; borderlands violence; and the history of religion. Her geographic focus includes South Africa, the history of colonial North America and the interplay between domestic Britain and the British empire. She is currently working on a history of relationships between hunter-gatherers and the British in the early nineteenth-century, with attention to the San in southern Africa and Haudenosaunee in northeastern North America including British cultural conceptions of hunting and of racial theory set against the background of violent conflict over resources in colonial borderlands. She is also interested in the role of kinship in the British empire and the history of families; in past work she has sought to bring together Haudenosaunee conceptions of the politics of kinship with diverse British views. She is developing further work in the history of housing and debates about “rent” in Britain and the settler empire, also tied to ideas about the politics of domesticity and family. She served as Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of British Studies from 2010-2015. She is currently coediting with Dr. Shino Konishi of the University of Western Australia volume III (on 1750-1914) of the five-volume Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization (forthcoming, 2027). Another project she is pursuing at Cambridge is a micro-history of four San people who performed / were displayed across Britain and their insertion into popular conceptions of evolution and racial theory before Darwin.
At Clare Hall, Elizabeth Elbourne is accompanied by her husband Professor Daniel Weinstock, of the Faculty of Law and Department of Philosophy of McGill University, an ethicist and expert in public policy with particular attention to medical and legal ethics and the politics of multicultural societies
Select publications
- Elizabeth Elbourne. Empire, Kinship and violence: Family histories, Indigenous rights and the making of settler colonialism, 1770-1842. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- Elizabeth Elbourne. Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. 2nd edition 2008.
- Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (eds.), Sex, Power and Slavery. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014
Some recent articles:
- Elizabeth Elbourne. “Remembering, forgetting and the telling of stories: Land and commemoration in the aftermath of the American Revolution” in Pamela Klassen, Monique Sheer and Benjamin Berger (eds), Making Promises: Oaths, Treaties and Covenants. University of Toronto Press: forthcoming (in press)
- Elizabeth Elbourne. “Peace, genocide and empire: The London Missionary Society and the San in early nineteenth-century southern Africa” in Geoffrey Troughton (ed), Pacifying Missions: Christianity, Violence and Empire in the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill University Press, 2023
- Elizabeth Elbourne, “Race and the making of South African Christianity”. In Daniel Magaziner (ed), Oxford Handbook of South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
- Elizabeth Elbourne. “Violence, moral imperialism and colonial borderlands, 1770s-1820s: Some contradictions of non-violence”, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, special issue on colonialism and non-violence, 2016.
- Elizabeth Elbourne. “Broken alliance: Debating Six Nations land claims in 1822”, Cultural and Social History, special issue on “Indigenous modernity”, 9(4), December 2012, pp. 497-529
Select awards
- Jan Smuts Visiting Fellowship, Cambridge, 2024-25
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant, “The British and the San”, 2019-2024
- Wallace Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association and Joel Gregory Prize of Canadian Association of African Studies for Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853
- Visiting fellowship, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 2003
Further links
https://www.mcgill.ca/history/elizabeth-elbourne
