Simon Adams’s thesis is that capital punishment was crucial in how the West was won: ‘The gallows were a potent symbol of an unforgiving social order that was determined to stamp its moral authority over one-third of the Australian continent.’ But hanging was discriminatory; it ‘was never applied fairly or impartially in Western Australia’. Adams points to the fact that ‘there were 17 men hanged between 1889 and 1904, all of whom were “foreigners”: two Afghans, six Chinese, one Malay, two Indians, one Greek, one Frenchman and four Manilamen’, but not a single ‘Britisher’. Capital punishment was racist, reflecting the ‘distortions and prejudices of the British colonial legal system’.

On 17 January 1991, Alan Atkinson wrote to fellow historian Manning Clark to express his appreciation after reading The Puzzles of Childhood (1989) and The Quest for Grace (1990), Clark’s two volumes of autobiography. While Clark had only four months to live, Atkinson would soon begin work on The Europeans in Australia, a three-volume history of his country that would occupy him over the next twenty years. ‘I enjoyed both [the autobiographies],’ he told Clark; they ‘had a kind of subjectivity about them. It’s a remarkable style you use, which seemed to relate very much to me, so that they taught me a lot.’ Atkinson later described how he was ‘profoundly influenced’ by Clark’s work. Even more than the vast scale of Clark’s six-volume A History of Australia, it was the ‘infinite variety and open-ended stillness … of the past itself’ that affected him so intensely. Clark had shown Atkinson that the historian must ‘not just reimagine the national story but also do it in ways that ask questions about humanity itself’.

In 2006, a year after the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Inga Clendinnen published ‘The History Question’ as part of Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay series. ‘The History Question’ was, as its subtitle ‘Who Owns the Past?’ suggests, a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of historical understanding, and, more specifically, its uses and abuses. But at its heart lay an extended and surprisingly savage critique of The Secret River, the claims Clendinnen believed Grenville had made for it, and for fiction’s capacity to illuminate the past; and, more deeply, of the very idea of historical fiction.

One of the more successful ventures of Oxford University Press in the closing decades of the last century was a five-volume History of the British Empire. With more than a hundred contributors, this was a major undertaking, but its beginnings were not auspicious. Roger Louis, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, was appointed editor-in-chief. That drew a public complaint from Max Beloff, an Oxford professor and founding principal of the private University of Buckingham, who was raised to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher. Beloff wanted to know why OUP was allowing an American to rewrite ‘our colonial history’.

Kingston, Jamaica was scary in early 1985. Asked what reggae track was playing on his shop stereo, a Rastaman retaliated, ‘What the fuck do you want to know for?’ An elderly, one-legged woman maintained a meagre crafts display in a dockside souvenir shed, though no cruise ship had called there in a year. A ‘cheap’ chicken dinner cost more than a waiter earned in a month. A block from the hotel, young men menaced foreigners ‘taking the sights’. Watching Jamaica play Trinidad at Sabina Park involved a gate check by armed police with dogs. A passing motorist picked us up after the game: ‘too dangerous to walk in Kingston now.’ Elsewhere on the island, a gang gathered while we inspected Marcus Garvey’s statue in St Anne (significantly, the birthplace of reggae stars Burning Spear and Bob Marley). One Montego Bay five-star hotel’s driveway was lined with prostitutes; another halved its original price to attract us as its only guests – the pool terrace overlooked a slum worthy of the Rio favelas. A planet away from the postcard Caribbean, it was just as far from other West Indian sites.

Much critical historical interest in Edward John Eyre has centred on the apparently radical contradictions in his life. Known variously as ‘the enlightened defender of Aboriginal rights in Australia, but also as the reviled “butcher of Jamaica” in England and the Caribbean’, Eyre’s notorious career began in the late 1830s and included exploration and colonial administration in Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies, reaching both its apex and nadir while he was governor of Jamaica during 1864–65. Historians have puzzled over how a man who displayed a marked respect for indigenous people during the period from 1839 to 1845, as an Australian explorer, Resident Magistrate and later Protector of Aborigines at Moorunde, could have acted in such a barbarous way as governor of Jamaica after riots broke out in 1865. There have been several biographies and numerous piecemeal studies of Eyre’s colonial career. In Edward Eyre: Race and colonial governance, Julie Evans expands past approaches, attending to the play of power between London and the colonies (amply canvassed earlier in relation to the Morant Bay Jamaica rebellion by Catherine Hall, and extended here), the contradictory constructions of ‘race’ in colonial contexts (derived in part from the postcolonial critiques of Patrick Wolfe) and the distinctly different colonial cultures in which Eyre worked. She aims to confound and refigure the ‘common correlations between race, resistance and repression in the colonies’.

Until about twenty years ago, historians of colonial North America were writing about it as ‘this strange New World’. Whether because of distance or a native frontier, inflated (or skewed) visions, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s new man, the American, was thought to have been born on an unknown and therefore malleable physical and institutional landscape. Everything could, as it were, begin from scratch – and that’s the way the Americans wanted it. Today, historians have repositioned the colonies within the seventeenth – and eighteenth – century Atlantic World. In these studies, North American colonials simply lived English, Dutch and French lives overseas. It was not just that they replicated the home country’s customs and institutions in Philadelphia, Charleston or Montreal: that we’ve known. They used an available Atlantic World: black slaves ran to British ships on the Atlantic and served as sailors; New England merchants travelled to the Caribbean; Dutch New Netherlanders as assiduously carried on business with Amsterdam wholesalers as with retailers on Manhattan Island; British soldiers stationed on the African coast found themselves shipped to South Carolina.

Peter Russell, a distinguished Canadian student of the politics of the judiciary, asks if ‘my people’ – the English settlers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US – can live honourably. Is their authority defensible against indigenous people’s charge that ‘my people’ bullied them out of their sovereignty? Because European colonial power has been shadowed by a sense of moral unease, interpreting the colonists’ laws matters. ‘There is a lot of leeway in the law,’ Russell observes, ‘and no more so than in legal cultures based on the common law.’ The High Court of Australia’s decisions in Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) – making native title recognisable to the common law – seemed to Russell to confirm judges’ potential to be the conscience of liberal constitutionalism.

In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.

‘He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.’ Thus Donna Merwick invites us into this sad and instructive tale about the colonial Dutch world of North America.