Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Colonial government by correspondence: the British government's communicative practice in colonial bureaucracy at the turn of the twentieth century in southern Africa
- Date
- Friday 17 April 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
In this talk, I explore the communicative practices of the British Colonial Office and its administrators on the ground in Britain’s colonies at the turn of the twentieth century. British colonial governance took the form of an elaborate formal system of official correspondence, an understudied domain in the literature on official letters and letter writing. I focus on correspondence (1899 – 1901) about the labour supply for mines in Southern Rhodesia, conducted between the Colonial Office and the chartered British South Africa Company (BSAC), which held the mining rights of the territory and was legally responsible for its administration. The different actors represent different versions of political reality and in so doing, challenge, negotiate and finally compromise on provisional solutions. The case exemplifies the complexity of colonial business by correspondence and illustrates its risks and hazards.
I discuss the correspondence in terms of its material and temporal frame, the different levels of responsibility and accountability as represented by the correspondents, and their adherence to prescribed generic conventions and flouting of strict protocols. This examination provides a rich historical and textual context for a systematic historical sociolinguistic reading of the correspondence as administration. The documents illuminate how the machinery of colonial government was enacted using a range of communication methods: official and unofficial, corporate and personal, elaborate and abrupt. The various actors relied upon a variety of modes of communication, including letter post, cable and telegraph depending upon the importance or urgency of the message. The thoroughness with which the Colonial Office managed its correspondence highlights the complexity of the instruments used to inform the decisions and actions of the government of the day, including the oversight of the actions of its agents.