“The Pig and the Peace: Defining Imperial Order in the Age of Revolutions”

Venue: Carrillo Gantner Theatre (B02), Sidney Myer Asia Centre

Presenters: Associate Professor Lisa Ford

This lecture begins with the execution of a “very fine pig” in Sydney in 1795. Pigs made notoriously disorderly colonists – procreating, trespassing and damaging public property at will. But this particular pig caused an unusual amount of trouble. Her death escalated into a brawl when her master – an “avowed” republican called John Boston – ran into the street to demand which “damned Villain of a Rascal” had shot his sow. The villainous rascals, it transpired, were members of the New South Wales Corps. They responded by giving Boston a “damned good threshing”. It would not do, they argued later, to let such a man insult the King’s soldiers in a colony of thieves. This fracas is more than an amusing anecdote. The legal controversy that followed showed that the brawlers, the governor and the court held quite different ideas about how to keep order in the colony of New South Wales. The Corps argued that the threat of revolution and the convict majority meant that soldiers needed special power and status to keep the colonial peace. John Boston argued that the colony needed to support peculiar liberties – his liberty to talk politics, but, more importantly, his liberty to trade and contract with convicts who would have no legal standing at home. The governor and the court defended civil law against military violence, but they too imagined a compromised legal order – one where both convicts could testify against free men and the governor wielded extraordinary power. New South Wales was a strange place indeed in 1795. But, this lecture will argue that the controversy tells us a great deal about how the British imperial constitution was imagined in the age of revolutions. In the upheavals of colonial Boston and Montreal, in the fractious military autocracies of Trinidad and Malta, and in the street-side brawls of Sydney, colonists, governors, judges and soldiers argued endlessly about how to order colonies full of unruly subjects. Disputes like these mattered – at stake were the rights of British subjects scattered around the globe.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/7111-the-pig-and-the-peace-defining-imperial-order-in-the