Chris Holdridge

I am a cultural historian of British imperialism, with a particular interest in popular politics, as well as the global histories of convict transportation and internment camps. My research focuses on the tension between individual rights and coercive governance and laws in the carceral spaces of Britain's settler empire during the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on southern Africa and Australasia.

I was awarded my doctorate in 2015 at the University of Sydney, on settler protest in the Cape and Australian colonies against convict transportation in the 1840s and 1850s. In 2016, I returned to South Africa where I am currently an NRF Scarce Skills Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State.

I am increasingly interested in the long and entangled histories of exile, international law, and penal practice. I grew up in Cape Town, not far from Robben Island, where the apartheid state imprisoned ANC activist and future South African president Nelson Mandela. Furthermore, Cape Town's harbour is the only departing point for passenger ship journey's to the remote island of St Helena, where the British exiled Napoleon. It was also the site where, during the South African War of 1899–1902, around 5,000 Boer prisoners of war were interned. At a time when internment, whether of refugees on remote islands off Australia and in camps in Europe, or suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, attract humanitarian criticism, the longer history of internment as a practice of state power and imperial rule continues to fascinate me. This focus animates my current research, whether my book manuscript on opposition to Britain's penal colonies, or work on a new project (in collaboration with Wm. Matthew Kennedy) examining the internment of 30,000 Boer POWs by the British in St Helena, Bermuda, India and Ceylon.

March 2016