Tony Ballantyne

Contact Details

Room 2S7, Arts 1 (Burns) Building
Tel 64 3 479 8061
Email tony.ballantyne@otago.ac.nz
Office Hours: Thursdays, 9-11
Teaching: HIST 106, HIST 223, HIST 303, HIST 430

Academic Qualifications

1993: BA (Hons) Otago
1999: PhD Cambridge

Research Interests

Tony's research focuses on the cultural history of the British empire during the nineteenth century. He has worked extensively on the development of colonial knowledge, changing understandings of language, religion and race, and the uneven ‘webs’ of exchange and connection that gave the empire shape. He has developed many of these approaches and arguments through his work on the history of the colonial Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora.

Tony has also explored the changing place of New Zealand within the British empire. He has recently completed a book manuscript on missionaries and debates over the consequences of empire building between 1814 and the early 1840s. His current research focuses on the development of colonial knowledge in southern New Zealand, a project that has been supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He is currently working on two monographs: the first explores the development of a folk political economy in colonial Otago and the second examines the interfaces between print capitalism and literary culture in southern New Zealand. A range of Tony’s new Zealand-based research will be anthologized in a collection of essays that Bridget Williams Books will publish in 2012.

Tony continues to work collaboratively. He is part of a research team that is producing a history of the book in New Zealand. He has a long-standing collaboration with Antoinette Burton from the University of Illinois. They have recently completed Empires and The Reach of the Global, 1870-1945, part of the new world history series produced by Harvard University Press and Beck.

Select Publications

• [co-editor with Antoinette Burton], Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (University of Illinois, 2009.)
• [editor], Textures of the Sikh Past: New Historical Interpretations (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Duke University Press, 2006).
• [co-edited with Brian Moloughney], Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand's Pasts (University of Otago Press, 2006).
• [co-editor with Antoinette Burton], Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Duke University Press, 2005).
• Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001; paperback, 2006).

Recent Conference Papers and Presentations

• With Antoinette Burton, ‘Imperial Frictions: Thinking through Impediments to Global Connection’, WUN International Network in Colonialism and Postcolonial Studies, University of Sydney (2011).
• ‘Economic Systems, Colonization and the Production of Difference: Thinking Through Southern New Zealand’, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Interpretation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2010) .
• ‘Information, Intelligence, Empire: Rethinking the Mid-Nineteenth Century Crisis in the British Empire’, Eclipse of Empires. Colonial Resistance, Metropolitan Decline, and Imperial Crises in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Barcelona (2010).
• ‘Speaking, Listening, Writing, Reading: Communication and Colonization’ - the Allan Martin Lecture, History Program, RSSS, Australian National University (2009)

Areas of Research Supervision

Colonial knowledge; imperial networks; print culture; cultural and intellectual life in nineteenth century New Zealand, especially Otago and Southland.

Editorial Responsibilities

• Member of editorial boards: Historiography East and West; Journal of Punjab Studies; New Zealand Journal of History; Journal of New Zealand Studies; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

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