CHARLES VAN ONSELEN is the acclaimed author of The Small Matter of a Horse, The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders, and The Seed is Mine, the last of which won the Alan Paton and Herskovits prizes and was voted as one of the 100 best books to emerge from Africa during the 20th century. He has been honoured with visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford, and was invited to be the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow in the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies at Harvard. He is currently Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.

 

AMONG THE FLOOD TIDE of emigrants who left the British isles for the ‘Southern world’ of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the later 19th century were many thousands of young men who relied on their muscle and native wit to make a living. Not a few were from criminal backgrounds in the warrens of industrial Britain, or had left after a brush with the law at home. Here Charles van Onselen brilliantly evokes this darker underside of the great emigration, the restless, transient, unsettled lives of young men without homes or attachments, wandering from continent to continent in new and ill-policed societies. Drawing on a mass of archival and other contemporary sources, he traces the ordinary/extraordinary life of Jack McLoughlin, from his family’s origins in famine-stricken Donegal, to the industrial slums of Victorian Manchester (and its prisons), and the casual employments and criminal opportunities of gold-rush South Africa and Australia. McLoughlin’s criminal career, and its unhappy end, make a gripping story, but in van Onselen’s hands they also illuminate the human desperation that accompanied what we sometimes think of as the great age of imperialism. This is a marvellous addition to the social history of empire.

Professor John Darwin, Nuffield College, Oxford University

 

CHARLES VAN ONSELEN HAS long been acknowledged as among the finest of contemporary social historians. But this book will add to his reputation in a major way. Through the painstaking archival detection that is the hallmark of his work, he has traced the global career of an intriguing late 19th and early 20th century career criminal and murderer. As he leads his reader across the world in pursuit of ‘One-armed’ Jack, he provides not just a brilliant account of the life and psyche of a tormented individual, but also a deep understanding of the places and institutions that made him. These days many historians promise us ‘transnational’ history, but few have the ability to pull it off in the way that van Onselen does. This is not just another biography – it is an education in the history of the era in which the world we live in was created.

Professor Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University and the University of Pretoria