Tobias Harper

Toby is currently working on the history of fish and fish acclimatization in the British Empire, tentatively titled "The Settler Fishes of the Southern Hemisphere". This work shows some of the strange entanglements between animal introductions and evolving settler culture and law in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. He has published about Victorian beliefs about fish pain and the history of fish introductions in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Toby's first book From Servants of the Empire to Everyday Heroes: The British Honours System and the People in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2020) shows how a seemingly “traditional”, even archaic-looking institution – the British honours system – expanded and modernized in the twentieth century to serve imperial and domestic political priorities. It argues that one major consequence of the persistence and growth of honors in Britain and the British Empire was a connection between the expansion of the state through imperial and social democratic institutions and the expansion – or democratization – of hierarchy. As new groups were granted status in established power structures they also became invested in distinguishing themselves in an elaborate status system. The expansion of the state popularized hierarchy more than egalitarianism. At the same time, in parts of the decolonizing former empire, especially Ireland and India, nationalist governments reacted against the honours system, making it a symbol of what was wrong with the empire. In both cases the honours system offered a powerful set of symbols in debates about the relationship between the empire, government, the monarchy and social order.

In other words, the more the British Crown ranked people, the more the people cared about rank.