The connections between Britain’s colonies have started to arouse the interest of historians, and the transfer of certain types of sport hunting from one colony to another provides an opportunity to gauge the strength of connection between rural regions within the British Empire.  Pigsticking is not a fashionable sport among historians (perhaps a factor in its present relative obscurity) but it offers an opportunity to explore links between its origin in British India and rural regions of nineteenth-century Australasia.

Pigsticking was a style of hunting developed by British Imperialists in India and strongly promoted by R. S. S. Baden-Powell in his book Pigsticking or Hoghunting and similar manuals by other sporting authors.  It was a significant enough form that it was imitated, with varying degrees of success, by those with knowledge of India living elsewhere.  In particular, the presence of pigsticking in New Zealand is evident in hunting memoirs.  However it is only with the emergence of keyword-searchable newspaper archives that a survey of its practice has become possible. 

This paper explores both the pigsticking connections that existed between Britain’s colonies and the role of digital collections in uncovering them.