Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism ― Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World

The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the nineteenth century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this world meant for Indigenous communities facing invasion by those emigrants. While settlers in the British Empire and the USA have been seen as participants in newly globalized networks, the Indigenous peoples upon whose lands they settled tend to be seen as rooted, localized, and peripheral to the story of imperial and national expansion. This book weaves through trans-imperial, Indigenous, local and family histories, showing that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so. Moving between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the USA, it highlights the enduring associations between race, place and behavior in settler societies from Indigenous perspectives.

Zoe Laidlaw is Reader in Imperial and Colonial History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of Colonial Connections 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Governance (2005) and is currently working on the relationship between British humanitarianism and colonialism in the nineteenth century.

Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, with Fae Dussart (2014); Imperial Networks: Creating identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001), and co-editor of Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (2006), with David Lambert.