Abstract
Colonialism, between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, has produced a profound and extensive rearrangement of physical spaces and peoples. Moved by force of circumstance or necessity as migrants, slaves, indentured labourers, convicts, refugees or seekers of wealth, millions of people, entire societies in some cases, were reorganised during the colonial era. This has left an enduring and unresolved legacy in the socalled postcolonial present, for in most cases, Indigenous societies and First Peoples were already present in the places to which people moved. As a result new meaning and social demography had to be carved and asserted over existing and enduring Indigenous spaces. It is this historical process of remaking space, and the intricacies of interaction — violent, ideological and cultural — between colonising and colonised peoples that is explored by the essays, poems and narratives in this collection. Centring around the Pacific Ocean, with its proliferation of settler colonies, contributors take us through an expanse of time, place and region to piece together interwoven but discrete case-studies that illuminate the transnational threads and local experiences that produced, or made colonial space.
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Notes
See Robert Freestone, review of Of Planning and Planting: the Making of British Colonial Cities (1997) by Robert Home, Journal of Historical Geography 24, 3 (1998): 381.
Another work, Imperial Cities: Landscape Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert, is also a view largely from the metropole. While useful, this work does not adequately address the violent or oppressive exigencies of settler colonies or their cities, nor the requirement for Indigenous peoples of formerly colonised societies to write of their own historical conditions, giving their perspectives on space and empire. On problems with cultural geography see, for example,
Catherine Nash, ‘Cultural Geography in Crisis’, Antipode (March 2002): 321–5.
Jay T. Johnson et al., ‘Creating Indigenous Geographies: Embracing Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledges and Rights’, Geographical Research 45, 2 (2007): 117, 118.
For important new work see, for example, Daniel Clayton, ‘Critical and Imperial Geographies’, in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Piles and Nigel Thrift (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 354–68; and
‘Introduction’, in Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 1–6.
Distinctions between settler and franchise colonies have been made since as early as Francis Annesley’s 1698 distinction between ‘colonies for trade’ and ‘colonies for empire’. See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context Series, ed. Quentin Skinner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155–6. The literature on settler colonialism is extensive. Some defining studies are offered in
Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: the Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983);
Donald Denoon, ‘The Political Economy of Labour Migration to Settler Societies: Australasia, Southern Africa, and Southern South America between 1890 and 1914’, in International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives, ed. Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (Hounslow, Middlesex: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1984);
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: the Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999). For some more recent explorations see the collection of articles in
Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003);
Annie Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006);
Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Adam Smith is generally credited with these ideas of stadial progress, a model of the age of hunters, pastoralists, agriculture and commerce, where these four stages came to be understood as distinct, hierarchical and successive modes of production. Importantly these are conceptualised in a progressive, teleological fashion, figuring European society as the highest ‘stage’. The key point is that the stages came to be conceptualised as distinct ‘modes of production’ and Indigenous peoples were often figured as ancient ‘hunters’ without rights in land. The coalescence of ideas of the entitlement to own the land that one tills expounded by John Locke’s (1623–1704) Two Treatises of Government, with ideas of political economy driven by the rapid changes of the industrial revolution were also important factors in the creation of particular philosophical views of colonists.
See R. L. Meek, ‘Smith, Turgot and the “Four Stages” Theory’, in Smith, Marx and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought (London: Chapman and Hall, 1977), 23, 29;
James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: the Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also
Johannes Fabian, Time and Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and
Patrick Wolfe, ‘On Being Woken Up: the Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1993): 197–224.
The literature on settler colonialism and genocide is a large and growing body of work. For some of the most recent writing and thinking on the topic see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997);
Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (London: Duke University Press, 2003);
Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006). See the contributions by
Norbert Finzsch, Philippe R. Girard, Ann Curthoys, Raphael Lemkin (edited by Ann Curthoys) and A. Dirk Moses in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also the edition on settler colonialism and genocide in the Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (2008).
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), ix, 33.
On ‘networks’ of empire, see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Anne Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005);
Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). See also
Lester and Fae Dussart’s use of ‘trajectories’ in their article ‘Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th-Century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’, New Zealand Geographer 64, 205 (2008): 217–18.
See, for example, Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001);
Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–48.
John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003);
Katherine Raine, ‘Domesticating the Land: Colonial Women’s Gardening’, in Fragments: New Zealand Social and Cultural History, ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Bronwyn Labrum (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), 76–96;
C. F. H. Jenkins, The Noah’s Ark Syndrome: One Hundred Years of Acclimatization and Zoo Development in Australia (Perth: The Zoological Gardens Board of Western Australia, 1977).
See, for example, Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 16–40, who argues that the British put particular emphasis on the erection of houses, the planting of gardens and the fencing of land as strategies and symbols of possession of Indigenous lands.
For scholarship that looks comparatively at the historical and legal processes by which Indigenous peoples were dispossessed, see the comparative studies, C. K. Meek, Land Law and Custom in the Colonies (London: Frank Cass, 1968); Weaver, The Great Land Rush. For specific histories, some recent and some classic, see
Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005);
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1989);
Frederika Hackshaw, ‘Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi’, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. I. H. Kawham (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989);
I. H. Kawharu, Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);
Claudia Orange, An Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2004);
Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987);
Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987).
In addition to those mentioned below, see Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001); Giselle Byrnes, ‘Surveying Space: Constructing the Colonial Landscape’, in Fragments, ed. Dalley and Labrum;
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Essay in Spatial History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987); Cronon, Changes in the Land; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi;
Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (1998).
Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
It is the formative work of Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) which has influenced much scholarship in the area of critical urbanism and cultural geography of the last two decades, although often unacknowledged. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (first published as La Production de l’espace, 1974), (Cambridge: English translation Basil Blackwell, 1991), 73. See also,
Andy Merrifield, ‘Henri Lefebvre: a Socialist in Space’, in Thinking Space, Critical Geographies Series, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 168. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 33.
David Roediger, ‘Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments’, Theoria (December 2001): 77. For various key texts on the construction of race see, for example,
I. Hannaford, Race: the History ofan Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);
K. Mahlik, The Meaning of Race: Race History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996);
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999);
Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994).
Barbara Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143–65.
Michael Cross and Michael Keith, eds, Racism, the City and the State (London: Routledge, 1993), 3.
For example, some noteworthy works related to Australia and North America: Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Jane M. Jacobs Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire;
Daniel Clayton, Island of Truth: the Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000);
Richard White and John M. Findley, eds, Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999);
Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserve in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002);
Neil Smith and Ann Godlewska, eds, Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994);
Lindsay J. Proudfoot, ed., (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); on specific subjects see also
Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010).
Key amongst these are studies of assimilation and other social engineering policies of settler governments. For the key settler colonies under consideration in this collection, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, see the comparative studies by Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995);
Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). See also
Francesca Bartlett, ‘Public Stories of the Stolen Generations: Narratives of Assimilation and Resistance’ (La Trobe University, 1999); Bringing Them Home: a Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997);
Suzanne Fournier, Stolen from Our Embrace: the Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997);
Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Center Press, 2000);
Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974).
Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, ed. Sara Tulloch (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997).
See, for example, Denis Byrne, ‘Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past’, Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82–107, 91;
Melinda Hinkson, ‘Exploring “Aboriginal” Sites in Sydney: a Shifting Politics of Place?’, Aboriginal History 26 (2002): 62–77.
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: the Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, 3 (2001): 829–65.
Veracini cites Norman Etherington, ‘Genocide by Cartography: Secrets and Lies in Maps of the South-Eastern African Interior, 1830–1850’, in Disputed Territories: Land Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, ed. David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 207–32.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50–94.
See, for example, the various reflections on the ways in which the hearings of the Waitangi Tribunal have reshaped the way history is done, in Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005);
Michael Belgrave, ‘The Tribunal and the Past: Taking a Roundabout Path to a New History’, in Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Michael Belgrave, Merata Kawham and David Williams (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005); M. P. K. Sorrenson, ‘Towards a Radical Reinterpretation of New Zealand History: the Role of the Waitangi Tribunal’, in Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Kawharu.
Although by no means an extensive list, the following studies and edited collections explore the political underpinnings, and the kinds of investments that are inherent in the various history and culture wars being fought over colonial pasts. With regard to recent disputes regarding historical memory and responsibility see Tony Birch, ‘“History is Never Bloodless”: Getting it Wrong after One Hundred Years of Federation’, Australian Historical Studies 118 (2002); Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘On “Getting it Wrong”: Collateral Damage in the History Wars’, Australian Historical Studies 127 (2006); Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘On the Border of the Unsayable: the Apology in Postcolonizing Australia’, Interventions 2, 2 (2000); Francesco Paolo Vitelli, ‘Epic Memory and Dispossession’, Issue 1 (2005). For comparative considerations of related history wars, see the edited collections Nyla R. Branscombe and Berjan Doosje, eds, Collective Guilt: International Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Roy Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn’t Enough: the Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Finally for a wider exploration of history’s imperialism see
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
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© 2010 Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds
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Mar, T.B., Edmonds, P. (2010). Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies. In: Mar, T.B., Edmonds, P. (eds) Making Settler Colonial Space. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277946_1
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