About the Book
Colonial frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Early towns and cities in the far reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. The lives of Indigenous peoples in these urbanizing frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of European progress.
Urbanizing Frontiers explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and newcomers in two Pacific Rim cities -- Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia. Built on Indigenous lands and overtaken by gold rushes, these cities emerged between 1835 and 1871 in significantly different locations, yet both became cross-cultural and ultimately segregated sites of empire. Victoria’s population came to include large numbers of Indigenous peoples, a legacy of the fur trade, whereas Melbourne’s Indigenous population was far smaller. An explanation lies in the structural features of the fur trade versus pastoralism, and the ensuing politics of race that played out at the spatial, imaginative, social, and legal levels, where bodies and spaces were rapidly transformed, sometimes in violent ways.
This innovative, interdisciplinary study reconceptualizes the frontier as urbanizing space by charting the development of the settler-colonial city and exploring the lives of the newcomers, Indigenous peoples, and mixed-race peoples who, in turn, shaped its development. It will be of interest to students and scholars of colonialism, urbanism, Indigenous studies, transnational history, cultural geography, and Pacific Rim studies.
About the Author(s)
Penelope Edmonds is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1) Extremities of Empire: Two Settler-Colonial Cities in Comparative Perspective
2) Settler-Colonial Cities: A Survey of Bodies and Spaces in Transition
3) "This Grand Object": Building Towns in Indigenous Space [Melbourne, Port Phillip]
4) First Nations Space, Protocolonial Space [Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1843-58]
5) The Imagined City and Its Dislocations: Segregation, Gender, and Town Camps [Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1839-50]
6) Narratives of Race in the Streetscape: Fears of Miscegenation and Making White Subjects [Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1850s-60s]
7) From Bedlam to Incorporation: First Nations Peoples, Public Space, and the Emerging City [Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1858-60s]
8) Nervous Hybridity: Bodies, Spaces, and the Displacements of Empire [Victoria, British Columbia, 1858-71]
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
"This book makes an original and highly important contribution to the specific historiographies of Canada and Australia, as well as the broader literatures on colonialism, urban development, and race ... Transnational comparative analysis is an increasingly important approach to understanding the past, especially in the study of colonialism and settler-indigenous relations, and to my knowledge no other study with this scope and theoretical bent has been published."
-- Lisa-Anne Chilton, Department of History, University of Prince Edward Island
Sample Chapter
Front Matter and Chapter One
Related Topics
History
History > Canada
Native Studies
Native Studies > Canada
History > Other
Women's Studies
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