11 - Frontier Violence in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Summary

This chapter explores typologies of frontier violence as a particular feature of Britain’s settler colonial world. As historians have discussed, settler colonialism was distinctive from other forms of colonialism for its reliance upon the acquisition of Indigenous lands and the dissolution of Indigenous societies. From the 1820s onwards, the increasing pace of settler migration to the colonies and the settler demand for land created new pressures that generated repetitive patterns of frontier warfare for the next century. Indigenous peoples resisted colonial incursions on their country, and governments responded with an array of measures that ranged from diplomatic solutions to paramilitary policing and the enlistment of martial law. This chapter considers how these patterns of frontier violence were not consistent around the nineteenth-century British world but moved in cycles between strategies of conciliation and extraordinary legalized force. In doing so, it traces how different expressions of frontier violence supported government efforts to secure the settler polity and to assert colonial claims of sovereignty.