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European colonial conquest included many instances of indigenous peoples being exterminated. Cases where invading commercial stock farmers clashed with hunter-gatherers were particularly destructive, often resulting in a degree of dispossession and slaughter that destroyed the ability of these societies to reproduce themselves. The experience of aboriginal peoples in the settler colonies of southern Africa, Australia, North America, and Latin America bears this out. The frequency with which encounters of this kind resulted in the annihilation of forager societies raises the question of whether these conflicts were inherently genocidal, an issue not yet addressed by scholars in a systematic way.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Chapter 1. ‘We are Determined to Exterminate Them’: The Genocidal Impetus Behind Commercial Stock Farmer Invasions of Hunter-Gatherer Territories
Mohamed Adhikari
Chapter 2. ‘The Bushman is a Wild Animal to be Shot at Sight’: Annihilation of the Cape Colony’s Foraging Societies by Stock-Farming Settlers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Mohamed Adhikari
Chapter 3. ‘Like a Wild Beast, He Can be Got for the Catching’: Child Forced Labour and the ‘Taming’ of the San along the Cape’s North-Eastern Frontier, c.1806–1830
Jared McDonald
Chapter 4. ‘We Exterminated Them, and Dr. Philip Gave the Country’: The Griqua People and the Elimination of San from South Africa’s Transorangia Region
Edward Cavanagh
Chapter 5. Vogelfrei and Besitzlos, with no Concept of Property: Divergent Settler Responses to Bushmen and Damara in German South West Africa
Robert Gordon
Chapter 6. Why Racial Paternalism and not Genocide? The Case of the Ghanzi Bushmen of Bechuanaland
Mathias Guenther
Chapter 7. The Destruction of Hunter-Gatherer Societies on the Pastoralist Frontier: The Cape and Australia Compared
Nigel Penn
Chapter 8. ‘No Right to the Land’: The Role of the Wool Industry in the Destruction of Aboriginal Societies in Tasmania (1817–1832) and Victoria (1835–1851) Compared
Lyndall Ryan
Chapter 9. Indigenous Dispossession and Pastoral Employment in Western Australia during the Nineteenth Century: Implications for Understanding Colonial Forms of Genocide
Ann Curthoys
Chapter 10. ‘A Fierce and Irresistible Cavalry’: Pastoralists, Homesteaders and Hunters on the American Plains Frontier
Tony Barta
Chapter 11. Dispossession, Ecocide, Genocide: Cattle Ranching and Agriculture in the Destruction of Hunting Cultures on the Canadian Prairies
Sidney L. Harring
Chapter 12. Seeing Receding Hunter-Gatherers and Advancing Commercial Pastoralists: ‘Nomadisation’, Transfer,
Genocide
Lorenzo Veracini
Select Bibliography
Index
About the author
Mohamed Adhikari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town.
Summary
European colonial conquest included many instances of indigenous peoples being exterminated. Cases where invading commercial stock farmers clashed with hunter-gatherers were particularly destructive, often resulting in a degree of dispossession and slaughter that destroyed the ability of these societies to reproduce themselves.
Additional text
“By highlighting the destructive impact of commercial stock farming and its connection to international markets, Genocide on Settler Frontiers draws attention to a neglected yet crucial element in the fatal nexus between colonialism and genocide. Covering cases in Africa, Australia, and North America, this is an original and much-needed comparative volume.” · A. Dirk Moses, European University Institute, Florence
“This collection brings cutting-edge research into the history of genocidal situations in southern Africa, Australia, and North America by younger as well as established scholars, illuminating the history of not only modernity but also world history.” · John Docker, University of Sydney
“The book is on the cutting edge of scholarship on settler genocide. The focus on the conflict between hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers advances our understanding of these murderous conflicts.” · Norman Naimark, Stanford University
