University of British Columbia Press
Urbanizing Frontiers
Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities
Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
Urbanizing Frontiers
Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities
Frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Towns and cities at the farthest reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. Yet the experiences of Indigenous peoples in these urban frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of progress. This book explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and settlers 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 segregated sites of empire. This innovative study traces how these spaces, and the bodies in them, were transformed, sometimes in violent ways, creating new spaces and new polities.
328 pages | © 2009
Table of Contents
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