Urbanizing frontiers : Indigenous peoples and settlers in 19th-century Pacific Rim cities

Book

Urbanizing frontiers : Indigenous peoples and settlers in 19th-century Pacific Rim cities / Penelope Edmonds.

Summary:

"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."--pub. desc.

Record details

ISBN: 9780774816229
ISBN: 0774816228
ISBN: 9780774816212
ISBN: 077481621X
ISBN: 9780774816236
ISBN: 0774816236
Physical Description: 317 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Publisher: Vancouver : UBC Press, ©2010.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 288-302) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Extremities of empire : two settler-colonial cities in comparative perspective -- Setter-colonial cities : a survey of bodies and spaces in transition -- "This grand object" : building towns in Indigenous space (Melbourne, Port Phillip) -- First Nations space, protocolonial space (Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1843-58) -- The imagined city and its dislocations : segregation, gender, and town camps (Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1839-50) -- Narratives of race in the streetscape : fears of miscegenation and making white subjects (Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1850s-60s) -- From bedlam to incorporation : First Nations, public space, and the emerging city (Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1858-60s) -- Nervous hybridity : bodies, spaces, and the displacements of Empire (Victoria, British Columbia, 1858-71).