Genocide on Settler Frontiers

When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash

Mohamed Adhikari

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782387398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Genocide on Settler Frontiers
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes in the Contributors
• Chapter 1. 'We are Determined to Exterminate Them': The Genocidal Impetus Behind Commercial Stock Farmer Invasions of Hunter-Gatherer Territories
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Chapter 5. Vogelfrei and Besitzlos, with no Concept of Property: Divergent Settler Responses to Bushmen and Damara in German South West Africa
• Chapter 6. Why Racial Paternalism and not Genocide? The Case of the Ghanzi Bushmen of Bechuanaland
• Chapter 7. The Destruction of Hunter-Gatherer Societies on the Pastoralist Frontier: The Cape and Australia Compared
• 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
• Chapter 9. Indigenous Dispossession and Pastoral Employment in Western Australia during the Nineteenth Century: Implications for Understanding Colonial Forms of Genocide
• Chapter 10. 'A Fierce and Irresistible Cavalry': Pastoralists, Homesteaders and Hunters on the American Plains Frontier
• Chapter 11. Dispossession, Ecocide, Genocide: Cattle Ranching and Agriculture in the Destruction of Hunting Cultures on the Canadian Prairies
• Chapter 12. Seeing Receding Hunter-Gatherers and Advancing Commercial Pastoralists: 'Nomadisation', Transfer, Genocide
• Select Bibliography
• Index