Theory of Transnational Markets and Civil Society III

This course focuses upon Australia’s historical relationships between settlers and Indigenous people in comparative perspective. In the first part of the course, students will consider how key terms like ‘settler colonialism’, ‘race’, ‘the civilising process’, and ‘treaty’ can be conceptualised in historical context. We will trace how colonial ideas about settlement, land tenure and law sat within a pre-existing European tradition of thought, and how these ideas might be rethought through an Indigenous worldview. We will investigate different practices of cross-cultural brokerage and co-existence on frontiers of British colonial settlement, and consider some of the triggers that gave rise to colonial violence. Through the latter part of the course, we will turn to twentieth-century policies of assimilation and consider how they were shared or divergent in different geographical settings of the British Commonwealth. Finally, students will engage with some of the ongoing legacies of the colonial past in the present, and investigate how debates about truth telling have evolved in Australia, as well as in connected settler nations of the former British Empire.