Traffick of Empire

Trade, Treaty and Terra Nullius in Australia and North America, 1750–1800

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9316230
AutoresBruce Buchan (0000-0002-3984-5540, Griffith University, autor correspondente)
Ano2007
Volume5
Fascículo2
Páginas386-405
Data de publicação2007-02-08
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHistory Compass (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1478-0542 • E-ISSN: 1478-0542
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00392.x
OpenAlexW2000120600
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas38

It will be argued in this article that British colonial authorities in Australia employed a framework of concepts, ideas and assumptions then current in European thought in their efforts to translate the difference of the Indigenous inhabitants to the terms of European familiarity. This framework was also buttressed by a previous extensive experience of colonial diplomacy and trade in North America. By drawing on these intellectual and experiential sources, colonisers in Australia sought to represent the Indigenous inhabitants as ‘savage’– lacking their own property rights or sovereignty. Some historians in Australia have focussed most attention on the concepts of legal thought – notably terra nullius – in seeking to explain the colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples. A more potent if long neglected source for this dispossession, I argue, lies in the ways that Europeans thought about and practiced trade or ‘traffick’

Colonialism · Diplomacy · Empire · Ethnology · Experiential learning · Indigenous · Intellectual property · Political science · Sociology · Sovereignty · Treaty · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Ecology