Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

The seventh chapter focuses more directly on a third assemblage of these variously integrated powers – biopolitics. Colonial biopolitics generated and worked through categories that located individuals within divisive population groups (Swiffen and Paget 2022). Revealing an imagined normative social hierarchy, colonial criminal accusation assigned individuals to economic, racialized, and gendered population groups that congealed with white, male, possessive relational orderings. A remarkable assembly of Cree leaders perceptively challenged dispossessing colonial law and order in a translated public letter submitted to a local newspaper. Without political processes to manage conflicts between opposing legal fields, lawless violence could quickly descend around accusatory thresholds – as revealed by a case involving the police inspector Dickens (one the famous author’s sons). Through this example we glimpse the struggles by which colonial theatres of criminal accusation tried to assert monopolistic jurisdiction – highlighting how violence and force were the currency of lawless, biopolitical battles to declare law. As is outlined, such powers have left enduring legacies of inequality within criminal justice systems today.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter engages with the complexities of Anthropocene politics and ecologies in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Home to the densest concentration of wind turbines anywhere on earth, the Isthmus is a key site for climate change mitigation, but not without controversy. Working from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, we show how local Indigenous and mestizo communities are contending with the massive transformation of their lands and livelihoods. We ask a central question for Anthropocenic times: what are the political forces that shape the possibilities for low carbon futures? Who sets the agenda for transitions and who—human and otherwise—is affected by enormous infrastructural shifts in energy systems? In this chapter, we show how various forces—political, economic and cultural—operate along with the wind itself to shape local futures in both positive and negative ways. We pay special attention to Indigenous philosophies and experiences because they help us see better possibilities at the nexus of energy, environment and human thriving.

Where is the Pacific in colonial American literary studies? Nowhere, according to our anthologies, literary histories, syllabi, and scholarship, which all seem to agree that the Pacific enters American literary studies only well after the colonial period. This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on the colonial Pacific to suggest what it looks like, why it is important, and how we might begin to incorporate it into our literary histories. It insists on the inclusion of Indigenous literary and political histories from the Pacific and on recognizing the long and complicated intersection of these with Chinese and other Asian trade histories as well as with European empire and commerce. These contexts are crucial for shaping the recovery, integration, and understanding of Pacific texts into a global American literary history. Our literary anthologies and histories – and the narratives they implicitly or explicitly tell – need to reach into Indigenous, international, and multilingual colonial pasts. The story of America we currently tell and teach is a very different one than it would be if we included the colonial Pacific; this chapter provides some initial building blocks from which to construct a new, critical, transoceanic narrative for early American literary studies.

The Introduction introduces the main themes, theoretical framework, methods, and key concepts of the study.

This chapter explores typologies of frontier violence as a particular feature of Britain’s settler colonial world. As historians have discussed, settler colonialism was distinctive from other forms of colonialism for its reliance upon the acquisition of Indigenous lands and the dissolution of Indigenous societies. From the 1820s onwards, the increasing pace of settler migration to the colonies and the settler demand for land created new pressures that generated repetitive patterns of frontier warfare for the next century. Indigenous peoples resisted colonial incursions on their country, and governments responded with an array of measures that ranged from diplomatic solutions to paramilitary policing and the enlistment of martial law. This chapter considers how these patterns of frontier violence were not consistent around the nineteenth-century British world but moved in cycles between strategies of conciliation and extraordinary legalized force. In doing so, it traces how different expressions of frontier violence supported government efforts to secure the settler polity and to assert colonial claims of sovereignty.

This chapter examines the storied and constant presence of violence in the Pacific from the earliest imperial phases in the sixteenth century to the eve of the greatest cataclysm of violence in the region: World War Two. It explores how and why violence altered over this long period, considering the impacts of technologies, economies, ideologies and colonial experiences from other imperial theatres that were deeply integrated with the Pacific from the outset. It weighs the impact of conditions particular to the Pacific – the immense asymmetries of power and population sizes, vast distances and the great diversity of human and natural geographies – on how violence shaped the Pacific across this historical expanse. Also, as it took five centuries to integrate the entire region into global systems, first encounters between Indigenous and colonial peoples, where violence often set a course for future relations, played out repeatedly across the region and across time, beginning in the early sixteenth century and ending in the 1930s in the New Guinea Highlands. This chapter is framed around innovative Indigenous responses to imperial violence, particularly the philosophy of non-violent resistance that emerged in New Zealand in the 1860s that went on to influence the course of other historical episodes.