Empire of Political Thought:
Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government
Bruce Buchan
Empires in Perspective
978 1 85196 925 8: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 570 0
Empire of Political Thought investigates how European colonists in Australia represented the indigenous peoples they found there, and how they governed them using Western political thought. Buchan argues that an ideological framework drawn from Western traditions rendered indigenous peoples familiar to Europeans. Rather than effacing indigenous difference, colonists employed a conceptual language that recognised those differences but assimilated them and rendered them as deficiencies.
This is the first study to link the imperial government in Australia with comparative colonial contexts in North America and Canada. The contemporary relevance of this book is underscored by the continuing efforts of Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere to articulate their visions of political and cultural self-government and self-determination.
Sample pages
Readership
Empire Studies, Commonwealth History, Political Theory, Historical Anthropology
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Empire of Political Thought
Chapter 2: The ‘Traffick’ of Empire: Commerce, Consent and Colonisation
Chapter 3: Savage Subjects: War, Conquest and Empire
Chapter 4: Fit for Society
Chapter 5: Benevolent Empire – Aboriginal Welfare
Chapter 6: Colonial Legacies - Sovereignty, Self-Determination and Native Title
Conclusion
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