Bibliographical Essay

Frontier violence has only recently become a recognised structuring theme of histories of British imperialism. Philippa Levine's excellent overview of the rise and fall of British imperialism, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (London: Routledge, 2013), deals with frontier violence and Indigenous dispossession as an inevitable consequence of colonial conquest.

A wide field of scholarship draws out the specific histories of imperial conquest, Indigenous resistance and the violent culture of the frontier in Britain's colonial possessions. For Africa, these include Noel Mostert's Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Knopf, 1992), Nigel Penn's The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist & Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), Richard Price's Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Jon Abbink, M. E. de Bruijn and K. van Walraven's anthology Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden: Brill, 2003). On India, recent important works include Elizabeth Kolsky's Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Taylor Sherman's State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010).

Frontier violence has been valuably theorised through a number of particular frames. One of the most controversial of these is the question of whether the violence of colonial conquest in Britain's settler colonies constituted genocide. Key works exploring this question are Mohamed Adhikari's anthology Genocide on Settler Frontiers (New York: Berghahn, 2014) and Patrick Woolf s Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), both of which focus on the concept and comparison of genocide across settler frontiers, Alison Palmer's comparative study Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), and two anthologies edited by Dirk Moses: Genocide and Settler Society (New York: Berghahn, 2004) and Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008). For a critique of this approach see Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Reflections on Genocide and Settler­Colonial Violence', History Australia 13.3 (2016), 335-50. As a counterpoint to this question, scholars have explored the significance of the legal frameworks through which frontier violence took place across Britain's Empire, and the ways in which it was justified as legitimate action by the state. Lisa Ford addresses this problem in terms of the role of legal violence in securing sovereignty in her comparative study Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).