The Settler Colonial Frontier: Vacillations of Conciliation and Warfare

The dramatic increase in settler migration from the 1820s set the terms for the kind of frontier conflict that would continue across the British Empire for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Ultimately, however, the existence of treaties offered no guarantee against the flaring of violence on the Empire's settler frontiers; nor did treaties guard against unpredictable shifts in the fragile political landscape that led agree­ments of allegiance to change into conditions for warfare. In New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between the Crown and more than 500 Maori chiefs formed the terms on which the British government secured the exclusive right to purchase Maori lands in order to advance sovereignty claims over the territories of New Zealand.

Complex vacillations between peace negotiations and frontier warfare were also the experience on the northern and eastern frontiers of South Africa. South Africa represented the most diverse of Britain's settler frontiers, each of which raised distinct questions about the methods and consequences of colonial violence. The northern frontier of the Cape Colony, which Britain inherited from the Dutch in 1795, was already marked by violent warfare between the Khoisan, the San and Dutch settlers. According to Nigel Penn, this inheritance influenced British policy in the establishment of mission stations which would become a feature of all the Cape frontiers. It also led the Dutch to vacate the Northern Cape in 1833 in the Great Trek for the southern African interior, which in turn would create a new set of problems for the British.^[374] On the eastern frontier, strategies of conciliation and violence underwent complex turns over the nineteenth century, as Britain's involve­ment in eastward expansion entailed the intervention of its troops in Boer/ Xhosa wars. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, British settlement of the Eastern Cape unfolded not as a territorial sweep through Indigenous lands but as a series of cyclical shifts between treaties and frontier wars. The resistance of the Xhosa and their highly successful strategies as guerrilla fighters created persistent problems for the British in achieving governmental control.^[375] In its intensity of sustained conflict over a century, Noel Mostert has shown, the Eastern Cape frontier constitutes the most protractedly violent frontier zone in South Africa's history.^{[376] [377]}

At the same time, it must be recognised that the history of colonial violence is far more complex than can be encompassed by a settler colonial account of the frontier as a site of Indigenous dispersal and settler replace­ment.

The idea of an advance frontier that would introduce colonial order and thereby avoid the causes of open conflict between Indigenous people and settlers was tested in British Canada during the 1870s, when the dominion government sought to gain control over the vast prairie lands that stretched west from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains. Unlike New Zealand and South Africa where frontier wars followed in the wake of short-term or thwarted treaties, the westward push of the Canadian frontier was relatively stable, planned as a process of laying down the framework of law and government before the arrival of settlers.1⁴ The relative peace of western Canadian settlement compared to other British settler frontiers might also be attributed to the terms that coalesced on both sides to favour a state of allegiance rather than conflict.

However, the absence of frontier wars does not mean that Canadian settlement proceeded without coercion, threat of force, or enlistment of cultural violence against Indigenous people. Following the signing of treaties through the 1870s, Indigenous peoples were managed onto circumscribed reserve lands, which became whittled down as increasing numbers of settlers migrated west to take up land for farming and cattle ranching. Those bands who refused to accept treaties were coerced into submission, and Indigenous people's promised rights as British subjects became increasingly limited under the statutory powers of control embodied in the federal Indian Act (1876) and its later amendments. As Gerald Friesen has put it, by the last decade of the nineteenth century Indigenous people were confined to a restrictive regime on reserves where they were managed as ‘wards of the state', setting them upon ‘a very different course' from Anglo-Canadian settler society'.^[381] While resistance did not often take the form of physical violence, Indigenous people have always actively protested the Canadian government's interpretation of the treaties and its failures to protect Indigenous rights, arguing that the spirit of the treaties was to share the land's resources, not to cede Indigenous sovereignty.

As a diplomatic strategy of imperialism, then, negotiating treaties with Indigenous peoples was not necessarily a measure that either secured the sovereignty of the British Crown or granted effective authority to its repre­sentatives in colonial government. As Richard Price observes, it was in the very nature of the settler colonial frontier to be fragile and unpredictable, because, by definition, the frontier was a space ‘where hegemony was constantly being negotiated and defended'.¹⁶ This was evident in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, where treaties were forged only to become contested or negated in future years. However, in these settler colonial sites the imperial government had at least recognised the importance of Indigenous polities to the extent that it undertook to negotiate formally for Indigenous lands.

In the Australian colonies, by contrast, no formal transactions for Indigenous lands were ever pursued by the Crown, a decision justified on the perceived grounds that Australia's Indigenous people's political, legal and agricultural practices were not sufficiently developed to warrant such nego­tiations, and that they therefore already came within the Crown's protection. This absence of a treaty-making tradition helped to determine how Australia's colonial frontiers became defined by repeated, episodic conflict that was fought opportunistically between Indigenous and settler groups or otherwise waged by colonial governments in periodic campaigns against resistant Indigenous populations. The imperial government's failure to recog­nise Indigenous polities on their own terms also shaped the ways in which Australia's patterns of frontier violence were treated by colonial authorities. In New Zealand and South Africa, the failure of treaties to secure lasting peace led ultimately to military campaigns that were openly acknowledged as warfare. In Australia, however, the concept that Indigenous peoples could already be deemed subjects of the Crown meant that frontier violence was handled, at least officially, not as warfare but as a form of civil insurgency.

A much-debated response to the dilemmas of violence with and against Indigenous peoples was the concept of protection, a policy initiative of the imperial government that evolved during the 1830s in the wake of the successful campaign to abolish slavery around the British Empire. The objectives of protective policy were outlined in the 1837 Report of a House of Commons Select Committee that had been established in 1835 to consider the status of the Empire's Indigenous peoples and the question of how their rights and well-being could be reconciled with a British agenda of continuing colonisation. Much of the evidence that came before the Select Committee focused on the recent problems of frontier violence in the Cape Colony, but the devastating consequences of recent conflict with Indigenous people in Van Diemen's Land also raised the prospect that ‘the whole of the native population' could be eradicated by violence.^[382] The Select Committee Report argued that the best means to repress further conflict would be to proffer Indigenous people the benefits of British civilisation, including through the refuge of British law. Nowhere was this seen as being more urgent than in the Australian colonies, where in the face of settler violence and ‘the contamina­tion of the dregs of our countrymen', Indigenous people were perceived as being at risk of vanishing ‘from the face of the earth'.^[383]

Through the 1840s, Aboriginal protectorates operated in New Zealand and several Australian colonies as a measure that authorities hoped would encourage Indigenous people's conciliation to colonial culture, help to secure the Crown's jurisdiction on fragile frontiers, and ultimately allow the causes of violent conflict to give way to new regimes of assimilation and order. By the mid 1850s, however, all of the protectorates established in the Australasian colonies had been wound down. In this critical period of the mid nineteenth century, a political shift towards granting settler colonies powers of self-government saw the metropole gradually loosen its oversight over Indigenous matters, leaving colonial governments with increasingly independent scope to deal locally with the ongoing problems of frontier violence.^[384]