This chapter examines from a comparative perspective the experience of European empire by indigenous peoples of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean worlds.
We focus on what has often been thought of as Europe’s ‘revolutionary period’—a phase as famous for its massive imperial expansion as for its political struggles. It is indeed this extraordinary expansion—encompassing nearly one-third of the world’s population—that led C.A.
Bayly to describe the era as a ‘critical one in the epistemological and economic creation of “indigenous peoples” as a series of comparable categories across the globe’.1 Despite such a creation of comparability, however, surprisingly little work has been done on measuring indigenous experiences within and across expanding imperial borders.Certainly, one reason for this neglect has been a reluctance on the part of scholars to perpetuate the European framing that such work must entail: to place in historical relation indigenous peoples from the Americas and the Austral-Pacific—as will be pursued here—is to grant some special privilege to the European empires that encountered them separately. Yet we argue that this reluctance has also come at a price: it has missed an opportunity to understand how indigenous people in our period shared some common means of repelling, accommodating or appropriating the European encounter. Understanding these commonalities begins to shift our conception of what is central in driving imperial history, from the ‘newcomers’ to the ‘natives’.
Much imperial history, even today, still figures indigenes as the objects upon whom empires acted; some more nuanced recent work on specific encounters has endeavoured to see how indigenes occasionally maintained more autonomy than previously assumed; and a few have even tackled the task of investigating the two-way processes at play in encounter.2 We wish to go beyond these amendments and turn the imperial story on its head, seeing indigenous action as a key force in all imperial action on the ground, especially during this pivotal era. While Europeans may have determined the rationale behind which peoples we compare acted, it was often those peoples who determined how encounters played out, what longer-term effects they had, and frequently the ways in which their meetings reverberated back in Europe.
Once we begin to ‘face empire’, and explore this critical period from the perspective of indigenous peoples across the globe, we can start to discern some common, if preliminary, patterns. Though this period can be characterised by the creation of new and often more repressive European strategies to manage ‘conquered’ populations, our examples in this chapter suggest that indigenous peoples themselves also forged important tactics to manage Europeans. In doing so, they were able to make an indelible mark on modern developments. Whether they affected the course of independence movements, as in the Americas, or redirected exploration and settlement, as in the South Pacific, indigenous peoples changed the nature and purpose of European empires at this critical juncture in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways.