00:00:20.420 - 00:00:42.070

Well, a frontier conventionally is, of course, a fixed line. Frontiers between nation states, between organised nation states are fixed lines that have been negotiated or that have been defined by the two nations that are involved,

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and they tend to be clear lines of demarcation. The geography of them is well-known. The sort of procedures for crossing them is well-known. And they are characterised by the familiar kind of sights

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of a frontier, of border posts and fences and gates and officials. A colonial frontier, which is the subject of this database, is a very different kind of frontier.

00:01:15.060 - 00:01:25.170

It's more described-- it's best described as a zone, rather than a fixed point. It's not a fixed point. It's not a site, which you can say, there's the frontier,

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and you're crossing over from the colonial side to the side where the indigenous people or the native people live. So a colonial frontier is a zone. It's not a fixed point, and tends to be, therefore, fluid

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and movable. I suppose the sort of final point of the colonial frontier, in the 19th century anyway, would be the point at which the furthest settler had

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settled and set up some sort of dwelling and engaged in sheep raising or pastoral activities or other kinds of farming activities. But the fundamental difference between the frontier

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as we conventionally think of it, between nation states and the colonial frontier is that one is fixed and the other is negotiated, and the other one--

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Sorry. One is fixed, fixed frontier with the nation states, and the colonial frontier is a fluid zone. This collection of documents, Frontier Life,

00:02:39.970 - 00:02:52.970

has quite a lot of material in it, which shows, actually, the creation of nation-state frontiers or fixed frontiers. There's material from the Hudson Bay Company archives

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where there are surveyors going around drawing the boundaries of what was known as the Red River Settlement in Canada, which later became the province of Saskatchewan. And there's material, too, on the negotiations

00:03:09.010 - 00:03:26.990

between the Hudson Bay Company and the United States and in terms of the creation of the Alaskan frontier. So this collection of materials of frontier life has material in it that shows--

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In a way, it demonstrates the difference between the nation-state frontier and the colonial frontier. This collection is focused on the 19th century colonial

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frontier. And a major reason to study the colonial frontier and frontier life in that period is that the 19th century was a century of imperial empires,

00:04:01.850 - 00:04:18.790

of empires that sort of came to dominate the world system. And the largest of those, which is, again, the subject of this collection of documents was the British Empire, or rather, I

00:04:18.790 - 00:04:32.270

should say the Anglo world that was created in the 19th century, created largely by the diaspora of British settlers who emigrated from Britain.

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Over the course of the 19th century, 22 million Britons left the United Kingdom and went to places like the United States, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, what became

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known as the settler colonies for the British Empire, with the addition of the United States, which, ironically, was the recipient of the largest number of British immigrants.

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So the point is that the 19th century marks, in a way, the proliferation of colonial frontiers. They're a major kind of feature of the world system of the 19th century.

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And they are the product of this massive diaspora of mainly British emigrants who went out from Britain to these parts of the world. That's one major reason to study them.

00:05:28.310 - 00:05:43.830

Another major reason to study them in the 19th century is that they were the sites of major dispossession of native peoples. I mean, the British tended to think that

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or to write about these frontiers as if they existed in what the British called a terra nullius, an empty land. In fact, none of these lands were empty.

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They were heavily populated, often with indigenous people. And so, this enormous wave, this deluge of settlers coming out from the United Kingdom to places like Australia, New Zealand,

00:06:11.810 - 00:06:26.140

the United States naturally involved the conflict or interaction with, and conflict with, the native people. And the end result was that massive dispossession

00:06:26.140 - 00:06:39.070

across the Anglo world of indigenous people from their land and disruption of their culture. So that's further reason to study them. This was a major world event that

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happens in many different parts of the world. And the third reason to study them is the consequences of that. In other words, the legacies of this diaspora, or the legacies

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of the interaction between the indigenous people and the settlers are legacies that continue on into the 20th century down to the present day.

00:07:11.070 - 00:07:24.520

It is-- the colonial frontier is a feature of world history, really from the 17th century onwards. It wasn't invented in the 19th century. It was a very important feature of 19th century world history,

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but it wasn't peculiar to the 19th century. It wasn't the new invention of the 19th century. And the colonial frontier has been a feature of world history since the Roman Empire.

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But it becomes a significant feature, I think, of the history of the world from the 17th century onwards, really when the origins of modern globalisation begin, back in the 17th century.

00:07:58.680 - 00:08:09.830

I'm thinking, for example, of the creation of the Spanish Empire in Latin America and in the southwest United States, which, again, is reflected in the documents, some

00:08:09.830 - 00:08:23.370

of the documents of this collection from the California Historical Society, where there are many documents that refer to the latter stages of the Spanish colonial frontier, which lasted in

00:08:23.370 - 00:08:37.490

the southwest United States up until the early 19th century, as a matter of fact. So the colonial frontiers have been a feature of world history since at least the--

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significantly, at least since the 17th century, when they were associated, most notably, with the Spanish Empire. Well, because a colonial frontier

00:09:01.200 - 00:09:24.540

is marked by the interaction between incomers from outside and the original inhabitants, the indigenous people who occupy that land, and because, also, what is involved in this colonial frontier,

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ultimately, is the dispossession of the land of the original people, and it's displacement into the possession, into the hands of the colonial settlers, there is bound to be violence involved in this interaction,

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in this process. There's nowhere where colonial frontiers exist which were-- I think it's true to say-- devoid of violence.

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There are different levels of violence. There were different structures of violence. But everywhere, there is violence. Now, the interesting thing about this violence

00:10:12.840 - 00:10:32.690

is that it's often a violence that is arbitrary, it is sudden, that is personal and that is intimate. In other words, it's less commonly, or not always,

00:10:32.690 - 00:10:49.090

perhaps less commonly, violence that is the product of a deliberate kind of armed movement by a state body. And that-- although, such violence does

00:10:49.090 - 00:11:01.130

occur, and I'll refer to that again in a minute, one of the features of colonial frontiers is that they are dominated by what historians call non-state actors.

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That is the presence of the state, the organised state, is very weak, especially in the early years of a colonial frontier. And so, there's a lot of anarchy and disorder

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on the frontier that defines or determines the violence as an arbitrary, as a personal, as an intimate, as an uncontrolled matter. You know, the image we have of the United States of the Wild

00:11:38.030 - 00:11:57.700

West is an image that is romanticised and constructed, but which has a core of reality to it. And it was that kind of moment in the history of the colonial frontier where there is a very weak state

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presence, where the forces of law and order are not very strong, where individuals are responsible for their own affairs and their own safety, and where they're not answerable to state bodies.

00:12:15.900 - 00:12:31.570

Those moments are characteristic of the colonial frontier, and it's in those moments that the colonial frontier was probably at its most violent. Because there were no restraining institutions,

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no restraining bodies to channel the violence or to constrain it. And violence of this sort is often the product of anxiety and fear, settlers

00:12:51.830 - 00:13:13.780

going into a strange land of which they really knew nothing, encountering strange people, which they don't know, whom they don't understand, are often beset by anxiety and fear, and violence, generally speaking,

00:13:13.780 - 00:13:35.670

is produced when power is threatened. And one of the peculiar things about colonial violence in the colonial frontier is that these new settlers coming in and they're trying to establish themselves

00:13:35.670 - 00:13:52.920

feel, in fact, beleaguered, and feel often powerless. We look back and we tend to see them as the harbingers of a big imperial movement, which they were, but they themselves didn't see it this way.

00:13:52.920 - 00:14:07.070

They were, in fact, often beset by a sense of isolation, by a sense of beleaguerment, confronting strange, indigenous peoples whose behaviour they couldn't predict and didn't understand.

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And it's in that kind of world, in that kind of situation, that violence is resorted to very quickly. Whereas in a world which has institutions of law and order and police and other civil institutions,

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violence will be responded to less quickly and less immediately. Frontiers are trigger happy places, and they're trigger happy places, in part, because the level of anxiety,

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the level of fear, especially on the part of the incomers, I think, is very close to the surface. The same must be true also for those on the other side of the frontier,

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the indigenous people, who also, no doubt, were confronted with situations and cultures that they didn't understand. And they, too, are surely beset with these kinds of feelings

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of anxiety and fear, and that made a very combustible situation, I think. So that a resort to violence, and resort to the gun was a very, very--

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it was a first reaction or a second reaction, rather than a third or fourth or fifth reaction. And that is the reason why these frontiers are in fact sites of a great deal of violence.

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A place like Australia, which we think of today as a very peaceful, ordered society, its early history is rent with the most terrible kind of violence.

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Large numbers of the aboriginal peoples were literally slaughtered. Settlers would go out on hunting expeditions. Settlers would go out on hunting expeditions,

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and shoot any aborigine they came across. So violence is a very important feature of this phase of colonial frontiers, which is a phase marked by the absence of strong state structures

00:16:35.940 - 00:16:50.930

and strong state presence. Now, I should also say that once the state has established its presence on the frontier, that that doesn't guarantee that violence will disappear.

00:16:50.930 - 00:17:11.740

There are many instances of violence against indigenous peoples by the forces of the state. But certainly, before the state's established its institutions, the kind of violence you see

00:17:11.740 - 00:17:39.530

is a kind of, as I say, trigger happy violence of an intimate and often personal nature that is sparked very easily. The colonial frontier produces middle ground features

00:17:39.530 - 00:17:56.670

and meeting place features, such as intermarriage between groups who are representative of European settlers and the indigenous people. And there was a great deal of functionality

00:17:56.670 - 00:18:17.150

in such relationships and such patterns. In the case of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, for example, very large numbers of what are called metis people were produced out of this interaction

00:18:17.150 - 00:18:32.900

between the Hudson Bay Company, who was interested in trading furs, and the indigenous people who could provide the furs, but could also provide a great deal of knowledge about how to operate within the environment of Canada.

00:18:32.900 - 00:18:44.320

And out of this kind of mutual interest comes things such as mixed race formations, like the metis people in Canada, who, again, are featured in this digital collection.

00:18:47.600 - 00:19:04.870

This middle ground character of the colonial frontier produces systems of negotiation, systems of mediation that allow both settlers and indigenous peoples to come into a relationship

00:19:04.870 - 00:19:25.370

and to negotiate their differences and to create viable kinds of societies. And so, the colonial frontier, in this respect, is capable of producing almost alternative societies that

00:19:25.370 - 00:19:37.240

do not flow necessarily from the writ of the metropolitan society, but they come out of the needs of the particular environment in which they exist.

00:19:37.240 - 00:19:49.780

And the Canadian case is a good example of that. And the Southwest United States in the years of the Spanish Empire is another good example. As is, actually, the old Northwest

00:19:49.780 - 00:20:05.590

of the United States, where similar kinds of middle ground societies were created. And that last for quite a long time, until the establishment of the United States itself,

00:20:05.590 - 00:20:39.550

and after 1815, especially, the extension of federal government control over the areas spreading into Ohio and Indiana. The frontier has been important in the development of national identity of these nations that

00:20:39.550 - 00:20:59.110

emerged from the settler experience, such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, too. There are differences in each case, of course, between these societies.

00:20:59.110 - 00:21:16.110

But generally speaking, everywhere the role of the frontier has been sort of interpreted and a narrative has been developed about the role of the frontier in the early history

00:21:16.110 - 00:21:31.440

of these countries. That's most obvious, I think, in the case of the United States with the Wild West image. And indeed, from the very moment that the United States frontier

00:21:31.440 - 00:21:50.100

was closed in the 1890s, it began to be figured into the national narrative about what it meant to be an American and what it was that defined America.

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There's a very famous historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner who wrote-- in 1893, he wrote an article that has been extremely important in historical debate

00:22:06.600 - 00:22:17.710

about the role of the frontier. Turner basically argued that the frontier experience was what defined America and what made the United States different from Europe and what

00:22:17.710 - 00:22:29.970

created the virtues and the attributes of being an American. And although there's a great deal of the debate about that, and historians would not argue it in the way

00:22:29.970 - 00:22:47.530

that Turner did today-- Historians today would not argue the way that Turner did. It's nevertheless true that the role of the frontier was critical to the creation of American national identity.

00:22:47.530 - 00:23:02.100

And the same is true in the United Sta-- The same is true in Australia, and places like Australia and New Zealand, but in different forms. In New Zealand, for example, the experience

00:23:02.100 - 00:23:27.450

of the frontier, colonial frontier phase of its history was interpreted as being a period of healthy and generally peaceful interaction between the Maori and the British settlers. And that, then, gets written into the narrative

00:23:27.450 - 00:23:44.050

about New Zealand history as a story of good race relations. The good race relations that New Zealanders like to think characterise their society is tracked back to the early history of New Zealand when

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there was a colonial frontier type period where the British government was very weak or not even present, where a middle ground, New Zealand middle ground society was created.

00:23:56.790 - 00:24:10.120

That involved a great deal of cross-race relationships cross-race families, and that this laid the foundations for a healthier kind of race relations that characterised New Zealand's history

00:24:10.120 - 00:24:19.190

or that was believed to characterise New Zealand's history. In Australia, another variant of that kind of story was developed.

00:24:19.190 - 00:24:36.090

In Australia, the terrible violence that was associated with the early history of Australia, the early history of settlement in Australia, where large numbers of aboriginal peoples

00:24:36.090 - 00:24:56.620

were killed or died as a result of diseases, that experience was sort of silenced and was folded into a story about hardy pioneers battling against the natural envir--

00:24:56.620 - 00:25:15.360

the difficulties of nature and the harsh environment, and battling also against the reticence and the obduracy of aboriginal peoples, who were very reluctant to accept the benefits that Western civilisation was supposed

00:25:15.360 - 00:25:29.400

to bring them. And so, the Australian story of this frontier experience was kind of sanitised, and the terrible violence that characterised it, in reality, was written out

00:25:29.400 - 00:25:43.970

of the story. And a story about hardy pioneers who, it is true, occasionally had to discipline the Aborigines, but battling against the aboriginal presence

00:25:43.970 - 00:25:59.130

and battling against the harshness of nature, triumphed in creating a strong settler Western society in Australia. So wherever the colonial frontier

00:25:59.130 - 00:26:15.400

existed, at least in the Anglo world, it has become an important part of the national identity of the nations that emerge out of the colonial experience and written into that national identity in various ways.

00:26:30.240 - 00:26:50.350

I think perhaps the most peculiar feature of the frontier in Southern Africa is the way in which the racial lines were not just a matter of difference between white settlers

00:26:50.350 - 00:27:09.540

and non-white indigenous peoples. In South Africa, there was a racial division within the white groups themselves, between the Afrikaner, who were the descendants of mainly

00:27:09.540 - 00:27:22.640

Dutch settlers who came to South Africa from the late 1600s onwards and the British, the settlers who came much later, who came in the early 1820s.

00:27:22.640 - 00:27:39.730

That particular settlement of the British into Southern Africa is, again, well-documented in this digital collection in the material on Southern Africa, especially around the large numbers

00:27:39.730 - 00:27:56.780

of British settlers that were brought to South Africa in the 1820s, known as the 1820 settlers. But these settlers, these British settlers in South Africa, unlike British settlers in other white settler

00:27:56.780 - 00:28:15.610

colony very rapidly, became urban dwellers. They did not become farmers on the whole, whereas the Afrikaner, Dutch origin settlers, were primarily, at least the early period

00:28:15.610 - 00:28:27.270

in the 19th century, were primarily in the-- played the role of the pioneer that the British settlers had played elsewhere. They went out into the rural areas.

00:28:27.270 - 00:28:42.880

They trekked out into the wilderness and established their kind of civilisation, and they were primarily a rural people. So that was the major difference--

00:28:42.880 - 00:28:53.100

that produced major differences between South Africa and otherwise white settler colonies, especially because the British tended to regard the Afrikaners as forms

00:28:53.100 - 00:29:11.400

of white savages in the 19th century, especially. And so, South Africa was different in the sense that the racial lines cut across race, as well as between races. There are strong similarities, however,

00:29:11.400 - 00:29:23.780

between the sort of racially ideology that is produced in South Africa and that is produced in North America and elsewhere. But I think that's the key difference.

00:29:23.780 - 00:29:42.350

I mean, the history of the frontier in Southern Africa has many of the same kinds of features as it does elsewhere. In spite of Afrikaners' later association with a very strict racial ideology of racial distinction

00:29:42.350 - 00:29:59.480

and racial difference, there was a period when there was a lot of cross-race relationships of a sexual nature between rural Afrikaners and various African peoples.

00:29:59.480 - 00:30:14.850

And so there were-- and there were systems of cooperation that were developed, as well as systems-- as well as the presence of terrible and arbitrary violence that characterised the South African frontier.

00:30:14.850 - 00:30:23.240

So there are many similarities, but there are some key differences. And the key difference, I think, is between the way in which the white racial lines were

00:30:23.240 - 00:30:49.210

drawn in Southern Africa in the 19th century, especially. Settler political conscious develops out of the tension between metropolitan control and the settlers' desire to control their own affairs.

00:30:49.210 - 00:31:14.440

And the objects of settler political attention tend to be the agents or what they see as the agents of metropolitan control, such as, for example, the missionaries in the early 19th century, who

00:31:14.440 - 00:31:32.370

were a very powerful lobby in London in the colonial office and who have a very particular kind of view as to how indigenous people should be treated, and of the kind of policies that should be pursued

00:31:32.370 - 00:31:41.700

towards indigenous peoples. Missionaries had the ear of the colonial office for a long time. Settlers resented that.

00:31:41.700 - 00:31:56.250

The settler political consciousness begins to argue from the early 19th century that it knows better how to deal with indigenous peoples than the agents of the metropolitan centre.

00:31:56.250 - 00:32:11.730

And so it's around issues like that that settler political consciousness develops. And by the middle part of the 19th century, that consciousness has become powerful enough and assertive

00:32:11.730 - 00:32:27.590

enough for the British government looking back to the experience of the American Revolution to grant settler colonies, like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, a higher degree, a significant degree

00:32:27.590 - 00:32:33.530

of independence and self-governance and self-rule.