Comparing colonial violence on the India and Queensland frontiers, c.1850-1900

<p dir="ltr">This thesis offers a novel juxtaposition of colonial violence on the frontiers of India and Queensland. It breaks down the typological distinction between settler and non-settler colonies and demonstrates how the frontier shaped colonial violence and the Indigenous response. It shows that the frontier space held similarities in the ways violence was legitimated, the mechanisms which animated it and its methods of deployment, in colonies purported to be wholly unalike. By bringing settler and administrative colonies into a single analytical frame, this thesis disrupts the historiographical tendency toward narrow comparison and sheds light on the structural presence of violence across the imperial network. By comparing violence across typological boundaries, it shows how violence was structurally embedded on and shaped by the spatial characteristics of the frontier, irrespective of colonial administration.</p><p dir="ltr">Making use of official colonial correspondence, administrative records, newspapers and contemporary narratives, the chapters explore the frontier colonial encounter in colonies previously considered to be structurally distinct. Beginning with the legal underpinnings of frontier violence, the thesis then explores how frontier anxiety catalysed violence in both case studies. It then examines the Indigenous response to the colonial presence on the frontier and explores Indigenous deployment of attenuated agency to leverage and exploit the colonial presence. Finally, it investigates the ways in which the frontier colonial encounter reflected back upon the imperial metropole in a process of mutual political constitution which catalysed administrative change at the turn of the century.</p><p dir="ltr">By using the frontier as a methodological bridge, this thesis challenges the orthodoxy of delineating colonies into self-contained silos. It offers a novel prism through which to consider the structural presence of violence within the imperial world-system and demonstrates the value of broad comparison in the imperial network, revealing the ubiquity of colonial violence at the furthest geographical extremities of empire.</p>