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Facing Empire

Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age

edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell
foreword by Daniel K. Richter

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A comprehensive volume that interrogates European imperialism from the perspective of indigenous experiences.

The contributors to Facing Empire reimagine the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world.

Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples’ experiences of the...

A comprehensive volume that interrogates European imperialism from the perspective of indigenous experiences.

The contributors to Facing Empire reimagine the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world.

Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples’ experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney.

Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale.

Contributors: Tony Ballantyne, Justin Brooks, Colin G. Calloway, Kate Fullagar, Bill Gammage, Robert Kenny, Shino Konishi, Elspeth Martini, Michael A. McDonnell, Jennifer Newell, Joshua L. Reid, Daniel K. Richter, Rebecca Shumway, Sujit Sivasundaram, Nicole Ulrich

Reviews

Reviews

Unlike many comparative histories of empire that adopt a European lens, this volume treats indigenous peoples as its main subjects... Facing Empire is a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to global indigenous histories. The essays are high quality, and the editors effectively draw out similarities in how the histories, rivalries, expectations, and interests of indigenous peoples defined the terms of encounters.

A new, compelling, and important examination of the British Empire from the perspectives of the colonized during the transitional period of 1760 to 1840. Demonstrating that themes of indigeneity might well stretch beyond the conventional reaches of the burgeoning field of indigenous studies, Facing Empire will help set the agenda for future research.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
376
ISBN
9781421426563
Illustration Description
7 b&w illus., 2 maps
Table of Contents

Foreword, by Daniel K. Richter

Introduction: Empire, Indigeneity, and Revolution
Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell

Part I: Pathways
1. The Future Makers: Managing Australia in 1788
Bill Gammage
2

Foreword, by Daniel K. Richter

Introduction: Empire, Indigeneity, and Revolution
Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell

Part I: Pathways
1. The Future Makers: Managing Australia in 1788
Bill Gammage
2. The Indigenous Architecture of Empire: The Anishinaabe Odawa in North America Michael A. McDonnell
3. Exploiting British Ambivalence in West Africa: Fante Sovereignty in the Early Nineteenth Century
Rebecca Shumway
4. New Ecologies: Pathways in the Pacific, 1760s-1840s
Jennifer Newell
5. Closed Sea or Contested Waters? The Persian Gulf in the Age of Revolution
Sujit Sivasundaram

Part II: Entanglements
6. Red Power and Homeland Security: Native Nations and the Limits of Empire in the Ohio Country
Colin G. Calloway
7. Between Reform and Revolution: Class Formation and British Colonial Rule at the Cape of Good Hope
Nicole Ulrich
8. Christianity, Commerce, and the Remaking of the Māori World
Tony Ballantyne
9. Broken Treaty: Taungurung Responses to the Settler Revolution in Colonial Victoria
Robert Kenny

Part III: Connections
10. Envoys of Interest: A Cherokee, a Ra‘iatean, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
Kate Fullagar
11. Makahs, Māori, and the Settler Revolution in Pacific Marine Space
Joshua L. Reid
12. Imperial Structures, Indigenous Aims: Connecting Native Engagement in Scotland, North America, and South Asia
Justin Brooks
13. Shawundais and the Methodist Mission to Native North America
Elspeth Martini

Afterword, by Shino Konishi

Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Kate Fullagar, Ph.D.

Kate Fullagar is a senior lecturer in modern history at Macquarie University. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795.
Featured Contributor

Michael A. McDonnell, Ph.D.

Michael A. McDonnell is a professor of history at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America.