Urbanizing Frontiers by Penelope Edmonds, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Colonial frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Early towns and cities in the far reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. The lives of Indigenous peoples in these urbanizing frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of European progress. Urbanizing Frontiers explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and newcomers in two Pacific Rim cities – Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia. Built on Indigenous lands and overtaken by gold rushes, these cities emerged between 1835 and 1871 in significantly different locations, yet both became cross-cultural and ultimately segregated sites of empire. Victoria’s population came to include large numbers of Indigenous peoples, a legacy of the fur trade, whereas Melbourne’s Indigenous population was far smaller. An explanation lies in the structural features of the fur trade versus pastoralism, and the ensuing politics of race that played out at the spatial, imaginative, social, and legal levels, where bodies and spaces were rapidly transformed, sometimes in violent ways. This innovative, interdisciplinary study reconceptualizes the frontier as urbanizing space by charting the development of the settler-colonial city and exploring the lives of the newcomers, Indigenous peoples, and mixed-race peoples who, in turn, shaped its development. It will be of interest to students and scholars of colonialism, urbanism, Indigenous studies, transnational history, cultural geography, and Pacific Rim studies. | Urbanizing Frontiers by Penelope Edmonds, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters