Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities

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 experiences 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, 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.