Violence and Colonial Dialogue: Australia-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific's frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today's Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant.
Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured. In so doing it delivers insights into the operation of violence in colonial relations, makes valuable observations on the dynamics of racial construction in the colonial world, and develops novel perspectives and strategies for the telling of colonial pasts. The resulting dialogue between coercion and agency provides an important intervention in existing debates over the meaning of colonial history.
Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Violence and Colonial Dialogue will be of considerable interest to Pacific and Australia historians and anthropologists and those studying colonial societies, indentured labor, and related topics.

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