Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history.Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction discourse was ironically applied to "the great white race" in various apocalyptic formulations. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the world, by the 1930s the stereotypic idea of "fatal impact" began to unravel, as did also various more general forms of race-based thinking and of social Darwinism.

Offers a comparative analysis of the processes and aftermath of decolonisation from philosophical, historical, literary and legal perspectives.

This book offers an innovative new framework for reading British and settler representations of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Taking the representation of the Southern African San as its case study, it uses methodologies drawn from critical anthropology, imperial history and literary studies to show the role that literary representations of Indigenous peoples played in popularising the hierarchical view of racial difference. The study identifies an ‘ethnographic poetics’ in which the claims of scientific discourse blend with a consciously literary preference for metaphor and analogy. This created a set of mobile figures that could be disseminated to different reading publics in both Britain and the colonies through a variety of literary genres and textual media. It advances research on race and imperial history by focusing on the importance of literature - from newspapers and periodicals to popular novels - in shaping discourses of national and racial belonging in Britain and the Cape Colony.

Empire, Kinship and Violence traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Elizabeth Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Elizabeth Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.

The idea that the period of social turbulence in the nineteenth century was a consequence of the emergence of the powerful Zulu kingdom under Shaka has been written about extensively as a central episode of southern African history. Considerable dynamic debate has focused on the idea that this period – the ‘mfecane’- left much of the interior depopulated, thereby justifying white occupation. One view is that ‘the time of troubles’ owed more to the Delagoa Bay Slave trade and the demands of the labour-hungry Cape colonists than to Shaka’s empire building. But is there sufficient evidence to support the argument? The Mfecane Aftermath investigates the very nature of historical debate and examines the uncertain foundations of much of the previous historiography.

History is a powerful aid to the understanding of the present, and those who are concerned with the escalating crisis in South Africa will find this an invaluable source book. This is the story of the evolution of a society in which race became the dominant characteristic, the primary determinant of status, wealth, and power. Cultural chauvinism of the first European colonists – primarily the Dutch – merged with economic and demographic developments to create a society in which whites relegated all blacks – free blacks, Africans, imported slaves – to a systematic pattern of subordination and oppression that foreshadowed the apartheid of the twentieth century. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the new empire-builders, the British, reinforced the racial order. In the next century and a half the industrialized South Africa would become firmly integrated into the world economy. Published originally in South Africa in 1979 and updated and expanded now, a decade later, this book by twelve South African, British, Canadian, Dutch, and American scholars is the most comprehensive history of the early years of that troubled nation. The authors put South Africa in the comparative context of other colonial systems. Their social, political, and economic history is rich with empirical data and rests on a solid base of archival research. The story they tell is a complex drama of a racial structure that has resisted hostile impulses from without and rebellion from within.