Governing natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia's north (Studies in Imperialism)

By: Ben Silverstein

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Synopsis: In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory. By the late 1930s, Australian settlers were coming to understand the Northern Territory as a colonial formation requiring a new form of government. Responding to crises of social reproduction, public power, and legitimacy, they re-thought the scope of settler colonial government by drawing on both the art of indirect rule and on a representational economy of Indigenous elimination to develop a new political dispensation that sought to incorporate and consume Indigenous production and sovereignties. This book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in a broader governmental context.