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2 results

  • 20 - Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871

  • from Part III - Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides
  • Edited by Ned Blackhawk, Yale University, Connecticut, Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut, Benjamin Madley, University of California, Los Angeles, Rebe Taylor, University of Tasmania
  • General editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Genocide
    Published online:
    23 June 2023
    Print publication:
    04 May 2023, pp 481-507

  • Summary

    The British colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) began in 1803. There was an estimated 6,000 Aborigines (Palawa) living on the island with a history dating back over 40,000 years. By 1835, there were just over 100 Palawa living in forced exile on one of Tasmania’s smaller offshore islands. Only two residents remained when the government closed the Aboriginal Settlement in 1871. This chapter traces the history of Tasmania’s colonisation from 1803 to 1871 and finds that the British committed acts against the Palawa that meet the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: killings, child removals, and creating conditions unconducive to sustaining life. Tasmania has been cited as one the ‘classical’ cases of genocide, but the finding has also stirred debate. This chapter surveys the historiography of Tasmanian genocide including Raphael Lemkin’s 1940s finding of a clear case of genocide; Henry Reynolds’ 2001 counter evidence of gubernatorial humanitarianism; and the subsequent histories that recognise genocide within the structure of settler colonialism. This chapter concludes that the British committed genocide in Tasmania with intent, but reported and framed that crime within the rhetoric, and even the guidelines, of contemporaneous humanitarian policies.

Empire, Kinship and Violence
  • Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842
  • Elizabeth Elbourne
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • 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.