Short description:

This book explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and settlers and compares the emergence of racial boundaries in two Pacific Rim cities ? Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia.

Long description:

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.

Urbanizing Frontiers is a fine example of comparative colonial history. This sort of history requires research in multiple locations often separated by vast distances, engagement with the historiographical contours of at least two countries, and a conceptual language to bridge them. ...[it shows] rich and compelling evidence or the insightful analysis which is developed with reference to postcolonial, feminist and spatial theory.... Urbanizing Frontiers is a sophisticated monograph, carefully crafted and impressive in scope. It deserves a wide readership in indigenous studies, colonial history, urban history and historical geography, while also making an important and timely contribution to both Australian and Canadian history.