Frontiers of Colonialism

“An original contribution and an important one. Presents interesting and compelling case studies in the variability of colonialism and colonial encounters.”—Melissa S. Murphy, coeditor of Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas

“Creates bridges to understand and compare diverse sets of data and questions, incorporating larger ideas of colonial and indigenous structure, action, reaction, and agency. These new insights may turn over some previously held understandings of what we associate with colonialism and how to perceive it.”—John G. Douglass, coeditor of Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do

“Pushes archaeologists out of familiar theoretical, methodological, and regional silos to expand understandings of colonial context and relations between old-timers/indigenous people and newcomers/colonists.”—Siobhan Hart, coeditor of Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology

Bringing together case studies of prehistoric and historic sites from Western and non-Western contexts, including China, the Philippines, the Pacific, Egypt, and elsewhere, Frontiers of Colonialism makes the surprising claim that colonialism can and should be compared across radically different time periods and locations.

Christine Beaule challenges archaeologists to rethink these two major self-imposed boundaries of study and instead to examine colonial administrative strategies, local resistance, and cross-cultural interaction within a larger, comparative framework. Beaule argues that crossing these frontiers of study will give scholars more power to recognize and explain the varied local impacts of colonialism.

Christine Beaule is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.