Indigenous peoples have reservations: Isabelle Merle, ‘Indigenous Reservations in Australia and New Caledonia: A Colonial Reality and Its Variations in Aboriginal and Kanak Worlds’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous peoples have reservations: Isabelle Merle, ‘Indigenous Reservations in Australia and New Caledonia: A Colonial Reality and Its Variations in Aboriginal and Kanak Worlds’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2025

29Nov25

Abstract: Based on the study of colonial archives relating to New Caledonia and on the rich historiography on Australia, especially pertaining to the colony of New South Wales, this article focuses on the ‘indigenous reservation’ as a particular object of study and attempts to shed light on its origins and its development in two territories built and conceived by France and Britain as settler colonies. Rather than providing a direct comparison, the article places in parallel two colonial contexts in which the ‘indigenous reservation’ became a familiar reality during the 19th and 20th centuries as a solution to ‘the problem’ of indigenous presence in territories claimed as ‘new’ by Europeans. As this article lays out, however, the indigenous reservations in New Caledonia and Australia had neither the same history nor the same function.

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