ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the Western world’s earliest overseas settler colonial conquest, which resulted in the extinction of the Indigenous population of the Canary Islands, situated off the coast of southern Morocco. It provides a sweeping survey of civilian-driven violence in the making of Canada, from seventeenth-century British claims to Newfoundland to present-day penetration of the Arctic north; and across the breadth of North America from the Maritime Provinces to British Columbia. The book then examines the role of state-sanctioned militia, especially the impact of their slaving activities, on the destruction of San societies along the Cape Colony’s northeastern frontier district of Graaff-Reinet during the five decades straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. It also investigates the murderous confluence of civilian- and state-driven processes of Aboriginal dispossession in Queensland.
