ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues for the importance of recovering Indigenous participation within the global networks of power and mobility that have constructed the world. It explains a range of analytic scales, including global, regional and intra-Indigenous networks, including histories of ideas and cultural forms and biography, as well as exploring contemporary legacies. The book evaluates the networks linking Indigenous and colonial cultural hierarchies and ways of ordering difference. It discusses an exemplary work of the new imperial history by Catherine Hall, to which the rest of the volume in some respects responds. The book explores the interaction of humanitarians, settlers, Indigenous people and the British imperial government at a critical moment the passing in the British parliament of the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850. It focuses on print culture, but more closely engages with the question of who belongs within ideas of Indigenous networks.
