Introduction

This book is about the encounter between the British Empire and the Indigenous peoples of Australia and Aoteroa/New Zealand in the early nineteenth century. The introductory chapter lays out my broad argument about the content of that encounter and the legacies that the period installed in the histories of both British imperial culture and the settler colonies themselves. The chapter sketches the organization of the book. But, in addition, it explains my own vision of the historical process in this period and its relationship to the way other historians have written about this period and its issues.