English Colonial Terrorism, Genocide, and Indigenous Australians

Abstract

With the expansion of the European-dominated capitalist world system to the Australian continent in the late eighteenth century, English settlers practiced terror and genocide on indigenous Australians to take over their homeland. These crimes against humanity continued into the nineteenth century until indigenous peoples were almost destroyed, and the ownership of their land was entirely transferred to the English colonial settlers and their descendants. These settlers and their descendants have justified the theft and robbery of indigenous people’s land in the discourses of race, culture, backwardness, religion, civilization, and modernity This chapter first introduces indigenous Australians, their cultures, and the social organizations that made them vulnerable to the British genocidal attack. Second, it explains how the British colonial settlers expropriated indigenous Australians’ land through terrorism and genocide and justified their criminal actions in the doctrine of terra nullius (empty land) (Lindqvist 2007). Third, it identifies and explores several mechanisms of terrorism and genocide and their impacts on different groups of indigenous Australians.