History

Protection vs Native Title

Item: Empire and the Making of Native Title
Author: Lisa Ford

The Treaty of Waitangi in Tasman context

by Lisa Ford •

May 2021, no. 431

Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, property and Indigenous people by Bain Attwood

Cambridge University Press, $49.95 hb, 455 pp

History

Protection vs Native Title

The Treaty of Waitangi in Tasman context

by Lisa Ford •

May 2021, no. 431

Bain Attwood’s Empire and the Making of Native Title is a welcome contribution to the field. Like many good historians of sovereignty and native title in Australia and New Zealand, Attwood stresses the importance of contingency and complexity in the first decades of British settlement on both sides of the Tasman Sea. His early chapters focus on the local and imperial contexts that shaped Crown approaches to Indigenous title in New South Wales, Port Phillip, and South Australia. The rest of the book provides a forensic account of the lead-up to and aftermath of the British assumption of sovereignty in New Zealand, and its shifting ramifications for legal arguments about Māori land title.

Lisa Ford

Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. Her work explores the interface of sovereignty, constitutional law, and jurisdiction with everyday legal practice in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Empire and United States. She is author of Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Harvard, 2010); and co-author with Lauren Benton of Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1840 (Harvard, 2016).