Across the past fifty or more years, indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have increasingly made political and legal claims about sovereignty and land. As this has occurred, numerous scholars in a broad range of disciplines – especially law and history – have tried to explain how these two matters were dealt with by the British empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Often that work has been done in the hope that it will bolster the indigenous peoples’ claims or redeem the settler societies whose legitimacy has been drawn into question because of their unjust treatment of First Peoples.
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