Paternalist Reckonings

In the early nineteenth century, white Americans and Britons wielded humanitarian ideals to promote and justify their accelerated colonization of Indigenous nations. As historian Elspeth Martini argues, paternalism toward Indigenous peoples lay at the heart of this imperial humanitarianism. The post-1815 upsurge in the rate and reach of US and British incursions into Indigenous territories increased the volume and frequency of white expressions of concern for Indigenous welfare. No longer justifying these invasions merely as “civilized” entitlement, US and British policymakers more explicitly rationalized their mass expropriations of Indigenous territories as compatible with the interests of those whose lands they took.

Stunning in its breadth, Paternalist Reckonings moves deftly between sites in North America, Australia, southern Africa, and Europe to bring US and British policies toward far-flung Indigenous nations within the same historical frame. Employing a range of methodologies, Martini reveals how proclamations of concern for Indigenous well-being worked to rationalize and consolidate a form of colonial rule in which US and British colonizers stripped Indigenous nations of their territories and sought to deny their existence as sovereign peoples.