In the context of a wider study of the evolution through time of relationships between Indigenous peoples, settlers and the British empire though the example of three family histories, this initial chapter starts in the borderlands between the lands of the Haudenosaunee and colonial New York just before the revolution. It re-reads the well-known histories of Haudenosaunee siblings Joseph and Molly Brant (Thayendenegea and Konwatsienni) and of British Superintendent of Indians William Johnson, Molly Brant’s partner, in a wider regional context. The chapter takes the Mohawk Valley as an example of a context in which the empire was compelled to accept to some extent the models of incorporation, including the creation of kinship links designed to foster mutual obligations, used by Indigenous people who were still key military allies. At the same time, William Johnson also used household power (including the ownership of enslaved people) to attempt to dominate a complex society. Before the Revolution, people in Mohawk Valley borderlands lived in a state of uneasy equilibrium, held together in part by the empire’s military need of an alliance with the Haudenosaunee, even as regional violence made relationships increasingly untenable.

The experiences of John William Bannister as Chief Justice of Sierra Leone are brought into conversation with those of his brother Thomas Bannister, a settler in Australia, as both tried urgently to mobilize the global resources of empire to rescue failing family fortunes. In Sierra Leone, John William Bannister tried to administer impartial justice in a deeply racialized context. Thomas was one of the ‘pioneers’ in the Swan River colony in western Australia and an investor in the project of Van Diemen’s Land settlers to colonize Kulin lands in what would become the colony of Victoria, in the aftermath of genocidal violence in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He promoted consensual colonialism through treaties, echoing his brother Saxe, former Attorney General of New South Wales. The chapter examines the invasion of Australia, including violence against Indigenous peoples, ‘exploration’, ecological change including the importation of livestock, British elite patronage and the highly controversial effort of disingenuous settlers to create a treaty with the Kulin. The chapter closes with comparison between West Africa and Australian coastal colonies in the 1820s and 30s, disparate sites along the sea lanes of empire tenuously linked by imperial markets, military control and common justificatory ideologies.

Saxe Bannister was appointed Attorney General of New South Wales probably at least in part because his interactions with the Six Nations had brought him to the attention of the Colonial Office. He found himself plunged into conflict with competing settler factions. The chapter focuses primarily, however, on his interaction with Indigenous resistance, particularly by the Wiradjuri, in the context of the violent conquest of Australia. Bannister tried to apply the British rule of law as he saw it to frontier contexts, calling for the declaration of martial law during warfare in both Bathurst and Hunter Valley. He also tried unsuccessfully to prosecute police officers and local settlers for extrajudicial murders. Bannister left New South Wales in disgrace but his legal legacy persisted in debates that had implications across the British settler empire: the court case would later lay the groundwork for the legal refusal of Indigenous sovereignty in exchange for the protection of Indigenous people against settler violence. The chapter highlights the importance and the contradictions of the British ideology of the rule of law.

This chapter examines the American Revolution in the territory of the Six Nations and in colonial New York as an example of the shift in power to settlers and settler rejection of Indigenous modes of alliance that also typified the expansion of settler colonialism elsewhere. In borderland regions, the American Revolution was also a land war. Ethnic cleansing and warfare broke many of such fragile bonds of kinship (real and fictive) as existed between settlers and Indigenous peoples, even as the metaphor of brotherhood was important to Ranger groups in which Indigenous and settler soldiers fought together. Difference was entrenched through violence. Specific examples of the politics of kinship examined include nineteenth-century settler family stories about warfare, including stories about Joseph Brant, who was often taken as a symbol of settler relationships with the Six Nations; changing practices of captive-taking on the part of the Six Nations; complex relationships between white and Indigenous soldiers; and the breaking of kinship links between the Six Nations themselves, in which the Brants played a significant role.

This chapter examines the sponsorship by the politically powerful Buxton family of the disastrous Niger expedition, which sought to harness medical advances, new geographic knowledge and the power of steamships, to send three steamships down the River Niger to negotiate treaties with African chiefs whereby chiefs would agree to end the slave trade and in return receive trade boats from Britain. Secretly, the expedition was also supposed to purchase territory and lay the foundations for a cotton plantation funded by British investors. The chapter examines the extent to which the expedition was a family enterprise, as well as exploring the ideological assumptions of the expedition, opposition to it, and the importance of the marriage between humanitarianism and colonialism that it represented. The failure of the expedition marked a turning point in the power of abolitionist families. For example, the expedition was opposed by Chartist activists in the name of popular power and opposition to the focus of elite families on suffering others overseas rather than on the British poor. Debate over the Niger Expedition thus presaged the growth of settler populism, and marked an important turning point in the history of empire, kinship and violence told by this book.

The former Attorney General of New South Wales, Saxe Bannister, on whom this chapter focuses, travelled to the Cape Colony after being forced from his position in Australia. In the late 1820s, he argued for the need to apply British justice impartially in a frontier context, leaving an important record of colonial violence. He revealed abuses in colonial courts in two cases of settler violence against Khoekhoe people in the eastern Cape, despite putative British legal reform; highlighted Xhosa wrongs in the face of dispossession; and accused the colonial government of countenancing an illegal slave trade in San children. Khoekhoe people tried to use Bannister’s legal expertise to interact with the colonial government through petitions, while Xhosa chiefs funnelled statements of grievance through him, albeit to little immediate effect. I also suggest that Bannister thought of the Khoekhoe as analogous to the Haudenosaunee, in part because of their roles as military allies of the British, and may have shared political strategies with them. Bannister simultaneously believed that he, through his association with the trader Francis Farewell, had inherited a treaty with the Zulu leader Shaka giving the pair territory in Zululand. Despite being disappointed in his effort to monetize this ‘treaty’, Bannister later vigorously promoted the creation of the British colony of Natal. The chapter explores paradoxes of imperial liberalism and its difficult relationship to anti-colonial resistance.

After the American Revolution, the British gave away Six Nations lands at the negotiating table in 1783. The loyalist Six Nations claimed territory in what would become Upper Canada in 1791. The chapter first examines the corruption scandal around Guy Johnson’s abuse of Indian department funds in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. It then follows the move of the Six Nations to territory that would become Upper Canada, where their presence posed questions about Indigenous sovereignty and the extent of imperial control. Joseph Brant tried to exploit his interstitial role both to accumulate personal power and to promote Indigenous sovereignty, even as the Grand River community struggled over the best economic strategy to adopt and many rejected Brant. Despite considerable ambiguity and the enduring importance of kinship-based political strategies, the eventual colonial response to the challenge of Indigenous claims would eventually be to seek to control the membership of Indigenous communities, while failing to protect Indigenous lands or investments, even as ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ increasingly became separate social categories. Attacks on the power of Indigenous peoples were linked rhetorically to attacks on corruption and on family bio-power.

By the 1830s, a number of British humanitarians saw empire as a solution to problems. The final section of this book focuses on the Buxtons, a powerful British gentry family whose members turned from the abolition of slavery to the defence of Indigenous peoples in the British settler empire in the late 1830s. This first chapter of two discusses Priscilla Buxton, daughter of leading abolitionist MP Thomas Fowell Buxton and his close collaborator, who sat at the centre of an empire-wide information gathering network. She spent much of her life on international political causes in response to her deep sense of Christian duty even as she also ultimately supported an expedition that would have begun the colonization of what is today Nigeria. The chapter analyses the evidence that Buxton accumulated about police and settler killings on the Eastern Cape frontier and shows how a political case was made, relayed in part through kinship networks. The study also follows the fate of key stories, notably evidence for the killing of Xhosa chief Sigcau and seven of his men by settlers on commando, once they entered the discursive space of a commission of inquiry and were attacked by the supporters of the colonial administration.

This book has focused on the relationship between family biopower and empire. It has made the argument that kinship strategies were used by some Indigenous people to try to manage empire, even as imperial power often flowed through elite families. By the 1840s, settler democracy and the growth of settler nations increasingly challenged these forms of power as a mode of governance, despite the continuing power of wealthy families. This concluding discussion uses the example of the failure of the Niger expedition and the colonial buy-out of Indigenous lands in Upper Canada with the Act of Union to illustrate the turn to the settler nation, and the entrenchment of new kinship strategies, focused on the white family of the nation rather than kinship ties between settlers and Indigenous peoples. It also argues that moral colonialism was firmly entrenched as a response to colonial violence and that this vision in itself would become an important justification for the rise of the British empire to world hegemony.

The middle section of this book focuses primarily on the Bannister brothers, members of the minor gentry who both critiqued settler colonialism and yet simultaneously promoted and made careers from it. John William Bannister settled in Upper Canada after being demobilized from the navy at the end of the Napoleonic wars. John William’s interaction with the Six Nations helped launch the long career of the Bannisters as supposed experts in Indigenous affairs. This chapter discusses the struggle of John Brant and his cousin Robert Kerr to have the Grand River headlands returned to the Six Nations, and the efforts of John William and Saxe Bannister to support a Brant–Kerr embassy to London to that effect. The chapter also discusses the involvement of both William Johnson Kerr, a descendant of Joseph Brant, and John William Bannister in the controversial colonial career of Robert Gourlay in Upper Canada. It concludes by exploring the commission of inquiry proposed by Saxe Bannister into British relationships with the Six Nations, and the related efforts of the Bannister brothers to broker Indigenous expertise for colonial positions.

The introduction traces the main arguments of the book and provides an overview of key events discussed. It begins with the Sullivan Campaign of the American Revolution. This campaign ethnically cleansed Haudenosaunee people from territory that would later be ceded by the British to the Americans after the Revolution. The chapter asks what this campaign can tell us about the larger history of Indigenous–settler relationships. Among other things, it takes the campaign as an example of the rejection of real and fictive kinship ties between Indigenous peoples and settlers that was, I argue, a necessary precursor to the creation of settler nations. At the same time, some prominent imperial policy makers would struggle, as the book to come will also argue, to maintain different conceptions of Indigenous–imperial kinship in an effort to create a manageable and moral colonialism. The introduction outlines the book’s methodology of using microcosmic analyses to illuminate a macroscopic process: the project of British settler colonialism as it sprawled across time and space during this critical period of the creation and consolidation of settler colonial states. It gives an overview of pertinent scholarship and describes the topics of chapters to come.