2025/10/02 by Isabelle Merle, Charlotte Ann Legg, Briony Neilson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Island Studies and Pacific Affairs #New Caledonia Indigenous Studies #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/00223344.2025.2579827
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/11/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Based on the study of colonial archives relating to New Caledonia and on the rich historiography on Australia, especially pertaining to the colony of New South Wales, this article focuses on the ‘indigenous reservation’ as a particular object of study and attempts to shed light on its origins and its development in two territories built and conceived by France and Britain as settler colonies. Rather than providing a direct comparison, the article places in parallel two colonial contexts in which the ‘indigenous reservation’ became a familiar reality during the 19th and 20th centuries as a solution to ‘the problem’ of indigenous presence in territories claimed as ‘new’ by Europeans. As this article lays out, however, the indigenous reservations in New Caledonia and Australia had neither the same history nor the same function.