In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.

The aboriginal peoples of southern Africa, collectively known as San, suffered widespread genocidal violence as a result of colonial invasion from the eighteenth century onwards. Being hunter-gatherers and racially stereotyped as among the lowest forms of humanity, they were targeted for mass violence by colonial states and civilian militias. The first case study in this chapter analyses exterminatory Dutch and British violence against San in the Cape Colony during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second examines the obliteration of San society in Transorangia by indigenous Griqua polities during the early nineteenth century, cautioning against the over-simple, racialised binaries that often inform studies of frontier strife. Thirdly, from the mid-1840s onwards after the British annexation of Natal, conflict with San communities in the midlands resulted in their eradication by 1870. The fourth case study outlines how South African forces halted the German genocide of Namibian San when they invaded German South West Africa in 1914. The final case reveals a different pattern. It explores how late-nineteenth-century white pastoralists established peaceful relations with San in western Bechuanaland.

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.

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.

The transfer of the Cape to British control in 1806 gave the region new geopolitical prominence and the Cape sea-route more importance as the colonial authorities sought to consolidate control of the hinterland. British colonisers legitimated their presence in the region by insisting on their commitment to civilisation, progress, better governance and scientific accomplishment. This included conquest of the Xhosa, the British settlement programme in 1820, and scientific institutions. African kingdoms were also changing rapidly as they absorbed new military technologies such as horses and firearms. In the 1820s, a Royal Observatory was sited at Cape Town to expand knowledge of astronomy in the southern hemisphere and help with navigation and mapping. In the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific networks and associations gained footholds in local colonial society leading to the establishment of a natural history museum, the revival of the botanical garden and zoological expeditions. Geological exploration revealed fossils in the Karoo, prompting new thinking about the age of the earth. Flints and middens helped to catalyse archaeology as a field of interest – as did rock art. The science of race, which slip-streamed in Darwin’s wake, was given impetus by imperial conquest in South Africa.