Warfare of the most dreadful description: a comparative study of settler colonial violence in Connecticut and Tasmania

The Pequot War in seventeenth-century Connecticut and the Black War in nineteenth-century Tasmania were key moments in American and Australian history, respectively. Separated by two hundred years and 17,000 kilometers, they nonetheless followed remarkably similar trajectories; relative peace followed by aggressive settler expansion, the clash of two radically different military cultures, and the physical removal of the remaining indigenous survivors. Using the innovative field of settler colonial studies, this thesis will comparatively examine settler colonial violence in Connecticut and Tasmania. As a burgeoning number of works in the field have shown, settler colonial studies lends itself well to global and comparative approaches, as well as trans temporal ones. However, to date, there have been very few studies of the latter. This project will analyse the structural attributes of settler colonial violence comparatively and trans temporally to identify the ways in which they manifest in different cultural contexts and temporal frameworks. More broadly, it will seek to provide a detailed analysis of how the operative logic of settler colonialism can inform and shape seemingly unrelated events, and further the understanding of this distinctive and pervasive process.