Ch 6Displacing Indigenous Peoples — Class 11 History, concept-first.

This chapter turns to two continents — the Americas and Australia — where European settlement fundamentally displaced the peoples who already lived there.

This timeline is the fourth in a set of comparative timelines that run across the chapter. It covers roughly three centuries, from 1720 to 2000, and is organised region-wise — Africa, Europe, Asia, So…

The driving force behind European colonies was profit, but the way that profit was extracted varied enormously from place to place.

The story of North America begins with its geography, because the land itself shaped everything that followed.

The story of the Native Peoples of North America begins long before any European set foot on the continent.

The first thing to grasp about this section is that it is not a single story. It is a set of three distinct threads: the vocabulary used to name native peoples, a native account of first contact, and…

In the eighteenth century, western Europeans measured civilisation by three yardsticks: literacy, an organised religion, and urban living.

The story of how native peoples lost their land in the USA is not a story of simple conquest. It is a story of broken promises, legal trickery, forced marches, and a deep cultural clash over what land…

The promise of gold had always hovered over North America, but it became a concrete obsession in the 1840s when traces of the metal were found in California.

The American Revolution of the 1770s was fought in the name of a “democratic spirit.” For the settlers, this spirit became the defining identity of the new United States, setting it apart from the mon…

The section opens with the American Civil War, which forced the US government to turn its attention away from the frontier and toward the conflict between the North and the South.

Human habitation in Australia is ancient, just as in the Americas. The people Europeans later lumped together as ‘aborigines’ — a general label covering many distinct societies — began arriving on the…

Not till the 1920s did things begin to improve for the native peoples of the USA and Canada. The turning point was a major survey called The Problem of Indian Administration, directed by the social sc…