This thesis presents a view of multiple human contacts with Australia, using a variety of data from the literature; linguistic, ethnographic, geographic, physical anthropology and art history. It will be shown that successive groups of people arrived in Australia before its settlement by Europeans. These people made their presence felt in various ways, which have been considered. Some in ancient and later times may have arrived from Africa, perhaps being blown off course and carried by the currents and winds of the Indian Ocean. Later migrations came from Asia, and finally technologically advanced peoples of Indonesia and China came to Australia. Some of these people left artefacts, practices and language that became part of some Aboriginal languages and some religious beliefs and practice, along with some physical biological traces. The peoples named “Aborigines” by European settlers were a diverse set of groups with a diverse set of physical and cultural influences. In particular the Batak people of Sumatra over a period of time contributed a large component of these diverse influences. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1274235 / Thesis (M.Sc.) -- School of Medical Sciences, 2007.

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In October 1875 the Canadian government reserved a tract of land along the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg for the exclusive use of Icelandic immigrants. This was part of a larger policy of reserving land for colonization projects involving European immigrants with a common ethno-religious background. The purpose of this policy was to promote the rapid resettlement and agricultural development of Aboriginal territory in the Canadian Northwest. The case of the Icelandic reserve, or Nýja Ísland (New Iceland), provides a revealing window into this policy, and the ways in which it intersected with the larger processes of colonization in the region during the late nineteenth century. The central problem that this study addresses is the uneasy fit between "colonization reserves" such as New Iceland and the political, economic and cultural logic of nineteenth-century liberalism. Earlier studies have interpreted group settlements as either aberrations from the "normal" pattern of pioneer individualism or communitarian alternatives to it. This study, by contrast, argues that colonization reserves were part of a spatial regime that reflected liberal categories of difference that were integral to the extension of a new liberal colonial order in the region. Using official documents, immigrant letters and contemporary newspapers, this study examines the Icelandic colonists’ relationship to the Aboriginal people they displaced, to other settler groups, and to the Canadian state. It draws out the tensions between the designs and perceptions of government officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg, the administrative machinery of the state, and the lives and strategies of people attempting to navigate shifting positions within colonial hierarchies of race and culture.

Abstract Demographic history and natural selection are central forces shaping the genetic diversity of populations. Knowledge on these forces increases understanding of processes shaping genetic variability of populations. In this PhD thesis I investigated demographic history and selection in multiple populations of Arabidopsis lyrata, an outcrossing herbaceous plant species of the Brassicaceae family. Due to its wide distribution in the temperate and boreal regions, A. lyrata serves as a good model system to study population genetic consequences of colonization of northern latitudes. The first aim of this study was to characterize the demographic and colonization history of the species using site frequency spectra estimated from whole-genome diversity data. Another aim was to detect genetic loci targeted by recent selective sweeps at genome-wide scale as well as at candidate flowering time genes. Patterns of genome-wide selection at linked sites (linked selection) were also compared between populations of Capsella grandiflora and A. lyrata with contrasting demographic histories. Evidence for strong effective population size decline in the past few hundred thousand years was detected in A. lyrata populations species-wide. This study also suggests recent Scandinavian colonization from an unknown refugium, distinct from the Central European source population. Selection analyses revealed loci targeted by positive selection in two Scandinavian lineages after the recent population split as well as selective sweeps in flowering time genes in the colonizing populations. In comparison with the studied C. grandiflora population, the Norwegian A. lyrata population had weaker purifying selection and no evidence for reduction of diversity around genes was found. This thesis offers novel information on species colonization history and its genome-wide effects, which is important for understanding the framework of local adaptation. / Tiivistelmä Populaation demografinen historia ja luonnonvalinta ovat keskeisiä populaation perinnöllisen muuntelun muokkaajia. Näiden tekijöiden tutkimus on tärkeää eliöiden sopeutumisen ymmärtämiselle. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkin demografista historiaa ja valintaa monivuotisen ristisiittoiseen ruohovartisen Brassicaceae-heimon kasvilajin idänpitkäpalon (Arabidopsis lyrata) useissa eri populaatioissa. Idänpitkäpalko on erinomainen mallilaji pohjoiseen ympäristöön sopeutumisen tutkimukseen, koska sen toisistaan eristäytyneet paikalliset populaatiot ovat levittäytyneet laajalle boreaalisella ja lauhkealla ilmastovyöhykkeellä. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli luonnehtia populaatioiden demografista historiaa ja kolonisaatioreittejä käyttäen koko perimän laajuisesta muunteluaineistosta estimoituja alleelifrekvenssispektrejä. Lisäksi koko perimän laajuista aineistoa sekä kukkimisaikaa ohjaavien geenien sekvenssejä käytettiin positiivisen luonnonvalinnan merkkien tunnistukseen. Genominlaajuista kytkeytynyttä valintaa vertailtiin toiseen ristisiittoiseen Brassicaceae-heimon lajin Capsella grandifloran populaatioon, jonka demografinen historia poikkeaa huomattavasti tutkituista idänpitkäpalon populaatioista. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että kaikissa tutkituissa idänpitkäpalon populaatioissa tehollinen populaatiokoko oli pienentynyt viimeisen muutaman sadantuhannen vuoden aikana. Kolonisaatiohistorian tarkastelu osoitti, että idänpitkäpalon skandinaaviset populaatiot ovat todennäköisesti peräisin keskieurooppalaisesta refugiosta erillisestä läntisestä refugiosta. Skandinavian kolonisaation yhteydessä vaikuttaneen positiivisen luonnonvalinnan merkkejä havaittiin useissa eri genomin osissa sekä erityisesti valojaksoa mittaavissa geeneissä. Tämä kertoo erilaisiin valojaksoihin sopeutumisen tärkeydestä skandinaavisen kolonisaation yhteydessä. Verrattuna tutkittuun C. grandifloran populaatioon, idänpitkäpalolla puhdistavan valinnan havaittiin olevan heikompaa ja muuntelun vähenemistä geenien ympärillä ei havaittu. Tämä tutkimus tarjoaa uutta tietoa Skandinavian kolonisaatiohistoriasta ja sen genominlaajuisista vaikutuksista. Tutkimuksessa tuotettua tietoa voidaan hyödyntää paikallisen sopeutumisen ymmärtämisessä.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study focuses on the nascent colonial tourist sector of the Belgian Congo from 1945 until independence in 1960. Empire in Africa was the last remaining vestige of might for the depleted European imperial powers following the Second World War. That might, however, was largely illusory, especially for Belgium, which had been both defeated and occupied by Germany. Post-war Belgium placed much value on its colonial role in the Belgian Congo, promoting and marketing its imperial mission to domestic and international audiences alike. Such efforts allowed Belgium to justify a system that was under fire from the new superpowers of the United States of America (USA) and the Soviet Union. This thesis makes the case that the Belgian authorities recognised the opportunity to harness the ‘new’ economic activity of tourism to help deliver pro-colonial propaganda, particularly to the USA which had a growing affluent class and where successive administrations were keen to encourage overseas travel. In building a tourism sector post the Second World War, efforts in diversifying the economy were secondary to the objective of using the marketing of tourism to actively position and promote Belgium’s long-term involvement in the Congo.

This is a study of the creation and evolution of state forestry within colonial Kenya in social, economic, and political terms. Spanning Kenya’s entire colonial period, it offers a chronological account of how forestry came to Kenya and grew to the extent of controlling almost two million hectares of land in the country, approximately 20 per cent of the most fertile and most populated upland (above 1,500 metres) region of central Kenya . The position of forestry within a colonial state apparatus that paradoxically sought to both ‘protect’ Africans from modernisation while exploiting them to establish Kenya as a ‘white man’s country’ is underexplored in the country’s historiography. This thesis therefore clarifies this role through an examination of the relationship between the Forest Department and its African workers, Kenya’s white settlers, and the colonial government. In essence, how each of these was engaged in a pursuit for their own idealised ‘good forest’. Kenya was the site of a strong conservationist argument for the establishment of forestry that typecast the country’s indigenous population as rapidly destroying the forests. This argument was bolstered against critics of the financial extravagance of forestry by the need to maintain and develop the forests of Kenya for the express purpose of supporting the Uganda railway. It was this argument that led the colony’s Forest Department along a path through the contradictions of colonial rule. The European settlers of Kenya are shown as being more than just a mere thorn in the side of the Forest Department, as their political power represented a very real threat to the department’s hegemony over the forests. Moreover, Kenya’s Forest Department deeply mistrusted private enterprise and constantly sought to control and limit the unsustainable exploitation of the forests. The department was seriously underfunded and understaffed until the second colonial occupation of the 1950s, a situation that resulted in a general ad hoc approach to forest policy. The department espoused the rhetoric of sustainable exploitation, but had no way of knowing whether the felling it authorised was actually sustainable, which was reflected in the underdevelopment of the sawmilling industry in Kenya. The agroforestry system, shamba, (previously unexplored in Kenya’s colonial historiography) is shown as being at the heart of forestry in Kenya and extremely significant as perhaps the most successful deployment of agroforestry by the British in colonial Africa. Shamba provided numerous opportunities to farm and receive education to landless Kikuyu in the colony, but also displayed very strong paternalistic aspects of control, with consequential African protest, as the Forest Department sought to create for itself a loyal and permanent forest workforce. Shamba was the keystone of forestry development in the 1950s, and its expansion cemented the position of forestry in Kenya as a top-down, state-centric agent of economic and social development.