North American Frontier African Frontier Australasian Frontier

Map and Chronology of Frontier Life

The settling of vast areas of the world by Europeans from the 17th to 20th century and the dynamics of the frontier areas that arose from this has left a particular and lasting influence on history. This map situates events in time and space in order to contextualise the frontier between European, European-American and European-Australasian people and the indigenous inhabitants of North America, Africa and Australasia.

A chronology of events for the colonial frontiers is shown on the left-side of the map. The shaded background on the map displays long-term fluctuations in settlement, contact and political control. In doing so it gives a rough outline of the frontier at different stages of European colonisation. The date that the background shading refers to is given in the key at the top of the page. Each point on the map relates to an individual event. More information on these events is provided by the chronological entries in the side-bar. Each entry has a set of keywords that will search the database of documents included in Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters.