Indigenous populations of the Pacific and American West

Abstract

This special issue of the Asia Pacific Economic History Review explores the impact of colonisation on Indigenous populations across the Pacific and American West from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Three of the contributing articles examine ways of modelling Indigeous populations at point of contact and the scale and pace of subsequent declines. A further two explore the problematics of counting violent deaths on the frontier and reconstructing the factors motivating settler aggression. The last article examines the impact of colonisation on sex ratios and the implications of this for marriage rates between and within different ethnicities.