Empire of Political Thought investigates how European colonists in Australia represented the indigenous peoples they found there, and how they governed them using Western political thought. Buchan argues that an ideological framework drawn from Western traditions rendered indigenous peoples familiar to Europeans. Rather than effacing indigenous difference, colonists employed a conceptual language that recognised those differences but assimilated them and rendered them as deficiencies. This is the first study to link the imperial government in Australia with comparative colonial contexts in North America. The contemporary relevance of this book is underscored by the continuing efforts of Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere to articulate their visions of political and cultural self-government and self-determination.