The processes of border raids, wars of conquest, and civil strife, which affected the Ndongo and then the kingdoms of the Kwango River valley in the 17th century, were repeated to the south and east in the course of the 18th century as the slave frontier expanded.
The ending of more overt violence as the slave frontier moved on left the weak women, children, and the poor vulnerable to innumerable personal acts of kidnapping and betrayal, a process exacerbated by the indebtedness of local traders to coastal merchants and the dependence of the traders on the transatlantic economy.
Werewolves, vampires, shape-shifters, elves, Duchesses, sheikhs, bondage-lovers, bisexuals, gay men, slaves, ghosts, frontier women and evangelical Christians are all the stuff of romance fiction these days.
There was no violence on Turner's frontier, no slaves or Indians to muddle the story.
The fragility of the frontier between slaves and citizens, humans and nonhumans, equals and nonequals, is what triggers the fear of becoming the political other, and the "problem of membership" (29).
Historians, such as Raymond Evans in his distinguished History of Queensland, point to the shadows of Brisbane's violent past: convict trauma, South Sea Islander slave labour, land grabs and frontier war.
Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.
The most obvious is population size decline, which reflects the cumulative effects of epidemic disease, slave raiding, forced labor tribute, frontier conflict casualties, and the often overlooked factor of fugitivism.
As soon as white slave owners moved deeper into the frontier, blacks began escaping to Native American communities, in which they were culturally adopted, intermarried and blurred into a fuzzy history of Black Indians.
The princes and other members of the royal family were granted fiefs and posted away from the capital to govern frontier zones, while people of slave origin were preferred for the royal guard and palace officials.
Others, including many escaped slaves and indentured servants, melted into the frontier, where they preferred being unremarked on by anyone in a position for official remembrance.
