Bringing together case studies of prehistoric and historic sites from Western and non-Western contexts, including China, the Philippines, the Pacific, Egypt, and elsewhere, Frontiers of Colonialism makes the surprising claim that colonialism can and should be compared across radically different time periods and locations.

Christine Beaule challenges archaeologists to rethink these two major self-imposed boundaries of study and instead to examine colonial administrative strategies, local resistance, and cross-cultural interaction within a larger, comparative framework. Beaule argues that crossing these frontiers of study will give scholars more power to recognize and explain the varied local impacts of colonialism.