Shannyn Palmer, ‘Making Histories ‘Ngapartji-ngapartji Way’: Exploring Collaboration, Exchange and Intercultural Histories in a Colonised Settler Nation’, History Compass 11, 2 (2013). History assumes a particular significance in contemporary colonised settler Australia. The epistemological and political challenges that persist for those historians wanting to explore an intercultural historical understanding of Australia continue to prompt questions about the […]

Moses Ochonu, ‘African Colonial Economies: Land, Labor, and Livelihoods’, History Compass 11, 2 (2013). In what ways and through what mechanisms and policy instruments did colonial regimes seek to draw Africans into the colonial economy as laborers, wage earners, taxpayers, and consumers of foreign manufactured goods? How successful were colonial efforts to reform access to […]

Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch (eds), Settler Economies in World History (Brill, 2013). Settler colonialism was a major aspect of the imperial age that began in the sixteenth century and has encompassed the whole world unto the present. Modern settler societies have together constituted one of the major routes to economic development from their foundation […]

Robert Nichols, ‘Indigeneity and the Settler Contract’, Social Criticism 16 (2013). This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content […]

Capitalism produced not only the advanced industrial societies of the West and Japan, but also colonialism and underdeveloped countries. South Africa is a by-product of this twin process. To know how poverty, unemployment and inequality can be eliminated requires not only a correct knowledge of how the problem arose, but also of the economic history […]

  Paul S. Landau. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 300 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-19603-1. Reviewed by Edward Cavanagh (University of Ottawa) Underlying each of the book’s nuanced arguments is the idea that highveld polities, in all their complexity and diversity, barely correlate with the “tribal” titles […]

This lecture was delivered on December 6, 2012 at Princeton University for the 10th Annual Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture. Mahmood Mamdani is an academic, author, and political commentator. In 2008, Mamdani was voted as the 9th “top public intellectual” in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine […]

Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘Destabilizing the Settler Academy: The Decolonial Effects of Indigenous Methodologies’, American Quarterly 64, 4 (2012). The academy forms within settler societies as an apparatus of colonization. Indigenous researchers critically engage its colonial power by practicing Indigenous methodologies: an act that also implicates non-Indigenous people in challenging the settler academy. Indigenous methodologies do […]

Mark Neocleous, ‘International Law as Primitive Accumulation; Or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization’, Eur J Int Law 23, 4 (2012). This article aims to bring the category of ‘primitive accumulation’ into the vocabulary of critical and Marxist international legal theory. It does so by first elaborating the critique of international law that has recently developed […]

The fact that the settler population is mostly white, English-speaking, and has European ancestors creates an illusion of identity. Politicians encourage this by constantly talking of Australia as a “Western country”, a nonsense term that a surprising number of social scientists still use. Current trends in universities are worsening the problem. Neoliberal policy-makers drive Australian […]