William Gallois, ‘Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Algeria’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, 1 (2013). While the French colony of Algeria was known to have been a violent place, historians have rarely compared the specificities and contours of its violent culture with those of other nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Australia and America. This review article asks why […]

Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press, 2013). For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined […]

Jason Baird Jackson, ‘The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond’, Journal of American Folklore 126, 499 (2013). In this paper I offer a comparative assessment of the ox-hide purchase narrative (tale type AT 2400, ATU 927C*; Motif K185.1) in Native North America. Drawing on my own fieldwork and […]

Charles Geisler, ‘New Terra Nullius Narratives and the Gentrification of Africa’s “Empty Lands”‘, Journal of World-Systems Research 18, 1 (2012). Extraterritorial ownership and control of sub-Saharan African land have a long and troubled history. This research investigates a much-studied practice—the recent enclosure of African land and resources—but asks a little-studied question: how are non-Africans reasserting terra nullius […]

Camilla Boisen, ‘The Changing Moral Justification of Empire: From the Right to Colonise to the Obligation to Civilise’, History of European Ideas (2012). This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius […]

Book Forum: Pekke Hämäläinen’s Commanche Empire, in History & Theory 52, 1 (2013). ‘INTRODUCTION’: BRIAN GRATTON ‘INDIGENOUS POWER IN THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: JOSH REID ‘INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN’S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: KARL JACOBY ‘GLOBALIZING THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: JOHN TUTINO ‘IMPERIAL SPACES IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN’S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE’: RACHEL ST. […]

Karl Hardy, ‘Unsettling Hope: Settler-Colonialism and Utopianism’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2nd series, 1 (2012). Bit in lieu of abstract: Critical investigation of the varied conceptualizations and historical effects of utopianism is an essential concern for utopian studies scholarship. Utopia has been theorized beyond a literary tradition initiated by Thomas More as “social dreaming” (Sargent) and […]

Lee M. Panich, ‘Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America’, American Antiquity 78, 1 (2013). This article seeks to define common ground from which to build a more integrated approach to the persistence of indigenous societies in North America. Three concepts are discussed— identity, practice, and context— that may prove useful […]

Palestinians, both at home and abroad, have found an unlikely partner in the struggle against colonization: First Nations, the indigenous peoples of Canada. Native peoples from all over the world joined together on Monday as part of an international day of solidarity with Idle No More, an indigenous uprising that has supporters across the globe. […]