Excerpt: IS settler colonialism simply a trendy buzzword, or will it become an enduring and useful concept in North American history in general and early American history in particular? Recent criticisms (some seen in print, some heard in conference sessions and hallways) object to theorizations and applications of settler colonialism that appear reductionist and teleological, arguably […]

Excerpt: THE notion of settler colonialism looms large in our tales of U.S. empire. Unlike other colonialisms, which pull peoples and resources into networks of labor, trade, and extraction, settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” Patrick Wolfe wrote. It eliminates others to establish new societies on stolen land. Though scholars often focus on “the elimination of the […]

Excerpt: MUCH of the theorizing about settler colonialism has been rooted in analyses of the Anglophone world, but most of North America was initially colonized by the French or the Spanish. What can we learn about the settler colonial narrative by focusing on their colonies? As Nancy Shoemaker notes, there are, in addition to settler colonialism, […]

Excerpt: WHAT do we do with the black “settler”? Or rather, what do we do with the more than one hundred thousand African Americans who moved north and west onto violated and usurped Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century? We have sidestepped this question in studies of the American Midwest and West even as settler colonial […]

Excerpt: ATTENTION to “settler-driven” colonies as a distinct form first emerged in the context of the long nineteenth century of modern British imperial expansion. […]  The difference between settler and franchise colonialisms manifests itself most clearly in the outcome of nationalist mobilizations for independence. In the franchise setting, postcolonial independence results in white colonists being “throw[n] . […]

Excerpt: THE framework of settler colonialism invites scholars to use an Indigenous standpoint to better understand history and society. The hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica and the conversations it has sparked urge scholars to account for the complex and varied relations that shaped the settling of the North American continent. In practice #VastEarlyAmerica encourages decentering the standard British colonial, […]

Excerpt: THE Jefferson-Hartley map, drawn to reflect the Land Ordinance of 1784, represented the settler colonial aspirations of the United States (Figure I). The map was produced by Thomas Jefferson as part of his work on a series of congressional committees tasked with creating a system of government for lands from the Appalachian Mountains west to […]

Excerpt: IN January 1788 the First Fleet dropped anchor in Botany Bay and began disgorging its cargo of convicts, marines, and officials to inaugurate the colonial history of Australia. It arrived in the middle of global revolutionary changes that were ushering in the modern world. Britain was industrializing, capitalism was beginning to conquer the world, and […]

Excerpt: IN 1655, the Dutch residents of Manhattan discussed how they could best attack their Lenape-Munsee neighbors. What they really wanted, according to an initial draft of a petition they wrote to the West India Company directors in the Netherlands, was “the assistance of 3 to 400 good soldiers, who would be willing to settle down […]

Excerpt: THOSE who see explanatory power in settler colonialism as a concept cast it as a theory, as a “global and genuinely transnational phenomenon” pitting settlers against indigenes. Yet the vast majority of studies employing settler colonialism as their vantage point concentrate on the former British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and […]