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The story of settler colonial studies: Cyrus Schayegh, ‘Settler colonial studies: a historical analysis’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: This text is a historical analysis of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). Partly because most SCS scholars in principle only see those polities as settler colonies whose settlers eventually became a majority and gained independence—i.e. principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—some historians have critiqued it. At the same time, historians have used it to revisit their research. Throughout, though, they have engaged SCS in area- and period-specific journals, without bundling their insights. This historical analysis of SCS addresses that issue. It has two parts. As shorter first part unpacks the historical-political background for SCS’s Anglo-bias: the similar and linked domestic political trajectories of Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia’s indigenous peoples from the 1950s and their centrality in the internationalization of indigenous politics from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A longer second part analyzes three issues both central to SCS and relevant to historians: structuralism, colonialism versus settler colonialism, and the settler-native binary.


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