« Racialising settler colonialism: Jan E. M. Richardson, ‘”Other” black peoples: rethinking race and settler colonialism in Australia’s northern tropic’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025
The settler colonialocene: Meg Parsons, ‘Indigenous knowledge and politics of recognition in the Colonialcene’, Political Science and Public Policy, 2025, pp. 330-339 »

Chinese settlers? Letian Wang, ‘Settlerhood Unsettled? Entangling Chinese Migrants in the Settler Colonial History of Early British Columbia, 1858-1923’, BC Studies, 223, 2024

08Mar25

Abstract: The question of Chinese settlerhood in early British Columbia has long been overlooked in scholarly circles due to the historiographical gap between Chinese Canadian history and settler colonial studies. To bridge this gap and decolonize Chinese Canadian history, I apply the ‘entangled histories’ method to examine it through the lens of settler colonialism. Drawing on Canadian history, Chinese diaspora studies, and Cantonese cultural analysis, this study reveals that the Chinese were ‘settlers without settlerhood’: they were largely unable and unwilling to displace Indigenous peoples permanently, yet they played a crucial role in reinforcing settler colonization in early British Columbia and beyond. This paper aims to demonstrate that anti-Asian exclusion and settler colonization were not isolated phenomena but intricately interconnected and mutually reinforcing.


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