Abstract: This article appraises debates about modernism in 1930s and 1940s Australia in relation to the cultural and political traditions of settler colonialism. We theorise settler modernist and anti-modernist engagements as conditioned by a succession of negations constituting ‘Australia’ as what we have previously termed ‘the negative Commonwealth’. Both rejections and affirmations of European modernist […]

Abstract: For nearly two hundred years since the annexation of New Zealand to the British empire, Māori have written thousands of petitions criticising the colonial and later national government. There has been surprisingly little analysis of this extensive archive of Indigenous petitioning in New Zealand. A close examination of petitions changes how historians understand relations […]

Description: This book examines the legacy of a British child migration scheme that relocated British children to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, with the aim of populating the colony with “fresh white stock”. The selected children were resettled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school established in a disused RAF airbase outside the […]

Abstract: Indigenous-settler relations on antipodean frontiers have been well analysed by numerous scholars, yet the actors and agents are usually framed as adult and often male. Focusing on the Australian colony of Victoria from its invasion in 1835 to the mid-1850s, I position young people as parties of encounter in this contact zone. I focus […]

Abstract: Sovereign Citizens have gained mainstream attention by refusing to recognise law. This attention often entails ridicule, as illustrated by viral Sovereign Citizen arrest videos. This article critically examines both Sovereign Citizen ideology and the voyeuristic enjoyment of their humiliation. First, I propose that although Sovereign Citizen ideology is premised on rejecting law, it nevertheless […]

Abstract: The prospect of Mars colonization is becoming increasingly feasible, with multiple national and private entities preparing for human settlement on the Red Planet. To ensure long-term success and avoid stagnation, as seen with the Moon, a clear Master Plan is essential. This paper outlines a phased development strategy, beginning with initial outposts and progressing […]

Abstract: The onset of a new geoclimatical era is an unavoidable marker of a novel global dispensation. Clarity about nomenclature and periodisation is needed in order to effectively adapt and mitigate. Several possibilities to describe the new era have been proposed; the ‘Anthropocene’, the ‘Capitalocene’, and the ‘Plantationocene’ have been most prominent. This article reviews […]

Description: This book examines the afterlives of the built environment produced through early 20th century settler colonialism. The author analyses contemporary architectural preservationists’ narrative strategies to remake the histories of what were designed as racialized “European” zones – in opposition to “Indigenous” zones – as part of the documentation, preservation, and addition to the UNESCO […]

Abstract: Americans living in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and China’s treaty ports encountered a contradiction. The British dominated elite foreign society, their political, social, and cultural agendas often setting the pace for life within the community. But as citizens of a country that had recently wrested its independence from its one-time imperial overlord, Americans arriving in […]