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Constituent Indigenous power: Melissa S. Williams, Dale A. Turner, ‘Indigenous Constituent Power’, in Peter Niesen et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power, Oxford University Press, 2026, pp. 491-505 »

Settler socialism? Dani Joslyn, ‘Settler socialism in the nineteenth-century United States’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

02Mar26

Abstract: This article argues for the utility of a category I call ‘settler socialism.’ It traces the history of a series of intersecting nineteenth-century socialist projects that variously emerged in conversation with agrarian Republicanism and predicated the reorganization of gender and class relations on the eradication of indigenous people. This category allows us to see the imbrications between some socialist efforts – in this case, largely but not exclusively utopian communal ventures – and the wider projects of westward expansion and settler colonialism. How exactly they participated in indigenous elimination ranged from endorsing President Andrew Jackson’s genocidal ‘Trail of Tears’ to training teachers in Indian boarding schools, and to more generally mythologizing, celebrating, and encouraging westward expansion and the expropriation of indigenous land and erasure of indigenous people as an opportunity for the restructuring of settler political economy. Settler socialism is both a contingent category – describing only a subset of socialism in general and US socialisms in particular – and one also that allows us to see connections between a range of movements across a large swath of space and time.


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