« The settlers’ ‘dream’: Neerej Dev, ‘From Rivermind to Care Homes: Settler Dreams and Britain’s Care Crisis; the cannibalistic business model depicted in Common People holds up a mirror to Britain’s predatory social-care infrastructure’, Economic & Political Weekly, lXI, 11, 2026, pp. 71-72

It’s an improvement! (no it isn’t): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Book Review: Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure by Liam Midzain-Gobin’, International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 2026

10Apr26

Excerpt: Settlers routinely imagine empty spaces when they think about what they are doing in the countries they seek to possess. They can only do so by foreclosing Indigenous lifeworlds, and they are typically enthusiastic foreclosers. Liam Midzain-Gobin’s Settler Colonial Sovereignty opens with a reference to Canadian politician Alexander Morris’s 1858–1859 call for a Nova Britannia to be established in British North America (3–5). Morris was an inveterate denier of Indigenous sovereign organisation, and he was certainly not alone.1 While this vision of emptiness has been noted in much of the literature appraising settler aesthetics and perception, until now, it had not yet been analysed for what it says about settler cosmologies. Cosmologies are usually appraised in relation to Indigenous collectives, but Settler Colonial Sovereignty reverses this normalising assumption and queries the stories about the fundamental order of the world the settlers tell themselves and everyone else who will listen. Cosmology now operates in the semantic area ideology once operated in—it is about how we make sense of the world—but these are not times for terminological quarrels, and what matters is that Midzain-Gobin is able to develop a crucial insight: if we take settler cosmologies into consideration, and if we understand the effects of the initial emptiness the settlers uncomprehendingly perceive in the land, then we can perceive a constant discursive refrain, a logic that still informs settler utterances, despite genuine and less genuine contemporary attempts to achieve Indigenous “inclusion.” It is the logic of improvement. The logic of improvement, we learn, is fundamentally based on settler cosmologies and ways of knowing (as explained in chapter 1). Importantly, the knowledge production that emanates from the logic of improvement is seen as “apolitical,” and a form of “common sense” (49). After all, who does not like improvement? As the book progresses, we realise that the logic is relentless: whether the state demands that Indigenous people conform to settler expectations, whether it sets out to delimit First Nations reserves and is unprepared to receive Indigenous sovereign inputs (as explored in chapter 2), whether it develops and reforms land and resource monitoring schemes (as detailed in chapter 3), or whether it collects data regarding Indigenous individuals and groups so that it can craft better and more targeted policy interventions (as charted in chapter 4). The logic of improvement underpins settler knowledge production and settler power, and is therefore the foundation of settler sovereignty: a specific sovereign formation that characterises the settler colonial polity. Midzain-Gobin observes that the logic of improvement “structures the very ways” settlers conceive of “what is possible” (9). It structures their knowledge and the governance systems they are determined to impose. Lands and territories can be the subject of improvement (usually by settlers), and Indigenous individuals and their collective institutions also become the target of improvement policies. This is the stuff of coercive assimilation, and it is deadly. But the settlers’ policies and governance mechanisms are also the subject of constant improvement: the settler state, we realise, is not averse in principle to improving its operations because improvement is still, even in an age of Indigenous inclusion, the very language of its cosmological foundation. The settlers are still heading towards their country: once, they literally moved towards it; now, they move metaphorically. One day, they believe, the settler state will finally be capable of containing and representing the Indigenous collectives it is now containing and repressing. This is the cunning of the logic of improvement: it flexibly applies to the contemporary integrative or reconciliationary settler dispensation and to past coercive attempts at improvement. Improvement is the “ideational core of settler colonial worldmaking,” Midzain-Gobin argues (22). A consideration of the logic of improvement makes the relentless constancy of the settler polity manifest. Midzain-Gobin’s sources and archives deal with Canadian settings, but his method and findings are relevant for the study of all the settler colonial polities. The settlers, after all, share a cosmological orientation—one result of being collectives that are heading towards their countries, unlike all other collectives, which are constituted by peoples who come from their countries. The logic of improvement may therefore accompany Patrick Wolfe’s logic of elimination, a formulation that kickstarted Settler Colonial Studies as an autonomous field of research about two decades ago. Attending to both logics enables an examination of the continuities in settler colonial policies and governance, but the two logics may also be considered in their interaction. Settler Colonial Sovereignty‘s most valuable analytical offering may indeed lie in an appraisal of the two logics’ sequential and concomitant operation: improvement by elimination in a primary or originary “frontier” moment, and elimination by improvement in successive, more settled, and much “improved” eras.


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