The women of settler colonialism: Carla Joubert, Barberton Daisies: Women and Settler Colonialism in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Western University, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The women of settler colonialism: Carla Joubert, Barberton Daisies: Women and Settler Colonialism in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Western University, 2026

04May26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the role of white women in the settler colonial processes of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) and the Northwest Territories in the nineteenth century. It introduces to the historiography of the Transvaal evidence that the ZAR mimicked the patterns of settler colonization globally. Through an analysis of the Boer trek period, statute law, private diaries and correspondence, and government records, this dissertation shows that white women played a fundamental role in the creation of a settler colonial republic, and its predecessor settlements, in the Transvaal region from 1834 to 1881. It is also placed in conversation with the established settler colonial history of Canada. The thesis includes a comparative case study, Wetaskiwin, Alberta, against which to affirm the internationally consistent nature of settler colonialism broadly, and in the ZAR, specifically. The dissertation studies the role of women through three thematic paradigms: settler colonialism, race, and gender. In each, the history of women as laborers, wives, reproducers of the state, and social figureheads and caregivers, comes to the fore to show that women served vital roles during settler colonization, and in state policies of Indigenous removal and displacement. The dissertation concludes that white women were core participants in settler colonization in the ZAR, and that the ZAR fit into a global pattern of imperial settlement.

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