« Humanitarian settler colonialism: Pietro Stefanini, ‘Populating Colonized Palestine: The Role of Humanitarianism in the Demographic Project of Zionist Settler-Colonial Replacement, 1938-52’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2026

Mobile settlers: Prue Laidlaw, D. H. R. Spennemann, C. Allan, ‘The Role of Itinerancy in Australian History: Rethinking the Settler Narrative’, Australian Historical Studies, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: This article introduces ‘mobile settler colonialism’ to challenge historiographical frameworks that equate colonial progress with settlement and permanence. Examining itinerant workers in colonial Australia (1850–1914), it demonstrates that mobile labour – including Chinese hawkers, Afghan camel drivers, Indian merchants, shearers, and railway navvies – was foundational to colonial capitalism. During the 1880s wool boom, 20,000 itinerant shearers processed wool worth over £20 million annually, more than two-thirds of the colony’s total export value. Yet archives documented these workers through regulation, criminalisation, and death records, framing itinerancy as deviant while depending on it economically. This article further argues that mobile settler colonialism operated through a hierarchy of movement in which some itinerancies were celebrated as civilisational and others criminalised according to race, class, and legal status. Circulation and dispossession were mutually constitutive: the erasure of mobile lives reflects the settler colonial logic equating legitimacy with permanence, property, and whiteness.


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