Georgine Clarsen, ‘Pedaling Power: Bicycles, Subjectivities and Landscapes in a Settler Colonial Society’, Mobilities (Published online: 08 Jul 2014). Mobilities across contested terrains are key to the formation of settler societies. This paper explores how safety bicycles were drawn into the Australian settler project at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the six independent colonies […]

Edward Cavanagh, Review of The promise of land: undoing a century of dispossession in South Africa, in Social Dynamics (Published online: 07 Jul 2014). As it does in the wider scholarship on land reform, along with policy documents and variously coloured ANC “papers” on land reform, talk of “colonialism” and “dispossession” (etc.) emerges so oddly and inconsistently in […]

Tom Lynch, ‘“Nothing but land”: Women’s Narratives, Gardens, and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback’, Western American Literature 48, 4 (2014). This essay applies ecocriticism, informed by a transnational, settler-colonial theory, to a comparative analysis of texts by three US and three Australian women authors. Through an examination of both “wild” and domestic landscapes, […]

Mark Mazower, ‘The End of Eurocentrism’, Critical Inquiry 40, 4 (2014).  bit in lieu of abstract: From one viewpoint, the years from 1945 to 1948 can be seen as a story about European reconstruction; from another, they emerge as the opening chapter of decolonization. Putting these two stories together raises the question of how Europe’s relations with […]

David Williams, ‘Adam Smith and colonialism’, Journal of International Political Theory (online June 29, 2014). In the context of debates about liberalism and colonialism, the arguments of Adam Smith have been taken as illustrative of an important line of anti-colonial liberal thought. The reading of Smith presented here challenges this interpretation. It argues that Smith’s opposition […]

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says we have all benefited from Britain’s original foreign investment because Australia was “unsettled” before the British arrived. […] “As a general principle we support foreign investment. Always have and always will,” he said. “Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment.” “I guess our country owes its existence to a form […]

Nicola Perugini, ‘The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the “Evacuation Trauma”‘, History of the Present 4, 1 (2014). The evacuations of settlements in a colonial situation can represent moments of potential rupture and reversal of a political order rooted in dispossession. In the case of Israel and Palestine, however, such moments are characterized by the […]

For the first time, the court recognized the existence of aboriginal title on a particular site, covering a vast swath of the British Columbia interior. The court also spelled out in detail what aboriginal title means: control of ancestral lands and the right to use them for modern economic purposes, without destroying those lands for […]

Darryl Leroux, ‘Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec’. Malinda S. Smith, ‘Commissioning “Founding Races” and Settler Colonial Narratives’. in Canadian Ethnic Studies 46, 2 (2014).

Ravi de Costa, ‘Descent, Culture, and Self-Determination: States and the Definition of Indigenous Peoples’, aboriginal policy studies 3, 3 (2014). Canada’s concept of “status” – the definition of who is an Aboriginal person under the Indian Act – has its analogies in the administrative practices of many countries. However, the European colonial expansion produced great […]