settler colonial studies blog

German settlers in the Far East: Vladimir N. Shaidurov, ‘The German Population of Siberia amid Social Transformations, 1900s–1920s’, Journal of Frontier Studies, 4, 2025

18Nov25

Abstract: At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Siberia once again became a “melting pot” that brought together representatives of diverse ethnic groups. The reasons for migration beyond the Urals were predominantly economic. This article examines how various social events in the first third of the 20th century affected the lives of Siberian Germans. Amid the agrarian crisis, Russian Germans engaged in agriculture were compelled to seek ways to survive within Russia. The modernization of the state resettlement policy in the early 20th century and the expansion of rail transport created favorable conditions for labor migration, as a result of which, by the mid-1910s, Siberia had become one of the most rapidly developing agrarian regions. German settlers played no small part in this process by establishing capitalist family-farm enterprises that served as models for Russian oldsettlers and other migrants. The events of 1914–1922 disrupted the established rhythms of German rural life. The economic policies of the Bolsheviks who came to power precipitated famine in the first half of the 1920s. The German population suffered as well, which fueled growing emigration sentiment. Even so, the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the revival of cooperatives enabled a rapid recovery of small scale commodity production. The All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union played an important role in this process. The gradual rollback of the NEP and the shift to a command-administrative economic model brought increasing pressure to bear on the German population, among which conservative clerical sentiments predominated. By the late 1920s, this would trigger a new round of confrontation between Russian Germans and the Soviet state. This article will interest readers concerned with the history of ethnic minorities (Russian Germans) and nationalities policy in the 20th century.

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That burning feeling: Rachel Fetherston, ‘Bushfire, Drought and Settler-Colonial Culpability in the Eco-crime Novel’, in Rachel Fetherston, Theorising the Postcolonial Eco-Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, pp. 155-189

18Nov25

Abstract: While in recent years Australian crime fiction has gained some attention amongst both academics and reviewers, it is still missing from an area of study in which I believe it demands more notice—that is, ecocritical discussions of Australian fiction. This chapter investigates the idea of Australian crime fiction as a largely underexplored representation of the modern environmental crisis, discussing how Australian eco-crime fiction portrays the troubling relationship between human violence, the settler-colonial decimation of Australian environments and an increasing disconnect between Australian settler culture and a stable idea of home. Such a relationship indirectly alludes to the impact of a changing climate on Australian communities and ecosystems and suggests that popular genre fiction can contribute in profound ways to broader socio-environmental considerations. With this ecocritical framework in mind, this chapter analyses the nonhuman “phenomena” of drought and bushfire in Jane Harper’s The Dry (2016) and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands (2018), and what such novels reveal about the criminal nature of anthropogenic climate change and the settler-colonial destruction of Australian habitats.

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Settler colonialism does not produce ‘good institutions’: Kate Meagher, ‘Thandika Mkandawire and the Decolonization of Settler Colonial Thinking’, International Development, 21/10/25

18Nov25

Excerpt: Thandika Mkandawire, the late Chair of African Development at the LSE and celebrated Professor in ID, had a knack for taking trending development perspectives and turning them on their head to reveal how they are experienced by people of the Global South. Reading his work on settler colonialism and institutions is something of an ‘aha moment’, triggering a Gestalt shift that reveals what development looks like to those at the receiving end. Thandika’s insights challenge the reigning perspective of Nobel-prize winning scholars, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (affectionately known as AJR is ID circles), who are credited with rehabilitating settler colonialism by distinguishing it from the violent and extractive practices of colonialism in areas less hospitable to European settlement. In their seminal article on the subject, AJR argued that settler colonialism, in contrast to its nasty extractive variant, implanted ‘good institutions’ associated with secure property rights, the rule of law, and democratic governance, which have driven successful development over the centuries. Revisiting the experience of settler colonialism in Africa, Thandika’s work raises questions about who settler colonial institutions were good for, and whether the settler era is as shrouded in the past as often suggested. Re ecting on settler colonialism through the prism of Thandika’s life and work provides an ideal opportunity to highlight his iconic research on African Development to a new cohort of ID students, and, in the spirit of Black History month, shows how engagement with the histories of the colonized can contribute to deepening and decolonizing contemporary development debates.

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The language of settlers: Daniel Duncan, ‘Placing the Needs Washed Construction in a Broader Settler Colonial Context’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 31, 2, 2025, pp. 70-79

18Nov25

Excerpt: In this study, I showed that four settler colonial varieties—Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, and American English—share a minority morphosyntactic feature across a wide geographical space, and that this feature’s presence in each variety is consistent with having been brought by members of the settling population. I suggest that this finding is akin to the homogeneity of national varieties like Canadian English. In this sense, the homogeneity of settler colonial varieties is scalar. At a regional level, in the case of the United States, or national level, in the case of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the founding population of a given settler colonial state establishes a specific variety (Denis and D’Arcy 2019). These regional and national varieties are not necessarily identical to one another; differences in the exact mix of founding population, plus hundreds of years of drift, lead to differences between them. In addition to this regional/national scale identified by Denis and D’Arcy (2018, 2019), there appears to be a larger, pan-colonial scale to the homogeneity of settler colonial Englishes. Although the specific founding populations of each variety differ, they do share a great deal. To risk oversimplifying, much of the difference in founding populations might be characterized as a matter of the proportion of the overall mix contributed by specific groups rather than a matter of which groups participated at all. In this sense, settler colonial varieties broadly share sets of founding groups. That the AEP, which came from Scots/Scots-Irish settlers, can be found across settler colonial varieties suggests that this shared set of founding groups has resulted in a shared set of minority features as well. In this way, the AEP, while not a majority feature in any settler colonial variety, is nevertheless indicative of a pan-colonial homogeneity in dialectal makeup and dialectal diversity. Further exploring this homogeneity across settler colonial Englishes may be useful in understanding how these varieties developed.

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Settler colonialism is depressing: D. C. Wendt, M. Garneau, H. Fraser-Purdy, N. Augustine, C. Gilpin, S. H. Stewart, C. J. Mushquash, J. A. Burack, ‘Depression and Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada: Prevalence, risk/protective factors, interventions’, in T. M. Olino, J. W. Pettit, R. C. Boyd, B. C. Chu, E. P. Hayden, D. A. Pizzagalli (eds), APA handbook of depression: Minoritized populations, lifespan development, assessment, and treatment, American Psychological Association, 2026, pp. 57-76

18Nov25

Abstract: This chapter focuses on depression in the context of Indigenous Peoples of North America (Turtle Island). While this population includes less than 5% of the United States (U.S.) and Canada, the implications of this chapter are outsized relative to the population size. Mental health problems, including depression, faced by Indigenous Peoples are inseparable from settler–colonialism. This chapter tries to understand relevant psychological and clinical approaches while simultaneously holding cultural and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples at the forefront. Indigenous coauthors help facilitate this cultural relevance. First, the chapter provides a brief overview of the Indigenous context in the U.S. and Canada to better conceptualize depression in this population. Next, it summarizes the literature on depression phenomenology and prevalence in Indigenous communities, addressing key risk and protective factors. Finally, the chapter summarizes the literature on best intervention practices, including assessment, mental health promotion, prevention, psychotherapy, and cultural interventions.

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Forced settlers? Christina R. Clark-Kazak (ed.), Forced Migration in/to Canada: From Colonization to Refugee Resettlement, Mc-Gill Queen’s University Press, 2024

16Nov25

Description: Forced migration shaped the creation of Canada as a settler state and is a defining feature of our contemporary national and global contexts. Many people in Canada have direct or indirect experiences of refugee resettlement and protection, trafficking, and environmental displacement. Offering a comprehensive resource in the growing field of migration studies, Forced Migration in/to Canada is a critical primer from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Researchers, practitioners, and knowledge keepers draw on documentary evidence and analysis to foreground lived experiences of displacement and migration policies at the municipal, provincial, territorial, and federal levels. From the earliest instances of Indigenous displacement and settler colonialism, through Black enslavement, to statelessness, trafficking, and climate migration in today’s world, contributors show how migration, as a human phenomenon, is differentially shaped by intersecting identities and structures. Particularly novel are the specific insights into disability, race, class, social age, and gender identity. Situating Canada within broader international trends, norms, and structures – both today and historically – Forced Migration in/to Canada provides the tools we need to evaluate information we encounter in the news and from government officials, colleagues, and non-governmental organizations. It also proposes new areas for enquiry, discussion, research, advocacy, and action.

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Settler realism: Mark Fiege, Leisl Carr Childers, Michael J. Lansing (eds), Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West, Bison Books, 2024

16Nov25

Description: Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in light of contemporary issues and crises. Along with Stegner’s achievements, the contributors show how his failures offer equally crucial ways to assess the past, present, and future of the region. Drawing from history, literature, philosophy, law, geography, and park management, the contributors consider Stegner’s racial liberalism and regional vision, his gendered view of the world, his understandings of conservation and the environment, his personal experience of economic collapse and poverty, his yearning for community, and his abiding attachment to the West. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country is an even-handed reclamation of Stegner’s enduring relevance to anyone concerned about the American West’s uncertain future.

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Settler horror: Aleryk Fricker, ‘The great Australian silencing of the lambs’, Agora, 2025

16Nov25

Excerpt: A simple advertisement for lamb perpetuates colonial mythologies, but critical engagement can help students to engage with historical truth-telling.

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Settler gothic: Cynthia Sugars, ‘”Destination Indigenous”: Wilderness Tourism, White Guilt, and Indigenous Ghosts in Algernon Blackwood’s Canadian Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 27, 3, 2025

16Nov25

Abstract: Blackwood’s Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood’s stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood’s Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer’s imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.

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The settler colonial conformity of non-conformism: Read Wheeler, The Albertlanders: The Making and Remaking of a New Zealand Provincial Immigration Scheme, PhD dissertation, Massey University, 2024

14Nov25

Abstract: This thesis examines immigrants who joined the Albertland Special Settlement Scheme, which was established in 1861 by the Auckland Provincial Government to bring a group of Christian non-conformists from Britain to the Kaipara. The scheme was one of several special settlements which provided the opportunity for religious or ethnic settlements to be established in New Zealand. They were an attempt by the provincial governments to boost migration to the colony and to settle outlying areas. Some of these have been previously studied, such as the Scottish settlement at Waipū and the Bohemian settlement at Pūhoi. These studies have focused on the correspondence and journals of the migrants to build a sense of these settlements and how their traditions changed or were abandoned. Other community research involved large demographic studies with observation focused on the development of the townships rather than the lives of those who stayed there. This study also focuses on the lives and experiences of the migrants, but it augments archival records with new digitally available resources, such as genealogical websites, to explore the long histories of these immigrants’ lives from their place of origin, until 1962, when descendants of the settlers assembled to celebrate a century since their arrival. The advent of the internet and the widespread digitisation of archives and secondary sources has provided unprecedented access to new primary sources and better ways of accessing and managing existing sources. This thesis draws on these new methodologies. The Albertland settlement has been assessed by general histories and dedicated works as a failure. This thesis argues while the northern Kaipara did not attract or retain the vast majority of the Albertland migrants, those who did settle were able to recreate something of the non-conformist communities they hoped for, despite the limitations of geography, poor agricultural potential and isolation. This was a major achievement. A good proportion of migrants who never even went to Albertland, or who stayed but briefly, also did well in the new colony through business ventures and community standing. The thesis explores several phases of the scheme’s history. The first stage, the making of the Albertland scheme, occurred though the joining of like-minded individuals prior to departure. In the second phase, the migrants faced the challenges of the voyage out and the dramatic difference between what was expected and the isolated, surveyed and difficult country they found on their arrival. Many chose not to go on. The hope of establishing a nonconformist community, the joining together of those with different religious beliefs, was shattered by the dispersal and fracturing of the scheme into separate communities, isolated from each other. Those remaining in or shifting to Auckland often did very well. Three thousand prospective settlers registered for the Albertland scheme, just over 2,500 of these voyaged to New Zealand. The Albertlanders came from more diverse backgrounds than previously thought and yet they began forming communal bonds as soon as their voyages to New Zealand began. However, from this group only 300 journeyed to the settlement and after five years only 150 remained. This represents only five percent of the prospective settlers. Nonetheless, strong non-conformist foundations were maintained, and community feeling was strengthened, not weakened, through responses to challenges such as land speculation, crime, and civil administration. Around 2,000 of the settlers remained in Auckland and influenced the development of the city and some even the colony. However, while separated from their compatriots on the Kaipara they were still referred to as the Auckland Albertlanders. Those who stayed on the Kaipara and those who remained in Auckland reunified the scheme in nostalgia, forging in memory the cohesion and stability that saw the settlers and their descendants maintain a common identity through anniversary celebrations and remembrances. Success had different meanings throughout Albertland’s history. For the founders of the scheme, success was the establishment of a large, independent, non-conformist settlement with a centralised leadership. For the original settlers, success meant remaining on the land and establishing a functional community. Those who left Albertland for elsewhere or had remained in Auckland found success meant establishing businesses and engraining themselves into the already established communities they moved to. The descendants of the Albertlanders found success in regaining a connection and reclaiming the vision of the founders, tempered through the hardship of those who settled on the land. Ignoring the extent to which the community had been dispersed across the Kaipara, and throughout the country.

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