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Land hungry! Alice Louise Gorton, Earth Hunger: Agriculture, Settler Colonialism, and the Rise of the Global Grain Trade, 1846-1914, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2025

20Oct25

Abstract: This dissertation argues that Britain’s shift to free trade in 1846 moved British settler colonialism in Canada and Australia away from older trade and land monopolies and toward an imperial-agrarian system that sought to transform Indigenous lands into breadbaskets for the newly industrializing metropole. Liberal theories articulated in the 1840s created the ideological basis for new colonial legislation in the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the routine enclosure of land for settlers. Contrary to the utopian visions of interdependence and trade harmony painted by free traders in the 1840s, free trade policies led to an increase in British territorial conquest in the settler colonies. As foreign grain imports put pressure on the domestic agricultural sector in the 1870s, many began to view settler colonization as a release valve that could alleviate domestic population and food pressures. The 1870s were pivotal. As the imperial-agrarian system expanded to feed a growing industrial population in Britain, Indigenous communities in areas slated for grain production entered the agricultural economy and developed new political claims around land, even as colonial expansion undermined access to resources. Indeed, efforts to secure private property rights for farmers in new regions undermined the existing food supply, which led to subsistence crises, displacement, and land loss among Indigenous communities across Canada and Australia. While new legal agreements emerged to reserve land for Indigenous peoples in the empire, the cyclical dynamic of agricultural development and improvement also foreshadowed the erosion of those agreements. The establishment of the grain economy set in motion a process of continual exploitation and expropriation, as colonists sought new arable lands—new extractive or commodity frontiers—to preserve or expand their margins. As settlers ran into both economic and ecological limits, such as exhausted soil and rising land prices, they sought to appropriate more Native land, establishing farmsteads in territories they had once considered marginal or that had been legally reserved for Indigenous communities. The grain economy in both places experienced significant growth in the 1890s and 1910s. These decades also saw intensified efforts to subdivide and allot reserve lands for sale to agricultural settlers. Examining the closure of Poonindie in South Australia and the surrender of the Siksika reserve in Alberta, my argument shows how land allotment was closely tied to the grain trade. This dissertation uses the thread of the grain trade to bind together national histories within a British imperial system linked by trade. The story of the grain trade between 1846 and 1914, with its extensive land use, sprawling capital-intensive infrastructure, and integral position in the global and increasingly globalized food economy, gives us a more holistic picture of a period for which scholars have tended to write distinct histories of the British empire and its settler dominions in Canada and Australia. The project demonstrates that grain became the crop most closely associated with settler colonies, as the production of cash crops by family farmers simultaneously addressed both the population and agricultural crises in Britain. Grain was the flipside of the industrial economy, the crop that underwrote Britain’s economic growth and upheld its imperial system.


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Settler redface: Bethany Hughes, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, NYU Press, 2024

20Oct25

Description: Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.


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Visual settlers (and Taylor Swift): Erin Morton, ‘Seeing Like a Settler: Taylor Swift’s folklore and the White Visualization of Settler Colonialism’, RACAR: revue d’art canadienne, 50, 1, 2025, pp. 30-47

18Oct25

Abstract: À partir de l’album folklore de Taylor Swift (2020) considéré comme trame pour concevoir le colonialisme de peuplement en Amérique du Nord, cet article examine la signification, pour la discipline de l’histoire de l’art au Canada, de « voir comme un colon ». En explorant les connivences qui sous-tendent les fantasmes et la féminité idéalisée des pionnières blanches à travers des tropes familiers, tels que le retour à l’enfance et à la nature, je me sers de folklore pour m’interroger sur les objets de confort de l’évasion coloniale qui se sont à mon sens cristallisés dans l’isolement de la pandémie de COVID-19. Je compare les imaginaires coloniaux de folklore à ceux du photographe canadien écossais du XIXe siècle, William Notman, pour montrer que ni les fantasmes coloniaux de Swift ni les miens ne sont nouveaux, mais qu’ils s’inscrivent plutôt dans un schéma de longue haleine qui consiste à se voir comme un colon pour éviter les désagréments des complicités coloniales. En fin de compte, je me sers de cette recherche pour rejeter les fantasmes apparemment inoffensifs des femmes blanches colonisatrices comme des sources de confort non violentes auxquelles nous pouvons facilement revenir dans les moments de (relative) difficulté.


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The racial-settler-capitalist regime: Debbie Bargallie, Alana Lentin, Kieron Turner, ‘Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2025

18Oct25

Abstract: In 2023, 60.6 per cent of Australian voters defeated the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. The disinformation campaign against the “Voice” deployed longstanding myths about Indigenous people claiming rights and benefits above the settler population. Countering this, Voice proponents sought to instil calm by insisting that Indigenous people would not be able to demand restitution of land. This masked the fact that Australian colonialism is founded upon Indigenous dispossession, and a history of Indigenous slavery and ongoing labour exploitation almost entirely obliterated from public discourse. Building on Debbie Bargallie’s research on racism against Indigenous workers, our paper uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine how the negation of Indigenous labour exploitation past and present is maintained by a racial regime. The regime posits Indigenous recognition and reconciliation as routes out of disadvantage, thus obscuring the history and present of Australian racial capitalism.


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On settler colonial Zionism: Syed Rizwan Haider Bukhari, ‘Settler Colonialism and Resistance Historical Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, International Social Research Nexus, 1, 3, 2025

18Oct25

Abstract: The paper is the historical trace of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, within the larger contexts of the colonization, settler projects, and world geopolitics. Starting with the emergence of political Zionism in late 19th century Europe, the paper reviews how antisemitism, imperialism, and frequent betrayals by world powers all came together to form a century of dispossession, violence and rebellion. The article studies critical turning points using a historical-analytical methodology, including the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, the Nakba of 1948, the six-day war, the Oslo Accords, and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza (2023-2025). Rooted in settler-colonial and postcolonial theory, the discussion proves the way Zionism was both a national move-ment and a European colonial project. The conclusions outline that the Gaza crisis that has taken place today is not the singular battle, but rather the result of a 100 years-long process of displacement and subjugation. The paper ends by restating the moral, political, and scholarly urgency of re-forming Palestine as an incomplete project of decolonization of the world.


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House, the settler: Michele Lancione, ‘The Colonies of Home’, in Elaine Stratford, Katie Walsh (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Home, Routledge, 2026

18Oct25

Access the chapter here.


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Indigenous, taxed: Kyle Willmott, ‘The Fiscal Politics of Settler Colonialism’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 21, 2025, pp. 229-247

18Oct25

Abstract: This review concentrates on the fiscal practices of settler colonial states and societies such as Canada and the United States. Synthesizing critical interdisciplinary literature, I characterize how the fiscal forwards settler political goals of civilization, dispossession, and possession of Indigenous people, nations, and territory. Emphasizing the sociality and material power effects of fiscal colonialism demonstrates how practices like taxation have been administered historically and contemporarily around imperatives of settler authorities and against Indigenous nationhood. Organized around the knowledge politics of fiscal colonialism, the review foregrounds how fiscal discourses, techniques, and knowledge forms are integral to understanding settler colonial legal and political framing of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this literature analyzes how public finance is structured and constituted by racist economic hierarchies, political ideologies, and property regimes that inscribe anti-Indigenous imperatives into law, state repertoires, and social practices.


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Red reds: Owen Walsh, Kathryn Berry, ‘“Real red reds”: Indigenous Americans and the Communist Party of the USA, 1924-1939’, Radical Americas, 10, 1, 2025

18Oct25

Abstract: This article argues that Indigenous people were visible and agential participants in the American Left long before the explosion of Native activism in the 1970s. By situating Indigenous people in the interwar Communist Party, the article makes two major contributions to the histories of Indigeneity and socialism in twentieth-century USA. First, the article argues for a history of the Popular Front that is thoroughly attuned to the complex ways that settler-colonialism structures Left politics in the Americas. The interwar Left produced genuinely radical critiques of the USA as a colonial project and demonstrated a real appreciation of the US’s origins in the genocidal violence of European capitalism. But it failed to undertake a Marxist theorisation of Native oppression, leading to programmatic absences, problematic representations and persistent theoretical ambiguities. This mixed legacy helped set the stage for extensive debates later in the century about the compatibility between Marxism and Indigenous struggles for land sovereignty and cultural autonomy. Second, the article situates late-twentieth-century Native radicalism within a longer history of Indigenous affiliation with the organised Left, demonstrating how effective such alliances could be, even as non-Native communists betrayed their ignorance of Native culture and proved somewhat inconsistent in their ideas about Native sovereignty. The article invites more thoroughgoing assessments of the various and complex ways that the US’s settler-colonial character has historically structured – and been challenged by – the militant Left.


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Freedom Cities for ‘freedom’ settler colonialism: Max D. Woodworth, ‘“Freedom Cities”: Trump and an American global new city’, Urban Geography, 45, 1, 2024, pp. 45-52.

18Oct25

Abstract: This Urban Pulse entry examines Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build up to ten so-called Freedom Cities on federally owned land if re-elected. Similar to new cities being built around the world, Freedom Cities would be selected through a competitive bidding process and aim to overcome perceived crises in present-day urbanism. However, this essay provides a close read of the Freedom Cities proposal to examine how the idea of a new city provides a means for Trump and his movement to envision a society shaped by specific settler-colonial and far-right political visions emergent within the current American political-cultural moment. As such, the Freedom Cities proposal affords a rare window into the radicalization of the Trumpian movement in 2023.


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Ethnographic and settler colonialism: Julià Gómez Reig, ‘The Regia Nave Italia: Race, Migration and FascistColonial Diplomacy in Latin America, 1922-24’,Contemporary European History, 2025

16Oct25

Abstract: In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador.This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.


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