settler colonial studies blog

Build a statue and they will follow: Jennifer Sessions, ‘The Anxious Origins of a French Colonial Monument: The Duc d’Orléans in Algiers’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History’ 51, 8, 2025, pp. 72-79

10Dec25

Excerpt: The “civilian Population” addressed by the fundraisers, meaning the European settler population, was in an even shakier position as these threats intensified. The number of European colonists in Algeria had grown from a few thousand in the early 1830s to 44,500 by the end of 1842. But they continued to fall short of colonization advocates’ visions of a settler colony like British North America or Australia, where French families would replace the indigenous inhabitants and transform the territory into an extension of the mother country. Europeans remained vastly outnumbered by the Algerian majority, estimated at some three to four million in this period, and their demographic profile failed to meet colonialist ideals. Over half of the Europeans living in Algeria in 1842 were Spanish, Italian, or Maltese, rather than French. There were twice as many men as women. And most were not living on rural farms, but in towns and cities. Efforts to recruit French farming families to settle on confiscated Algerian land in 1841 largely attracted poor urban workers not the “families of small landowners, with excellent morality, including able-bodied, working-age children, able to bring at least 1,500 to 2,000 francs to the colony” administrators had hoped for. These disappointing results added fuel to bitter debates raging among political economists and policymakers about how to colonize Algeria and whether it was worth the financial and administrative costs to do so at all. Europeans already in the colony in the early 1840s lived in fear of losing the military protections and the investments in colonial development on which their physical and economic survival depended. Finally, to understand why the men of the monument commission wished to erect a statue of King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son in Algiers, we must understand the situation of the French monarchy in the 1840s.

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Demanding settlers: Chandra Murdoch, ‘Colonization Off-Reserve: Settler Petitions, Anishinaabe Capital Funds, and the Department of Indian Affairs in Ontario, 1854–1910’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 4, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: Following treaties in Saugeen Ojibwe Nation Territory (the Bruce Peninsula, 1854), the North Shore of Lake Huron (1859), and Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island, 1862), the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) controlled land sales and the conditions for white settlement. The DIA sold land to fulfill treaty obligations, administering new capital funds that generated annuity payments for treaty signatory communities. This article argues that petitions from settlers in these regions influenced how the DIA managed the capital funds they held in trust. Anishinaabe funds subsidized the development of nascent settler properties and economies through DIA decisions influenced by settler demands. The department invested in settler infrastructures and economies through surveys and road construction and lowered land prices and timber dues at the expense of capital funds. These decisions often went explicitly against Anishinaabe demands. Drawing on twenty-seven settler petitions, political correspondence of Anishinaabe leaders, and capital fund accounts through Orders in Council and DIA annual reports, this article shows how the DIA used money in Anishinaabe capital funds to support settler communities. By situating DIA administrative and financial involvements off-reserve, the article demonstrates their orientation towards expanding settler economies at the expense of Anishinaabe wealth in the context of the imperial withdrawal of support for the DIA.

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Parallel settler colonialisms: Alison Holland, ‘Sacrificing Indigenous interests: solving the ‘native question’ in Australia and Palestine on the eve of the Second World War’, Settler Colonial Stduies, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: In 1937 administrators in Australia pronounced the fate of Aboriginal Australians as their eventual elimination, either through biological absorption or natural death. Historians have discussed this moment primarily through the prism of genocide. In this article I widen the interpretive lens to compare it to the contemporaneous resolution to eliminate Indigenous peoples from Palestine by British administrators. I show how the 1937 Aboriginal welfare conference and the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine were symptomatic of an imperial humanitarian turn when the ‘native question’ was raised as an international concern for the first time. Widely understood to have been a failure, this humanitarian moment simultaneously recognised ‘native’ interests and retreated from (sacrificed) them. The outcomes for Indigenous people in Australia and Palestine bear this out and demonstrate how solutions about racialized ‘others’ that were playing out across Europe were refracted in policies targeting Indigenous peoples around the colonial periphery. The comparative frame places Australian developments in global context and draws out the settler colonial imperatives at work. Despite their differences the comparison highlights the salience of the structural effects of settler colonialism. It suggests that this moment was foundational, when the twentieth century settler colonial logic of elimination was set in train in both sites.

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The torus against settler colonialism? Alex Prong, ‘The Torus Chronotope: Spatial Motif as Anticolonial Resistance in The Night Watchman’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 42, 2, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: Torus spatiality offers a unique form of geographic resistance to the asymmetrical power dynamics of settler colonialism that remains sensitive to the infinite complexity of spacio-temporal relationships in fiction and in reality. In this essay I argue for the torus as a literary artistic chronotope that disrupts the domination/resistance binary in which resistance must parallel that which it disrupts, denaturalizes space’s subordination to time under capitalism, and enables the polyvocal ensemble cast of Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman.

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Settler Gothic: Jamie Ashworth, ‘”A peculiar lustre”: The Gothic mode, settler colonialism and the environment, Wairarapa, New Zealand, 1841–53’, International Review of Environmental History, 11, 1, 2025, pp. 71-91

09Dec25

Abstract: This article gathers texts from missionaries and surveyors from the first phase of European colonisation in Wairarapa, New Zealand, from 1841 to 1853, and critically analyses them as part of a wider corpus of settlers’ writings. Diaries, maps and reports are used to examine colonists’ attitudes toward the environment of the district; based on these, the argument is made that settlers viewed Wairarapa through the Gothic mode, a tendency that portrayed the environment as simultaneously beautiful, alien and hostile. Throughout this analysis, it is further argued that this current of attitudes contributed to colonial desires to exploit ‘waste land’ throughout the district, wherein the extraction of natural resources became justified as an act of familiarisation and accesibility. These attitudes appeared throughout formal documents, alongside memoirs and personal texts, encompassing themes of religion, expansionism and capitalism. It is concluded that the methods of literary description used by these settlers reveals that settler capitalism, among other ideologies of colonisation, deeply permeated European outlooks on the environment, affecting the public and private literary works produced by colonists as a reflection thereof.

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Building dispossession: Jasper Ludewig, Nathan Etherington, ‘Technologies of territory: Baker’s Australian County Atlas and the architecture of property’, Urban History, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

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O settler Canada: David MacDonald, Emily Grafton (eds), On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples, University of Regina Press, 2025

09Dec25

Description: An unflinching examination of the impacts of settler colonialism from first contact to the contemporary nation state. On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples is the first installment in a comprehensive collection investigating settler colonialism as a state mandate, a structuring logic of institutions, and an alibi for violence and death. The book examines how settler identities are fashioned in opposition to nature and how eras of settler colonialism have come to be defined. Scholars and thinkers explore how settlers understood themselves as servants of empire, how settler identities came to be predicated on racialization and white supremacy, and more recently, how they have been constructed in relation to multiculturalism. Featuring perspectives from Indigenous, Black, mixed-race, and other racialized, queer, and white European-descended thinkers from across a range of disciplines, On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples addresses the fundamental truths of this country. Essays engage contemporary questions on the legacy of displacement that settler colonialism has wrought for Indigenous people and racialized settlers caught up in the global implications of empire. Asserting that reconciliation is a shared endeavor, the collection’s final section exposes the myth at the heart of Canada’s constitutional legitimacy and describes the importance of affirming Indigenous rights, protecting Indigenous people (especially women) from systemic violence, and holding the Canadian settler nation state—which has benefited from the creation and maintenance of genocidal institutions for generations—accountable.

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Women settlers: Kelly McMichael, ‘Redefining Frontier Womanhood: Irish Female Landownership in Mexican Texas’, Journal of Texas History, 1, 2, pp. 29-62

06Dec25

Abstract: This article argues that Catholic Irish women who settled in Mexican Texas in the 1830s reshaped gender hierarchies through landownership and legal agency. Unlike their counterparts in Ireland and the United States, these women entered a Spanish-derived civil law system that recognized their right to own, manage, and defend property. Drawing on petitions, land grants, and case studies focusing on female immigrants like Elizabeth Hart and Anne Burke, the article shows how legal pluralism and frontier necessity enabled Irish women to exercise economic and civic power. Their experiences challenge male-centered narratives and demonstrate how law, migration, and circumstance reshaped gendered authority in early Texas.

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When home is where the settler is: Lisa Binkley (ed.), Dwelling on the Margins of Empire: Colonized and Indigenous Peoples’ Imaginaries of Home, Bloomsbury, 2025

06Dec25

Abstract: Embracing the concept of marginality as a method for recovering histories of home, this book explores communities that have been seen to exist outside of western models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domesticity, particularly as they were transplanted in – and transformed by – settler, Indigenous, and imperial geographies across the globe. In focusing their attention on Indigenous perspectives on home in the face of – and despite – colonial dislocations, both cultural and territorial, several contributors expose home’s function as a site of cultural vitality and political resistance, as well as colonial violence, across a range of geographical contexts. In addition to highlighting previously marginalised, non-western perspectives on home, this collection explores the operation of domestic politics within nominally undomesticated spaces, as well as within seemingly “unhomely” historical experiences – such as political activism, intergenerational trauma, and geographical exploration. In so doing, it invites critical re-evaluations of home as a category of analysis within imperial, settler colonial, and Indigenous histories on a variety of fronts. Chapters are organised around three key themes, previously positioned in opposition to normative understandings of home, that contributors have reimagined as intrinsic to material and imagined geographies of home: travel and mobility; politics and public life; and colonial violence.

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A divided city (divided by settler colonialism, that is): Justine Skilling, John Reid, Steve Matthewman, ‘A tale of two cities: urban greening projects in a settler society’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

05Dec25

Abstract: We are witnessing an urban green turn. Urban greening is frequently proposed as a solution to numerous issues ensuing from this. However, as with other settler societies, urban greening in New Zealand occurs on unceded Indigenous lands. It must contend with the foundational violences upon which its cities are built and be developed as rangatiratanga [chiefly authority, sovereign] space. We explore such challenges via two case studies in the country’s two largest cities: (1) Ngahere regeneration in Ngā Hau Māngere, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), which seeks to create forests and food gardens in the Local Board with the lowest tree canopy in the city; (2) The Residential Red Zone in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), which resulted from damage from the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. It is arguably the largest example of managed retreat in an urban setting globally. We argue that the only viable urban greening governance frameworks are those which involve substantive power-sharing with mana whenua [people with customary authority over the land], that de-prioritise settler amenity and environmental service functions in favour of Indigenous cultural resurgence, and which centre cultural integrity, historical redress, and spiritual relationships to place.

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