Abstract: This article examines the political and ideological uses of agronomic research, focusing on state-directed rural white settlements in Angola. Implemented ‘against the tide’, in the mid-1950s, with Angola’s African anti-colonial movement already under way, these schemes contained numerous contradictions. Under a modernising agenda, the Estado Novo dictatorship created the colonatos of Cela and Cunene, with the expressed purpose of reproducing Portuguese rural villages in Africa, settling poor Portuguese peasants and perpetuating colonial rule. Drawing on a range of primary sources from Portuguese colonial and scientific archives and the literature on Angola, I analyse the relationship between policymakers and the agricultural engineers mobilised to study the soils and its agricultural suitability in the regions chosen for the colonatos. I show that several experts criticised state-sponsored development of white rural settlements and exposed the policy’s drawbacks. I also place this particular example within the context of the existing literature on the history of science and development in post-war Africa. I will argue that the Portuguese version of the ‘developmentalist’ colonial state was burdened with an anti-progressive ideology that criticised industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarianisation, ignored technical and scientific conclusions, and despised settlers’ aspirations of upward mobility, seeing such aspirations as potentially politically disruptive. According to this model, the ideal type of white settler – modest, rooted in the land, earning only enough to get by – would be emulated by the African peasant, ensuring both social peace and colonial order. The failure of this experiment illustrates the (dis)connection between science and ideology in the last years of the Portuguese Empire, and the social and economic cost of their disengagement.

Abstract: During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an “alien” race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp’s view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp’s articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous “white” settler society.

Excerpt: As Lawrence Buell has observed, the pastoral, which in the ‘old’ worlds of Europe was a type of symbolic allegory not expected to be taken literally, became in Europe’s ‘new’ worlds of settler colonialism, such as the United States and Australia, ‘a vehicle of national self-definition’ as well as a template for the construction of an  idyllic settler colonial pastoral way of life (52). The settler colony was often envisioned as a type of Arcadia. Available here.

Excerpt: Richard White is a historian, not a mad scientist. Yet the career of one of his most celebrated works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), is rather like the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. The book’s arrival was an electric moment, thanks to its lightning bolt of a thesis. Its illuminating central metaphor of a “middle ground” charged the entire field of early American history with new energy. White’s work countered tired narratives of indigenous defeat with a stunning new portrait of shared cultural spaces that were neither entirely Native nor entirely French and that flourished on inland lakeshores from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth.

White’s admiring readers gave his term an awkwardly lumbering life of its own. The nuanced and place-specific thesis soon became an overused “watered down idea about the mechanics of compromise in all kinds of social and political situations.” Fifteen years after its release, even White mused about how far his creation had wandered from him. In the very field The Middle Ground helped create—North American borderlands—historians now try to keep the concept contained. They argue that the crudely rampant version of the term has damaged our understanding of the past. The concept simply did not apply to every place where invaders and indigenes accommodated each other’s cultures. Before the nineteenth century, that happened everywhere on the Americas to some degree, but the balance of Native-versus-European accommodation see-sawed wildly depending on where one looked.

In more recent scholarship, “middle grounds” are hard to find. Colonists were more likely to submit to indigenous rules in Kathleen DuVal’s take on the Arkansas Valley, Juliana Barr’s study of the southern plains, and Pekka Hamalainen’s overlapping work on Comancheria. Conversely, while Natives set a lot of the initial terms of engagement on the peripheries of British colonies, they would eventually find themselves in two discrete worlds rather than a confusingly shared one in places like James H. Merrell’s Pennsylvania woods or Alan Taylor’s Iroquoia. Some new work actively challenges the concept of a “middle ground” on its home turf. Heidi Bohaker, Brett Rushforth, and Robert Morrissey each argue that White’s thesis is an incomplete characterization of French-Algonquian relations near the Great Lakes.

Yet few things speak as much to the longevity of a thesis than the fact that new books still feel the need to debate it, while others continue to echo it. Though White is never directly cited in Jeffrey Glover’s Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664, the book is evidence of how scholars from other disciplines are still embracing The Middle Ground’s most basic point: that borderlands encounters involved compromises and reconciliations. Glover, a literary critic, prods us to see early American treaties and treaty-making not just as a process of advancing colonial rule but as dense ritual and textual moments created by both foreign and indigenous authors. He correctly points out how in the first century of English colonization, treaties were haphazard affairs that centered as much on performances and exchanges as the scratch of pens on paper.

Abstract: By asserting the realities of settler coloniality in the evolution of southwestern Mindanao as a frontier space, this paper addresses a phenomenon consistently disavowed in mainstream historiographical accounts of the region. It raises three other broad concerns. First, that while resources, territory, and population are factors that figure centrally in the political economy of settler colonialism, they may equally be said to be bound up with the practices of state sovereignty in general, involving ‘white’ settler colonial relations as well as ‘indigenous’ ones competing for spatial hegemony at the frontier. Second, that these processes are embedded in historical narratives of the frontier and its inhabitants that echo, in similar or divergent ways, well into the present. Finally, that settler colonial studies would benefit from a stronger engagement with the political geographic literature and with analyses of the production of (post)colonial state space.

Abstract: This article examines the existing literature surrounding Percy Reginald Stephensen (1901–1965). ‘Inky’ to his friends, Stephensen was a prominent yet complex and ostensibly contradictory figure of the Australian literary, cultural and political landscape of the 1930s and early 1940s. In an attempt to overcome what this article presents as the persistent sense of analytical obscurity and uncertainty surrounding both Stephensen and his most famous essay, The Foundations of Culture in Australia, the following analysis reveals that, taken together, attempts to explicate this perplexing figure present an inconsistent and often conflictual picture of Stephensen. In particular, two central ambiguities in the existing historiography are highlighted, the first revolving around divergent interpretations of Stephensen as either radical or reactionary in intent, the second hinging on competing conceptions of Stephensen as either a cultural cringer or an anti-imperial chauvinist in sentiment. The article concludes by introducing a settler colonial studies interpretive perspective as a potential means of bringing the admittedly ambivalent aspects of Stephensen within the same analytical frame. In so doing, the analysis proposes a reinterpretation of Stephensen as a settler nationalist intellectual.

Abstract: This text is centered on how Indigenous foodways, specifically those of Anishinaabe people from the Treaty 3 territory in northwestern Ontario, cultivate an embodied self-determination from nourishing our bodies, minds and spirits to cultivating our kinship relations, to renewing our political economies and governance structures. Specifically, I bring place-based Anishinaabe knowledge and experiences into dialogue with food sovereignty scholarship, Indigenous studies and feminist geographies to examine how Indigenous foodways have and continue to be impacted by colonial-capitalist structures of violence, including historical legacies of genocidal practices of assimilation and contemporary colonialism reproduced through industry-sponsored forms of state-making, development and resource exploitation. Subsequently, I examine how Anishinaabe people embody self-determination through a balance of anti-colonial resistance and a resurgent politics. I argue that a resurgent politics is founded on the renewal of responsibilities to and a decolonial love for land, including the nexus of cultural traditions that make up land-based food practices such as language, storytelling and ceremonial protocols. Namely, everyday acts of resurgent decolonial love entail the rebuilding of intimate and spiritual relationships with family and land, the reclamation of ancestral territories and the re-envisioning, experimentation and embodiment of alternative political economies and governance structures. For Anishinaabe people, this resurgent decolonial love is founded in their ancestral law of mino bimaadiziwin or “living the good life”.

Access the afterword here.

Abstract: Understanding settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a past historical event serves as the basis for an historically grounded and inclusive analysis of U.S. race and gender formation. The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide. Settlers sought to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems, including chattel slavery to work the land, extract resources, and build infrastructure. I examine the various ways in which the development of a white settler U.S. state and political economy shaped the race and gender formation of whites, Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans.

Abstract: By looking into the case of Palestine, this article has two goals: the first is to provide philosophical scaffolding to the theme of resistance in settler colonial theory, and in so doing to argue that resistance need to be regarded as part of the structure in settler social formations. Secondly, the article rereads ‘the logic of elimination’ upon which settler colonialism is founded in order to suggest that as a settler colonial project Zionism historically evolved via a process of ‘double elimination’ – of indigenous life and of shared life. The aim of this article is then to fold the second conclusion into the first: alongside with indigenous resistance, shared life need be conceived as part of the structural struggle against settler colonialism. The article has three sections. In the first section, the state of the art in the field of settler colonial studies is presented in order to identify strengths and weaknesses. The second section offers a conceptualisation of the idea/practice of resistance by drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s works. The last section reframes the logic of elimination concluding with a political vision that expands on the notion of resistance.