As long ago as 2001, faculty at Stanford convened a Mellon Foundation seminar at the Stanford Humanities Center on “Settlement, Race, and Sovereignty in North America, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine,” examining similarities and differences, paving the way for other comparative studies. Today there is at least one transnational journal, Settler Colonial Studies, with essays on a wide range of settler societies. Understanding how the United States is founded as a settler society with the exclusion of indigenous people and the expropriation of their land is not a calumny but an aid in understanding all of the further developments of the United States, including the “plantation colonialism” of slavery and the necessity of importing workers as immigrants. Scholars now examine a wide range of societies with this rubric, including New Caledonia (with French settlers and native people), Fiji (South Asians brought by the British and native people), Korea (during the Japanese occupation), Taiwan (the exclusion of indigenous people), Liberia (with the settlement of African Americans dominating native Africans), the more famous “white settler colonies” (Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, with its two major settler populations, English- and French-speaking), and the failed French colony of Algeria. A recent issue of Settler Colonial Studies features a comparative study of Nazi Germany’s expansion with settlers in the East with the US expansion of the frontier on the West. These are historical developments, and examining and debating their similarities and differences is not an exercise in calumny but necessary to understanding and ultimately dealing with the legacies of history in an honest, clear-eyed fashion — which of course is an important goal of humanistic scholarship.

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Like all settler colonial societies, the formation of Israel has its own unique features. However, as a colonizing project modeled after European efforts, early Zionist leaders felt it was essential to have sponsorship by a great power, seeking a charter first from the Ottoman Sultan and then the Russian Czar. Eventually, the British Empire, as it was about to conquer Palestine during World War I, agreed to sponsor the establishment of a “Jewish national home.” The fact that the agenda of the Zionist leadership did not ultimately entirely fit British policy does not negate the initial tutelage, just as the 13 American colonies’ struggle for independence does not erase their colonial origins. Israel was planted in Britain’s hothouse, and it continues to seek a great power sponsor. Since the 1960s, that role has been played by the United States.

[…]

Many believed that Israel was part of that movement and, particularly because of its kibbutzim and other socialist features, that it would play a progressive role in world politics. This view began to shatter when Israel established its capital in Jerusalem, contrary to the 1947 UN partition plan and General Assembly Resolution 303 of 1949 on the international status of Jerusalem, and when it refused to repatriate Palestinian refugees in contravention of UN General Assembly Resolution 194. The government of Israel invented the myth that the refugees fled in response to Arab orders — a claim Walid Khalidi first debunked in well-researched articles published in 1959 and Israeli historian Benny Morris massively refuted based on declassified Israeli documents. When Israel joined with France and Britain to invade Egypt in 1956, many began to realize that the Israeli government was more interested in allying with the former colonial powers than with the postcolonial world. Today, many of those socialist appearances have been swept aside and Israel has become a garrison state to serve its own colonizing interests as well as those of the United States, even if those interests are not completely identical.

‘Let’s Have Reasoned Debate, Not Distortion and Calumny: A Reply to Russell Berman’, by Hilton Obenzinger, Joel Beinin & David Palumbo-Liu, for LA Review of Books (27 April 2014), in response to Russell Berman’s ‘The Goal of the Boycott’. 

Haifa Rashed, Damien Short and John Docker, ‘Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine’, Holy Land Studies 13 (2014).

This essay furthers the debate on the Palestinian case as it relates to Genocide Studies, questioning the lack of substantive discussion of this case to date in traditional Genocide Studies fora. It reemphasises the importance of the settler-colonial dimension to Zionist settlement in Palestine, which, it argues, has so far not been explored sufficiently. The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event.

Olaf Zenker, ‘New Law against an Old State: Land Restitution as a Transition to Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa?’, Development and Change (2014 advance).

Based on a case study of the so-called ‘Kafferskraal’ land claim, this article scrutinizes the ongoing land restitution process in post-apartheid South Africa with regard to its capacity to provide a transition towards ‘justice’. After sketching the legal and institutional set-up of land restitution, the justice of the actual restitution process is explored with reference to conflicting interpretations by various actors involved in this exemplary case. Here, a focus on divergent understandings of what historically constituted valid rights in land as well as forms of past compensation reveals continuing discrepancies regarding the legitimacy of various property regimes. These differences, leading to divergent evaluations of ‘the justice’ of this claim’s final outcome, are shown to be ultimately rooted in incompatible logics of exceptionality and the ordinary, which conceive of land restitution in terms of either ‘law making’ or ‘law preserving’. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of such a configuration of land restitution as a measure of transitional justice.

Settler-colonial violence has rarely prompted any condemnation from Israel and its institutions. Regularly dismissed as isolated incidents despite the constant phenomenon and its deleterious effects upon Palestinians, settler violence is sanctioned by the Zionist state. Its perpetrators are regaled with impunity for upholding the historical violence that facilitated the establishment of the settler-colonial state.

However, similar violence unleashed recently against the IDF evoked a firm condemnation. Following the army’s demolition of dwelling structures in the West Bank, Jewish settlers stormed the IDF’s headquarters, threatening the soldiers and vandalising military equipment and facilities. According to the Times of Israel, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz warned that failure to respond to “nationalist crimes” will threaten Israel’s security.

Ramona Wadi for Middle East Monitor.

Frank F. K. Byamugisha (ed.), Agricultural Land Redistribution and Land Administration in Sub-Saharan Africa: Case Studies of Recent Reforms (World Bank Publications, 2014).

Agricultural Land Redistribution and Land Administration in Sub-Saharan Africa: Case Studies of Recent Reforms focuses on ‘how’ to undertake land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, but with relevant lessons for other developing countries. It provides details, with case studies, on how reforms were undertaken to address a pressing and controversial development challenge in Africa – land ownership inequality – and an intransigent development issue – inefficiency and corruption in land administration. An equally important contribution of the book is assessing reforms and highlighting valuable lessons for other countries contemplating reforms.

Warren Elofson, ‘The Universality of Frontier Disorder: Northern Australia Viewed Against the Northern Great Plains of North America’, Journal of Agricultural History 88, 2 (2014).

This paper compares the levels of violence and law breaking on the cattle frontiers of the northern Great Plains of North America and the Northern Territory of Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that various conditions peculiar to frontiers such as sparse settlement, gender imbalance, the absence of infrastructure, the weakness of traditional Old World institutions, and racism lowered respect for authority and made law enforcement extremely difficult. The author suggests that the truth of the latter thesis is bolstered by the fact that at the same moment in history the people in these two societies discarded conventional rules and values as they built their pastoral industry—literally a world apart.

Jarno Valkonena and Sanna Valkonena, ‘Contesting the Nature Relations of Sámi Culture’, Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies. Published online: 14 Apr 2014

Sámi culture is said to be characterized by a very close relationship to nature, regardless of time and place. However, the human–nature relation is a complex, multidimensional issue. Before we can make any substantive claims about the Sámi relationship to nature, we need first of all to define the “nature” to which the Sámi relate themselves. We study presentations of the Sámi nature relation and compare them to empirical research. We argue that there are in fact two different nature relations, which we describe as practical and discursive. It seems that on the one hand, the “special” nature relation of the Sámi refers to local habits and areas and therefore is not generalizable. On the other hand, there are political and performative constructions of indigenous Sámi identity that are tied to notions of nature relations.

Julie Kaomea, ‘Education for Elimination in Nineteenth-Century Hawai`i: Settler Colonialism and the Native Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s Boarding School’, History of Education Quarterly 54, 2 (2014).

bit in lieu of abstract:

On August 27, 1862, the much-loved crown prince and heir apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawai’i died tragically and inexplicably at the tender age of four. Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa, the beloved child of a long line of chiefs, was the only son of Alexander Liholiho (Kamehameha IV) and Emma Na′ea (Queen Emma). He was believed to be the last child to be born to a reigning Hawaiian monarch and the last hope of the Kamehameha Dynasty. Adored by the Hawaiian public, his birth was celebrated for days throughout the islands. Likewise, his untimely death was mourned for years to come as it left his parents heartbroken and the Hawaiian nation without a constitutionally recognized heir. One of the Hawaiian newspapers is quoted as saying, “The death of no other person could have been so severe a blow to the King and his people.” The following year, the King himself died of grief and despair.

There are many unanswered questions that shroud this young prince’s death. The most notable being the still unknown reasons behind his sudden and fatal illness. While others have retrospectively reevaluated Prince Albert’s medical diagnoses and how he may have contracted the illness, this paper examines what I believe to be a larger question surrounding the prince’s early demise, that is, why was he the sole member of his royal cohort? In a society where children, and particularly ali′i (chief or chiefly) children, were valued and cherished, why were there not more young ali′i of his generation?

Using settler colonialism as a theoretical framework, this paper links the dramatic, mid-nineteenth-century decline in ali’i births to the residential Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s School where Prince Albert’s parents, Alexander Liholiho and Emma Na’ea, along with fourteen other young ali’i of their generation, attended as children.

Jared van Duinen, ‘Review Article: The Borderlands of the British World’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15, 1 (2014).

bit in lieu of abstract:

This review article seeks to explore the benefit that might result from bringing two hitherto separate theoretical frameworks into conversation with each other. These two frameworks are the British World and borderlands theory. The British World is a relatively new development in the historiography of the British Empire. The framework was conceived and developed over the course of a series of conferences held between 1998 and 2007 and the edited collections that these conferences produced. This approach took its cue from J.G.A. Pocock’s 1973 call for a “new British history” that would bring into closer propinquity the hitherto largely separate histories of the British Dominions and the wider British Empire. Thus the British World’s chief remit was to “bring the old Dominions back into the mainstream of imperial history and to examine their connections to the United Kingdom and with each other.” Borderlands theory initially began by examining those regions of interface between “Anglo” North America and Hispanic South America. It has since been adapted to any number of similar “borderlands” regions around the world and in world history. Through reviewing recent books that utilise these separate theoretical frameworks, this article will propose that the transposition of borderlands theory to the British World offers a means for redressing certain blind spots within the British World framework.

By and large, the British World framework has as its object of study the British sphere of influence created by the mass emigration of Britons to settler colonies like Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand in the approximate period of the 1850s to the 1940s. By bringing Britain and these Dominion colonies within the same frame of reference, British World studies has aimed to transcend the parochial and insular nationalist histories that have tended to dominate the historiographies of settler colonies like Australia and Canada. To this end, the British World framework is more concerned with exploring the networks and flows of people, goods and ideas that connected these various settler colonial spaces and places. As such, the British World framework fits within a broader field of scholarship which contends that the British Empire, ca. 1850s–1940s, was a precedent to the globalisation/transnationalism that is of such interest to scholars of contemporary society. Viewed in this way, the seeds of transnationalism are imperial rather than postcolonial.

Neilesh Bose, ‘New Settler Colonial Histories at the Edges of Empire: “Asiatics,” settlers, and law in colonial South Africa’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15,  1 (2014).

The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795–1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885–1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as “Asiatic,” even though many Indians began to identify as Indians in the context of political protest against discrimination. In this essay, I argue that a history of law governing “Asiatics” in colonial South Africa reveals important processes of settler colonialism in the British Empire that situate Indians as settlers in a complex landscape of power. Because of their ever-increasing settlements and attachments to land, legal regimes sought to control their movement and residence. Through a brief review of early Indian migration into the Cape region from the mid-seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century assumption of power by the British Empire, I discuss how Indians, though still categorized in a blanket “Asiatic” category by the colonial state, as in previous time periods, were increasingly monitored and controlled because of their expanding settlements from 1885 to 1914. Such a process shows how Indians of South Africa fit into contemporary frameworks of settler colonialism, particularly those developed by Lorenzo Veracini, and the concept of an “exogenous others,” or settlers who were blocked from indigenization in the process of empire. If extended into larger histories of “settler colonies” in the British Empire, such a new vantage point will allow histories of the British Empire that transcend narrow strictures of race, ethnicity, or community.