Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Rowman, 2014).

Did Native Americans suffer genocide? This controversial question lies at the heart of Native America and the Question of Genocide. After reviewing the various meanings of the word genocide, author Alex Alvarez examines a range of well-known examples, such as the Sand Creek Massacre and the Long Walk of the Navajo, to determine where genocide occurred and where it did not. The book explores the destructive beliefs of the European settlers, and then looks at topics including disease, war, and education through the lens of genocide.

Native America and the Question of Genocide shows the diversity of Native American experiences post-contact, and illustrates how tribes relied on ever-evolving and changing strategies of confrontation and accommodation depending on their location, the time period, and individuals involved, and these often resulted in very different experiences. Alvarez treats this difficult subject with sensitivity and uncovers the complex realities of this troubling period in American history.

Yogi Hale Hendlin, ‘From Terra Nullius to Terra Communis: Reconsidering Wild Land in an Era of Conservation and Indigenous Rights’, Environmental Philosophy (early view, 2014).

This article argues that understanding “wild” land as terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) emerged during historical colonialism, entered international law, and became entrenched in national constitutions and cultural mores around the world. This has perpetuated an unsustainable and unjust human relationship to land no longer tenable in the post-Lockean era of land scarcity and ecological degradation. Environmental conservation, by valuing wild lands, challenges the terra nullius assumption of the vulnerability of unused lands to encroachment, while indigenous groups reasserting their rights to communal territories likewise contest individual property rights. South American case studies illustrate routinized terra nullius prejudices.

Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Sub-surface Property, Free-entry Mineral Staking and Settler Colonialism in Canada’, Antipode (early view, 2014).

This article examines mineral rights and claim staking in northern Canada, with a focus on settler colonialism and how liberal understandings of property are embedded in the legal geography of the right to explore for minerals. The history of these legal systems is explained through the “free-entry” principle understood as the right to stake a mineral claim without consulting with private landholders or Indigenous peoples. Free-entry debate highlights how ideologies of property are assumed neutral through staking regulations. Based on an analysis of interviews with key informants involved in mining regulation, I analyze the geographic stratification of land into two categories, above and below the surface, as an avenue to understand how dominant ideologies of property reveal a critical site of contestation.

Karen Fox, ‘Ornamentalism, Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand’, Journal of Imperialism and Commonwealth History ifirst (2014).

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine’s analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.

Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014) 

is now available on Taylor & Francis Online. 

Henry Heller, ‘Marx’s Capital as History’, International Critical Thought 4, 1 (2014).

David Harvey asserts that Marx’s Capital is devoted to a rigorous examination of capitalism as an economic system. According to Harvey, history as such is for the most part absent. The following analysis acknowledges that the economics of capitalism is fundamental to Marx’s great work. But in Capital Marx shows that capital’s development itself is based on the evolving relationship of capitalists and workers over the long term. Therefore its workings cannot be understood unless viewed historically. Capital—its origins, development and eventual demise—is accordingly the historical protagonist of this great opus. The one chapter of Capital which Marx explicitly designated as historical—chapter 10 “On the Limits of the Working Day”—was meant to demonstrate that the growth of the working class—the emergence of its consciousness and capacity for political struggle—was itself the result of the evolution of capitalism from manufacture into large-scale industry.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35, 1 (2014). SPECIAL ISSUE ON ADVANCING POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES

Howard Williams, ‘Colonialism in Kant’s Political Philosophy’, Diametros 39 (2014).

This article examines the controversy that has arisen concerning the interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s account of European colonialism. One the one hand there are those interpreters such as Robert Bernasconi who see Kant’s account as all of a piece with his earlier views on race which demonstrate a certain narrow mindedness in relation to black and coloured people and, on the other hand, there are those such as Pauline Kleingeld and Allen Wood who argue that the earlier writings on race are not wholly typical of Kant’s approach and suggest that Kant’s later discussions of colonialism in Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals provide a better indication of Kant’s progressive views on the treatment of non-European societies. The article draws attention to the very strong evidence of Kant’s dislike for the pattern of European expansion to other parts of the globe and indicates that within Kant’s writings there are the seeds of a wholly unconventional critical understanding of western colonialism that have yet to be developed fully. The article suggests that this critical understanding surpasses the unsystematic objections made to colonialism in post – modernist thought and also the critique proffered by the determinist Marxist account

Matthew L. Basso, ‘Settler Societies, Open Societies, and Colonialism’, Reviews in American History 42, 1 (2014).

A review essay on David Hackett Fisher’s Fairness and Freedom.

Laura Doyle, ‘Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2014).

This essay argues that recent scholarship in world history has accrued data calling for changed analytical models in postcolonial, Marxist and cultural studies. Documenting transcontinental interactions in ancient and medieval periods, scholars have rewritten longstanding narratives of finance, trade, labour, science and religion, with crucial implications for the arts as they operate within a (post)colonial and world-systems terrain. The data reveal a dialectic of historical materialism encompassing multi-directional interactions over a very longue durée: dynamic and uneven, yet systemic and accretive – and formative for ‘modern’ history. The essay offers one theoretical framework – of ‘inter-imperiality’ – for analysing this data so as to highlight dialectics in the material, the political and the cultural fields, which pre-date and prepare western European states’ entry into an Afro-Eurasian world-system. An inter-imperial model on the one hand expands the relevance of postcolonial models, and on the other hand it transforms them – encompassing, as it does, a political–economic field of several empires operating simultaneously in every period since ancient eras, and in relation to capitalist formations. The essay argues finally that such a model clarifies how elite and non-elite actors occupy an ‘inter-imperial positionality’ from which they variously shape the emergence of economic, material and cultural infrastructures.