James Lehning, European Colonialism since 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

This masterful synthesis provides a much-needed, complete survey of European colonialism from 1700 to decolonization in the twentieth century. Written by an award-winning author, this advanced undergraduate and graduate level textbook bridges, for the first time, the early modern Atlantic empires and the later Asian and African empires of ‘high imperialism’. Viewing colonialism as a phenomenon of contact between Europe and the rest of the world, the author takes an ‘entangled histories’ approach, considering the surprising ways in which the imperial powers of Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands displayed their identities in colonial settings, as much as in their imperial capitals. The author illuminates for students the common themes of colonial government, economic development and cultural contact across empires, and reveals the ways in which these themes played out, through contrast of the differing development, structure and impact of each empire.

It would be more logical to recognize only settler colonies as colonies per se and refer to all other results of expansion as dependencies. The loss of colonies is incomparably more dangerous for empires than the loss of dependencies. Trying to hold on to dependencies is meaningless, but to neglect the colonies is reckless.

‘Colonies vs. Dependencies: An Invitation to a Discourse’, by Vladislav Inozemtsev for Russia in Global Affairs, reproduced on one page at Valdai.

G.N. Barrie, ‘Accepting state responsibility by means of an ‘apology’ : the Australian and South African experience’,Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa 46, 1 (2013).

The International Law Commission’s 2001 Draft Articles on State Responsibility declares that, besides restitution and compensation as a means of accountability for an international wrong, satisfaction may also be offered. Article 37 states that satisfaction may take the form of an expression of regret or a formal apology. This is a movement away from the Chorzow Factory Case PC1J Series A no 17 4 (1928) where it was held that a breach of an international obligation demands full reparation for the injury caused. Article 37 is more in line with the Genocide Convention Case 2007 ICJ Rep 43 where it was held that state responsibility could arise at a political level. In the Rainbow Warrior Affair 20 RIAA 217 (1990) the tribunal considered that a French declaration of responsibility was, inter alia, an appropriate form of redress for using force against the territorial integrity of New Zealand. It is submitted that Australian Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 formal apology for the removal of aboriginal children from their parents (the ‘Stolen Generation’) and South Africa’s 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission are examples of an expression of regret or formal apology as set out in article 37 of the ILC’s Draft Articles on State Responsibility. It is submitted that in so doing Australia and South Africa have accepted accountability for breaches of ius cogens norms and erga omnes obligations.

Lorena Rizzo, Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa’, Visual Anthropology 26, 4 (2013).

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.

Occasion 5 (2013) Special issue editor Brian Codding.

Brian F. Codding, Douglas W. Bird, Ethan Blue and Jon Christensen, Richard White, ‘An Introduction to the Comparative Wests’

Alistair Paterson, ‘Enduring Contact: Australian Perspectives in Environmental and Social Change’

Frank Lake, ‘Historical and Cultural Fires, Tribal Management and Research Issue in Northern California: Trails, Fires and Tribulations’

Judee Burr, ‘Burning Across Boundaries: Comparing Effective Strategies for Collaboration between Fire Management Agencies and Indigenous Comm’

Grant Revell and Jill Milroy, ‘Aboriginal Story Systems: Re-mapping the West, Knowing Country, Sharing Space’

Jared Aldern, ‘Making Space for North Fork Mono (Nium) Narrative: Land, Learning, Parataxis, Policy, and Water in Central California’

Ethan Blue, ‘Finding Margins on Borders: Shipping Firms and Immigration Control across Settler Space’

William M. Taylor, ‘Home Ports and Sailing Ships: Maritime Settlement and Seaborne Mobility in Forming the Comparative Wests’

Darren Jorgensen, ‘Aboriginal Australian Cowboys and the Art of Appropriation’

Lisa Ford, ‘Comments on Comparing Wests’

Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that is what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland.

J. M. Coetzee, Summertime.

John Strachan, ‘From Poverty to Wretchedness: Albert Camus and the psychology of the pieds-noirs’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013)

This article uses the pieds-noirs (European settlers) of Algeria as a case study of how “poor whites” have been constructed, and have constructed themselves, in colonial historiography. Beginning with a reexamination of terminology, and of the socioeconomic status of the pieds-noirs, I argue that the poverty of this community is more often and more usefully understood as a form of psychological impoverishment. The work of Albert Camus represents a salient example of these discourses and offers the historian a productive means of rethinking the conceptually liminal space of “poor whites” between colony and metropole.

Will Jackson, ‘Dangers to the Colony: Loose women and the “poor white” problem in Kenya’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013).

While a great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the problematic presence of so-called “poor whites” across the European colonial empires, comparatively little work has tackled their presence in Kenya. In part this may be explained by the force of Kenya’s contemporary reputation as a destination for socialites and aristocrats. Yet it also reflects the fact that, until 1939, attempts by authorities to minimise the “poor white” presence succeeded. This article argues that only after this point, when existing social control mechanisms fell redundant, did a “poor white” problem in Kenya emerge. Yet to understand “poor whites” simply in terms of an anomalous conjunction of (White) race and (low) class is analytically insufficient. What the evidence presented here shows is that endeavours to manage “poor whites” centred on the management of women. Deviance was gendered. “Poor white” men were doubtless problematic in the settler colony but women, as mothers, produced them. The disciplining of a White female subjectivity demanded the policing of female deviants first of all. While there is evidence of “poor white” men throughout the history of colonial Kenya, it was only during the years of the Second World War that “poor white” women came to government attention. The endeavour to control them, moreover, brought with it the discovery of a “poor white” problem and a racialised welfare project designed to resolve it.

Edward Cavanagh, ‘Kingdom or Colony? English or British?: Early modern Ireland and the colonialism question’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, 2 (2013).

Plenty happened in the century between Henry VIII’s rise to the position of “King of Ireland” in 1541 and the countrywide protests against Crown plantation policy in the fateful Uprising of 1641. The “Gaelic Irish” (or “Native Irish,” those native to Ireland and predominantly Catholic), and the “Old English” (those descended from twelfth-century Anglo-Norman migrants, mostly Catholic and largely assimilated within Irish society) were met with increasing numbers of new settlers (Protestant “New English” and Presbyterian Scots) who sought to displace existing landowners and take up plots in accordance with late-feudal tenure arrangements recently introduced to Ireland. Tensions over land and custom heightened, and divisions of class and faith sharpened. Ireland descended into conflict, albeit of a kind that came in fits and spurts, differing from county to county. Eventually, the entire island’s status as subordinate to the rule of English monarchy was confirmed (if it wasn’t already) following developments after the Uprising. Despite a succession of ambivalent yet occasionally heavy-handed monarchs who watched on as events unfolded during this problematic hundred-year window — €”failing in their successive attempts to develop a coherent policy for the region — €””independence” eventually gave way to “occupation.”

For all the depth and richness of the historical literature on Ireland under English rule during the Tudor and Stuart period, significant inconsistency prevails as to how one best conceptualises the complex relationship between Irish society and imperial England. This relationship has become a source of considerable debate for historians; today the burning “colonialism question” remains as inescapable as it was when David B. Quinn first showed in the 1960s how expansion into Ireland and expansion into Virginia were parallel processes. Was Ireland merely one section, alongside Wales and Scotland, of the so-called “Celtic fringe,” a “kingdom united” with England, ideologically configured alongside Scotland into “the empire of Great Britain” rather than the English empire proper? Or was Ireland just a colony, albeit an exceptional one, imagined as part of a great “western enterprise” that spread outward into an “Atlantic world” of colonies that came in all shapes and sizes? To be fair to its participants, this debate is not so cleanly divided as I depict it, for the tendency among historians of early modern Ireland is not to cluster on either side of it but rather to adopt worthwhile arguments from both, or otherwise insist that the situation is “ambiguous”€ — as, for instance, the editors of the aptly entitled collection Natives and Newcomers put it in 1986, Ireland was “distinctive,” neither kingdom nor colony but instead “a constitutional anomaly” that was a bit of both.

[…]

The obvious starting point might be to draw a line between the Ulster “plantation” to the north and the  “plantations” in Munster, Connacht and Leinster to the south of it.  Howe was on the right track when he alerted us to “‘settler colonialism’, concentrated in the north” … 

The point is that justice was always going to elude Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but because it worked. Martin died and Zimmerman walked because our entire political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler colonialism — an ideology in which the protection of white property rights was always sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always black, brown, and red; and where the very purpose of police power was to discipline, monitor, and contain populations rendered a threat to white property and privilege.

Robin D. G. Kelly for Huffington Post.