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Why was an apology for settler colonialism like Goodin’s issued now? The world that settler colonialism made is not being challenged by particularly successful decolonising attempts and the settler colonial present still goes without saying. I would like to point to two possible answers. On the one hand, we are now collectively facing what Australian geographer and designer Tony Fry aptly referred to as the coming ‘age of unsettlement’: Having perhaps 10% of the global population as refugees, together with large numbers of ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), combined with the climate-forced relocation of many towns and cities, means that is possible that the ‘twelve thousand year epoch of human settlement’ will come to an end and be replaced by an age of unsettlement.1

In November 2011 Science published a paper presenting research conducted by a team led by population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Montreal. This work repackaged in a genetics-inflected language a recurring tenet of settler colonial discourse, a point initially suggested by the apologists of the settler ‘transition’ of the nineteenth century and repeated since by their followers. The transition had transformed the anxious perception of rebarbarised Europeans living at the edge of civilisation. In Belich’s analysis, this was a momentous nineteenth-century transformation in the political imagination of emigration, a shift that radically altered the prospects of those who left the colonising cores for the settler peripheries of the ‘Angloworld’.1 One result of this shift was that settler pioneers could be represented as inherently better humans — better than the peoples they had left behind and certainly better than the indigenous peoples they encountered. If this discourse was once framed in racial terms against indigenous peoples and other colonised populations (the settlers’ ‘Others’), or as a regenerative experience on the ‘frontier’ against those who had not moved there (the settlers’ other ‘Others’), in 2011 it was expressed with reference to a more efficient capacity to shape the genetic pool of future populations. It was in the present that the superiority of an historical experience could and should now be measured: Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown.

In a seminal 1998 book, an intervention that kick-started what with hindsight could be called the ‘settler colonial turn’, Patrick Wolfe concluded that settler ‘invasion is a structure not an event’.1 Countering the notion of a ‘post’ — the ‘post’ that had informed postcolonial studies as a scholarly endeavour since its inception, even if the exact meaning of that ‘post’ had been the subject of sustained scholarly debate — settler colonial studies developed as a comparative and transdiciplinary field that insisted on the unreformed immanence of fundamentally unequal relations between indigenous peoples and their nonindigenous counterparts: the settlers.2 At the turn of the century, the settler societies were transforming, had been doing so already for a few decades (in most cases at least since the late 1960s), and the position of indigenous peoples was being reformed in the context of a global indigenous movement that had important constitutional implications. Apologies for past injustice would be eventually uttered. And yet, settler colonial regimes have proved pervasive and resilient.3

Mark Rifkin recently issued a powerful call to unravel a pervasive settler ‘common sense’.1 Rifkin convincingly alerts us to the unreflexive settler colonial ‘structures of feeling’ that ‘saturate’ quotidian life. Settler colonialism remains, to use Rifkin’s formulation, ‘vital in the ongoing performance of quotidian modes of inhabitance and selfhood’.2 By definition, common sense is what goes unsaid, what remains unmarked. To mark and to observe its operation in various iterations, we should focus on the ideological processes that accompanied its historical consolidation. How did this particular ‘sense’ become ‘common’? Another ‘common sense’ comes to mind: Thomas Paine’s. Considering the specific circumstances in which it was issued, it could indeed be seen as a particularly powerful iteration of a settler common sense. Except that, paradoxically, Paine asserted a settler common sense then to make it evident when it had not yet been naturalised.3 Then, during a revolutionary crisis, the settler common sense had to be proclaimed and defended against another. As such, by definition, it was not yet unmarked; it was not yet ‘common’ (even if Paine programmatically endeavoured to establish the conditions of possibility for it to become so). Today, Rifkin invites us to attend to the ‘geographies of everyday non-Native occupancy’.4

Colonial processes mobilised peoples in unprecedented ways. Alfred W. Crosby began Ecological Imperialism by noting that ‘European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation’.1 But while descendants of non-Europeans are also all over the place, the study of migrations and human displacements has focused primarily on movement across space and only marginally on the sovereign entitlements with which people travel. The role of ‘empire’ in mobilising peoples as well as in constraining their movement is often neglected, and ‘settler’ remains a term that often applies to any individual or community that ends up permanently residing in a particular locale. Conversely, ‘immigrant’ can apply to all individuals or communities that have originated somewhere else. Thus, even if ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ should identify very different groups, they are often treated as interchangeable synonyms. Anthony Smith’s influential classification of different patterns of national formation, for example, distinguishes between the ‘Western’, the ‘immigrant’, the ‘ethnic’, and the ‘colonial’ models. In his characterisation, the ‘immigrant’ pattern refers to locales ‘where small part-ethnie are beneficiaries of a state of their own’, and where ‘waves of new immigrants from different cultures’ are eventually assimilated ‘into what becomes increasingly a territorial nation and a political community, as in America, Argentina, Australia’.2

Robert E. Goodin’s On Settling recently emphasised the current relevance of settlement. It opened with Hobbes’s denunciation of ‘constant striving’, and at first looked like a call for slowing down in a world that pushes us to constantly reach for more.1 On Settling, however, is most definitely not a critique of current dispensations. On the contrary, it could be seen as a contemporary apology for the world settler colonialism has made. True, only a few pages of Goodin’s book are dedicated specifically to settler colonialism, and On Settling presented an argument that does not narrowly focus on colonial settlement. It is crucial, however, that for Goodin settling begins with settling down on indigenous lands, and that the book uncritically adopted the very language of settler colonialism. As it deployed their same language, it ends up resembling the apologies for settler colonial endeavours produced during the ‘settler revolution’ — after all, a critique of modernity and constant striving, usually couched in declensionist denunciations of industrial modernity accompanied by evocations of serene arcadias, is one recurring feature of texts that promoted settler colonial endeavours in the ‘empty’ frontiers of the past. Today, of course, there are no empty lands. It does not matter: On Settling argued that we should settle down like we were settlers.

Settler colonialism has been resistant to decolonization. Some settler polities decolonized later, some tentatively, some not at all (Veracini 2007a). And yet, as underscored, for example, by the 2007 UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and by its careful assertion of an indigenous right to self-determination respectful of the sovereignty of existing states, there is a need to focus on the possibility of postcolonial futures in a not-yet postcolonial world.1 Considering the at times irresistible trajectory of decolonization processes during a number of crucial decades in the twentieth century, settler colonialism’s resilience requires explanation.

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A theoretical analysis of what is here defined as the settler colonial situation could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friederich Engels’ remark that the “need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”, and that it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”.1 “Nestle”, “settle”, “establish connections”: Marx and Engels were effectively articulating in 1848 what had become a transnational system of diversified colonial intervention. It was a typology of colonial action that depended on local circumstances and opportunities: there were different colonial empires, and there were different modes of empire. Settler colonialism, “the colonies proper”, as Engels would put in 1892 underscoring analytical distinction between separate forms, was one such mode of colonial action.2 Sometimes capable of displacing established colonial traditions, more rarely giving way to other colonial forms, settler colonialism operated autonomously in the context of developing colonial discourse and practice.

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A global analysis of the imagined geographies of settler colonialism could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 remark that the ‘need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe’, and that it ‘must nestle everywhere, settle every-where, establish connections everywhere’.1 ‘Nestle’, ‘settle’, ‘establish connections’: Marx and Engels were effectively articulating what had become a transnational system of diversified colonial intervention. It was a typology of colonial action that depended on local circumstances and opportunities: there were different colonial empires, and there were different modes of empire, each necessitating a set of specific circumstances and each supported by a network of loosely organised metropolitan lobbies and local agents.2 Settler colonialism, ‘the colonies proper’, as Engels would put in an 1892 letter to Kautsky underscoring an analytical distinction, was one such mode of colonial action.3 Sometimes capable of ultimately displacing previously established colonial traditions, more rarely giving way to other colonial forms, settler colonialism operated autonomously in the context of developing colonial discourse and practice.4