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This brief article is a response. It engages with recent critiques of settler colonial studies as an intellectual endeavour. Settler colonial studies, a number of scholars have argued, is at best u...

This article follows nineteenth century debates pitting US economists Henry Carey and Henry George on the one hand, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other hand. Carey and George maintained...

This paper develops two analogies in order to conceptualise endogeneity as a category of analysis. The first analogy compares Indigenous understandings of place and place-making and territorio as d...

South Africa’s settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonia...

This article discusses Islamophobia and its relationship with antisemitism in the context of the radical European right’s recent shift towards pro-Israel positions and away from its traditional antisemitism. Whereas this shift also has US and Australian manifestations, this article suggests that current Islamophobic utterances can be seen as surrogate antisemitism.

This essay focuses on settler colonialism as a developing mode of domination with contemporary manifestations. It highlights the similarities between historical settler colonialism and a contempora...

This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer va...

This paper offers an original interpretation of Garibaldi’s political style and imaginary. The aim is to account for Garibaldi’s sustained engagement with the possibility of displacement as an alternative to revolution. It begins in an afternoon on a remote small island between two oceans. Garibaldi was considering his options. When he returned to Italy, he had seriously reflected on the possibility of colonising other places. Colonising had entered the picture. It was a postcolonial Garibaldi.

This paper reflects on the medieval and classical antecedents of modern colonialism. In its first section, it focuses on Pisa’s medieval experience in order to contribute to a genealogy of ...

What are the implications of recovering settler colonialism as a mode of domination that fundamentally shaped Taiwan’s history? The article argues that this uncovering is crucial to understanding the formation of successive polities on the island of Taiwan, but this is not to say that a settler-colonial studies lens should replace a colonial one.

A new collective predicament demands a new way of observing reality. If the world changes, we need to develop new ways of looking at it. We should adapt our vision to the changing socio-political r...

Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical ...

This article focuses on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonization, on Karl Marx’s response to it, and on the role that settler colonialism as a global phenomenon played in shaping their thought. Marx’s rejoinder to Wakefield’s interpretation of an episode in the early colonization of Western Australia, when servants had deserted a wealthy colonist, was a foundational moment in the development of his general argument. Wakefield’s reaction to that episode was to develop the theory of ‘systematic colonization’, which he also proposed as an antidote to the prospect of impending revolution. Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation was entwined with his reading of Wakefield’s project. We argue that their different approaches to colonization, the prospect of settling ‘empty lands’ in other continents, can be seen as the starting points of two different political traditions. While revolutionary traditions are well known, this article outlines another global tradition, a political tradition that refuses reaction and revolution equally, and envisages displacement as the best method to produce social transformation.