Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

Focusing on the striking instance of colonial New Zealand, this article examines constitutional design for colonies of European settlement, arguing about such design in two key respects. First, this article examines the proposals of so-called ‘colonial reformers’ endeavouring to influence constitutional framing, including how their notions on ‘local self-government’ or ‘municipal government’ were reflected or not, while also illuminating their concepts of how to accommodate indigenous territorial governance and indirect administration of indigenous territories in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Second, recovering traces of these disputes and ways of thought from the archives, and how they were operationalised in grounded constitutional drafting or design, rather than resorting to analysing abstract canonical, high-level texts, such as those of Henry Maine and John Stuart Mill, is ultimately more rewarding for evaluating constitutional emergence and design. It reveals tensions within ‘colonial liberalism’, as characterised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. How putative settler interests informed these metropolitan-Westminster constitutional enactments or not, assessed through cabinet-level discussions, in Colonial Office deliberations on settler agitation, illustrates missteps and failures as well as the particular ways in which diverse features of imperial constitutional design emerged. Examining these points is timely given Linda Colley’s focus on a ‘contagion of constitutions’ in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries.     

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

Aimé Césaire 1913–2008

In a necessarily selective way, this paper explores the historiographical evolution of ‘settler colonialism’ as a category of analysis during the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies three main passages in its development. At first (until the 1960s), ‘settlers’, ‘settlement’ and ‘colonisation’ are understood as entirely unrelated to colonialism. The two do not occupy the same analytical field, pioneering endeavours are located in ‘empty’ settings and the presence and persistence of indigenous ‘Others’ is comprehensively disavowed. In a second stage (until the late 1970s), ‘settler colonialism’ as a compound identifies one specific type of diehard colonialism, an ongoing and uncompromising form of hyper-colonialism characterised by enhanced aggressiveness and exploitation (a form that had by then been challenged by a number of anti-colonial insurgencies). During a third phase (from the late 1970s and throughout the first half of the 1980s), settler colonialism is identified by a capacity to bring into being high standards of living and economic development. As such, settler colonialism is understood as the opposite of colonialism and associated underdevelopment and political fragmentation. It is only at the conclusion of a number of successive interpretative moments that ‘settler colonial’ phenomena could be theorised as related to, and yet distinct from, colonial ones. On the basis of this transformations, beginning from approximately the mid-1990s, ‘settler colonial studies’ as an autonomous scholarly field could then consolidate.     

Colonial Servicemen and their British ‘War Brides’: First World War Marriages in the British Empire

This article uses the phenomenon and failure of war marriages between British women and ‘colonial’ servicemen, mostly from the settler dominions, to explore the gendered, classed and racialised conditions of migration after the First World War. Positioning this migration of British war brides as part of the continued normalisation of settler occupation, the article demonstrates the patriarchal social expectations to which white women were subject. Fears of ‘khaki fever’ were extended to the protection of naïve ‘colonial’ soldiers from the manipulative sexuality of white, particularly working-class, women and girls. At the same time, ‘respectable’ women were prepared for frontier life and protected from the indignities of bigamy and desertion. The emphasis on their role as ‘daughters of Empire’ meant ‘undesirable’ matches and marital failure, as reported by the press, had consequences for the closeness of the imperial family and the maintenance of white superiority. The mediation of mobility in cases of mixed-race marriage indicate a more explicit, and sometimes violent, policing of the sexual independence of women and Black and indigenous men of colour. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to understandings of the legacies of global mobilisation and colonial encounters during the First World War.     

‘Not a Position for a Gentleman’: Sir Matthew Nathan as Colonial Administrator: From Cape Coast Castle to Dublin Castle via Natal

This article examines the role of Sir Matthew Nathan, British permanent under secretary for Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising in April 1916, and how critical events in his career as soldier, colonial governor and civil servant shaped his conduct and reaction to events in Ireland as the Rising unfolded around him. The article raises issues of identities: namely Nathan's own identity as an English gentleman, when, given his Jewish background, he was an outsider to that caste. Nathan's brief military career and lengthier career as a colonial governor earned him high praise as a model bureaucrat. In this paper Nathan's track from the War Office through government houses situated in West Africa, Hong Kong and Natal to Dublin Castle is traced to illustrate the changes in his character from decisiveness to indecision. While Nathan clearly misread the volatile situation in Ireland over the 1916 Easter weekend, his actions demonstrated both indecision and bureaucratic delaying tactics. It is argued that his experiences with obdurate settler ministers in Natal played a role in shaping his hesitancy at the time of crisis in Dublin and that this hesitancy provided an opportunity for the direct action of the Irish Volunteers. The conclusion is that, at the time of the Irish crisis, Nathan failed to exercise the ‘power of the personal influence’ expected of an experienced governor.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies

Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative completeness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes. We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian West Bank.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

Organic Union or Aggressive Altruism: Imperial Internationalism in East Africa in the 1920s

This article assesses the influence of international questions on the Conservative and Labour parties’ imperial policy in East Africa in the 1920s. Conservatives encouraged a policy of ‘organic union’, which meant the consolidation of settler control in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika by either formal or informal means. They preferred to ignore or minimise the influence of the League of Nations mandates provisions in Tanganyika, arguing that colonial questions, which in their view included mandatory affairs, were a domestic jurisdiction. The Labour Party was more sympathetic to ideas of liberal internationalism, and pursued a policy of ‘aggressive altruism’ in East Africa when in office, especially in the late 1920s. The article compares the two parties’ respective positions with reference to closer political union, settler relations, labour and land policy, and Indian rights, and by detailing the personal relationship between the conservative governor of Kenya, Sir Edward Grigg, and Labour's colonial secretary, Lord Passfield.     

Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town

This paper explores rural Australian settler historical narratives through an examination of the landscape of public history in the northwestern Queensland city of Mount Isa. In various sites of public history, including the city's 75th anniversary festivities, tourism sites, and popular historical literature, certain narrative themes are predominant. Themes of ‘discoverers’, ‘firsts’, and ‘pioneers’ coalesce into a ‘timeline’ approach to history, in which the past is ordered sequentially in a linear pattern of development and progress. Aboriginal people are incorporated into linear histories in various ways, notably through the concept of ‘the last of the tribe’, which separates an aboriginal past from a European, colonial present and presumes colonial authority to be effectively established. Aboriginal people, particularly the Kalkadoon, are also incorporated within a second narrative tradition, the Anzac legend, for their heroic, desperate and failed battle in 1884 against European invaders. Aboriginal leaders in Mount Isa use these settler narrative traditions to advance native title claims and to create a respected public space for Aboriginal people in the city. In short, settler historical narratives, while being conservative in language, are continually being reshaped and metaphorically extended to new contexts, and are mobilized for both conservative and critical political agendas..     

A Political Ontology of Land: Rooting Syrian Identity in the Occupied Golan Heights

Questions of identity, belonging and place are heightened in societies under protracted military occupation. Bridging scholarship on territorial justice and settler colonialism, this paper examines the impacts of, and responses to, the misrecognition of Arab residents enacted by the Israeli state in the occupied Golan Heights. The injustice of misrecognition entails the imposition on the indigenous population of a Zionist ethnogeography consolidated through Jewish settlements, forced citizenship and discriminatory land and water policies. Focusing on the distinctive agricultural practices by which a Jawlani (Syrian Golani) identity is forged, we highlight the role of sumud (“steadfastness”) as a strategy of non‐violent resistance. Sumud here rests on the mobilisation of communal norms of land and water management, evident in the creation of counter‐infrastructures and water collectives supporting apple orchards. In the face of settler colonial misrecognition, Jawlani rootedness expresses a distinctive ontology on land with a conjoined right of resourcehood.     

The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.     

Transcending Gender Roles,Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill’s Fight for her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa

ABSTRACT

Agnes Hill, the unmarried daughter of a British landowner and farmer and his mixed-race wife, was living a ‘white’ farmer’s life in the colony German South West Africa. In 1908, she was suddenly classified as ‘native’, due to the enforcement of radical racial legislation in the German colony degrading the offspring of mixed-race people as ‘bastards’. The new classification would have had dire consequences for the whole family, especially in respect to their landownership. However, Agnes fought for her family, with the support of solicitors and – as a daughter of a British father coming from the Cape Colony – with the help of the British consul residing in the German colony. She finally succeeded in securing the estate for the family, even if she was an unmarried woman in a predominantly patriarchal settler society. Using mainly material from the court cases, the article traces Agnes Hill’s fight for the Hill inheritance, thereby investigating various crucial issues of colonial societies. It points at the changing boundaries between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the ambiguity of racial classifications. The article argues that women such as Agnes Hill could play a significant role in colonial settler societies and were able to transcend gender-role boundaries.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia's colonial geographies

Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.     

Labour after Land Reform: The Precarious Livelihoods of Former Farmworkers in Zimbabwe

What happens to labour when major redistributive land reform restructures a system of settler colonial agriculture? This article examines the livelihoods of former farmworkers on large‐scale commercial farms who still live in farm compounds after Zimbabwe's land reform. Through a mix of surveys and in‐depth biographical interviews, four different types of livelihood are identified, centred on differences in land access. These show how diverse, but often precarious, livelihoods are being carved out, representing the ‘fragmented classes of labour’ in a restructured agrarian economy. The analysis highlights the tensions between gaining new freedoms, notably through access to land, and being subject to new livelihood vulnerabilities. The findings are discussed in relation to wider questions about the informalization of the economy and the role of labour and employment in a post‐settler agrarian economy, where the old ‘farmworker’ label no longer applies.     

‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

The messianic journey of Jonathan ha-Kohen of Lunel to the Land of Israel re-examined

In 1210, thanks to increased contacts between Jewish communities in western Europe and in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the crusades, Jonathan ha-Kohen, head of the yeshivah of Lunel and leading Jewish Provençal sage of his time, set sail for Alexandria, from where he proceeded on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A year later, a group of sages from northern France and England arrived in Marseille, en route to Palestine. A number of scholars have investigated the messianic aspects of this second wave of immigration, called the “‘ aliyah of the three hundred rabbis”. This article, however, seeks to examine the messianic aspects of the earlier journey, undertaken by Jonathan ha-Kohen and his followers, within their local Provençal context.     

Fearing social and cultural death: genocide and elimination in settler colonial Canada—an Indigenous perspective

This article reviews recent works on Indigenous politics and history in the Canadian context to produce insights about genocide in the Canadian context. The article is situated primarily in the field of Indigenous studies while also drawing on the field of settler colonial studies. It begins with contemplation of the concept of genocide and related terms in the Canadian context. The author suggests that it is useful to apply the concept of elimination developed by Patrick Wolfe to studies of genocide. The article then turns to Mohawk Interruptus with significant emphasis placed on how author Audra Simpson theorizes the concept of ‘refusal’ and the ‘fear of social and political death’. The last part of the article focuses on two books that examine the late nineteenth-century northern plains: Metis and the Medicine Line by Michel Hogue and Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. These books succeed in detailing the great changes that occurred as the fur trade era fell away and a settler colonial regime emerged on the Canadian plains. For Indigenous peoples, these changes had, and continue to have, devastating consequences. Drawing heavily on the insights of Simpson, the second half of the article argues that studying the late nineteenth-century northern plains produces important methodological insights about the study of genocide in Canada.