“To see things in an objective light”: the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.     

Weert: a Scheldt polder village in the fourteenth century

St Bavo's abbey of Ghent reclaimed considerable land during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on its estate at Weert, along the Scheldt in northeastern Flanders. Other lords, notably Jacques van Artevelde, also had interests in the polder, but their presence caused such hostility that two peasants with Weert connections were involved in the assassination of Artevelde's son in 1370. Poor soil and natural disasters forced St Bavo's to abandon the project in the late fourteenth century, after a final vigorous effort in the 1350s. The work of the monks and of the counts of Flanders had nonetheless separated Weert topographically from Flanders and diverted the Scheldt westward into its present course by the early fourteenth century. Despite a subsistence economy and a high incidence of poverty, conditions which might be expected to foster rapid turnover among the settlers, peasant society at Weert demonstrated remarkable stability.     

How is Australianness represented by prime ministers?: Prime ministerial and party rhetoric of race,class, and gender on Australia Day and Anzac Day, 1990–2017

ABSTRACT

Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by prime ministers to share, shape, and reproduce their understanding of what and whom is representative of a unique Australian identity and nationalism. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods with content analysis to evaluate and compare prime ministerial and party rhetoric in their Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches between 1990 and 2017 regarding class and economic relations, gender and sexuality, and race and national identity. We ask: How have prime ministers as reflexive actors used their speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day to represent what it means to be Australian? The study reveals that despite prime ministers sometimes using intentionally inclusive discourses, they simultaneously reproduce a classless, hetero-masculine, and Anglocentric Australianness as a normative representation of national identity in Australian society.     

England’s trade with the Continent in the early thirteenth century: customs and the port of Dover

ABSTRACT

This article identifies and prints the earliest detailed customs list from northern Europe, which was prepared for the port of Dover in 1233 or soon after, and it gives fuller and more detailed information about trade than for any other northern European port at this date. The list shows a remarkable diversity of trade, including some of the earliest references to particular goods in English documents, and widespread sources of trade including Flanders, Germany and Italy. The depiction of such trading links prompts questions about the ‘commercial revolution’ and the development of European trade, for it shows how varied trade and consumption could be in the era of the fairs of the Champagne towns, before the establishment of direct maritime links from the Italian cities to northern Europe. The appearance of commodities and trading links in the Dover list suggest that commercial development was earlier and more evolutionary.     

Democratisation and the British Empire

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the statistically established finding in democratisation studies that British rule seems to have been good for the survival of democracy in its former empire, and that the longer a nation spent under British rule, the likelier it is to have sustained democracy since independence. This is a finding which puzzles political scientists because they think of democracy and empire as opposites. The article considers the uses made of democratic innovation by the British and the responses anti-colonial nationalists made to the offer to ‘lead them to democracy’. It places democracy and empire in a different, more complex relationship. It also considers the contribution of anti-colonial protest to the working of democracy.     

The English trade at Bruges in the last years of Edward III

Records of confiscations of English property undertaken by the Flemish authorities in 1371 provide invaluable information on the mechanics of the English trade at Bruges, the ‘marketplace of the medieval world’, in the years immediately after the removal of the wool staple to Calais. Bruges continued to be the midpoint for the reconsignment of sizeable quantities of English wool, a trade in which Italian entrepreneurs played a considerable role. English broadcloths, although technically forbidden in Flanders as infringements of native textile monopolies, also found a ready market. The chief business of the English community in Bruges, however, was importing, through the brokers of Bruges and by direct contact with other foreigners, luxury items from Italy and Castile and bulk commodities from Germany and the eastern Low Countries.