David MacDonald and Graham Hudson, ‘The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 45, 2 (2012). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating the array of crimes committed in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Genocide is being invoked with increasing regularity to describe the crimes […]

Tom Pessah, ‘Violent representations: hostile Indians and civilized wars in nineteenth-century USA’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, iFirst (2013). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, white settlers officially labelled most conflicts with Native Americans as ‘wars’, unlike the ‘massacres’ white settlers experienced. This differential description indicated each race’s respective ‘civility’ and ‘savagery’. Indiscriminate warfare was officially […]

Ellen Smith, ‘White Aborigines: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen and the Publicist’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2013). This essay explores the way ideas about Aboriginality informed right-wing nationalist projects in Australia in the 1930s. Focusing on the publication by the proto-fascist Publicist group of Xavier Herbert’s classic anti-racist protest novel of the Australian […]

Brian Egan, ‘Towards Shared Ownership: Property, Geography, and Treaty Making in British Columbia’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95, 1 (2013). In British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, unresolved Aboriginal claims to land remain highly contentious. Since the early 1990s, a unique treaty negotiation process has sought to resolve questions about land ownership and establish […]

David B. MacDonald, ‘Reconciliation after Genocide in Canada: Towards a syncretic model of democracy’, AlterNative 9, 1 (2013). Despite recent claims by Saul (2008) that Canada’s federal and provincial systems of government, including its justice systems, have been strongly influenced by Aboriginal peoples, this article advances that any infl uence has been largely coincidental. A […]

Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (eds), Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, vol. 37 of Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology (2013).

William Gallois, ‘Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Algeria’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, 1 (2013). While the French colony of Algeria was known to have been a violent place, historians have rarely compared the specificities and contours of its violent culture with those of other nineteenth-century settler colonies such as Australia and America. This review article asks why […]

Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press, 2013). For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined […]

Jason Baird Jackson, ’The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond’, Journal of American Folklore 126, 499 (2013). In this paper I offer a comparative assessment of the ox-hide purchase narrative (tale type AT 2400, ATU 927C*; Motif K185.1) in Native North America. Drawing on my own fieldwork and […]

Charles Geisler, ‘New Terra Nullius Narratives and the Gentrification of Africa’s “Empty Lands”‘, Journal of World-Systems Research 18, 1 (2012). Extraterritorial ownership and control of sub-Saharan African land have a long and troubled history. This research investigates a much-studied practice—the recent enclosure of African land and resources—but asks a little-studied question: how are non-Africans reasserting terra nullius […]