The Long March To This Place?

Settler colonialism as a concept was developed in the late 1960s, and for several decades was of largely academic interest. More recently, and especially since the outbreak of war in Gaza in late 2023, ‘settler colonialism’ as a compounded term began circulating widely in public discourse. Even The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal focused in early 2024 on settler colonialism.i Apologists of settler colonialism Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their argument about the positive roles of settler-colonial institutions, which they describe as ‘inclusive’. That their argument is bogus should be emphasised; that it makes sense in the current reactionary conjuncture should also be noted.

Have Indigenous peoples embraced this critique of settler colonialism—a critique that depended on and consistently referred to the previous emergence and global consolidation of Indigenous studies? One can detect an uneven geography of uptake, depending on a correspondingly uneven geography of settler-colonial discourse and strategy. Mandated recognition would prompt refusal; non-recognition would prompt a demand to acknowledge.ii Indigenous peoples who can refer to historical or more recent treaties tend to ask that the settler polities finally commit to honouring them, and recognising the Indigenous sovereignties implied in these documents; Indigenous peoples from ‘unceded’ territories claim an unsurrendered sovereignty.

Some Indigenous scholars expressed a healthy scepticism towards, and rejected or expressed reservations in relation to the settler-colonial studies framework. This was inevitable given the widespread uptake referred above, and such a critique may even be seen as one result of supersession. As many Indigenous communities have achieved a significant degree of self-determination in recent decades, a critical focus on structural subjection and settler determination has become somewhat limiting, or distracting—a mode of analysis that can now be seen as neglectful of Indigenous communities, epistemologies, agency and sovereignty. It was a productive debate.

There was also a backlash against a socialist mode of critique, which despite its diversity agrees that settler-colonial studies distracts from class politics and from race, and that it represents workers as settlers: a negative representation leading to a sterile form of identity politics, and possibly even populism.iii Other arguments that were at times raised in this context included: that settler-colonial studies represents ‘Indigenous peoples’ as inherently distinct, as if they were not also workers and as if their nationalism and nativism were not to be rejected like all others. This article engages with this critique, outlines a protracted tradition of Marxian, Marxist and communist reflection on settler colonialism, notes that analyses of settler colonialism and class are not mutually exclusive, and argues that settler-colonial studies is ‘indigenous’ to Marxism and socialist traditions.

Colonisation and revolution

Many Marxist engagements with settler colonialism are well-known, each having attracted substantial scholarly attention, but they have not yet been appraised together.

First, Capital’s Chapter 31 and ‘poor Mr Peel’. Marx detects capitalism by observing its fraying at the extreme limits of the capitalist world system—indeed, beyond these limits, not in the factories of the ‘workshop of the world’, or even in the colonies of exploitation, even if he recognised how crucial the colonial relation had been to capitalism’s original consolidation, but in the emptiness of a remote location.iv But inception is not discovery, and Marx discovers capitalism in a settler colony—a failed one. Is he distracting away from class? Of course not, and he then ‘returns’ to Europe immediately after this excursion. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an influential promoter of settler colonies, was thus crucial to the development of the Marxian critique. Wakefield had offered a defence of capitalism arising from his intuition of its inherent contradictions and the observation of an inexorably diminishing rate of profit. Settler colonialism was Wakefield’s proposed solution to capitalism’s impending crisis, but for Marx it was an entry point to its exploration.

Second, while Marx and Engels stubbornly refrained from describing what communism would look like, the closest Marx got to it was probably in his letter to Vera Zasulic, where he approached the value of pre-capitalist resistance and life-worlds. The late Marx ended up believing that there was both a way through capitalism anda way beside it. For him, the struggles of what we would recognise today as Indigenous peoples opposing expanding settler-colonial and capitalist orders were another turning point. Wayne Wapeemukwa insightfully argues that ‘Marx began to develop a critical theory of dispossession that overspills the historical, metaphysical, and developmental sequencing usually attributed to him’, and that the ‘late Marx believes that Indigenous peoples have a concrete, metabolic, and communal relationship to the land that communism must recapitulate and rehabilitate’, a thesis that ‘has been misunderstood by readers of Marx, who impose an overly historicized interpretation upon his work’. Marx thought that what we would now call in Australia ‘Indigenous relations to Country’ were key to the supersession of capitalist relations, so an analysis of settler colonialism was crucial to both his discovery of capitalism in the first place and to his thinking about its possible supersession in the end. Not at all a distraction!

Today, the general opinion is that Marx and Engels were Eurocentric and uninterested in colonialism. But this critique is unwarranted; they actually argued, if not at first, that colonised peoples would need to follow unique paths to achieve their emancipation.v Engels was the more undogmatic of the two. An appraisal of Ireland and its contradictions had been the catalyst for their transformation,vi but it was not just the question of Ireland and other subjected nationalities; the United States was also a relevant reference point in their analysis, as were colonisation and settlement as processes. Marx had engaged extensively with prominent US political economist Henry Carey, who was in the United States the theorist of the ‘harmony of interests’ by way of settler-colonial expansion. Eugen Karl Dühring (see Engels’s Anti-Dühring) and Ferdinand Lassalle (see Marx’s The Critique of the Gotha Program) had both adapted from Carey the notion of the harmony of interests and reused it in a German context. Marx and Engels were not impressed. Marx fiercely critiqued the German Social Democrats and their approach because it imported the consequences of settler colonialism uncritically into their program. He did not refrain from representing the ‘labour aristocracy’ in negative terms.

Third, Rosa Luxemburg: her geographical analysis of capitalism was meant to counter widespread Second Internationalist understandings of capitalism and class. The Second Internationalists typically supported what was referred to as ‘progressive colonialism’ and approved of social imperialism. The Social Democrats in many countries often held that capitalism would naturally turn everyone into a worker and eventually usher in a socialist transformation. For Luxemburg, this was a radical undoing of Marx’s revolutionary theory. She abhorred this positivistic fatalism and focused on the outside of capitalism. This focus enabled her to appraise an ongoing primitive accumulation and dispossession, or, to use a phrase that those acquainted with settler-colonial studies would immediately recognise, to observe ‘a structure’ and not ‘an event’.vii She was returning to Marx against the Marxists of her day, and did so by exploring and critiquing a mode of domination informed by a logic of elimination.

It was not Marx or Engels who were Eurocentric and uninterested in colonialism, but the Second Internationalists (if not, obviously, Luxemburg). The Third Internationalists were decisively more invested in the colonial question, even if they struggled to distinguish between colonies of exploitation and settler colonies. They did try, though, in their attempts to develop a single theory, and even if the colonial world appeared to them as a uniform underdeveloped negative.viii Still, the Third International eventually singled out Canada and Australia as ‘subimperialist’ powers, while the 1928 ‘Theses on the revolutionary movement in the colonies and semi-colonies’ declared that it was ‘necessary to distinguish between those colonies of the capitalist countries which have served them as colonising regions for their surplus population, and which in this way have become a continuation of the capitalist system’, and the colonies subjected to exploitation and the extraction of raw materials. They even theorised the existence of a third tier, inclusive of Algeria, South Africa and New Zealand. These were the ‘emigrant colonies’. The Third International also advocated for a ‘Negro republic in America’, a territorial polity that would secede from the United States, and for an independent republic for Blacks in South Africa.ix It was the beginning of a systematic theory of colonial differentiation—a theorisation that included an awareness of the specific characteristics of the political regimes dominated by settler colonists and their subordination and oppression of Indigenous minorities.

Importantly, Third Internationalist theory maintained that anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism came before anti-capitalism—that they were not as important as anti-capitalism, and yet they were to be addressed first. The Leninist line developed in relation to the theoretical reflection offered by M. N. Roy, who rejected Eurocentric Marxism and followed a heterodox Marxist approach.x Roy and Lenin had similar theses on imperialism, but they diverged on the admissibility of collaborating with ‘bourgeois-democratic’ forces: Lenin was open to it, while Roy categorically refused all collaboration.xi It is important that the Third Internationalists developed in the early 1920s what we would recognise today as an Indigenous theory of national development, as well as an anti-colonial/anti-imperialist one. The Third International was soon forced to shift its focus eastward after the failure of revolutionary struggles in Europe. As Soviet power was consolidating in areas that had been the subject of historic Russian settler colonialism, the question of the nationalities encompassed within the forming Soviet polity emerged strongly.xii Central Asia was a settler colony, even if Tashkent, at its centre, was a city with a Muslim majority. Baku in Azerbaijan was the site of the 1920 Congress of the People of the East, where the Bolsheviks proposed the fusion of Islam and communism to spread the revolution and to intervene in the British-held Indian subcontinent. When an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement was reached in 1921, counselling a more diplomatic approach, the focus shifted even further east. Among the tasks of the 1922 Congress of the Toilers of the Far East was also the question of the many nationalities dwelling in Russian-dominated Siberia. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East, established in 1921, was designed to educate cadres mainly from the Indigenous nationalities of the Soviet periphery. This was not a vocational school; it was a highly qualifying technical university, most unlike the genocidal boarding or residential schools of the United States and Canada. The educated leaders it aimed to prepare were to take administrative positions and to run their autonomous republics. And they did.

As I argue in the next section, according to Third International theorisation, oppressed nationalities, no matter how small, would not disappear or need to assimilate; on the contrary, they would flourish as they engaged with Soviet power. Remote and dispersed demographic minorities would develop in their lands and revitalise their life-worlds. This Marxist tradition and its sustained engagement with colonialism and Indigeneity were eventually eclipsed, however—more and more so as the twentieth century progressed. Much later, Cedric Robinson and Edward Said, for example, each in different ways, had good reason to critique orthodox Marxisms for their neglect of racial and colonial capitalism. But the first, second and third moments referred to above demonstrate that a focus on settler colonialism was not in opposition to Marxism, or a diversion. It has been a crucial element of the analysis.

Soviet indigenisation, Indigenous cooperativism

The socialist movements at the turn of the twentieth century were split on the colonial question, as well as on pretty much everything else. Some argued that economic and class developments would lead to the abolition of national differences, others that ‘national-cultural’ factors would remain paramount. When the Soviet Union developed a comprehensive policy of affirmative action in the early 1920s, all Indigenous minorities were identified, named, recognised and assigned territories and various degrees of special protection. Identifiable nationalities became recognised, while the affirmative action policy was named ‘indigenisation’ (korenizatsiya). Languages, schools, law courts and Soviets were sites of Indigenous-socialist nation-building. The national-colonial revolutions in the USSR were accomplished in the name of internationalism rather than nationalism.

In the early 1920s, the Bolshevik leadership distinguished between nations and states that had consolidated in western Europe at the dawn of capitalism, eastern European nations that emerged after the multinational states dominated by Austria and the Ottoman Empire were disassembled, colonies and semi-colonies that had become subjected after the expansion of imperialism, and national collectives that had been targeted by Tsarist settler-colonial expansion and colonisation and had become minorities in their own lands.xiii For the Bolshevik leaders, there was therefore a dialectical link between the national, the colonial and the settler-colonial question. In the border regions of the Soviet state, the task was to adapt policy ‘to the specific conditions of economic life that obtain mainly in the East’.xiv This adaptation of Soviet power was to be performed in the language of these nationalities, setting up cultural and governmental institutions manned by individuals belonging to them. The nationalities of the Soviet Republics would have a territorial basis, and would speak their native tongues and transact in their languages. The nationality policy was to support all nationalities, including what we would now call the Indigenous peoples of the periphery of the Soviet Union, not to repress them or attempt their assimilation. The nationalities policy was to multiply nationalities and to protect them and their territorial base.

Korenizatsiya was official policy before it was reversed in the late 1930s, and Indigenous elites contributed to it. It was relentlessly pursued: Bolshevik general Mikhail Frunze, who had grown up a settler in the local settler colony, was charged with leading a ruthless anti-settler military campaign in Central Asia to enforce the local indigenisation process and wrestle power from insurgent settlers.xv Soviet korenizatsiya in the 1920a was also a tactical solution, much like the almost coeval New Economic Policy, as the Soviet state needed to rely on non-urbanised non-Russian masses. A Soviet/Russian mode of settler colonialism re-emerged after the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, with repeated forced removals of entire populations, and later with Khruschev’s ‘Virgin Lands campaigns’. There were veritable ‘Trail of Tears’ that scattered many national collectives across the Soviet Union. It seems significant that after destalinisation, Indigenous and indigenist insurgencies in various parts of the Third World/Global South would be primarily Maoist.xvi

Korenizatsiya was a significant development for the Indigenous peoples of the Anglophone settler societies who were able to observe it. It appealed, for example, to Nez Percé anthropologist Archie Phinney, who travelled and studied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.xvii Phinney approved of Soviet indigenisation, as it enabled his theorisation of an Indigenous way out of settler colonialism. He saw an Indigenous sovereign embrace of modernity, and a rejection of both the settler-colonial assimilative imposition of modernity that was on offer and the unsustainable and stifling confinement within reservations that it had ostensibly replaced. For him, settler colonialism offered two poisoned ‘solutions’: permanent segregation away from history in reservations, or assimilation. Both options embodied alternative logics of elimination, but Phinney’s Indigenous Marxism envisaged a way out: no proletarianisation, no subsumption within capitalist exploitation, no containment, and no exclusion from modernity. The way out was to make Indigenous collectives self-supporting via, in his words, ‘cooperative (tribal) organization and corporate (common) ownership of the means of production’.xviii Soviet policy, as he saw it, could preserve the Indigenous cultures of the Soviet Union while ensuring their transition to modern ways. These collectives were gaining cultural and economic agency; that is, the preservation of culture was not detrimental to economic advancement, as it was under settler colonialism in the United States. He saw a sovereign, Indigenous modernity, not a modernity that was construed as antithetical to ‘authentic’ Indigenous culture. Phinney intuited the pitfalls of what we would call now ‘repressive authenticity’.xix

Phinney thus endorsed radical bilingualism: for him, ‘only socialism’ in the context of a multinational formation would ‘clean the linguistic air’ and undo both the internalised ‘inferiority’ of native speakers and the ‘glamour’ of the colonisers’ language.xx Cosmopolitan transnationalism was the answer to the limits of reservation life, even the restructured ones that emerged out of John Collier’s Indian Reorganization Act following 1934. The ‘Indian’ was to be a ‘world citizen’ rather than a ‘reservation denizen’.xxi Phinney, who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1940s, was one of the founders of the National Congress of American Indians, an organisation that he imagined as ‘more aggressive and militant’ than earlier pan-Indian organisations—an organisation to be composed exclusively of an Indigenous intelligentsia and expressing a coherent Native identity. Phinney focused on protecting what he understood as an Indian ‘racial heritage’, a notion that escaped the blood quantum logic of the settler-colonial regime he was facing.xxii This ‘heritage’ would underpin a pan-Indian alliance and would not depend ‘for its survival upon a reservation atmosphere’; besides, ‘non-reservation Indians’ were for him ‘probably the most capable and aggressive element of the Indian population in the United States’.xxiii In short, as Benjamin Balthaser concludes, Phinney fused ‘a Marxist analysis of capitalism and modernity with an indigenous epistemology of sovereignty’.xxiv

Canadian Métis James ‘Jim’ Patrick Brady similarly developed an original Indigenous Marxist theory suited for settler-colonial conditions. After the defeat of the 1885 ‘rebellion’, many Saskatchewan Métis people had dispersed, and many had gravitated towards isolated districts in Alberta; they were often landless, or ‘squatting’ on Crown lands, but Brady consistently endeavoured in particular to establish Indigenous cooperative enterprises, which he saw as crucial to the establishment of an economic base and to underpinning an autonomous Indigenous engagement with modernity. Indigenous-led cooperatives, incidentally, were also what the Soviets had been promoting since the 1930s in partnership with Indigenous communities in the Arctic regions: collectives of Indigenous workers self-managing production and resources and engaging with newly established Soviet urban areas in self-determining ways.xxv

In Australia, the Communist Party consistently supported Indigenous struggles. It was a genuine relationship, as aptly summarised by Aboriginal artist, writer and activist Kevin Gilbert, who once concluded ‘thank god for the commos’. The CPA did not support Indigenous struggles despite 1920s Stalinism; it was probably ‘ahead of the curve’ on this issue because of this control over its leadership. The reverberations of korenizatsiya can be gleamed in the CPA leader Bert Moxon’s 1931 Communist Party’s Fight for Aborigines: Draft Programme of Struggle Against Slavery. The Programme called for the establishment of an independent Aboriginal republic in northern Australia; no Australian settler politician of national relevance has acknowledged this type of Indigenous sovereignty since then.

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The ‘New Left’ in the late 1960s rejuvenated Marxism in multiple and original ways. It did so not by neglecting settler colonialism as a mode of domination but by returning to analysing it. Arghiri Emanuel focused in an early issue of New Left Review on settler colonialism, and on the position of settlers in particular, to offer a critique of what he saw as ossified and unfortunate Marxist departures from Marxism. In the 1970s many in this Marxist tradition of economic analysis focused on settlers and their histories, especially in Australia.xxvi This tradition explained the specific class politics of settler societies, maintaining that Marxism could offer a suitable method of analysis.

It is not settler-colonial studies that separates ‘Indigenous person’ and ‘settler’; it is settler colonialism as a mode of domination that does. The socialist hostile evaluation of the ‘Pitfalls of Settler-Colonial Theory’ disregards nearly two centuries of sustained and meaningful Marxist and communist critique of a particular mode of domination.xxvii The record should be straightened. It is like saying—and it was and is routinely said—that Marx regrettably divided us all into ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’, as if it were not capitalism as a mode of production that did so. And it is like saying that since we are not capable of observing distinct and concomitant modalities of oppression at once, we should focus on one and neglect the other ones. But we are capable; at least we can try. And settler-colonial studies tries.

The history of reflection on the simultaneous operations of capitalism and settler colonialism is especially relevant today. Let’s consider how, for example, in the current conjuncture, capitalism does not seem to be interested in the reproduction of labour power as it used to be, and seems to be following a logic of elimination, or at least nonreproduction (some even say that it is not even capitalism any more).xxviii We are all subjected to an exogenous mode of domination that appropriates but is uninterested in reproducing us as labour. Like a class, we discover shared objective interests and are subjected in a relationship of elimination. Indigenous and endogenous peoples of the world unite!

i See also Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, New York: W. W. Norton, 2024.

ii Prominent interventions in this context were: Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014; Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

iii Ran Greenstein, ‘Colonialism, apartheid, and the native question: The case of Israel Palestine’, in Racism After Apartheid: Challenges for Marxism and Anti-Racism, Vishwas Satgar (ed.), Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2019, pp 75–95.

iv As an entry point to discussions about this fateful chapter, see Gabriel Piterberg and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Wakefield, Marx, and the world turned inside out’, Journal of Global History, 10(3), 2015, pp 457–478.

v See Ken Olende, ‘Engels on colonialism: Ireland and the agency of the colonised’, Socialist History, 65, 2024, pp 47–62. A classic counterpoint account of Engels’ attitudes is offered in Roman Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986 (written in 1948 but conceived in the 1920s). Rosdolsky, a communist leader until the West Ukrainian Communist Party was dissolved in 1938, underscored Marx and Engels’ early prejudice and even hostility against ‘nonhistoric’ peoples in relation to the revolutions of 1848, disregarding their later analysis. John-Paul Himka of the University of Alberta offered an introduction.

vi See Olende, ‘Engels on colonialism’.

vii This is Patrick Wolfe’s much-cited definition of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. It is helpful here to note that Patrick Wolfe, who is crucial to the consolidation of settler colonial studies, saw himself as a Marxist. See Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Patrick Wolfe’s legacy and method’, in Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini and Susan Slyomovics (eds),London: Verso, 2021, pp 1–20.

viii See Oleksa Drachewych, ‘Settler colonialism’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (eds), Houndmills, Palgrave, 2021, pp 2417–28.

ix Drachewych, ‘Settler colonialism and the Communist International’.

x See Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge, 2010.

xi Brigitte Studer, Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, London, Verso, 2023, p. 79.

xii Studer, Travellers of the World Revolution, pp 74–101.

xiii Joseph Stalin, ‘The immediate tasks of the Party in the national question, March 10, 1921’, in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021, pp 99–112.

xiv Stalin, ‘The immediate tasks of the Party’, p 104.

xv Marco Buttino, La Rivoluzione Capovolta: L’Asia Centrale tra il crollo dell’impero zarista e la formazione dell’URSS, Napoli: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2003; Adeeb Khalid, ‘Communism on the frontier: The Sovietization of Central Asia and Mongolia’, in The Cambridge History of Communism, Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp 616–36. On the settler colonisation of Central Asia, see Alexander Morrison, ‘Peasant settlers and the “civilising mission” in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43(3), 2015, pp 387–417.

xvi Maoism, like the earlier indigenist Marxism of Jose Carlos Mariategui, may be especially appealing for Indigenous insurgencies, enabling vernacular socialisms that are especially sympathetic to localised difference, while peasant guerrilla struggles are necessarily sensitive to place. A determination to shape revolution locally while rejecting or selectively appropriating external modes and technologies would also contribute to this affinity. See Feyzi Ismail and Alpa Shah, ‘Class struggle, the Maoists and the Indigenous question in Nepal and India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(35), 2015, pp 112–23; Christos Mais, ‘Maoism, nationalism, and anti-colonialism’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, pp 1701–08. On Mariategui, see Carlos Cruz Mosquera, ‘Jose Carlos Mariategui: Welding Marxism and indigenism in Latin America today’, Journal of Labor and Society, 21(1), 2018, pp. 5–17. The Trotskyist pursuit of ‘proletarian world revolution’, on the contrary, being much more inflexible and flattening, bordering on erasure, is much less conducive to Indigenous assertions of specificity.

xvii See Benjamin Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney, Marxism, and the making of Indigenous modernity’, Ab Imperio, 1, 2020, pp 39–58.

xviii Cited in Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad’, p. 48.

xix Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell, 1999, p. 179.

xx Cited in Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad’, p. 52.

xxi Cited in Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad’, p. 54.

xxii On the question of ‘white blood mixture’ and whether ‘mixture’ could be grounds for exclusion from tribal membership Phinney opted out of both blood quantum and assimilation, concluding that ‘it would be an unjust and unnecessary measure to arbitrarily reduce the numbers of tribal members in the United States’, and ‘a serious loss to the Indian cause if a half-blood or one-fourth blood exclusion rule should be adopted’ (40). What mattered for him was that ‘the Indian tribes themselves will have the guiding hand in the formulation’ of corrective measures’ to any policy regarding classification.

xxiii Cited in Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad’, at p. 53.

xxiv Cited in Balthaser, ‘From Lapwai to Leningrad’, at p. 56.

xxv Igor Stas, ‘The Indigenous citizens of Igarka: Colonial discourse and socialist modernity in the Arctic Soviet city in the 1930s’, Urban History Review, 51, 2, 2023, pp. 246-267.

xxvi A few significant texts in this tradition are: Kenneth Good, ‘Settler colonialism: Economic development and class formation’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 14(4), 1976, pp 597–620; Kenneth Good, ‘Colonialism and settler colonialism: A comparison’, Australian Outlook, 33(3), 1979, pp 339–51; Donald Denoon, “Understanding settler societies,” Historical Studies, 18(73), 1979, pp 511–27; Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere, New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1983; Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004; Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

xxvii Jordan Humphreys, Indigenous Liberation & Socialism, Melbourne: Red Flag Books, 2023, pp 53–74.

xxviii For this debate, see, among others, McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead, London: Verso, 2019; Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What Can We Do about It, London: Verso, 2022; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, London: Penguin, 2023.

About the author

Lorenzo Veracini

Lorenzo Veracini teaches history and politics at the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (Pluto Press 2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Palgrave 2010, and 2024), The Settler Colonial Present (Palgrave 2015), The World Turned Inside Out (Verso 2021), and Colonialism: A Global History (Routledge 2022). Lorenzo also co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016), manages the settler colonial studies blog, and was Founding Editor of Settler Colonial Studies.

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