Chris Youé

Settler colonialism or colonies with settlers

It used to be thought, or it was assumed, that settlers (read Europeans) who travelled to and stayed in far-off lands in the modern era and acted “colonial” were rock-solid examples of “colonialism”. When the settlers robbed aboriginal peoples of their land, regarded by the former as terra nullius or “empty land”, they justified the robbery and their rule on the “truth” that indigenous peoples were racially inferior and economically backward in material and cultural terms; Europeans were pioneers. This was colonialism, distinct from dependent settler-free parts of empire such as India, or Nigeria, but a type of colonialism nevertheless. The examples of “settler colonialism” that I have invoked here have not, in the recent historiography, been applied to empire in Africa (e.g. South Africa, Rhodesia and Kenya, which I refer to later as the triad) but rather to the settlement colonies that became the backbone of the British commonwealth (the Antipodes and North America) when the white invaders formed a majority and when land, not labour, was their objective. This view of “settler colonialism”, clearly an inspiration for the Routledge Handbook of Settler Colonialism (hereafter the Handbook), was first mooted by the late Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe (1999). The co-editor of the Handbook, Lorenzo Veracini, has taken up the theoretical mantle (Veracini 2010; 2013). In his obituary for Wolfe (Veracini 2016) he informs us that Wolfe’s seminal text, Settler Colonialism, was not meant to have been a treatise on a distinct form of colonialism but rather an analysis of Australian anthropology. The term was an afterthought, added at the request of the publishers.1

Mining Capital and Colonialism in Africa

The recent books by Raymond Dumett and Priscilla Shilaro concern the history of mining in the age of colonialism. That is where the similarity ends. Dumett’s collection focuses on the “great men” of European enterprise — in the African examples, Edwin Cade, Frederick Gordon, Cecil Rhodes, and Alfred Chester Beatty — and endeavours to link the mining giants of the imperialist age to the theory of “gentlemanly capitalism” propounded by Cain and Hopkins in their British Imperialism 1688-2000 (2002) and several articles before that (Cain and Hopkins 1980, 1986, 1987). Kenya’s Kakamega gold rush of the early 1930s does not even get a mention. Shilaro, on the other hand, devotes her entire study to this unique episode of Kenya’s history, and is the first monograph on a controversy which caused a major backlash amongst the proAfrican lobby both in the metropolis and the colony. Her concern is with a case study of the impact on Africans of what she depicts as colonial immorality, of legislation allowing the excision of “inviolable” African reserve land to accommodate the demands of European prospectors in the early 1930s.

The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation

and Sutton Scarsdale in Derbyshire, were abandoned because the environment was insalubrious (few people want to live next to B coal pit). Mcthley suffered further indignitics during World War 11: it was requisitioned and wrecked by the army. England’s Lost Houses is a popular architectural history that will appeal to a wide readership. It does not purport to be an academic polemic on the rise and fall of the country house, and consequently the text is kept to i~ minimum. The language used is straightforward and accessible, the introduction is comprehensive, and the potted biographies of the 1 10 houses and their occupants are enlightening, although several are frustratingly brief. ‘The reproduction black-and-white photographs from the Country Life archives are what make the book special, and one could spend hours poring over them. They provide insight into changing architectural styles and are also interesting as to the type of house that Country Life deemed worthy of inclusion i n its pages.

Introduction: John Flint and Agency in History

He is listed in the Canadian Who’s Who, in Who’s Who in America, and in the International Directory of Distinguished Leadership. In his 27 years at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, he supervised 30 PhD students and countless MAs. He is best known internationally as the scholar who unravelled the complexities (and simplicities) of those influential ‘agents’ of late nineteenth-century commercial empire,George Goldie and Cecil Rhodes. Although he has focused on significant figures of the colonial world — Kingsley, Lugard and Morel are others — John Flint, the man we (erstwhile students, former colleagues, Canadian Africanists) are honouring in these essays, has never been a disciple of what might be termed leadership dynamics; his ‘agents’ of empire may have held centre-stage but they have not controlled the play, the other actors or the audience, no matter how influential.

The Boers in East Africa: Ethnicity and Identity

Introduction The East African Scramble Events in the South Exploring the Hinterland Trekking Settlement The Economy The Church Education Transitions Conclusion Appendixes References Index