Settler colonial studies: a historical analysis

This text is a historical analysis of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). Partly because most SCS scholars in principle only see those polities as settler colonies whose settlers eventually became a majority and gained independence-i.e. principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand-some historians have critiqued it. At the same time, historians have used it to revisit their research. Throughout, though, they have engaged SCS in area- and period-specific journals, without bundling their insights. This historical analysis of SCS addresses that issue. It has two parts. As shorter first part unpacks the historical-political background for SCS's Anglo-bias: the similar and linked domestic political trajectories of Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia's indigenous peoples from the 1950s and their centrality in the internationalization of indigenous politics from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A longer second part analyzes three issues both central to SCS and relevant to historians: structuralism, colonialism versus settler colonialism, and the settler-native binary.