Colonialism is the pursuing, establishing and maintaining of control and exploitation of people and of resources by a foreign group of people. Implemented through the establishment of coloniality and possibly colonies, this colonization keeps colonized territory and people socio-economically othered and subaltern to colonizers and their metropole. While frequently advanced as an imperialist regime, colonialism can also take the form of settler colonialism, whereby colonial settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace an existing society with that of the colonizers, possibly towards a genocide of native populations.
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States, the British Raj, and the African colonies. John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.
Antoinette M. Burton is an American historian, and Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. On November 23, 2015, Burton was named Chair of the University of Illinois' search for a permanent Chancellor after the resignation of Phyllis Wise.
John MacDonald MacKenzie is a British historian of imperialism who pioneered the study of popular and cultural imperialism, as well as aspects of environmental history. He has also written about Scottish migration and the development of museums around the world. He is Emeritus Professor of imperial history at Lancaster University and founder of the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series (1984).
The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano. It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
Settler society is a theoretical term in the early modern period and modern history that describes a common link between modern, predominantly European, attempts to permanently settle in other areas of the world. It is used to distinguish settler colonies from resource extraction colonies. The term came to wide use in the 1970s as part of the discourse on decolonization, particularly to describe older colonial units.
Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers and settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers.
Alison Caroline Bashford, is a historian specialising in global history and the history of science. She is Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population. Alison Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge (2013–2017).
Michael G. Vann is an American historian who serves as Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. He teaches a range of world history courses, including 20th century world, Southeast Asia, imperialism, and genocide. His research specializes in the history of the French colonial empire, epidemic diseases such as the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, and Cold War era mass violence in Southeast Asia. Vann holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was a student of Tyler Stovall and Edmund Burke III. His dissertation was on the history of white supremacy in French colonial Hanoi. He is a graduate of 'Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawai'i, his home town.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Ian Robert Tyrrell is an Australian historian who is notable for his work on American exceptionalism and transnational history. Tyrrell was Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney until his retirement in July 2012 and is now an Emeritus Professor of History there. He is the author of twelve books, including True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860 –1930 and Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970. His main research areas include American history, environmental history, and historiography. He was among the first historians to popularise the idea of transnational history.
Saheed Aderinto is a Nigerian American Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University and an award-winning author. He is the Founding President of the Lagos Studies Association. In February 2023, Aderinto received the $300,000 Dan David Prize–the largest financial reward for excellence in the historical discipline in the world. He has published eight books, thirty-six journal articles and book chapters, forty encyclopedia articles, and twenty book reviews.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is an American author, radio producer and professor. She is one of six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). A Kanaka Maoli woman, Kauanui was raised in California. She was awarded a Fulbright (1994-1995) at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where she was affiliated with the Māori Studies department. Her research areas focus on indigeneity and race, settler colonialism, decolonization, anarchism, and gender and sexuality.
Penelope Ann Russell, is an Australian social historian. She is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney.
Desley Deacon is an Australian sociologist, historian and biographer. She has been professor emeritus at the Australian National University since 2009.
The connection between colonialism and genocide has been explored in academic research. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
Zionism has been described as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure."
Settler colonialism in Australia is the elimination of Indigenous Australians and their replacement by a settler society. Initially carried out by violent means, such as "massacres, forced starvation, poisoning, rape, disease, and incarceration", settler colonialism continues today in the form of cultural assimilation. Settler colonial studies emerged in Australia.
Chie Ikeya is a historian of Southeast Asia. She is Associate Professor of Asian and women's and gender history in the Department of History at Rutgers University.
