Colonialism is a practice by which a country controls people or areas, often by establishing colonies, generally for strategic and economic advancement. There is no clear definition of colonialism; definitions may vary depending on the use and context.
Susan Pedersen is a Canadian historian, and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Pedersen focuses on 19th and 20th century British history, women's history, settler colonialism, and the history of international institutions.
Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.
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. Along with Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, and Tony Ballantyne her work has helped define the "new imperial history". With Tony Ballantyne she has helped define a new approach to world history that focuses on colonialism, race and gender. 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 is a type of colonialism in which foreign settlers move to and permanently reside on land already inhabited by Indigenous residents. Settler colonialism causes the replacement or reduction of existing peoples and cultures; some, but not all, scholars describe the process as inherently genocidal. It may be enacted by a variety of means, ranging from violent depopulation of the previous inhabitants to less deadly means, such as assimilation or recognition of Indigenous identity within a colonial framework.
Alison Caroline Bashford, is an 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 a Kanaka Maoli woman born and raised in California with ties to family in Anahola on the island of Kaua`i and throughout the islands. She is an author, editor, radio producer, educator, serves on advisory boards, and is one of six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). 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.
Zionism as settler colonialism is the paradigm that views Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a form of settler colonialism. Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies, considered Israel an example and discussed it in his essay "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native". Other scholars who have used a settler-colonial analysis of Israel/Palestine include Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal, and Rosemary Sayigh.
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.
