Scholarship on race and colonialism occupies a fraught position within the British academy.

Within this precarious field, locations like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and Palestine receive insufficient critical attention. Framing Britain’s settler colonies as either part of ‘the West’ or entirely autonomous forecloses rigorous analysis of imperial power and reproduces the genocidal erasure of Indigenous presence. Likewise, detaching the settler colonial world from 'postcolonial' Britain obscures their integral role in the making of race, sex/gender, law, geography, history, technology, property, nation-states, capital and the human—overseas and ‘at home.’

Settler Colonialisms / British Empire is a LAHP-funded research network, workshop series and conference aimed at addressing these critical gaps in UK-based scholarship and political thought.   

Our project is animated by the following questions: How do past and present settler colonialisms circulate, articulate, reproduce and travel, forming notions of the future in the process? How do (UK-dominant) analytics of race, empire, diaspora, postcolonialism and capital resonate/contend with contributions from Native/Indigenous studies? And what does study from/of the settler colony teach us about the metropole, and vice versa?