Settler Colonialism and Early American History

Résumé En

This chapter explores settler colonialism as an explanatory and interpretative framework of the history of early America. Settler colonialism has taken the world of early Americanists by storm, creating debates about its relevance, revived in the last two decades by studies of British expansion in Australia insisting on the genocidal intent behind this form of colonisation. Burnard and Delahaye argue that the concept offers solid perspectives through which to differentiate between modes and processes of empire-building and colonisation, and to highlight the strategies deployed by colonial agents to negotiate and manage the authority conferred to them through their various colonial projects. However, they take a long view of the concept that challenges both the unifying and reductive definition of Australian scholarship and the neutral and normalised definition of American historiography. Instead, they argue in favour of the call for a contextual study of settler locales within the scope of the entirety of British expansionism, to point to commonalities and differences in the relationships British settlers entertained and retained with the native country from which they issued. They demonstrate that settlers understood and promoted their different contributions to British expansion in their own terms but within a common frame of reference regarding sovereignty, political culture and the meaning of empire in the long history of the nation. The dynamic processes through which colonisers could belong to the imagined community of their nations of origin while pursuing their own particular interests in the colonial spaces they wrote about and defended is revealed.