The field of settler colonial studies is attracting broad scholarly attention. Although it is comparative and transnational by definition, few scholars working in the field have made sustained inquiries into the historical particularity of the phenomenon across different sites. Arguing that settler statehood emerged in modern form when “perfect settler sovereignty” established the territorial authority of those states, Lisa Ford's monograph makes a valuable contribution to the field by opening up new ways of thinking about the connected histories of Anglophone settler societies and their “uniquely destructive” impact on indigenous people (p. 2). Methodologically inventive, richly supported by a wealth of archival research (to which the reader is directed in the generous footnotes), and written in unusually clear and precise prose, Settler Sovereignty will be of broad interest to scholars with an interest in colonialism and theories of imperialism, the relationship between law and sovereignty, and historical accounts of modernity.

Ford argues that a new form and practice of sovereignty emerged in both colonial New South Wales and early republican Georgia at about the same time. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the peoples living in the two colonial sites engaged in plural legal practices, a plurality that Ford describes in detail in the first half of the book. By the 1830s, however, that plurality was no longer acceptable to the burgeoning settler states in each place. “Perfect settler sovereignty,” by which states exercised jurisdictional control over all peoples living in defined territories, brought the legal middle ground to an end. Ford explains the emergence of that new form of power by paying close attention to the “in-lawing” of indigenous people. She argues that when settler authorities accrued to themselves the right to try indigenous people for crimes that previously would have been dealt with according to customary norms or resolved diplomatically, they also extended their authority in territorial terms.

Ford's history of settler sovereignty brings two unlike cases into unexpected connection. Australia, where no treaties between Aboriginal people and settler authorities were officially recognized, is usually considered to have been settled with very little acknowledgment of indigenous peoples' rights. Georgia, by contrast, grew in large part as a consequence of the political and economic interactions between settler and tribal polities and the slave labor that those polities relied upon. Nonetheless, Ford argues that in both sites it was the criminalization of indigenous violence that provided the necessary condition for the exercise of settler sovereignty. Ford thereby shifts our attention away from imperial policy and high political intention to local practices that she demonstrates were connected over wide spaces.

Settler Sovereignty is a history of law and legal practice and it remains bound by that intellectual field. Without engaging a broader economic and political context, Ford cannot provide a full explanation for the emergence of the new form of power she identifies. There are some terminological problems; I was never sure, for instance, what “indigenous rights” referred to in the various historical contexts she deals with, particularly considering that the term is one that emerged in the post-World War Two era. These are questions to be taken up by other scholars and it has become possible to ask them as a result of the light shed by Ford's insightful and provocative argument.