The most significant contribution of this welcome volume is that it addresses the question of how to study indigenous peoples within the framework of the global phenomenon of settler colonialism. Moreover, the book does not stop at raising the question, in the manner of Gayatri Spivak's ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Rather it goes on to investigate the colonized indigenous communities’ interaction with the invading colonizers. Some of the contributions offer structural analyses of this interaction, while others bring to the fore indigenous subjectivity; not a few of them do both. Crucially, the volume as a whole is a healthy combination of epistemological and ontological contemplation of the colonized on the one hand, and documented, empirical study of their actual history, economy, and anthropology on the other.

Comparative settler colonialism as a scholarly field is relatively recent. The foundational works evinced critical interest in the white settlers and only indirectly in the indigenes, even if the critique was radical. They insisted that the dispossession and elimination of the native societies were not extrinsic ‘things’ that the settler nations once did but what those settler nations intrinsically are. George Fredrickson's assertion that there is no history of the US and South Africa that is not the history of white supremacy is a notable example.Footnote ¹ Explicitly or implicitly, the assumption has been that studying the settler societies aloofly from their interaction with the native societies is tantamount to accepting the former's hegemonic narratives (for example, studying the formation of such pivotal Zionist institutions as the kibbutz and the Histadrut as if they were unrelated to what the Zionists called the ‘Arab problem’). This direct concentration on the settlers stemmed from the fact that these scholars originated in the settler nations that they radically criticized, as well as from the fact that the settlers, for obvious reasons, had left a heftier and more accessible record.

Even a scholar of native origin such as Edward Said, whose work is not normally associated with settler colonialism, addressed the settlers directly, and the colonizers more generally, rather than the natives. His seminal essay ‘Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, is a case in point. In it Said did not directly engage with the standpoint of the victims.Footnote ² Rather, he read Moses Hess, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Herzl, and submitted a corrective: one ought to ask not just what these writings meant for Jews but what their consequences would be for Palestinians. It might be objected, however, that the victim's standpoint is in the authorial voice.

Between indigenous and settler governance is a substantial contribution to the growing search for the study of indigenous societies in the context of comparative settler colonialism, in ways that go beyond the critical investigation of the settlers from the standpoint of what their actions meant for the natives, even if this consideration continues to loom large. The temporal focus of the volume's essays is the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth; spatially they deal with North America and Australasia. In the Introduction, Lisa Ford explains that what makes this possible, in essence, is the discrepancy between settler intention and structure on the one hand, and contingency and incompleteness on the other. The eliminatory nature of settler projects as well as their uncompromising drive to absolute sovereignty, vis-à-vis both the native communities and the metropole, has never been coherent and complete, and has left gaps, however narrow, for the indigenes to resist and try to reassert themselves in very difficult environments and in a perforce limited manner. Moreover, the legal and economic structure of the settler states – though prejudiced and discriminatory in theory and practice – could be creatively used by indigenes to further their interests with varying degrees of limited success.

The tension between structure and ‘messy’ reality as a facilitator for examining the indigenous communities in concrete circumstances is embedded in a comment that Ford makes on one of the most prominent scholars of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe. On several occasions she has disapproved of an excessive structural determinism that she detects in his approach, and she raises it again in this volume: ‘To this end, the work gathered here collectively rejects notions that settler colonialism is a structure bent inexorably on dispossession, subordination, erasure or extinction …. Instead, this volume demonstrates the contingency and incompleteness of settler states and their collective, indigenous interlocutors, and it insists on the constitutive nature of their interactions, however unequal (p. 11).’

Ford's critique is helpful in that it poignantly encapsulates the approach that provides a coherent framework for the volume's chapters; but it is also problematic. The book shows neither that settler projects are not eliminatory by both intention and material structure (in a land–labour formation in which, fundamentally, native labour is eschewed but the entire land is coveted it could not have been otherwise), nor that their eliminatory nature ended in the frontier phase. What it does demonstrate in a variety of ways is that this structure is incomplete, not perfectly coherent, and ridden with contradictions, which presents possibilities for indigenous action in an environment that has no ‘post’ of either settlerism or capitalism. Wolfe is the author of the most oft-quoted dictum in settler colonial studies: ‘Invasion is a structure, not an event’. The volume's content reaffirms this observation in both approach and documentary evidence. Otherwise, why use the designation ‘settler states’, in which ‘settler’ is not just a pronouncement on these states’ origination but one that signifies their ideology, praxis, and institutions?

Of the numerous excellent chapters in this collection I would like to highlight three. Ian Hunter's original argument in ‘Vattel in revolutionary America’ is in the register (described above) of studying the history of the settler nations as the history of their engagement with the indigenes, without directly examining the indigenes themselves. Prevalent narratives of settler legal history, while not uniform, share the assumption that the use of European justice to conquer and dispossess the indigenous people was a corruption of that justice. Focusing on the American revolutionary statesmen-intellectuals, Hunter argues that they ‘did not operate within milieux governed by overarching norms: norms they betrayed and that we might restore. On the contrary, during the 1780s and 1790s these statesmen worked within a tradition of political thought whose central premise was that the actions of states – engaged in warfare, conquest, annexation and colonization – are not subject to an overarching principle of justice’ (pp. 12–13).

What they did resort to was the European principle of jus gentium, the right of nations, which the American founding fathers acquired through its most important articulation, namely Vattel's Law of nations. This principle recognized that domestic law within European states was beholden to justice, but that that justice was inapplicable to the relations between European states, and that these relations were governed by a casuistic logic, whereby the case-by-case arrangements between given states tautologically justified – or at least legitimized – them. Hunter proceeds,

It is important to clarify that Hunter does not suggest that seizure of native land was abandoned as a result of the passage from jus gentium to a common-law type of justification. American jurists now defined conquest and pre-emptive purchase as ‘unjusticiable’. At that point, a resort to the law of nations might have implied collective indigenous right to land, and hence circumscribed sovereignty; this was unthinkable.

Tim Rowse's ‘The identity of indigenous political thought’ is a daringly anti-essentialist endeavour, whose pertinence is wider than the volume's purpose. Rowse objects, and proceeds to offer an amply demonstrated alternative, that ‘Trying to identify the indigeneity of ideas suggests that there are criteria for judging to be “truly indigenous” based on their continuity with pre-contact traditions, their political intentions and effects’ (p. 95). He suggests instead eschewing the ahistorical jargon of genuine authenticity. Rowse contextually reads the texts of four native thinkers – Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Apirana Ngata, and William Cooper – whose lives spanned the period from the 1830s to the 1930s in North America and Australasia. He interprets their arguments on their own terms in their own contexts. He insists on taking seriously ‘the self-proclaimed indigeneity of [the] authors’, and is unperturbed by the fact that ‘They presented themselves as Christians, as “civilized” and even as “white’ … They are interesting because they connected the fortunes of their people to certain human universals of evidently Western provenance’ (p. 95)

Those who presuppose that indigenous thinkers must adhere to their pre-contact Weltanschauung to be authentically indigenous, understand them as strategic and mimetic when they did not do so. Rowse rejects this essentialism. His approach is, methodologically, the most thought-provoking contribution to the volume because it fundamentally offers an abashed and fresh way of thinking about the dialectic tension between the particular and the universal, a way in which the thinkers whom he reads were to the settler societies what the mirror was to Snow White's stepmother. Take Charles Eastman (1858–1939), a Sioux whose father converted to Christianity. He wrote to the American settler society in 1915: ‘You are suffering from a civic disease, and we are affected by it. When you are cured, and not until then, we may hope to be thoroughly well men’ (p. 100). This statement would not have been inappropriate for other ‘native’ figures such as the French Jew Bernarad Lazare in the fin-de-siècle Third Republic or Martin Luther King in the racist US of his time.

In ‘Economy, change and self-determination: a central Australian case’, Diane Austin-Broos turns to the material base of an indigenous community – the Western Arrente people in central Australia – in the settler context. The foundation of her piece is empirical; her research consists in an interesting combination of historical documentary evidence and ethnographic data. On that basis she raises questions relating to the economic base. Ontologically, she asks whether, in accounts of indigenous self-determination under settler sovereignty, the economy should ‘precede’ law and governance. She goes on to submit that invasion had two transformative points of impact upon Arrente economy. One was ‘European things and practices including new foods, animals and tools. The other was [settler] pastoralism's impact on a desert environment watered by periodic rains but also subject to periodic drought. In particular, a drought in the 1920s denuded the land and made a hunter-gatherer economy difficult to return to, especially in the context of settlement’ (p. 109). Resorting to Heidegger, she submits that ‘These two impacts were mutually reinforcing; they redefined the Arrente's experience and their sense of being in the world’ (p. 109).

Politically, Austin-Broos questions the prevalent assumptions: one is that what is called (economic) development is viewed as being perforce assimilationist (and assimilation is the final stage of the elimination of the natives by the settler project) ‘and, therefore, as something antithetical to the rights involved in self-determination. Alternatively, this dilemma is avoided by the assumption that only local forms of development based on land rights are appropriate for Indigenous peoples’ (p. 108). She complicates these assumptions by offering possible answers to two questions: ‘But is greater participation in an Australian economy inevitably assimilationist? And does an economy built on land rights obviate the need for remote Aboriginal people to engage more fully with the education that rural enterprise now requires?’ (p. 108).

In conclusion, the great merit of this volume is perhaps evinced by the fact that it stimulates one to think of cases that are not included in it. Take Palestine/Israel: what is called the two-state solution, hypothetically assuming that it is at all possible, would offer the conflict's indigenous side national sovereignty, however circumscribed. The common-state solution would inevitably mean forsaking full-fledged sovereignty, at least some degree of fusion with the settler society, and a fundamental shift to the struggle for an equitable political framework. What path should the native Palestinians take?