The resurgence of indigenous politics and activism in the early twenty-first century has powerfully illuminated the violent past and continuing impact of settler colonialism. Through round dances, marches, and occupations, contemporary indigenous movements such as Idle No More, Tiny House Warriors, No DAPL, and Standing Rock have not only starkly depicted the violent past and continuing impact of settler colonialism but also launched evocative and forceful calls for indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and environmental protection. Such work is multifaceted and multidirectional: indigenous nations and people address and expose the violent dispossession at the heart of settler colonialism while they simultaneously navigate the complicities and evasions of democratic ambitions and ideals. As the theorist, poet/musician, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson notes, “Movement building is a productive or generative politics of refusal when we are building and reinvigorating and embodying and amplifying our instance of acting as peoples who belong to specific Indigenous nations. We are creating the alternative on the ground and in real time.”^{Footnote 1}

This difficult work—which calls out enduring colonial dispossession while also clearing ideological, socio-cultural, economic, and political space to support and sustain alternative indigenous and de-colonial theories—is the spur to two superb and remarkable new studies, Barbara Arneil’s Domestic Colonialism and Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People. With nuance and insight, each study illuminates different yet vital dimensions of modern political theory’s colonial roots and investments. While both studies look roughly at the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in America and Europe, each work nonetheless provides uniquely innovative perspectives on the scope, features, and influence of colonialism in the past and for the present. Taken together, both books not only stand as fundamental contributions to colonial studies, political theory, and American and European history but also delineate essential future pathways for political theory as a decolonizing endeavor.

In a groundbreaking study, Arneil tackles a dimension of colonization long unexamined: domestic colonization. Often, she notes, colonialism is discussed in conjunction with imperialism, with colonization typically defined as “a set of processes, external to the colonizing state or metropole, of domination over foreign people(s) rooted in racialized differences” (p. 1). Yet during the nineteenth and first half of the twentiethth century, there were thousands of domestic colonies “created within the borders of states, as opposed to foreign lands, for fellow citizens who were either ’idle’ (poor, unemployed, vagrants, beggars, tramps), ’irrational’ (mentally ill, disabled, alcoholic, epileptic), or members of political, religious, and racial groups in order to segregate and engage them in agrarian labour on uncultivated soil with the express purpose of ’improving’ both the people and the land through such labour” (p. 1). Domestic Colonies takes the reader through a masterful comparative analysis of a vast array of domestic colonies. These include labor colonies established to manage the urban and idle poor (such as Johannes Van den Bosch’s Benevolent Society in Holland, the Mettray colony in France, Salvation Army settlements in North America and the United Kingdom, and Metis colonies in Alberta and Saskatchewan); farm colonies for the mentally ill and disabled (i.e., Rome State Asylum in New York, Waverly Farm Colony in Massachusetts, and the Bethel farm colony in Bielefeld, Germany); and utopian colonies of freely consenting participants looking to challenge the existing religious, economic, and racial political models. Particularly distinctive among these utopian settlements were the Doukhobor colonies of Canada, Robert Owen’s New Harmony colony in Indiana, and the African American freedom colonies in Kansas, Texas, (Mound Bayou) Mississippi, and (Boley) Oklahoma.

In Dahl’s magisterial Empire of the People, domestication of a very different and much more consistently repressive nature takes center stage. Working through familiar and lesser-known texts by Thomas Jefferson, Black Hawk, Alexis de Tocqueville, William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, among many others, Dahl examines nineteenth-century settler colonialism in the Americas to lay bare how practices and ideologies of indigenous dispossession shaped the theoretical foundations of American democracy. As Dahl notes, while much critical attention has been paid to liberalism’s intertwined emergence with imperialism, relatively little scrutiny has been directed to “how ideologies and practices of settler expansion figured into the formation of democratic theory” (p. 7). His study powerfully rectifies this neglect by examining the “constitutive role of colonial dispossession in shaping democratic values and ideals” (p. 1). At stake is not simply recognition of colonial features of democratic institutions and policies but also a more potent and critical reckoning with the repressive and acquisitive characteristics of democratic theory’s most valued features—social equality, self-rule, popular sovereignty, rule of law, and pluralism.

Together, what these two accomplished accounts provide is a powerful set of directives for theorizing and challenging what Kevin Bruyneel describes as “settler memory.” Namely, he contends, “settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that serve as the fundamental bases for creating settler colonial nations-states” (p. 36; my emphasis).^{Footnote 2}

The first of these directives is to expand and pluralize understandings of colonialism. Both Arneil and Dahl seek to unearth and expose features of colonization long hidden. Hannah Arendt, Dahl notes, may have valued the diffused aspirations for national sovereignty and individual autonomy but nonetheless “obscured the colonial violence that laid the basis of American federalism by disavowing the presence of indigenous peoples” (p. 23). To shed light on these disavowals, Empire of the People emphasizes three primary features of colonialism: 1) the role of popular sovereignty and constituent power in fostering settler colonial processes of expansion; 2) the processes and justifications for the expropriation of indigenous land; and 3) the paradox of settler sovereignty.

Most notably, the principle of imperial equality that animates American democracy, as Dahl poignantly reveals in his nuanced discussion of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, constructed a “new world conception of empire that privileged the equality of quasi-sovereign settler communities over notions of empire organized around the governance of colonial dependencies” (p. 46). This democratic federalism may have rejected the hierarchical and unitary features of empire, but nonetheless generated a distinctive and coercive form of colonial expansion, namely, a “federative replication” of colonial settlements that “engendered profound degrees of colonial violence in sanctioning the elimination of indigenous sovereignties through a process of republican expansionism” (p. 46). On the ground, these settler communities exercised a popular sovereignty that was deeply linked to expropriated land.

As Dahl reveals in his innovative consideration of a range of “micro-constitutions” in the 1770s and 1780s (namely, the Vermont Constitution of 1777, Watauga Compact of 1772, the Cumberland Compact of 1780, and the Constitution of the State of Franklin in 1784), the “coloniality of constituent power” is most fully—and most coercively—expressed in “the sovereign capacity of settlers qua founders to establish new political societies on top of expropriated land” (p. 25). Colonization was used as a “means of ensuring democratic consent and actualizing constituent power in the founding of a new constitutional order” (p. 58): It emphasized resistance to government, colonial rebellion, and power vested in the people. As such, it emphasized the people’s rights to “alter and abolish,” and also the rights of the people to “emigrate.” This dynamic established a “colonization-constitution dialectic” in which settlers could exercise constituent power in order to untie the bonds of government and erect new institutions (p. 53). Moreover, this dynamic extended all the way from the legal tasks of constitution making to the ethical and moral features of American democracy. As Dahl finds in his assessment of Emerson’s 1844 speech, “The Young American,” “it was the appropriation and colonization of land that encouraged the cultural and moral autonomy of democratic individuals, which in turn prevented the resurgence of old-world political traditions from taking root in America” (p. 120).

For Arneil, addressing domestic colonies in all of their empirical and ideological variation enables us to see “colonization” not as a blunt “metaphor for various kinds of domination” but, rather, in more nuanced and precise terms as a series of instruments used by a variety of groups and actors to different ends. Across wide-ranging ideological and demographical diversity, these domestic colonies all were bounded, discrete, and internally focused, and as she persuasively illustrates through her painstaking comparative approach, they differed substantially from either imperial or internal colonization, namely, the “wholesale dispossession of land and systematic attempts at assimilation of indigenous peoples” (p. 14). Rather, domestic colonies motivated by a remarkable diversity of aims and ambitions were broadly driven by a desire to elude mainstream society, including its carceral institutions. Nonetheless, in the aspiration to “improve,” “regulate,” and “develop,” domestic colonies (particularly farm and labor colonies) could and did use distinctive forms of violence (in the forms of segregation, training, and work). “[C]olonization” seen this way, Arneil argues, addresses “an empirical reality of the past,” albeit not a past that is wholly “negative” or “repressive” (p. 14).

Bringing these many differences to light enables us to see key connections. Notably, Arneil’s focus on the farm colonies in the United Staates, Britain, and Canada illustrates the entwined connection between disability and colonization and the ideologies of colonialism and ableism. In a notable example, the 1911 Orillia farm colony in Ontario brought in the colonial principle of “segregation” and “changing habits,” along with the “principle of improvement” to transform and improve colonial inhabitants (p. 222). As Dr. Helen MacMurchy, Inspector of the Feeble Minded in Ontario, announced in a 1907 report: “Farm colony life for the mentally defective person is intended to give them the maximum of freedom and development via agrarian labour” (p. 143).

At the same time, while in many cases domestic colonies were oppressive, restrictive, and coercive, they also offer powerful counternarratives about colonialism and its ambitions. As Arneil deftly shows, multiple and varied “progressive” thinkers, such as William Booth, Max Weber, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Tommy Douglas, among others, “viewed ’home colonies’ as the most positive way that states could interact with certain kinds of citizens within their own society” (p. 15). Utopian colonies, in particular, viewed their objectives as emancipatory and challenging to the larger power structures of racism and capitalism in society. Thinkers as varied as Alexis de Tocqueville, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, Leo Tolstoy, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Bernstein theorized and pursued domestic colonies in order to pursue improvement and, in certain cases, to challenge and contest racism, capitalism, and religious persecution. Colonization—in practice and in ideology—was seen as viable and compatible not only with liberal and democratic thinkers but also with “a variety of ideologies and beliefs—including republicanism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and/or Christianity” (p. 221). Attending to these differences, Arneil proposes, enables us “to expand and complicate our understanding of ‘colony’ by examining both the process of colonization and the ideology of colonialism which justified it in all of their historical manifestations” (p. 221).

Beyond drawing our attention to diversity, both books also provide a strong directive to address colonialism’s transnational and intersecting features. By highlighting the cross-national circulation of colonial practices and ideologies, Dahl looks to challenge the sentiments of American exceptionalism: the American empire appears not sui generis but, rather, as deeply imbricated in widely circulating “technologies of native control.” Despite America’s self-styled uniqueness, the American empire is part of transnational “networks of overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (p. 16). Like Arneil, Dahl emphasizes the cross-national circulation of colonial practices and ideologies. European colonizers looked to the United States for examples of how to govern native peoples in colonial outposts; most notably, Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, drew upon the American precedent of settler colonization to address French colonialism and the Algeria question. At the same time, a range of American theorists and administrators, such as Jefferson and Henry Knox, also drew upon their own experiences with colonial domination in other parts of the world to construct forms of democratic equality and self-rule that rested upon indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism.

Meanwhile, although domestic colonies were discrete and internally focused, they were still embedded in and activated by an extensive transnational network. As Arneil astutely notes, “[d]omestic colonies, despite the binary underpinning much of the preceding analysis, were, in reality, not the opposite of external settler colonies but common nodes within transnational colonial networks, constituted materially and conceptually via the transit of bodies and ideas, respectively, across borders” (p. 222). Even the utopian colonies most committed to resisting racism and capitalism are nonetheless embedded in a settler colonial framework that dispossesses indigenous peoples and claims “empty/waste land” via arguments of improvement. This transnational network enabled administrators, planners, and activists to learn from examples and policies adopted between European metropoles and external colonies and bodies, as well as ideas that flowed between different sites and nodes (i.e., labor colonies in Java in South East Asia that served as the model for subsequent labor colonies in Holland and Surinam).

At the same time, Arneil is careful to distinguish the transnationality of domestic colonialism from the carceral imperial network often referenced by postcolonial scholars. The networks of domestic colonies were rooted in principles of agrarian labor and improvement, and these were conceptually and ideologically distinct from an imperial carceral network that stressed hard labor, containment, and punishment. As she notes, “domestic colonies” used the “same arguments of “economic efficiency and ethical superiority” employed by external forms of colonialism to critique and oppose “domestic institutions rooted in domination, like prisons, asylums, indentured servitude” (p. 239). To be sure, various examples of domestic colonization, such as “Operation Snatch” for the Doukhobor children, created specifically insular, demarcated, and repressive environments that carried out deeply abusive practices and policies on the mind and body in the name of improvement. Administrators and superintendents were granted “colonial license to do virtually anything in the name of improvement, while segregation (removal from any oversight from society) provided them with the impunity necessary to do so without repercussion” (p. 240). Attending to these differences enables us to see in even a more granular fashion the particular and painful abuses exercised in the name of “improvement” and “progress.”

The final directive for political theory is reckoning with alternatives/paths not taken. As Dahl forcefully argues, “settler political thought” has disavowed “the origins of democracy in colonial dispossession and in turn” erased “the political and historical presence of native peoples.” This “disavowal,” he submits, is not passive forgetting but instead “active refusal to historically and ethically grapple with the presence and political claims of indigenous peoples as well as the colonial violence that paved the way for the emergence of modern American democracy” (p. 4). To decolonize democracy requires active pursuit of the alternative and indigenous political theories and conceptions that settler political thought has sought to marginalize and ultimately erase.

Arneil’s meticulous tracing of domestic colonies refuses the reflexive treatment of colonization as oppressive. As the author notes, utopian colonies sought radical political ends for their own members—in contrast to external and settler colonies (and also labor and farm colonies), which were typically capitalist and racialized. These settlements sought emancipation for minority populations and envisioned radical possibilities for their own members. For example, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, farming, education, and civic participation were all pursued as ways in which ex-slaves could become independent and free. As Booker T. Washington wrote, “here negroes would find greater opportunities and more freedom of action than they would have been able to find in the older communities in North and South” (p. 215). And while it is true that most of these utopian domestic colonies failed quickly and spectacularly, they nonetheless offer thought-provoking examples for assessing how radical theories and ambitions have and might be implemented. William Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana (1825–27) was, for instance, a key example of a domestic and utopian colonial project rooted in segregation, agrarian labor, and improvement, as well as a radical form of socialist colonialism, “which, like the Doukhobors, sought to fundamentally challenge the precepts of Lockean colonialism, including individual property, capitalism, and materialism by virtue of Owen’s secular commitment to collectivist ownership and cultivation” (p. 197).

Drawing on indigenous theorists past and present, Dahl mines underrecognized resources in American democratic thought that can aid in the work of decolonization. While he recognizes that it is beyond the scope of his book to “fill in” all of “those absences,” he nonetheless provides a suggestive and compelling “reconstructive effort to sketch the outlines of a decolonial theory of democracy” that emphasizes: “1) a nonsovereign conception of democracy that relinquishes the aspiration to collective self-mastery and 2) a transmodern conception of democracy that attends to the productive influence of indigenous traditions on the modern democratic tradition” (p. 20).

Various indigenous political thinkers, such as Elias Boudinot, Black Hawk, Shawnee leader Tecumseh, and his half-brother Tenskwatawa, provide insightful witnessing and acute diagnoses of democracy’s multiple forms of colonial violence in context. Tenskwatawa, for example, discusses “revitalization of traditional Indian cultures” as a way to combat the “spread of Anglo civilization” (p. 68). Sauk Chief Black Hawk responds to settler colonialism by emphasizing democratic principles of consent and treaty relations and challenging the commodification of land. As he proclaims, “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold” (p. 69). In one of the richest sections of Empire of the People, Dahl addresses William Apess’s defense of indigenous sovereignty and, in particular, Apess’s criticism of American foundational principles and his demand for a redefinition of friendship and democratic polity based on indigenous counternarratives. According to Dahl, “Indian nullification operates not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the foundational violence of American settler democracy” (p. 19).

Empire of the People and Domestic Colonies each provide innovative and insightful interpretations of colonization and its impact on modern political theory, emphasizing new features and examples of colonization while also providing compelling readings of crucial (and often overlooked) texts and thinkers. Certainly, there remain areas for additional exploration and development. It would be wonderful, for example, to hear more from Arneil about the connection of domestic colonies to current political debates, as well as to see whether or not the frameworks of the carceral state and the colonial state have now transformed and merged. It also would be compelling to reflect more on the status of failure in the domestic colonies: What does such failure reflect and express, and what forms of domestic colonization remain? One can easily imagine, for instance, how her analysis might stir compelling critiques and analyses of Occupy Wall Street and immigration and detention centers. Relatedly, it would be fascinating to hear more from Dahl on whether certain features of American settler democracy could be rehabilitated or transformed. Are there any forms of popular “self-authorization” that can assist in the work of decolonization? Might the mantle of the “people” be used not only to contest coercive forms of settler colonialism but also to exercise a nonsovereign and transmodern conception of democracy?

Together, Arneil and Dahl carve out new and compelling trajectories in the research on colonization and modern political theory as they also gesture toward important future lines of inquiry and investigation for the challenges that colonization in the modern past poses for understandings of colonialism in the present.