This book explores shifting forms of continental colonialism in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to the present. It offers an interdisciplinary approach bringing together historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to contribute to a critical historical anthropology of colonialism. Though focused on the modern era, the volume illustrates that the colonial paradigm is a framework of theories and concepts that can be applied globally and deeply into the past. The chapters engage with a wide range of topics and disciplinary approaches from the theoretical to the empirical, deepening our understanding of under-researched areas of colonial studies and providing a cutting edge contribution to the study of continental and internal colonialism for all those interested in the global impact of colonialism on continents.

In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire opened the grasslands of southern Ukraine to agricultural settlement by new colonists, among them Prussian Mennonites. Mennonite colonization was one aspect of the empire’s consolidation and modernization of its multi-ethnic territory. In the colony of Molochnaia, the dominant personality of the early nineteenth century was Johann Cornies (1789–1848), a hard-driving modernizer and intimate of senior Russian officials whose papers provide unique access into events in Ukraine in this era. Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine uses the life story of Johann Cornies to explore how colonial subjects interacted with Russian imperial policy. The book reveals how tsarist imperial policy shifted toward Russification in the 1830s and 1840s and became increasingly intolerant of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious minorities. It shows that Russia employed the Mennonite settlement as a colonial laboratory of modernity, and that the Mennonites were among Russia’s most economically productive subjects. This microhistory illuminates the role of Johann Cornies as a mediator between the empire and the Mennonite colonists, and it ultimately aims to bring light to the history of nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine.

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.

Through a range of case studies from eastern and western Europe, this book breaks new ground in investigating the extent to which European peoples living within Europe were also subjected to the ideologies and practices of colonialism.

Colonialism: A Global History interprets colonialism as an unequal relationship characterised by displacement and domination, and reveals the ways in which this relationship has been constitutive of global modernity. The volume focuses on colonialism’s dynamism, adaptability, and resilience. It appraises a number of successive global colonial ‘waves’, each constituting a specific form of colonial domination, each different from the previous ones, each affecting different locales at different times, and each characterised by a particular method of exploiting colonised populations and territories. Outlining a succession of distinct colonising conjunctures, and the ways in which they ‘washed over’ what is today understood as the ‘Global South’, shaping and reshaping institutions and prompting diverse responses from colonised communities, Colonialism: A Global History also outlines the contemporary relevance of this unequal relation. Overall, it provides an original definition of colonialism and tells the global history of this mode of domination’s evolution and reach. The broad chronological and geographical scope makes this volume the ideal resource for all students and scholars interested in globalisation, colonialism, and empire.

A widespread and still contemporary political phenomenon that exercises a profound effect on societies, settler colonialism structures relationships both historically and culturally diverse. This book assesses the distinctive feature of settler colonialism, and discusses its political, sociological, economic and cultural consequences.

States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism, its doctrine of neutrality, and its transnationally entangled scientific community, constitutes a perfect case in point.