Lorenzo Veracini. The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea. London: Verso, 2021. 320 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-83976-382-3.
Reviewed by Carla Joubert (University of Western Ontario)
Published on H-Environment (September, 2023)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
The World Turned Inside Out is a far-reaching monograph with an ambitious goal, which it largely achieves. Lorenzo Veracini aims to prove that settler colonialism was a response to, or preemptive evasion of, internal revolution through global displacement. Veracini argues that as European citizens left their own homelands, they displaced Indigenous peoples and, with time, replicated the very institutions from which they fled, which “begets further displacement” (p. 25). The monograph shows the intricate relationship between settler colonialism abroad and the failures of capitalism and mercantilism in the metropoles of empire. As failing economic systems in Europe destabilized society, Europeans looked abroad for greater economic and social freedom and stability. The monograph exists in the broader context of settler-colonial theory and aims to develop our understanding of how and why settler colonialism manifested. It is in conversation with Veracini’s prior work and the theory of settler colonialism developed by Patrick Wolfe and his successors. It also explores the settler-colonial present and future. If, as Veracini argues, settler colonialism was a disruption to revolution through displacement, then our current world remains vulnerable to the continuation of settler-colonial practices, spatially and politically. His scope is truly international. While he shows the most thorough understanding of settler colonialism as it manifested in the Americas, he also engages with settler-colonial practices on every other continent. The monograph is both transnational and international. Veracini succeeded in his aim to “outline many imagined and practical efforts to reconstitute ‘worlds’ elsewhere as an alternative to the perception of social upheaval” (p. 12).
Some of the important issues explored in The World Turned Inside Out include the role of social and economic upheaval in the manifestation of settler-colonial political institutions. Veracini also interrogates how settler colonizers disregarded Indigenous displacement in pursuit of European replacement. In this argument he is persuasive, though his engagement with Indigenous responses to settler-colonial political practice—and thus, potential modifications of that practice—is limited.
Methodologically, Veracini leans on a plethora of case studies across space and time to prove his primary claims. His engagement with the settler colonization of the United States is his most in-depth case study, and one to which he frequently returns. However, he also shows a relatively thorough understanding of the process of settler colonization in other global case studies. Because Veracini aims to prove the political roots of settler colonialism, his source base is simultaneously expansive in scope, but limited in voice. Many of the architects of settler colonialism were European men in power.
The World Turned Inside Out is structured into an introduction, four main chapters, and a conclusion. The first two chapters and the introduction prove Veracini’s primary argument. Chapter 1 argues that early settlement was a route to evade unrest and the causes of unrest in Europe. These early settlements aimed for less class-based societies and placed a premium on cultivation. In the Americas, Australia, and South Africa, early settler societies replicated the internal responses from their homeland to revolution with their own responses to Creole revolutions. That is to say, as revolution came to the settler-colonial frontier, the frontier expanded through greater internal migration and settlement. Chapter 2 frames late-stage settler colonialism as an escape from the market revolution of the early nineteenth century in the United States and Europe. It also argues that settler colonialists sometimes migrated in evasion from persecution, and sought to replicate their homelands abroad. As people escaped persecution, they simultaneously (if inadvertently) protected the metropole, because it was no longer vulnerable to internal revolution. The analysis in this chapter is strong, though it takes for granted that political revolution was predominantly white, and predominantly male. Chapter 3 is more of a consultative section that builds on the argument developed in the prior two chapters. The chapter explores case studies ranging from national manifestations of settler-colonial responses to revolution, as in the cases of France and Russia, to more abstract examples like imaginary revolutions. This chapter provides one of few glimpses into the role of women in settler-colonial political discourse, namely in the context of social settlements in North America (pp. 162-164). Chapter 4 is an intriguing exploration of the settler-colonial present and future. Veracini interrogates the ways settler colonialism continues to manifest after the theoretical closure of the spatial frontier but with the ongoing need for political revolution. He proposes that, contrary to the perception of a receded frontier, we continue to practice the politics of settler colonialism in cyber and outer space. These examples are compelling in part because they illuminate how the continued exploitation of labor under capitalism continues to feed the same political upheaval that prompted settler-colonial policy (predominantly) in Europe. Only now that upheaval has manifested, or threatens to manifest, in sites of settlement like North America, in addition to new spaces “abroad,” like outer space and online.
The World Turned Inside Out further affirms what prior research on settler colonialism has posited, which is that settler colonialism manifested in response to internal pressures in settler-colonial metropoles. The primary beneficiaries of that process were European citizens who were (largely) voluntarily displaced, while Indigenous people were the predominantly disadvantaged people in that process. Veracini’s thorough engagement with the structural creators of settler colonialism is a significant contribution to the literature on settler colonialism. One key example of this is his interrogation of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a proponent of settler colonialism, in chapter 1 (pp. 73-77). He proves his primary claim that settler colonialism was largely a response to internal upheaval in settling societies. Chapter 3 also proves the truly international scope of settler colonialism in terms of settler motivation and practice. That helps to develop our transnational engagement with settler colonialism, which will hopefully manifest in the expansion of the field of settler-colonial studies as a comparative research space.
The primary weakness of The World Turned Inside Out is Veracini’s limited interrogation of the role of women and Indigenous people in the politics of settler colonization. Veracini argues that settler colonialism is a political structure, and that argument is predicated on the presumption that the relevant political institutions were primarily sites of European male power. While that presumption is largely true, women are structurally built into the fabric of settler colonialism, which depends on Indigenous displacement and replacement by settler bodies. As Patrick Wolfe argued, settler colonialism depended on a “logic of elimination” that “employed the organizing grammar of race”.[1] Subsequently, Indigenous peoples contested and often structurally changed the manifestation of settler colonialism globally. Settler women are core to the politics, practice, and continuation of settler colonialism as agents of replacement and displacement through domestic and reproductive labor. [2] Veracini shows a thorough engagement with, and understanding of, government agencies and political institutions that invested in the expansion of settler colonialism. Yet there is an insufficient engagement with the practical agency of marginalized communities in settler-colonial planning and spaces. A more thorough incorporation of the roles of women and Indigenous peoples (who are not wholly absent, but who are underrepresented in the text), would strengthen his argument about the structural nature of settler colonialism as a response to revolution given that women and Indigenous communities were often at the center of the very revolution to which he alludes.
In Veracini’s own words, “this book does not rely on newly unearthed evidence” but rather offers a “reconceptualization” of the existing literature (p. 17). The World Turned Inside Out is an expansively and thoroughly researched monograph that engages with significant primary source material. He is well grounded in European political theory from thinkers on early stages of settler colonialism, such as Eric Hobsbawm, to the later stages, such as Karl Marx and Robert Owen. He also explores government documents, correspondence, and literature by those planners of settler colonialism, such as James Harrington in Oceania and John Winthrop in Massachusetts. His engagement with these sources is a strength of the book, because Veracini’s close textual analysis and interpretation of these primary sources provide sometimes blatant evidence of his argument. He speaks to current and former settler-colonial secondary literature, including works by Joyce Appleby, Eric Foner, and Patrick Wolfe.
The World Turned Inside Out is a thoroughly researched monograph. Settler-colonial theorists will appreciate that the monograph includes footnotes, rather than endnotes, because Veracini’s engagement with his sources is fluid and interrogative. Readers will more thoroughly understand his argument if they read his footnotes alongside the main text, rather than as referential afterthoughts.
The book is aimed at historians of settler colonialism. It would serve as an excellent graduate-level introduction to settler-colonial practice historically. Veracini places the settler-colonial present in the context of the global climate crisis (see his section on “apocalyptic displacements,” pp. 268-275), and interrogates settler cultivation and land appropriation, so portions of the book will also have value in environmental history. Despite some minor growth areas, this is a thorough and persuasive monograph that proves the relationship between European internal upheaval, socially, politically, and economically, and settler-colonial relocation globally.
Notes
[1]. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-409, quotation on 387.
[2]. Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 22.
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Citation:
Carla Joubert. Review of Veracini, Lorenzo, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57334
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