Between Indigenous and Settler Governance ed. by Lisa Ford, Tim Rowse (review)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly publications on the intersections between history, law and colonialism. In 2012 alone, three major review essays in mainstream journals canvassed the breadth and depth of the literature: “Breaking Britannia’s Bonds: Law, settlers, and space in Britain’s imperial historiography” by Zoe Laidlaw in The Historical Journal;¹ “Law and Empire in Global Perspective: Introduction” by Lauren Benton in American Historical Review;² and “British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems, and Killing Fields” by Stephen Howe in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.³ These followed on from Russell Smandych’s comprehensive preliminary overview in 2010 (“Mapping Imperial Legal Connections: Towards a Comparative Historical Sociology of Law”).⁴

While Lauren Benton’s global history approach has helped shape the field (Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900 [Cambridge, 2002]),⁵ the British Empire has nevertheless remained a popular context of inquiry, with the distinctiveness of the settler colonial formation emerging as a widely influential conceptual intervention. The titles cited above, and of the volume under discussion here, attest to the import of academic work on the theory and practice of settler colonialism: in 2013, the analytical significance of the terms “Indigenous” and “settler” is appreciated, though of course not uncontested, across the humanities and social sciences. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, edited by Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (who are themselves well published in the area, and also appear in this volume), makes a very important contribution to this rich and varied literature, particularly to that which is accruing in polities continuing to live with settler colonialism.

Ford and Rowse bring together a characteristically diverse range of scholars— from history, law, criminology, economics and political science—to consider the extent to which Anglophone settler polities are, and always have been, confounded in their pretensions to domination by producing spaces where Indigenous people are able to assert various modes or degrees of autonomy (Ford conceives this more fulsomely in her introduction as “self-determination”). The volume comprises fifteen essays, developed from presentations at an earlier symposium, that examine the nature and extent of possibilities for Indigenous autonomy in settler polities in the past, present and future. There is one chapter on Natal, but Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States are the main contexts of inquiry.

The introduction provides a tight focus for the essays, which fall into five sections: “intellectual history” (Ian Hunter; Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford); “histories of legal pluralism” (Janna Promislow; Tim Garrison; Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane); “the survival of indigenous normative domains” (Richard Boast; Norman Etherington; Tim Rowse); “Australian indigenous economy” (Diane Austin-Broos; Jon Altman); “the impact of legal doctrine on the encounter between indigenous peoples and settlers states since the 1960s” (Kent McNeil; Jacob Levy; Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh); and “the normative dimensions of individual and corporate agency in Australasia and North America” (Carwyn Jones; Kirsty Gover).

While it is of course impossible adequately to represent the entire collection in the space available here, some brief observations on two of the sections will suffice to indicate its quality and scope. The chapters by Promislow, Garrison, and Douglas and Finnane in turn consider evidence of legal pluralism in Canada’s remote northwest trading frontier as European fur traders were obliged to work primarily within Dene legal frameworks in the early nineteenth century; the achievements of Cherokee Chief John Ross in securing political autonomy for his people post-Removal and in also seeking to establish an international pan-Indian confederation in mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory; and the continuing jurisdictional uncertainties and practical difficulties concerning the attempted assertion of any one law (whether settler or Indigenous) in the case of inter se “crimes” in colonial and present-day Australia.

Taken together the chapters in this section seek to complicate simplistic assumptions of settler hegemony, and their empirical evidence of legal pluralism thoughtfully informs the research field within which the collection is placed. They can also be read productively...