Browsing by Subject "Settler Colonialism"

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    "A New England in All But Name"
    (2022-04-20) Rork, Kerry
    “Settler colonialism” emerged as an analytical tool in the twentieth century as scholars attempted to both understand and reckon with the history of colonization. It describes a distinct means of conquest that relies on the replacement of a native population with a settler group in the form of the elimination or displacement of a people and/or a culture. This thesis explores the traditional settler colonial framework within the context of Trinity College, Dublin. Founded in 1592, Trinity College functioned to control the Irish population and solidify the settler group who will later be known as the “Anglo-Irish.” Yet, just as Ireland was ambiguous, Trinity College was ambiguous, as both sit uncomfortably within the framework of settler colonialism. For the purposes of this work, I rely on three historical periods: Trinity’s foundation, Trinity and the long eighteenth century, and finally, Trinity in the twentieth century. In the first chapter, I examine Trinity College’s founding goals of simultaneously assimilating Gaelic Irish and ensuring that the New English remain within Ireland. Chapter Two focuses on the period of globalization and revolution of the long eighteenth century. I explore the methods by which Trinity College and its scholars challenged and modified revolutionary ideas within the Irish context. And, finally, in Chapter Three, I show how Trinity College administration and scholars manipulated and mobilized Trinity’s history to defend their place as a settler colonial institution within the new Irish Free State. These three periods provide a means of understanding the framework of settler colonialism within Ireland and its outcomes in the formation of the “Anglo- Irish.” I rely on the work of Trinity College scholars and administration, legislation within Ireland, and documentation of Trinity College’s history. Trinity College’s interactions throughout its history provide a glimpse of the Irish colonial tension. Settler colonialism requires institutions that we may not think of as colonial, like universities. Yet such institutions and the people within them often operate as distinct and even oppositional agents. This work helps to provide a means of assessing and reexamining the institutional and intellectual role within the framework of settler colonialism within Ireland. Doing so becomes critical, especially as many of these institutions now must reckon with their legacies in the postcolonial world.
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    Unfree Soil: Empire, Labor, and Coercion in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1812-1861
    (2024) Tejada, Vivien

    This dissertation analyzes the relationship between bondage and conquest along the Upper Mississippi between the War of 1812 and the U.S. Civil War. It connects the range of unfree labor practices that flourished on the Upper Mississippi, in defiance of federal and territorial law, to the political geography generated by settler colonialism and slavery’s expansion. In the mid-continent, where U.S. sovereignty was stretched thin, the law was not the only factor that determined a person’s status. The few federal representatives in the Upper Midwest—Indian agents, army officers, and Christian missionaries—pursued the work of national expansion by illegally holding African Americans in bondage. Simultaneously, they acted to mold Native people into a racially segregated underclass of agrarian workers. The region’s trafficked subjects exploited the limits of federal power to ensure that this labor regime was never complete. Drawing on research conducted across fifteen archives, Unfree Soil finds that free labor could not exist on stolen land.

    This research recasts the history of what has often been understood as the free North and West. U.S. historians have demonstrated that westward expansion was a driving force in the nation’s conflict over slavery, but they have paid less attention to the labor and power relations that were already established in the center of the continent prior to the arrival of Anglo-Americans. Recent scholarship examining slavery in the Upper Midwest either ends with the War of 1812 or overlooks the region’s history of Native labor and unfreedom. The colonial archive, however, is rife with sources describing both Native labor and slave labor well into the nineteenth century. This dissertation engages the methods of legal history, Native American history, environmental history, and labor history to contextualize the archive’s fleeting references to the region’s colonized and enslaved inhabitants. In its focus on Native work, Unfree Soil collapses the land-labor binary that has traditionally divided Indigenous Studies from Black Studies. On the Upper Mississippi, the labor of enslaved Black people was central to the expropriation of Native land, and white Americans extracted not just Native land but also Native labor.