Settler Colonial Prehistories in Seventeenth-Century North America

Romney discusses the settler colonial prehistories in seventeenth-century North America. The term settler colonialism was theorized, and remains most widely used, by scholars working primarily on the post-1800 Anglophone world. Central to the theory is the idea of settler colonialism as a structure that requires Native erasure, both ideologically and in the real world, a structure that continues under multiple states into the present. That observation about the continuity of settler colonial structures across time despite regime changes represents the most important lesson that the theory has to offer early Americanists and Atlanticists.