Settler Colonialism: "It Ends With Us" in Palestine and Israel

Israel tried to operate settler colonialism on the pattern of earlier European settler colonialisms established around the world. That effort linked to me indirectly in a remarkably personal way. Without grasping why, I chose to participate in a program for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that took 20 of us to East Africa in the early 1960s as volunteers for a summer of teaching. I began to learn there what settler colonialism meant. Further studies grew into my doctoral dissertation later at Yale based on research in the records of London’s Colonial Office and the British Museum. My resulting book, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870–1930 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), tried to analyze Kenya’s settler colonialist economy.