Status Updates From The World Turned Inside Out...

The peak of the 'global settler revolution marked by tension between the settler (aka homesteader), hoping for easy and cheap "free" (not free, there were indigenous people there already) and the speculator/absentee landlord, who monopolized land granting them the ability to set whatever price on land, while offsetting tax to settler.

Necessary to expand frontier, antagonistic contradiction -> conflict

Been looking for a book that discusses the contradictions between the expansionist settlers and the centralizing 'federalists' (at least in the US context). Interesting to see how the settlers were seen as barbaric and uncivilized by those in the metropole. It seems that stereotype persists in the US conscious (see: how metropolitan libs see MAGA voters in the poorer states, othering them).

settler colonialism: a process that disperses social distress, concentrated in the metropole, outwards into the periphery/frontier. Capitalism -> social distress -> conditions for revolution (per colonial theorist E G Wakefield).

So if settler colonialism dies, is the only path forward revolution? No wonder Israel remains important to imperialism. Palestine must remain at the heart of all revolutionary movements.

Author associates words like revolurionary/reactionary with upside down and time, while colonialism is a process involving space, that (as the author suggests) can even undo time, because it is a kind of 'release valve' for the social distress that capitalism in the metropole produces

Was not expecting this book to mention several authors I had already previously read: Christopher Hill (read his book on Lenin years ago) and Sacvan Bercovitch (I finished his Puritan Origins of the American Self a couple months ago). Always a pleasant surprise bc im glad others have read what I've read and have elevated the dialogue to write a whole book!

"This book appraises the global history of the exchange between emplaced and displaced transformation" (2).