Cameron Willis’s Reviews > The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea > Status Update

I’m curious if you’d recommend!

Hi!!! I'm so sorry for the late response - I wanted to take some time to think it over and then I realised several weeks had passed. I enjoyed the book - strong argument, well-marshaled examples, broad coverage not just of the British Empire and the United States but of South American, Russian, Japanese and French settler colonialism. The core argument - that the 'ideal' of settler colony's and the people who first set them up was to escape conflict or political failures at home and build new, ostensibly better societies on someone else's land - is well sustained. It is mostly a description of what settlers wanted, believed and did, and the last chapter, that attempts to unite hippie communes, Elon Musk and space colonization, Zionism and gentrification is easily the weakest and doesn't engage with the reality of ongoing settler colonialism in Canada or Australia or New Caledonia.