On Veracini’s The World Turned Inside Out

“Since the seventeenth century, Lorenzo Veracini argues, efforts by Europe’s poor to “turn their world upside down” have been thwarted repeatedly by the ruling-class strategy of “turning the world inside out.””

“Veracini’s metaphors of these alternating contortions of the body politic encapsulate his argument that “settling communities in ‘empty lands’ somewhere else has often been proposed throughout modernity as a way to head off revolutionary tensions.””

“Veracini believes that the strategy of exporting revolutionary underclasses to lands beyond Europe has hitherto been under-analyzed, and, as a corrective, he proposes the foregrounding of settler colonialism as a “specific mode of domination,” promising in the process to uncover “an autonomous, influential and coherent transnational political tradition.””

“a transnational approach rooted in the examination of sensibility, rhetoric, and discourse, rather than in political economy, he believes, “rescues the histories of multiple displacements from being stranded within nationally defined historiographies.””

“He locates the beginnings of the global settler revolution in late sixteenth-century England, tracing its expansion into North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and concluding with a discussion of Thomas Paine. He describes the peak of the global settler revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, relating how a transnational network of European powers and their settler colonies became entrenched, encouraged by ideologues such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, George Grey, John Stuart Mill, James Froude, and Charles Dilke. Veracini proceeds to record the decline of the global-settler revolution to the moment when “the prospect of removing to some distant location and settling on the land ultimately lost the appeal it once had.””

“As a work of synthesis, The World Turned Inside Out communicates the multiple histories and contemporary reverberations of settler-colonial discourse.”

“There are, however, risks in skating at speed across so many different settler-colonial histories.”

“historical quibbles might be dismissed as empirical minutiae of secondary importance to the project of critiquing the global discourse of settler colonialism. However, if such historical details are given due weight, they fundamentally affect how settler-colonial history, economics, and politics are understood.”

“Veracini’s gallop across so many settler-colonial locations allows no time to pause and consider any individual location in any meaningful detail. As a result, those interested in understanding specific societies marked by settler-colonial histories are likely to feel shortchanged.”