Along with the late Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, who teaches history and politics at Swinburne University, is one of the leading theorists of settler colonialism. Veracini’s work has helped define this new field of study, complete with the inevitable arguments and contestations that such field-making invites. The foundational insights of settler colonial theory have helped a generation of scholars to understand the structural barriers this type of social formation places in the road of the struggle for justice for a settler colonial territory’s original inhabitants.

In The World Turned Inside Out, Veracini widens his lens, looking outside those societies understood as settler colonies today (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and occupied Palestine) to take in a global sweep of settler colonial impulses, which he dubs ‘the world turned inside out’. The title of the book, Veracini explains, derives from Christopher Hill’s articulation of the revolutionary political traditions during the English Civil War as ‘the world turned upside down’. By describing a world ‘turned inside out’, Veracini emphasises the distinction ‘between an inside and an outside, and between metropole and settler colony’. Not the vertical disruption of revolution but the horizontal displacement of settler colonialism that turns the world inside out.

Revolution is at the heart of this settler colonial impulse. The drive that Veracini interrogates rests on the idea that settler colonialism – ‘the creation of “worlds” elsewhere’ – is pursued as an alternative to the upheaval of revolutionary change. What Veracini terms ‘volitional’ or ‘voluntary’ displacement stems from the belief that migration and settlement can head off social unrest. The World Turned Inside Out presents a global history of this phenomenon through wide-ranging and meticulously researched case studies. Veracini offers the reader a reconceptualisation of events and evidence that are already widely known, and gives them a new understanding of revolution in a dialectical relationship with displacement.

There is a cast of thousands in this book and an extraordinary array of examples of the settler colonial impulse. While Britain and its various incursions into Indigenous territories in places now known as Australia, Canada, and the United States remain central to the book, the British were certainly not alone in advancing their settler colonial endeavours. Veracini narrates other cases, including the Welsh settlement in the Chubut Valley in Patagonia, the Polish founding of Nowa Polska in Brazil, the Finnish settlements in Sointula, British Columbia, French incursions to Algeria, New Caledonia, and French Guyana, Russia into Siberia and Central Asia, and many others. Here is a world of change and movement, a world turned inside out by those in search of an ‘elsewhere’ in which they might build a new society free from revolution and upheaval.

Yet one might also ask ‘whose world’ is being turned inside out rather than upside down. Or rather, whose worlds are turned upside down through this settler impulse to turn the world inside out? For the Indigenous and other prior inhabitants of these newly colonised spaces, the arrival of settler colonists wreaked precisely the type of havoc that the migrants were themselves seeking to avoid. Settler colonialism has seen Indigenous worlds turned devastatingly upside down, with disruptions that are still experienced today.

Veracini does not completely ignore the momentous upheaval that these colonial endeavours visited upon the peoples of the territories to which these societies displaced themselves. As he notes, ‘Displacement … begets further displacement and is inevitably predicated on violently displacing and dispossessing indigenous peoples and previous inhabitants, something the advocates of the world turned inside out rarely considered.’ Nevertheless, Indigenous dispossession resulting directly from the settler impulse is certainly not the focus of analysis – a fact that will no doubt sit uneasily with many readers. For the majority of writers and political actors who populate the pages of The World Turned Inside Out, Indigenous populations were, at best, an afterthought, if they were considered at all.

This is not to suggest that Veracini himself is dismissive of the price Indigenous peoples have paid, and continue to pay, for the invasion and colonisation of their territories. If the experiences of Indigenous peoples and nations are marginalised within this book, that is because the ideas driving voluntary displacement seem to have been, for the most part, quite extraordinarily unconcerned with Indigenous lives.

Veracini makes clear that the intent of the book is to contribute to current debates about forthcoming crises, and the possibility of renewed voluntary relocations. The final chapter charts an array of experiments in more contemporary settler colonialism, from the counter-cultural to the fringes of cults, and from cyberspace to a new ‘sovereign’ in space in the shape of the orbiting satellite ‘nation’ of Asgardia. Today, of course, we observe the world’s richest men competing to advance a new settler project beyond the confines of Earth. The billionaires currently flexing their wallets with phallic excess in a bid to colonise space are the closest examples of the historical thinkers in the book, plotting their voluntary displacement from a planet doomed by the very excesses they embody.

It is certainly true that our planet faces a climate catastrophe that will produce crises on a scale we can yet barely imagine. But what these examples share is the hubris and ego of men – and it is mostly men, and almost exclusively white men at that – who, rather than looking deeply into their present time and place to learn how to live lightly on this planet, how to justly share resources, how to live alongside people with different belief systems, chose instead to light out for new horizons, to turn their own worlds inside out with little regard for the peoples affected.

In the end, I was left with the sense that the ideas and ideologies that have driven settler colonialism over time are somewhat fantastical. Historical figures around the world have attempted the creation of new societies to avoid impending disaster, both imagined and real. Some of these efforts were rapid failures. Others, like Australia, have embedded themselves on Indigenous territories, and continue to struggle against the unavoidable fact of their emplaced illegitimacy. Veracini, it seems, reaches a similar conclusion in his closing sentences:

Setting up a polity against someone – in the case of settler colonialism, against indigenous peoples – is not like setting up a polity without them: the settler colonial polity cannot be amended by inclusion, because it is foundationally violent and dispossessory. If this exclusion is to be addressed, the settler colonial polity must be dissolved, which is a … revolution. The world turned inside out cannot keep its promises.

Here, perhaps, is the lesson we should all take from the book. If the promise of a new world is indeed an illusion, and we cannot escape upheaval by relocating ourselves and whole societies, should we not instead pay greater heed to living more consciously, carefully, and with a greater eye to justice in the present, exactly where we find ourselves now?