ABSTRACT
Anthropologists and historians are giving more attention to colonisation, and to ‘settler societies’, which tend to be seen as dominant and European (but see Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995). I argue that incomer groups are subject to certain constraining choices wherever and whenever they attempt to move in among other peoples. I consider two African cases: Kenya, which is generally taken to be exemplary of white British settler colonisation, and Liberia, where the dominant settlers were black Americans with limited support from the United States.
