Tracing the settler colonial legacies of insurance
From empire to wildfires in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7472949 |
|---|---|
| Authors | O S Morgan (0000-0002-1947-1991, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 170 |
| Pages | 104544 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geoforum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104544 |
| OpenAlex | W7125630724 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 38 |
British Columbia (BC), Canada is repeatedly identified as ‘ground zero’ for climate injustices. These impacts are seen internationally and experienced locally through increased severity and intensity of wildfires. What international audiences do not see, however, is the role that insurance plays in the aftermath of wildfires—particularly the ways that insurance widens pre-existing social and economic gaps as created by and through socio-legal subjectivities. How insurance continues to uphold property regimes in BC, recreating legal and political dynamics rooted within settler coloniality, is rendered invisible in media and the literature. While property is a precursor for property insurance and research has outlined how property in BC is based upon settler colonialism, research has not considered the impacts of wildfire in BC on property as upheld by insurance, nor trickle down impacts on communities. It is these unacknowledged interconnections between wildfire, insurance, property, and settler colonialism that this paper begins to address by laying a theoretical foundation that can serve for future place-based and empirical studies. By engaging Indigenous-led and anti-colonial frameworks of settler colonialism and property, I interrogate the emergence of insurance and property, and how socio-legal subjectivities operate on reserve land and remain central in defining who and how insurance can be accessed. In so doing, I suggest that property insurance widens pre-existing social and legal disparities as animated through settler coloniality by allowing some to 'build back’ and remain 'in place’ while others cannot
Colonialism · Empire · Government (linguistics · Politics · Property (philosophy · Property insurance · Property rights · Disaster Management and Resilience · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Mining and Resource Management
In the Wake
Decolonizing neoliberalism?
Index Insurance and the Articulation of Risk-Bearing Subjects
Cooperative community wildfire response
Unsettling Conversations on Climate Action
The enduring settler-colonial emergency
Western Canada’s new wildfire reality needs a new approach to fire management
Under the guise of science
Too late for indigenous climate justice
Colonial global economy
Critical insurance studies
Running with the land
The early history of fire insurance
Historical Study of Fire Insurance in the United States
Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807
Mathematics Black Life
The ties that blind
Insurance, climate change, and the creation of geographies of uncertainty in the Indian Ocean Region
Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence
Untangling insurance, rebuilding, and wellbeing in bushfire recovery
Making Space for Property
Climate Change 2022 - Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Infrastructure, Jurisdiction, Extractivism
Against abstraction
Grammars of reckoning
How does a settler state secure the circuitry of capital
What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging
Walking together
Inherent vice
Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality
On the Coloniality of Being
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |