“NEW” REGIONAL PARADIGM AND THE DISCOURSE OF COLONIZATION

The article analyzes the conceptual novelties in the regional history studies, which in the 1980s led to the formation of a “new” regional paradigm in historical researches, and later, in the 1990–2000s, — the concept of “settler colonialism” as one of its applications to the study of colonization processes. A regional “turn” in historiography associated with the use of descriptions of regional situations as a model for analyzing larger levels of historical reality (including region-oriented institutionalism in economic history), as well as with changes in the thematic focus of regional history studies (environmentalism, structures of everyday life, ethnic history, history of mentality), formed — mostly on the materials of the colonized regions of the U.S. West — the paradigm of “new” regional history. In line with the criticism of the shortcomings inherent in F. J. Turner’s “frontier” concept, the “new” regionalism offers as a research paradigm a deeper and multidimensional view of the natural basis of the region and its typical everyday life structures, identifying the unique specifics of each region, structural analysis of the region’s societal composition, emphasizing the multicultural and multi-actor nature of the colonization process, the multiplicity of development strategies and the “nodal” character of social interactions. In turn, these methodological ideas formed the basis of the “settler colonialism” concept focused on the structural analysis of “societies” arising in the process of colonization, and their characteristic array of complicated socio-institutional and interethnic interactions. This allows us to characterize the “new” regionalism and its application to the analysis of the colonization phenomenon as an important stage in a more in-depth and multifaceted study of colonization problems.