I'm still working through my comprehensive exams semester. My settler colonialism list has grabbed my imagination and has probably done the most to reorient my thinking. It has exposed my ignorance. My current reflections are below. Consider it provisional and uncertain. My ignorance of all history outside the United States is likely to shine through.
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| Arthur Boyd, "Persecuted Lovers" (1957). Australia. |
On September 13, 2007, the United Nations approved
the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with overwhelming support
from member states. There were just four dissenting votes: the United States,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Not coincidentally, these four countries
shared common histories of genocidal policies against indigenous populations.
In each case, European settlers built new homelands for themselves on conquered
land and eventually achieved dominant status over the rightful owners of the land. The United States, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand are extremely successful settler colonial projects.
Yet, as their dissenting votes at the UN reluctantly revealed, settler
colonialism is not buried in the past. In the present day, indigenous peoples
in these countries continue to make sovereignty claims that challenge the
supposedly settled status of these sovereign nation-states. Such claims, like
the UN vote, are powerful reminders that settler colonialism is, to borrow the words
of Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, a “structure” rather than an “event.” Rather
than conceiving of settler colonialism—like colonialism more broadly—as a
discrete historical stage through which a state may pass, we must consider how
settler colonialism is embedded in the foundational logic of many modern
states. For such states, settler colonialism is their present as well as their
past. If we think in these terms we may be able to imagine alternative futures.
Historians
have written about settler colonies for decades. The existence of large-scale
settlement in some colonies and its absence in others is a basic distinction
historians could not fail to notice. And yet the full significance and
coherence of these settler projects—on a global scale and across time—has not
been appreciated. Only in recent years have historians begun to build a
specific theoretical framework for a field of settler colonial studies distinct
from other forms of colonialism. Key figures in this project are the Australian
historians Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini.
In
the past decade, some prominent historians have adopted their framework,
including the American historian Margaret Jacobs for her Bancroft-Prize-winning
book
White Mother to a Dark Race, and
the Pullitzer-Prize-winning historian Caroline Elkins. Numerous edited
collections have appeared, and the field now has its own journal.
Settler colonial studies’ most prominent
impact has been felt in indigenous studies around the world. Nancy Shoemaker
recently complained that it has rapidly become “dogma” in her field of Native
American studies. When she failed to use a settler colonial framework at a
conference one of her colleagues was “astonished.” It
would appear that settler colonial studies has enjoyed a rapid ascent and is
earning wide influence. Yet there are few areas of the historical academy more isolated
than indigenous studies. Settler colonial studies has barely made a ripple in many
areas of historical inquiry to which it might meaningfully contribute. Among
American historians in particular, narratives of implicit exceptionalism
continue to be influential. Even more, preoccupations with the United States’
history of White supremacy and African Americans’ quest for inclusion have
actually drawn attention away from the conquest that made the American state
possible and have hidden the specifically settler colonial form that
characterized American White supremacy.
I argue that settler colonial studies can help us reimagine not only the history
of indigenous peoples, but American, African, and global histories across the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What follows is an attempt to sketch out
what that history might look like from a settler colonial framework. I begin by
defining the key features of settler colonialism in contrast to other forms of
colonialism. After outlining these characteristics, I offer very brief examples
of how such a framework reorients our understanding of national and global
histories.
Defining
Settler Colonialism
The defining purpose of settler colonialism is the acquisition of land.
Settler is not a synonym for farmer or
pioneer. It suggests invasion, war, theft, and conquest. In contrast to
colonies founded on resource extraction, geopolitical rivalry, or military
usefulness, settler colonies emerge when an outsider population invades the
land and attempts to construct a permanent homeland, often modeled on the
metropole (imperial center) they left behind. This basic difference has far-reaching
implications. In extraction-based colonies, the defining problem is a labor
problem: how does the colonizer coerce the indigenous population into
extracting resources for the metropole? In contrast, in settler colonies the
defining problem is a land problem: how does the settler population gain access
to, and control over, land formerly held by indigenous people? And just as
importantly, how does it achieve ideological legitimacy for this theft? These
questions imply dramatically different treatment toward indigenous populations. Extractive colonies rule; settler colonies exclude.
At a glance, this might appear far too simple. How can we bring, say, nineteenth
century U.S. Indian policy and twentieth century apartheid South Africa within
the same analytical frame? Did not the former involve a mixture of murderous
conquest and assimilation with the ultimate goal of
dissolving Native American identity into the settler project? And
did not the latter obsessively work to
define
difference precisely so that no such assimilation would take place? But if we
look to the land question while taking account of demographic balance and
disease environments, the question becomes clearer. In both places, the settler
government appropriated the overwhelming majority of arable land. The United
States had its Indian reservations and South Africa had its native reserves. In
the United States, the large settler population and comparatively small
indigenous population made genocide—through both war and assimilation—a viable
strategy. In South Africa, where the settler population remained a minority
throughout, assimilation would have worked against the settler project. Minority
settler regimes controlled the land by creating difference, while majority
settler regimes controlled the land by assimilating difference. In both cases,
the point of the settler project was seizure of the land itself.
Once in possession of the land, settler states were endlessly inventive and diverse
in the ways they solved other problems—especially labor problems—specific to
unique demographic contexts. While American and Australian settlers imported
much of their labor (slaves and convicts), settler colonies in Africa tended to
rely more heavily on indigenous labor. This reliance can obscure the core
functions of power in such settler colonies. It might appear that settler
colonies in Africa ruled indigenous populations with the same purposes as other
colonial formations on the continent. But this was not so. The metropolitan
administration of an extractive colony could imagine economic development and
native “uplift” leading to some sort new political arrangement in a distant
future. Profits and prestige to the metropole—not the creation of a specific
sort of society on the ground—were the focus of extractive colonies. Settler
projects, in contrast, envisioned the creation of homelands with carefully
ordered societies that left no room—spatially or ideologically—for the native.
It is important to point out that this exclusionary settler vision was contested,
with settlers on the ground often taking a harder line than metropolitan
authorities. Most settler projects began as colonies of an imperial metropole
whose interests were often at cross-purposes with settlers. The consequence was
that governance of settler colonies was often not in the hands of those most
invested in the creation of a new homeland. The complex contest for power and
governance between settlers, the metropole, and the indigenous population is
thus an important characteristic of settler colonialism.
[6]
Attempts by settler populations to achieve de facto or de jure independence
emerge as key turning points in a global settler colonial narrative. Settlers
often chafed against metropolitan policies that treated settler and native alike
as subjects. Their attempts to throw off metropolitan authority were often
simultaneously efforts to gain greater freedom of maneuver to subjugate and
exclude indigenous peoples.
To be sure, there was always slippage between the exclusionary settler colonial
imagination and the lived reality of intermixture and mutual influence. All
settler colonies utilized indigenous labor, and some were fully dependent on
such labor for the duration of their existence. Yet the ideological
underpinnings of the settler colonial project were nonetheless fundamentally
exclusionary. This can be seen most clearly in settler regimes that did
not achieve demographic dominance.
While White South Africans depended on Black African labor, they constructed
elaborate myths of the South African past to assert that Europeans had settled
the land first. In effect, they denied Black Africans’ indigeneity. This
allowed the settler regime to deploy African labor as migrant labor rather than
indigenous labor. The oppressive system of reserves, passes, and migrant labor
was all too real, but it was more than just material. African laborers’
physical movement made concrete their imagined status as a migrant rather than
indigenous population.
Though
indigeneity was not always so carefully denied, settler colonial regimes around
the world embraced common myths centering on pristine and empty wilderness and
improvement of the land. In the settler colonial imagination, settlers were the
first real possessors of the land. Even if indigenous peoples occupied the
land—or rather, in the settler imagination, wandered it—they had failed to make
good use of it. Settlers did not see themselves as invaders. Instead, they saw
themselves as pioneers, farmers, bearers of civilization. Such was the power of
the land in the settler colonial imagination that some even saw themselves as
conservationists! The land could be at once
forbidding, a howling and dangerous wilderness, and, especially in the receding
afterglow of failed settler projects like those in Kenya and Rhodesia, a fount
of nostalgia and romance.
Such
selective memories aside, the reality of settler colonialism is anything but
romantic. Patrick Wolfe and others have argued that the logic of the settler
colonial state is inherently eliminationist.
Because settlers want the land, indigenous people become not just superfluous
but, as people possessing alternative claim to the same land, deeply
threatening. This is not to say that all settler colonial projects inevitably
resulted in genocide. It is to suggest, rather, that the voracious hunger for
land inherent in a settler colonial project produces a propensity for genocide.
It is highly significant (though ironic) that the Rwandan genocide occurred in
a context in which the Hutu saw themselves as indigenous and cast the Tutsi as
settlers.
In
settler colonial contexts, participants readily perceive the contest for power
as zero-sum.
This
contest rarely features a simple binary between powerful settlers and oppressed
natives. Indigenous groups ultimately defeated many twentieth century settler
projects. In others, such as the United States, it took the better part of two
centuries for settlers to establish a decisive ascendancy. Indigenous military
and economic power decisively shaped these histories. Moreover, other outside
groups occupying spaces between the poles of settler and native complicated
settler colonial projects. Lorenzo Veracini has theorized a model in which
settler colonial states tend to have a “triangular relationship” between
settlers, indigenous, and “exogenous others.”
Jews in French Algeria, Indians in South Africa, and Black Americans in the
United States are examples of these exogenous groups. In many cases, such
groups roughly correspond to Mahmood Mamdani’s notion of “subject races” in
African colonies.
[11] Veracini argues that while
settler states often exclude these groups in various ways, they may also
selectively include them over time, allowing them to become, in effect,
“probationary settlers.”
[12] Precisely because they are
imagined as having no prior claim to land, such groups can potentially be
incorporated into the settler colonial polity.
Sketching a
Settler Colonial History
Some
historians have made a sharp distinction between twentieth-century settler
colonial projects in Africa, Korea, and Palestine as compared to
nineteenth-century settler colonial forms in the Americas and the Pacific.
They emphasize that twentieth-century settler colonies usually featured much
larger indigenous populations and stronger metropolitan authorities, both of
which worked against decisive settler domination. Ultimately, almost all the
twentieth-century settler states failed. These are important distinctions to
make. As with any historical framework, there is a danger of glossing over
difference, flattening distinctions, and losing our eye for specificity in the
rush to find commonality, continuity, and the new insights that a novel framing
of an old story can bring. But it is well to remember that danger lurks on the
other side of the spectrum as well. National or local histories full of texture
and nuance often miss global connections and transnational realities in their
determination to locate the specific.
And
studies limited to a single century may miss important antecedents and consequences.
There
are compelling reasons to understand settler colonialism as a cohesive
phenomenon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries even as we acknowledge
difference in local contexts. Twentieth-century settler populations did not see
themselves as alone. They forged solidarities with other contemporary settler
colonies and looked to earlier successful settler states for ideological
inspiration and practical advice. Nineteenth
and twentieth-century settler states should be studied together because the
links they established were as tangible as the people traveling between them. The
challenges they faced in securing self-government were often similar, their
ideological justifications embraced related myths, and their land policies had
a remarkable degree of overlap.
A
global history of the last two centuries told from this perspective would
render as text what is often—inexcusably—only subtext. We live in a world
underwritten by the conquest of indigenous peoples. It is difficult to imagine
the rise of global capitalism apart from the killing of indigenous people
around the world and the seizure of their land. All over the world, large
European-descended populations on indigenous land are at the epicenter of
capital creation and are sites of the most voracious (and unsustainable) consumer
markets. The rise of the last three empires—Great Britain, the Soviet Union,
and the United States—is inexplicable apart from their settler-fueled expansion
across multiple continents.
In
a world where capital is hyper-mobile and able to adapt faster than any
individual or community can hope to match, land—immovable, constant—can appear
downright old-fashioned. But a settler colonial framework would put land back
in the center of the historical narrative, showing how settler colonial states,
from the failed ones to our current lone global superpower, made the
accumulation of land for settlers the organizing principle of the state. A
settler colonial framework would remind historians that it is not enough to
make breezy references to racism or White supremacy, especially if we treat
such forces as constants across time. We must recognize White supremacy in its
specifically settler colonial forms. Race, as Patrick Wolfe has argued, “is
colonialism speaking.” By
attending to the logic of the settler colonial state in disparate contexts, we
can begin to make sense of racial regimes that appear to have little in common
with each other at first glance. Why is one population subject to a “one-drop”
rule while another’s identity is diluted through assimilation? Such varying
regimes work in different contexts to protect the privileges of the settler
population.
A
settler colonial history would frame settler colonies’ independence struggles
as key turning points. One way to think about change across time in settler
colonies and states is to examine when and under what conditions (if ever) the
settler population gained the de facto ability to impose its will on the
indigenous population. The metropole often had a different set of priorities
than the settler population. This became obvious in North America in the 1770s,
in Kenya in the 1950s, and in Algeria and Rhodesia in the 1960s. Those settler
colonies that achieved de jure or de facto independence at a relatively early
date (the United States, Australia, Canada) gained more freedom of maneuver to
solve their “native problem” on their own terms, usually with more brutality
and comprehensiveness than the metropole would have tolerated. Settler populations
that made their moves for de facto control at a much later date (Rhodesia and
Algeria in the 1960s) found that they had acted too late. Changing
international norms of human rights and self-determination meant that even
success would earn them pariah status.
A
settler colonial history would also emphasize the similar global practices used
to deny indigenous land rights and preserve the best lands for settler
populations. Often settler regimes pursued the subjugation of indigenous groups
through contrasting yet complementary policies. In Rhodesia, the Land
Apportionment Act of 1930 evicted Black Africans to clear space for
yet-to-arrive White settlers. Yet the 1951 Native Land Husbandry Act declared
the settler government’s intent to create “yeoman farmers” out of individual Black
Africans. As
individuals, Africans could eke out an existence on marginal land;
such cases of ostensible inclusion worked to dilute
group claims to land. This phenomenon of eviction followed by
individual allotment was also exemplified by the Dawes Act in the United
States. Similarly, in French Algeria new laws in the 1860s and 1870s converted
huge tracts of land from communal to individual control, enabling settlers to leverage
their economic advantage to buy up prime lands. In other cases, failure to
appear to at a French-convened hearing at a specific time could result in
indigenous forfeiture of supposedly “unclaimed” land.
Meanwhile in Australia, a series of Selection Acts, much like the Homestead Act
in the United States, increased settlement on indigenous land and spurred
further violence. When
we take a global view of these practices, a picture emerges of settler
populations on multiple continents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries moving
decisively to create the physical, legal, and ideological conditions necessary
for controlling indigenous land.
A
settler colonial framework would take care to explain how the policies of
settler states changed after control of the land became relatively secure.
Rather than seeing assimilationist policies as a disavowal of earlier violence
or as of a piece with the so-called civilizing mission of colonialism, a
settler colonial history better explains the fundamental continuities in
settler states. As Margaret Jacobs has argued, practices such as indigenous
child removal and education in Australia and the United States should not be
seen as more benign practices representing a break from earlier and more brutal
forms of colonization. Instead, so-called native uplift in settler states
had as a deliberate goal the erasure of indigenous group identity, and with it,
any claim to the land.
A
settler colonial framework also provides a useful antidote to exceptionalist
thinking. Exploring and explaining difference is part of the historian’s stock
in trade. But notions of exceptionalism tend not so much to explain difference
as assume it. Instead of the hard work of clarifying historical processes,
exceptionalism often offers ahistorical moral claims of the innate goodness or
villainy of a people or nation. There are two great exceptionalisms in
contemporary historiography. The United States is the exceptional nation, and
Africa is the exceptional continent. In the popular imagination, the former is
the place where liberty was born in the modern world; the latter the place
where chaos reigns and primordial conflicts erupt with confounding regularity. The
pull of these tropes, though reduced, still lingers in the historical
profession. A settler colonial framework has the potential to mitigate both
exceptionalisms. As Mahmood Mamdani has provocatively argued, “America appears
less as exceptional and more as a pioneer in the history and technology of
settler colonialism. All the defining institutions of settler colonialism were
produced as technologies of native control in North America.” More
work is needed to explore how well such a claim can hold up to scrutiny, but it
is abundantly clear that a settler colonial framework does offer new
possibilities for American history.
A
settler colonial narrative of American history reframes the American Revolution
as a settler attempt to secure the power to solve the “native problem” on the
settlers’ own terms. Though historians are well-aware of American settlers’
frustration with the 1763 British Proclamation Line, it is still often treated
as peripheral to the “real” issues animating the rebellion. A settler colonial
history highlights this quest for indigenous land as a central concern of the
conflict. In such a history, the near-constant processes of Indian removal and
warfare in the nineteenth century are read not as hypocrisies in the American
experiment but as an organic expression of the logic of the settler colonial
state. Nor should removal be read simply as a symptom of White supremacy or as
precondition for the expansion of racial slavery. Instead, the voracious drive
for land is better understood as a cross-sectional project uniting most pro-
and anti-slavery White Americans. The Civil War era Republican Party emerges,
then, not only as an anti-slavery party, but as a distinctly settler colonial
one whose vision of White yeoman farmers implied continued indigenous
dispossession. The policies pursued by the Lincoln and Grant administrations,
from the Homestead Act to aggressive wars of conquest in the West, bore out
those implications.
An
obvious question is where African Americans and other minority groups in the
United States fit in to this picture. Veracini’s notion of probationary
settlers is helpful here. From an indigenous and settler colonial perspective,
the African American struggle for inclusion from emancipation to the present is
the struggle to cast off this probationary status and be recognized as full
settlers. The North’s inability to imagine serious land reform after the Civil
War reflected the priorities of settler colonial state. African Americans were
outsiders valued for their labor on settler land. Redistributing land to the
formerly enslaved would upset these relations. To the present day, the bundle
of individual rights and privileges the settler colonial state promises remains
intimately tied to land. The American Dream—that vaguely defined and overworked
phrase—is if nothing else a dream about individual property. The promise of
individual rights and property ownership offers hope to African Americans. For
the indigenous, the same promise has a sharp edge, raising the specter of lost
sovereignty and group identity.
In
Africa, a settler colonial history helps us to better see that taking seriously
the legacies of colonialism and settler colonialism is not special pleading to
absolve African countries of responsibility for their contemporary difficulties.
In fact, these legacies are quite concrete in the political categories and
governing strategies pursued by supposedly post-colonial states.
If extractive colonialism had pernicious effects, settler colonialism had all
the more so. Indeed, the effects of settler colonial ventures live on even
where they were defeated. In Kenya, veterans of the Mau Mau struggle continue
to demand land redistribution—land that was originally taken from the Kikuyu to
benefit White settlers. In Zimbabwe, White settler control of huge portions of
arable land continued after independence. Chaotic and violent land reform at
the turn of the century removed most White control but solved few problems.
South Africa continues to be splintered by a grossly unequal distribution of
land and resources. In Africa and around the world, to tell the history of
settler colonialism is to narrate a significant story of our own time.
A
settler colonial framework reorients our comparative lens to see that the
problems of post-independence Africa involve not so much questions of race as
of indigeneity. These are not exceptional African problems, but global problems
in a world shaped by settler colonialism. From a settler colonial perspective,
the point of reference for Zimbabweans and Kenyans is not African Americans but
Native Americans. In successful settler colonial states such as Australia and
the United States, indigenous people face extreme poverty, cultural alienation,
and loss of sovereignty. Post-settler colonial African states offer powerful
counterexamples of more hopeful possibilities. The history of the modern world
is a history of settler invasion and indigenous dispossession. Indigenous
peoples resisted everywhere; only in Africa did they achieve widespread success.
Imagining
Alternative Futures
In
conclusion, I return to my own country. Historians are not immune from the trap
of subtly ahistorical thinking. Caught up in telling the story of the American
nation, it becomes very easy for us to assume that the status of the United
States is settled, that when it comes to the construction of the American
nation-state, we’ve reached the end of history. Such a posture (usually
unconscious) disallows the possibility of a future devolution of the American
settler colonial project. As Audra Simpson has written in her exceptional book,
Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across
the Borders of Settler States, indigenous people are still here. They have
resisted, and do resist, the assimilationist sovereignty claims of settler
nation-states. They claim their own sovereignty, their own nationhood. In
short, perhaps the most striking claim is the most obvious: we do not know what
the map of North America
will look like a century from now.
