Settler colonialism

"Indian Land For Sale" by the United States Department of the Interior (1911)

Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing indigenous society with the colonizer's. Because settler colonialism entails the elimination of existing peoples and cultures, some scholars describe the process as inherently genocidal. It may be enacted by a variety of means, ranging from violent depopulation of the previous inhabitants to less deadly means, such as assimilation or recognition of Indigenous identity within a colonial framework.

As with all forms of colonialism, it is based on exogenous domination, typically organized or supported by an imperial authority. Settler colonialism contrasts with exploitation colonialism, which entails an economic policy of conquering territory to exploit its population as cheap or free labor and its natural resources as raw material. In this way, settler colonialism lasts indefinitely, except in the rare event of complete evacuation or settler decolonization.

Writing in the 1990s, Patrick Wolfe theorized settler colonialism as a structure (rather than an event) premised on the elimination rather than exploitation of the native population, thus distinguishing it from classical colonialism. Wolfe also argued that settler colonialism was centered on the control of land and that it continued after the closing of the frontier. His approach was defining for the field, but has been challenged by other scholars on the basis that many situations involve a combination of elimination and exploitation.

Settler colonial studies has often focused on former British colonies in North America, Australia and New Zealand, which are close to the complete, prototypical form of settler colonialism, but is also applied to many other conflicts throughout the world.

Origins as a theory

During the 1960s, settlement and colonization were perceived as separate phenomena from colonialism. Settlement endeavors were seen as taking place in empty areas, downplaying the Indigenous inhabitants. Later on in the 1970s and 1980s, settler colonialism was seen as bringing high living standards in contrast to the failed political systems associated with classical colonialism. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the field of settler colonial studies was established distinct but connected to Indigenous studies. Although often credited with originating the field, Australian historian Patrick Wolfe stated that "I didn’t invent Settler Colonial Studies. Natives have been experts in the field for centuries". Additionally, Wolfe's work was preceded by others that have been influential in the field, such as Fayez Sayegh's Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and Settler Capitalism by Donald Denoon.

Examples

Settler colonial studies has often focused on former British colonies in North America, Australia and New Zealand, which are close to the complete, prototypical form of settler colonialism. However, settler colonialism is not linked to any specific culture and has been practiced by non-Europeans. The settler colonial paradigm has been applied to a wide variety of conflicts around the world, including British Kenya, the Canary Islands, French Algeria, Generalplan Ost, German South West Africa, Hokkaido, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italian Libya and East Africa, Kashmir, Korea, Latin America, Liberia, Manchukuo, Posen and West Prussia, Argentina, Rhodesia and South Africa.

South Africa

In 1652, the arrival of Europeans sparked the beginning of settler colonialism in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company was set up at the Cape, and imported large numbers of slaves from Africa and Asia during the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station for ships sailing between Europe and the east. The initial plan by Dutch East India Company officer Jan van Riebeeck was to maintain a small community around the new fort, but the community continued to spread and settle further than originally planned. There was a historic struggle to achieve the intended British sovereignty that was achieved in other parts of the Commonwealth. State sovereignty belonged to the Union of South Africa (1910–61), followed by the Republic of South Africa (1961–1994) and finally the modern day Republic of South Africa (1994–Present day). As of 2014, the South African government has re-opened the period for land claims under the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act.

Americas

In the context of the United States, early colonial powers generally respected the territorial and political sovereignty of the Indigenous tribes, due to the need to forge local alliances with these tribes against other European colonial powers (i.e. British attempts to check French influence, etc.). The Euro-American colonial powers created economic dependency and imbalance of trade, incorporating Indigenous nations into spheres of influence and controlling them indirectly with the use of Christian missionaries and alcohol. However, with the emergence of an independent United States, desire for land and the perceived threat of permanent Indigenous political and spatial structures led to violent relocation of many Indigenous tribes to the American West, including the notable example of the Cherokee in what is known as the Trail of Tears. Frederick Jackson Turner, the father of the "frontier thesis" of American history, noted in 1901: "Our colonial system did not start with Spanish War; the U.S. had had a colonial history from the beginning...hidden under the phraseology of 'interstate migration' and territorial organization'". While the United States government and local state governments directly aided this dispossession through the use of military forces, ultimately this came about through agitation by settler society in order to gain access to Indigenous land. Especially in the US South, such land acquisition built plantation society and expanded the practice of slavery. Settler colonialism participated in the formation of US cultures and lasted past the conquest, removal, or extermination of Indigenous people. The practice of writing the Indigenous out of history perpetrated a forgetting of the full dimensions and significance of colonialism at both the national and local levels.

China

See also: Chinese expansionism, Sinicization, Dzungar genocide, Southward expansion of the Han dynasty, Sinicization of Tibet, Migration to Xinjiang, Uyghur genocide, and Qin campaign against the Baiyue

Near the end of their rule the Qing tried to colonize Xinjiang along with other parts of the imperial frontier. To accomplish this goal they began a policy of settler colonialism by which Han Chinese were resettled on the frontier. This policy was renewed by the People's Republic of China, led by Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Russia and the Soviet Union

Main articles: Russian conquest of Siberia, Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Circassian genocide, Russification, and Population transfer in the Soviet Union

This colonization continued even during the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The Soviet policy also sometimes included the deportation of the native population, as in the case of the Crimean Tatars.

Taiwan

Further information: Taiwanese indigenous peoples

The ethnic makeup of Taiwan's contemporary population is largely the result of settler colonialism.

Canary Islands

Further information: Conquest of the Canary Islands

During the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Castile sponsored expeditions by conquistadors to subjugate under Castilian rule the Macaronesian archipelago of the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco and inhabited by the Indigenous Guanche people. Beginning with the start of the conquest of the island of Lanzarote on 1 May 1402 and ending with the surrender of the last Guanche resistance on Tenerife on 29 September 1496 to the now-unified Spanish crown, the archipelago was subject to a settler colonial process involving systematic enslavement, mass murder, and deportation of the Guanches, who were replaced with Spanish settlers, in a process foreshadowing the Iberian colonisation of the Americas that followed shortly thereafter. Also like in the Americas, Spanish colonialists in the Canaries quickly turned to the importation of slaves from mainland Africa as a source of labour due to the decimation of the already small Guanche population by a combination of war, disease, and brutal forced labour. Historian Mohamed Adhikari has labelled the conquest of the Canary Islands as the first overseas European settler colonial genocide.

Palestine, Zionism and Israel

Main article: Zionism as settler colonialism

Map of Israeli settlements (magenta) in the occupied West Bank in 2020

In 1967, the French historian Maxime Rodinson wrote an article later translated and published in English as Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? Lorenzo Veracini describes Israel as a colonial state and writes that Jewish settlers could expel the British in 1948 only because they had their own colonial relationships inside and outside Israel's new borders. Veracini believes the possibility of an Israeli disengagement is always latent and this relationship could be severed, through an "accommodation of a Palestinian Israeli autonomy within the institutions of the Israeli state". Other commentators, such as Daiva Stasiulis, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Joseph Massad in the "Post Colonial Colony: time, space and bodies in Palestine/ Israel in the persistence of the Palestinian Question" have included Israel in their global analysis of settler societies. Ilan Pappé describes Zionism and Israel in similar terms. Scholar Amal Jamal, from Tel Aviv University, has stated, "Israel was created by a settler-colonial movement of Jewish immigrants".

The portrayal of Zionism as a settler colonial movement is perceived by some scholars and commentators, as well as many Israeli Jews, as either an attack on the legitimacy of Israel or a form of antisemitism. Moses Lissak asserted that the settler-colonial thesis denies the idea that Zionism is the modern national movement of the Jewish people, seeking to reestablish a Jewish political entity in their historical territory. Zionism, Lissak argues, was both a national movement and a settlement movement at the same time, so it was not, by definition, colonial settlement movement.

Australia

See also: Cultural assimilation, List of massacres of Indigenous Australians, and Australian frontier wars

Europeans explored and settled Australia, displacing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Indigenous Australian population was estimated at about 795,000 at the time of European settlement. The population declined steeply for 150 years following settlement from 1788, due to casualties from the Australian frontier wars, infectious disease including the use of disease as biological warfare, and forced re-settlement and cultural disintegration.

Responses

Settler colonialism exists in tension with indigenous studies. Some indigenous scholars believe that settler colonialism as a methodology can lead to overlooking indigenous responses to colonialism; however, other practitioners of indigenous studies believe that settler colonialism has important insights that are applicable to their work.

Political theorist Mahmoud Mamdani suggested that settlers could never succeed in their effort to become native, and therefore the only way to end settler colonialism was to erase the political significance of the settler–native dichotomy.

In his book Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought, political scientist Adam Dahl states that while it has often been recognized that "American democratic thought and identity arose out of the distinct pattern by which English settlers colonized the new world", histories are missing the "constitutive role of colonial dispossession in shaping democratic values and ideals".

Further reading

• Cox, Alicia. "Settler Colonialism". Oxford Bibliographies. OUP. Retrieved 21 January 2021.
• Dahl, Adam (2018). Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-2607-6.
• Belich, James (2009). Replenishing the earth : the settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 573. ISBN 978-0-19-929727-6.
• Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. Monthly Review Press, 2018. 243p. ISBN 9781583676639
• Horne, Gerald. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Monthly Review Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-58367-875-6.
• Manjapra, Kris (2020). "Settlement". Colonialism in Global Perspective. Cambridge University Press. pp. 43–70. ISBN 978-1-108-42526-1.
• Marx, Christoph (2017). Settler Colonies, EGO - European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, retrieved: March 17, 2021 (pdf).
• Mikdashi, Maya (2013). What is settler colonialism? American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37.2: 23–34.
• Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (edited by Susan Pedersen and Caroline Elkins), Routledge, 2005.
• Veracini, Lorenzo (2010). Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. p. 182. ISBN 9780230284906.
• Wolfe, Patrick, 'Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race' (Verso 2016)
• Wolfe, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387–409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240

External links

• Articles on Settler Colonialism in Western American Literature