Colonialism
Lorenzo Veracini
The term “colonialism” derives from the Latin “colere” (“to cultivate”). A “colonus” was a tenant farmer inhabiting a settlement removed from the motherland (a “colonia”). Today “colonialism” designates one of the unequal relations. After the inception of colonial studies during the “age of decolonization” in the 1950s and 1960s (Memmi 2003; Fanon 1967), the study of colonialism fragmented into a variety of discourses, approaches, and terminologies. “Neocolonialism” emerged almost immediately to denounce relations that ostensibly acknowledged the equality of former colonizer and colonized but did not actually affect structuring inequalities (Nkrumah 1965; Sartre 2001). “Internal colonialism” emerged in the 1970s to focus on the resilience of colonial relationships within a specific polity (Casanova 1965; Hechter 1975). This designation was eventually applied to a remarkable variety of polities and realities, including Apartheid South Africa, Appalachia, the position of African Americans, and the Celtic “fringe.” “Postcolonialism” (or “post-colonialism”) emerged in the 1980s to emphasize the ways that colonial regimes continue to inform relations after the end of formal colonial subjection.
All of these approaches foreground what historian Partha Chatterjee has defined as “the colonial rule of difference” (1993, 19, 33). A relative latecomer, “settler colonialism” consolidated in the 1990s and 2000s to designate the “settler societies” and the relations they still entertained with colonized indigenous minorities. Settler Colonial Studies emphasized circumstances primarily characterized by a determination to erase colonized subjectivities rather than reproduce their subordination (Veracini 2010). Unlike the other colonial formations, “settler colonialism” supersedes rather than reproduces the colonial rule of difference; settlers win by discontinuing unequal relationships rather than maintaining them. Patrick Wolfe’s seminal theorization was often referred to during the consolidation of this new scholarly field. “What if the colonizers are not dependent on native labour,” he asked. Indeed, “what if the natives themselves have been reduced to a small minority whose survival can hardly be seen to furnish the colonizing society with more than remission from ideological embarrassment? . . . In contrast to the kind of colonial formation that Cabral or Fanon confronted [i.e., ‘franchise’ or ‘dependent’], settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour” (1999, 1).
Like scholars of “internal colonialism,” scholars contributing to Settler Colonial Studies have emphasized the continuing operation of an unchanged set of unequal relations. The former, however, assumed the state as given and already formed, whereas the latter have focused on locales that would once have been referred to as “frontiers”—sites where, by definition, the state is absent and in the process of being formed. Settler colonialism as a mode of domination, it was often noted, has typically resisted formal decolonization.
Today, “colonialism” is often referred to outside of academia. In Europe, for example, Les indigènes de la République (a French political movement inspired by a political manifesto denouncing the ongoing “indigenisation” of significant segments of the population) recently mobilized against the infiltration of typically colonial forms of rule.17 However, the term is adaptable and can be used in a variety of contexts. European right-wing movements opposing immigration, for instance, recurrently refer to the “risks” associated with “reverse colonisation” (Sasha Williams and Law 2012). More recently, draconian austerity measures imposed by international creditors on the Greek government have prompted one Greek MP to refer to “neo-colonial servitude” (Evans-Pritchard 2015).18
Outside of Europe, widespread “land grabbing” in Africa and elsewhere is often interpreted as a “new” colonialism (Liberti 2011). The Zapatistas (whose 1994 insurgency coincided with the five hundredth anniversary of the colonial encounter) have revived the term’s common use throughout Latin America, where colonialism has long been a significant structure of reference (Galeano 1997). Indeed, attempts to undo ongoing colonial orders in the context of variously defined Indigenous “resurgencies” even prompted the pope to decry economic austerity as “colonialism” during a trip to Bolivia (Arvinth 2015).
“Settler colonialism” is also often invoked in the diverse struggles of Indigenous peoples and their allies in contemporary settler societies like Australia, Canada, Israel, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States. Indigenous activists in these contexts have been particularly wary of “postcolonial” approaches, since ongoing uninterrupted domination does not fit with that paradigm’s implicit temporalities. Australian Aboriginal militant and poet Bobby Sykes’ ironic quip epitomizes this approach: “What? Postcolonialism? Have They Left?” (quoted in Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1999, 24).
As specific modes of domination, colonialism and settler colonialism are not new. In the ancient world, the alternatives of creating dependent polities out of existing populations or displacing existing populations with settlers were already apparent. Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans all practiced both modes of domination at different times, in different locales, and in relation to the vast diversity of peoples they encountered during their respective expansions (Graham 2016).
Europe’s colonial expansion only began in earnest during the fifteenth century. While its meteoric rise to global hegemony enabled a number of western European polities to accumulate vast colonial dependencies and to contend with each other for domination over international trade networks, the term initially indicated a variety of practices. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, for example, used “colony” to refer to their settlements (Bradstock 2013). Their usage, however, was probably more due to the original Latin meaning of the term (i.e., to “cultivate”) than an indication that the Diggers were thinking of the “colonies” that were being planted in Ireland and America at the time. After all, they always involved local people in their efforts and were determined not to displace—clearly an anticolonial stance. Indeed, Winstanley was probably keen on returning to an original uncorrupted order (in this case, an original uncorrupted meaning).
Europeans practiced settler colonialism as a mode of domination in sixteenth-century Ireland, the Cape of Good Hope, and in North America. However, the practice only went global as a result of what historian James Belich (2009) has called the “settler revolution.” The ideology that accompanied this “revolution” during the nineteenth century reformed the generalized perception of settlers and their societies. In places where “rebarbarised” demi-savage Europeans lived at the margins of civilization, the “frontiers” of settlement eventually became sites of political experimentation and manly regeneration—a conservative escape from both debilitating social contradictions and growing revolutionary tensions.
But revolutionary analyses were linked to the dynamics of settler colonial expansion as well. Indeed, the concept of primitive accumulation developed through reflection on what Marx defined as the only “real colonies, virgin soils colonised by free labour” and what Engels defined as the “colonies proper” (which he contrasted to those “countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated—India, Algeria, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and Spanish possessions”) (Marx 1976, 931; Engels 1882; see Piterberg and Veracini 2015). Marx was responding to the theory of “systematic colonisation” advanced by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who had originally “discovered” primitive accumulation upon noting how the presence of “free lands” in settler-colonial peripheries enabled servants to abscond and rely on a subsistence economy that undid their previous subjugation (Wakefield 1968).
As a specific term, “settler colonialism” was first used in the 1920s to indicate a particular type of British colonialism in the Australian context, where it was distinguished from convict colonialism and used to differentiate between South Australia and New South Wales (Veracini 2013). As a compound term, however, it originally developed in relation to “bona fide” or “actual” settlers. In the United States and in the British Empire during the nineteenth century, these widely used expressions identified “migrants” or “colonists” who had displaced with the intention of remaining in a particular locality or colony. The difference between colonialism and settler colonialism was clear to most observers (Foley 2011), and British historian J. R. Seeley aptly encapsulated the sociopolitical distinction: “The [settler] colonies and India are in opposite extremes. Whatever political maxims are most applicable to one, are most inapplicable to the other” (quoted in Bell 2009, 8). The distinction was also abundantly clear in the United States and was epitomized by the different ways in which conquered areas were treated during the Mexican War of 1846–48 (“occupation” south of the Rio Grande, organic incorporation north of it). One could approve of one mode of domination and precisely for that reason dislike the other. John A. Hobson, for example, approved of “settlement” although he disliked “imperialism.”
Lenin’s theory of imperialism overturned the perception that these modes of domination were separate. For him, the rise of globalized “monopoly capitalism” made their differences irrelevant (1952). Lenin emphasized imperialism’s ability to structure all “peripheries.” During the twentieth century (and especially during the period of decolonization, when many settlers “repatriated” to their respective motherlands), the analytical difference between colonialism and settler colonialism became blurred.
During the 1970s, and in the context of bitter anticolonial insurgencies in Africa, “settler colonialism” was used again to identify a type of ultra-colonialism through which settlers held power without a demographic majority (Emmanuel 1972). However, beginning with Donald Denoon’s seminal work (1983) on the settler economies of the Southern Hemisphere, “settler colonialism” once again became associated with polities in which settlers and their descendants were in power and a normalized majority. While the United States and Israel were for some time not included within the bounds of Settler Colonial Studies, they eventually became important case studies (Hixson 2013; Piterberg 2008). Today the concept is applied to locales including postcolonial African nations, Latin America, Taiwan, and even Pakistan (Devji 2014). As scholarly field and analytic paradigm, Settler Colonial Studies have gone global in recent years (Veracini 2015).
While radicals routinely engage with “colonialism,” engagement with “settler colonialism” is more rare. Nevertheless, radicals used the latter concept before academics did. Japanese-American Maoist activist J. Sakai, for example, noted how he originally wrote Settlers after realizing in the 1970s that white people were actually the “problem,” and because the revolutionaries he met from Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Palestine “kept using the term ‘settlers’” and “kept talking about ‘settler colonialism’” (2014, 421–22). For the indigenous peoples of the settler societies, talking about settler colonialism reminds settler majorities of the need to decolonize relationships and reform the constitutional bases of the settler polities. Reference to settler colonialism is also essential for indigenous communities striving to avoid being lumped together with “diverse” groups in multicultural contexts. Indigenous activists routinely contest attempts to extinguish their sovereign claims through multicultural “recognition” (Byrd 2011).
Palestinians and their supporters have also found reference to Israeli settler colonialism to be a powerful mobilizing device (see, for example, Salamanca, Qato, Rabie, Samour 2012). The paradigm has been especially useful to those opposing the Palestinian Authority’s two-state solution (a classic decolonizing approach that does not recognize a settler colonial reality). Similarly, indigenous protesters in Canada have recently prompted an indigenous “renaissance” through Idle No More (Coulthard 2014) and other struggles against neoliberal exploitation. For these movements, colonialism and settler colonialism never ended. Although “colonialism” is typically used to refer to unequal relationships linking the Global North to its southern counterpart, reflections on settler colonialism highlight the foundational illegitimacy of ongoing settler colonial regimes.
Settler colonialism constitutes a privileged point for thinking about capitalist accumulation. Primitive accumulation separates future laborers from their means of subsistence so that they might subsequently be exploited through the wage relation. But while at times there is indigenous labor under settler colonialism, there is never an indigenous proletariat. Under settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples become disposable. Similarly, other sectors of the population increasingly face accumulations that demand everything we have but do not particularly need us as labor. In contrast to the “old” enclosures, these “new” enclosures resemble the dispossessions that indigenous peoples confronted under settler colonialism (Veracini 2015). By highlighting this similarity, it becomes possible to devise a collective response.
See also: Domination; Nation; Occupation; Oppression; Race; Sovereignty; Zionism
17. On the 2006 Paris riots and the banlieus as sites of colonial warehousing where noncitizen inhabitants are managed like “colonised natives” located beyond the borders of an exclusionary democracy, see Castel 2007.
18. This is a recurrent reference in analyses of Greece’s current predicament vis-à-vis international creditors (see, e.g., Terki-Mignot 2015).