Revision as of 22:06, 14 November 2022

Settler colonialism is a structure that perpetuates the elimination of indigenous people and cultures to replace them with a settler society. Some, but not all, scholars argue that settler colonialism is 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 a 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. 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.

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. 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 British colonies in North America, Australia, and Zealandia, which are close to the complete, prototypical form of settler colonialism, but is also applied to other cases including Kashmir, the Canary Islands, Latin America, Liberia, South Africa, Rhodesia, French Algeria, British Kenya, Italian Libya and East Africa, Northern Ireland, Hokkaido, Japanese Korea, Manchukuo, German South West Africa, Posen and West Prussia, Generalplan Ost and Israel/Palestine.

In early modern and modern times

During the early modern period, some European nation-states and their agents adopted policies of colonialism, competing with each other to establish colonies outside of Europe, at first in Macaronesia, then the Americas, and later in Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

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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.

The Americas

European colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th century, when Norse sailors explored and settled limited areas on the shores of present-day Greenland and Canada. According to Norse folklore, violent conflicts with the indigenous population ultimately made the Norse abandon those settlements.

Extensive European colonization began in 1492, when a Spanish expedition headed by Genoese Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East but inadvertently landed in the Americas. European conquest, large-scale exploration, colonization and industrial development soon followed. Columbus's first two voyages (1492–93) reached the Bahamas and various Caribbean islands, including Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In 1497, sailing from Bristol on behalf of England, John Cabot landed on the North American coast, and a year later, Columbus's third voyage reached the South American coast. As the sponsor of Christopher Columbus's voyages, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize the largest areas, from North America and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Spanish cities were founded as early as 1496 with Santo Domingo in today's Dominican Republic.

Other powers such as France also founded colonies in the Americas: in eastern North America, a number of Caribbean islands, and small coastal parts of South America. Portugal colonized Brazil, tried early (since 1499) colonizing of the coasts of present-day Canada, and sat for extended periods on the northwest bank of the River Plate (including it in the Brazilian region). This was the beginning of a dramatic territorial expansion for several European countries. Europe had been preoccupied with internal wars, and was only slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the bubonic plague; thus the rapid rate at which it grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century.

Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere came under the ostensible control of European governments, leading to profound changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life. In the 19th century alone over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas. The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian Exchange, a widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human populations (including slaves), communicable disease, and ideas between the Pan-American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres following Columbus's voyages to the Americas.

Settler colonialism in the United States

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, which in some cases (especially in the American South) used in order to build a plantation society and perpetuate the practice of slavery in the creation of said plantation. The settler colonialism extended past the removal and extermination of the Indigenous people. The practice of disappearing the prior existence also was implemented, and continues to be perpetuated in local histories.

This forcible relocation of tribes came about in part through the mentality of Manifest Destiny, the mentality that it was the right and destiny of the United States to expand its territory and its rule across the North American continent, to the Pacific coast. Through various armed conflicts between indigenous tribes on one side, with settler society backed by American military power on the other side, along with an increasing number of treaties centering around land cessation, Native American tribes were slowly pushed onto a system of reservations, where they traded territory for protection and support from the United States government. However, this system could be disadvantageous for tribes, as they often were forced to relocate to reservations far from their traditional homelands, or had trouble obtaining goods and annuity payments that were promised by the government, leading to further armed revolts and conflicts such as the Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota. Cases of genocide that were carried out as policy include the Jacksonian era of forced removal and the California gold rush in Northern California. An example from 1873, General William T. Sherman wrote, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children..."

Following the conclusion of U.S./Native American conflicts in the late 1800s, displacement of indigenous peoples and identities switched to a more legal basis. Attempts were made to assimilate them into American society while stripping away territory; legislation like the Dawes Act of 1887 led to the division of previously communally held indigenous lands into individually owned pieces of land that were to be held by tribal members. While 'allotment' was as mentioned held up as a way to help indigenous people become 'civilized' and further assimilated into settler society, other motives included the erosion of tribal culture and social unity, along with allowing for more land for European-American settlement and economic ventures to make use of indigenous lands. In the educational sphere, a system of boarding schools for Native children (Col. Richard Pratt's Carlisle School being a notable example) worked to strip indigenous languages, religions and cultures away from children in order for them to better assimilate into American culture, in schools that were often geographically distant from their home reservation.

Further developments such as the Federal policies of termination and relocation in the 1950s and 1960s reinforced the aims of settler society to eliminate indigenous identity and occupation of space, through the disestablishment of Federal treaty/trust obligations to tribes, the transfer of civil and criminal jurisdiction over many reservations to the individual states, and the encouragement of Native Americans to leave their reservations and relocate to cities such as New York City, Minneapolis, Denver and Portland; it was hoped that this relocation would further erode tribal identity and speed up the process of assimilation. In the wake of the 1950s termination and relocation policies, a pan-Indigenous movement arose in tandem to the African American civil rights movement and broad-based social justice and antiwar movements of 1960s. While both policies were officially (in the case of termination) and unofficially (relocation) ended by the early 1970s, they had the effect of creating a large population of Native American urban populations, and the unintended side effect of giving rise to increased political awareness among Native Americans, leading to the creation of organizations such as the American Indian Movement.

In the present day, the legacy of settler colonialism in the United States has created a complicated relationship between indigenous tribes and the United States, especially in the area of treaty rights and sovereignty. Much contemporary literature written by indigenous scholars and scholars within the field of American Indian Studies/Native Studies centers around recognizing the disruptive effects that settler colonialism has had on Native American tribes, including land loss, destruction of tribal languages and cultures, and tribal efforts to maintain recognition of rights they have gained via treaties with the United States government. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O'Brien names the practice of writing Indians out of existence "firsting and lasting". The national narrative tells of the "last" Indians or last tribes as well as the story of "first" settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first everything and the "last of Mohicans", "Ishi, the last Indian", and End of the Trail (sculpture by James Earle Fraser). Elizabeth Cook-Lynn defines the effects of "American colonialism" within towns that sit outside of the Navajo Nation's boundaries. Indigenous scholars, including Linda Tuhiwai Smith, have developed methodologies of Indigenous decolonization that center Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices.

Indonesia

Ireland

China

In the nineteenth-century period known as the Chuang Guandong, "Crashing into Guandong/Manchuria", the ethnically Manchu rulers of Qing Dynasty China allowed rapid settlement by the ethnic-majority Han Chinese of the historical homeland of the Manchu and other Tungusic peoples in Northeast China, which had previously been strictly controlled and closed to habitation by most non-indigenous Chinese.

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 under the Xi Jinping Administration, led by General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping.

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• Imperialism
• Indian removal
• Internal colonialism
• Lebensraum
• List of diasporas
• Racial capitalism

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References

1. ^ LeFevre, Tate. "Settler Colonialism". oxfordbibliographies.com. Tate A. LeFevre. Retrieved 19 October 2017. Though often conflated with colonialism more generally, settler colonialism is a distinct imperial formation. Both colonialism and settler colonialism are premised on exogenous domination, but only settler colonialism seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers (usually from the colonial metropole).
2. Compare: Veracini, Lorenzo (2010). Settler Colonialism:. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series (reprint ed.). Basingstoke: Springer. p. 17. ISBN 9780230299191. Retrieved 29 January 2019. In this chapter, I interpret the settler colonial situation as primarily premised on the irruption into a specific locale of a sovereign collective of settlers.
3. Short, Damien (2016). Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-84813-546-8.
4. ^ Wolfe, Patrick (2006). "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native". Journal of Genocide Research. 8 (4): 387–409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240. S2CID 143873621.
5. ^ Englert, Sai (2020). "Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession". Antipode. 52 (6): 1647–1666. doi:10.1111/anti.12659. S2CID 225643194.
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7. Shoemaker, Nancy (1 October 2015). "A Typology of Colonialism | Perspectives on History". American Historical Association. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
8. ^ Adhikari, Mohamed (7 September 2017). "Europe's First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa: The Genocide of Aboriginal Canary Islanders". African Historical Review. 49 (1): 1–26. doi:10.1080/17532523.2017.1336863. S2CID 165086773. Retrieved 7 May 2022.
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11. Barclay, Fiona; Chopin, Charlotte Ann; Evans, Martin (12 January 2017). "Introduction: settler colonialism and French Algeria". Settler Colonial Studies. 8 (2): 115–130. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2016.1273862. S2CID 151527670. Retrieved 7 May 2022.
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Further reading

• Cox, Alicia. "Settler Colonialism". Oxford Bibliographies. OUP. Retrieved 21 January 2021.
• 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.
• Marx, Christoph (2017), Settler Colonies, EGO - European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, retrieved: March 17, 2021 (pdf).
• 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)

External links

• Articles on Settler Colonialism in Western American Literature

• CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2022
• Settler colonialism
• Cultural geography
• Settlement schemes