‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept

Abstract

In a necessarily selective way, this paper explores the historiographical evolution of ‘settler colonialism’ as a category of analysis during the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies three main passages in its development. At first (until the 1960s), ‘settlers’, ‘settlement’ and ‘colonisation’ are understood as entirely unrelated to colonialism. The two do not occupy the same analytical field, pioneering endeavours are located in ‘empty’ settings and the presence and persistence of indigenous ‘Others’ is comprehensively disavowed. In a second stage (until the late 1970s), ‘settler colonialism’ as a compound identifies one specific type of diehard colonialism, an ongoing and uncompromising form of hyper-colonialism characterised by enhanced aggressiveness and exploitation (a form that had by then been challenged by a number of anti-colonial insurgencies). During a third phase (from the late 1970s and throughout the first half of the 1980s), settler colonialism is identified by a capacity to bring into being high standards of living and economic development. As such, settler colonialism is understood as the opposite of colonialism and associated underdevelopment and political fragmentation. It is only at the conclusion of a number of successive interpretative moments that ‘settler colonial’ phenomena could be theorised as related to, and yet distinct from, colonial ones. On the basis of this transformations, beginning from approximately the mid-1990s, ‘settler colonial studies’ as an autonomous scholarly field could then consolidate.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0986984).

Notes

Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 2.

See, for examples, Banner, Possessing the Pacific; Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Coombes, Rethinking Settler Colonialism; Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers; Elkins and Pedersen, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century; Evans, Grimshaw, Philips and Swain, Equal Subjects; Ford, Settler Sovereignty; Goldstein and Lubin, Settler Colonialism; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Pateman, ‘Settler Contract’, 35–78; Russell, Colonial Frontiers; Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies; Veracini, What is Settler Colonialism?; Weaver, Great Land Rush; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism; Young, Idea of English Ethnicity.

For an early definition of colonialism that systematically avoided a joint consideration of the colonies of settlement and those of domination, see Keller, Colonization. This compartmentalisation, however, was typical of nineteenth-century understandings as well. John Stuart Mill, for example, wrote extensively, and for decades, on both colonialism and settler colonialism but kept them rigorously separate. See Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies’.

For interventions dealing with the issue of Zionism as primarily a settler colonial movement, see, for example, Jabary, Qato, Rabie and Samour, Past is Present; Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory; Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism; Rodinson, Israel; Salaita, Holy Land in Transit; Shafir, Land, Labor; Veracini, Israel and Settler Society.

Bowman, ‘Pioneer Fringe’. See also Bowman, Pioneer Fringe.

Bowman, ‘Pioneer Fringe’, 49, 50, 54.

See Price, White Settlers in the Tropics and White Settlers and Native Peoples. As Frederick Hoxie has recently noted, Price was probably the first scholar to conceptualise a specific form of settler-driven colonialism: ‘independent’ settlers, he noted in a 1929 essay, had proved to be better colonisers than other metropole-directed groups. See Price, ‘Experiments in Colonization’; Hoxie, ‘Retrieving the Red Continent’, 1158. See also Price, Western Invasions.

Price saw the different histories of Anglophone settler expansion as characterised by ‘similarities rather than contrasts’. The moving frontier had brought indigenous destruction, but a later phase had produced indigenous recovery. In the context of a destruction/recovery paradigm he plotted different experiences of indigenous-settler relations on a continuum: Australia's was the most destructive, followed by the US; New Zealand's was slightly more destructive than Canada's. See Price, White Settlers and Native Peoples.

Price, White Settlers in the Tropics, 3–4.

Steinbeck, The Red Pony, 129–30.

See, for examples, Allen, Bush and Backwoods; Burt, ‘If Turner Had Looked’; Coleman, ‘New Zealand Frontier’; Gerhard, ‘Frontier in Comparative View’; Lipset, First New Nation; Lobanov-Rostrovsky, ‘Russian Expansion’; Mikesell, ‘Comparative Studies’; Sharp, ‘Three Frontiers’; Treadgold, ‘Russian Expansion’. This genre of comparative inquiry, however, would be sustained for decades. See, for example, Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory; Lamar and Thompson, Frontier in History; Lonsdale and Homes, Settlement in Sparsely Populated Regions; McQuilton, ‘Comparative Frontiers’; Miller and Steffen, The Frontier; Solberg, Prairies and Pampas.

Webb, Great Frontier.

Hartz, Founding of New Societies. For critiques of this approach, see Bolton, ‘Louis Hartz’; Cross, ‘Comparative Exceptionalism’; Harris and Guelke, ‘Land and Society’; Hirst, ‘Keeping Colonial History Colonial’; Holt, ‘Louis Hartz's Fragment Thesis’; Martin, ‘Australia and the Hartz “Fragment” Thesis’. Despite this criticism, that what could be defined as the Hartzian ‘fragment’ school of historical thought is in many ways still operating should be emphasised. In different ways, David Grayson Allen's In English Ways, David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed and, more recently, Christopher Tomlins' Freedom Bound all interpret different settlement patterns in the ‘New World’ by focusing on the different experiences and locales of origin of the incoming settlers.

Hartz, ‘European Fragment’.

Hartz, ‘Theory of the Development’, 3.

Ibid., 6.

Ibid., 9.

Ibid., 6.

Shepard, Invention of Decolonization.

On conflicts with indigenous peoples in settler Africa, see, for example, Lodge, Resistance and Ideology. In this context, see also Arrighi, Political Economy of Rhodesia; Rodinson, Israel.

Ferro, Colonization, 211. On ‘ultra-colonialism’, see Anderson, ‘Portugal’, I, II and III.

Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’.

See Everatt, ‘Alliance Politics’.

On Fanon's understanding of settler colonialism, see Krautwurst, ‘What is Settler Colonialism?’.

Baran, Political Economy of Growth, 273–74, emphasis added.

Emmanuel, ‘White-Settler Colonialism’, 40.

Ibid., 57, 36.

Horvath, ‘Definition of Colonialism’, 47. For a similar classification of colonial phenomena, see also Fieldhouse, Colonial Empires; Finley, ‘Colonies’; Fredrickson, ‘Colonialism and Racism’; Osterhammel, Colonialism. Fieldhouse placed ‘mixed’, ‘plantation’ and ‘pure settlements’ colonies on an interpretative continuum. Finley argued against the use of ‘colony’ and associated terms when referring to the act of settling new lands—a circumstance that necessitated, he argued, an alternative terminology. Fredrickson distinguished between ‘occupation colonies’, ‘plantation colonies’, ‘mixed colonies’ and ‘settler colonies’. Finally, Osterhammel identified three ‘modular forms of colonies’: colonies of exploitation, colonies of settlement and enclaves or strategic territorial outposts.

Horvath, ‘Definition of Colonialism’, 47.

Good, ‘Settler Colonialism’. See also Good, ‘Settler Colonialism in Rhodesia’. Significantly, Good would also contribute to a successive interpretative trend. See Good, ‘Colonialism and Settler Colonialism’.

Good, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 597.

See Biermann and Kössler, ‘Settler Mode of Production’.

For exceptions to a compartmentalised interpretative pattern, see Akenson, God's Peoples; Lustick, Unsettled States; Weitzer, Transforming Settler States.

For economic definitions of settler colonialism, see, for example, Ehrensaft and Armstrong, ‘Dominion Capitalism’; Pomfret, ‘Settler Economics’. On the relative eclipse of this approach in the 1990s, see Beilharz and Cox, ‘Review Essay’. For more recent examples of this interpretative strand, see Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, ‘Colonial Origins of Comparative Development’; Denoon, ‘Settler Capitalism Unsettled’; Gaido, ‘Settler Colonialism’; Harris, ‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess?’.

On staple theory and its original formulation, see Innis, Fur Trade; Schedvin, ‘Staples and Regions’; Taylor, ‘Restructuring Canadian Business History’.

Schedvin represents Argentina as failure, Canada as success and Australia and New Zealand as both engulfed in a ‘staple trap’. The staple theory of economic development was recently criticised by James Belich, who proposed a reversed narrative emphasising early import-driven independent development and later ‘recolonization’. Belich, Replenishing the Earth.

Slemon, ‘Unsettling the Empire’.

McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question. For similar interpretative approaches in a US context, see Dunaway, First American Frontier; Kulikoff, Agrarian Origins.

Denoon, ‘Understanding Settler Societies’, 511.

Ibid., 513.

Ibid., 515, emphasis added.

See Wallerstein, Modern World-System.

For a discussion of ‘comparative location’ as a recurring theme in Argentina's historiography, see Salvatore, ‘Unsettling Location’.

Goodrich, ‘Argentina’, 70. Interestingly, Goodrich had also set the comparative tone in the earlier phase; see Goodrich, ‘Australian and American Labor Movements’.

This is a surprisingly vast literature. Beside Denoon's work, see Adelman, Frontier Development; Alexander, ‘Business Elites’; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, esp. 522–40; Duncan and Fogarty, Australia and Argentina; Dyster, ‘Argentine and Australian Development Compared’; Gerardi, Australia, Argentina and World Capitalism; Goodrich, ‘Argentina’; Hirst, ‘Keeping Colonial History Colonial’; Moran, ‘“Development” of Argentina and Australia’; Platt, Social Welfare; Platt and di Tella, Argentina, Australia, and Canada; Solberg, Prairies and Pampas; Teichman, ‘Businessmen and Politics’; Weaver, Great Land Rush, esp. 13–17; Wheelwright and Ferrer, ‘Australia and Argentina’.

See Paisley, ‘White Settler Colonialisms’, esp. 9.

Denoon, Settler Capitalism, 27.

On the global emergence of what could be understood as an indigenous international, see Mander and Tauli-Corpuz, Paradigm Wars; Niezen, Origins of Indigenism; Stewart-Harawira, The New Imperial Order.

See Pease, ‘New Perspectives’, 24. Pease mentions two critical monographs in his outline: Kolodny's Lay of the Land and Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence. For an Australian example of this trend, see Evans, Saunders and Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination.

See Veracini, Negotiating a Bicultural Past.

For a convincing critique of ‘internal colonialism’ as a notion suitable for the interpretation of indigenous subjection in settler contexts, see Byrd, Transit of Empire. Byrd argues that the conflation of racism and colonialism—the idea that ‘internal colonialism’ is applicable to all racialised alterities—disallows the upholding of a specifically indigenous special status and completes imperial conquest. She sees critical ethnic studies as complicit with settler attempts to produce the erasure of indigenous specificity.

The Canadian and US historiographies were relatively late in adopting settler colonialism as a conceptual category. In these cases, as both historiographies formed around the issue of settler independence (in the US it was an accomplished sovereign independence, in Canada a sustained relationship and connection with Britain), the dialectical opposition between institutional continuity and rupture contributed to blocking off settler colonialism. In the US, a focus on anti-colonial struggle prevented ‘colonialism’ entering the analytical field; in Canada there was no ‘settler colonialism’ because there was only ‘colonialism’ (even if the term was used with a distinctively local inflection). Even the historiographical revisions did not focus on settler colonialism: in the US the main argument was that, even if it had been previously denied, US foreign engagements were actually imperialist (that is, ‘colonialism’ was brought into the analytical field); in Canada the argument was that British imperialism was actually Canadian imperialism (that is, the focus on ‘colonialism’ was retained even if redirected). See Berger, Sense of Power (which authoritatively initiated two decades of historiographical revision); Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (which authoritatively organised two decades of historiographical revision).

On the ‘middle ground’, see, of course, White, Middle Ground.

For an inclusive overview of these processes, see McHugh, Aboriginal, esp. 1–58.

See, for examples, Reynolds, Law of the Land; Ward, An Unsettled History.

See, for examples, Flanagan, First Nations?; Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.