Veracini - Settler Colonialism

Settler Colonialism

Also by Lorenzo Veracini

ISRAEL AND SETTLER SOCIETY

Settler Colonialism

A Theoretical Overview

Lorenzo Veracini

Queen Elizabeth II Fellow, Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne

Lorenzo Veracini 2010

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First published 2010 by

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ISBN 978-0-230-22097-3 hardback

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Veracini, Lorenzo.

Settler colonialism: a theoretical overview / Lorenzo Veracini.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-230-22097-3 (hardback)

1. ColoniesHistory. 2. Land settlementHistory. I. Title.

JV105.V35 2011

325.3dc22 2010034610

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

This research was supported under Australian Research Councils Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0986984). This support was seriously enabling; without the fellowships the Council provided, researching and writing this book would have been impossible. Many in my generation had to leave Italy to find opportunities and dignity elsewhere. I was lucky and ended up in Australia. At the same time, Australia is also a great place to get to know about settler colonialism.

Part of will appear in Thinking Settler Colonialism: Essays on Settler Colonialism and its Consequences (Palgrave Macmillan). The jacket reproduces a painting by William Ludlow Sheppard entitled Wives for the Settlers at Jamestown (1876). I believe this painting identifies the moment when colonialism turns into settler colonialism. The cover image is reproduced with permission from the New York Public Library.

And I want to thank the shower for a number of decent ideas that came up while I was having one. Had we not had water restrictions all along, this book would have probably been a better one. Blame climate change.

Introduction: The Settler Colonial Situation

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A theoretical analysis of what is here defined as the settler colonial situation could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friederich Engels remark that the need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe, and that it must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. Sometimes capable of displacing established colonial traditions, more rarely giving way to other colonial forms, settler colonialism operated autonomously in the context of developing colonial discourse and practice.

Another point of departure for this analysis could be Charles Darwins voyage, which, as well as an exploration into the evolution of the species, was also a journey into what had become a geographically diversified system of intertwined colonial forms. On the issue of settler colonialism, he had specifically noted in 1832 that the Argentinean war of extermination against the Indians, an episode he had personally witnessed during his voyage, was too much.

The Indians are now so terrified that they offer no resistance in a body, but each flies, neglecting even his wife and children; but when overtaken, like wild animals they fight, against any number to the last moment. [ ] This is a dark picture, but how much more shocking is the undeniable fact that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood! When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhuman, he [general and temporarily out of office national leader Juan Manuel de Rosas] answered Why, what can be done? They breed so.

Personal dispositions are often surprising. Whereas one could argue that (especially the later) Marx was not a Marxist in suggesting that traditional, indigenous, and colonised societies could follow historical trajectories that did not necessarily reproduce the evolution of the metropolitan cores, at the same time, one could maintain that Darwin was not a (social) Darwinist when he regretted the deliberate targeting of the reproductive capabilities of the indigenous community and the horror intrinsic to what was otherwise understood as a globally recurring approach to indigenous policy. In both cases, a colonial imagination had failed to ultimately convince them.

This book is a theoretical reflection on settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism. It suggests that it is a global and genuinely transnational phenomenon, a phenomenon that national and imperial historiographies fail to address as such, and that colonial studies and postcolonial literatures have developed interpretative categories that are not specifically suited for an appraisal of settler colonial circumstances. The dynamics of imperial and colonial expansion, a focus on the formation of national structures and on national independence (together with a scholarship identifying the transoceanic movement of people and biota that does not distinguish between settler and other types of migration), have often obscured the presence and operation of a specific pan-European understanding of a settler colonial sovereign capacity. Settler Colonialism addresses a scholarly gap.

Colony as a term can have two main different connotations. A colony is both a political body that is dominated by an exogenous agency, and an exogenous entity that reproduces itself in a given environment (in both cases, even if they refer to very different situations, colony implies the localised ascendancy of an external element this is what brings the two meanings together). Settler colonialism as a concept encompasses this fundamental ambiguity. As its compounded designation suggests, it is inherently characterised by both traits. Since both the permanent movement and reproduction of communities and the dominance of an exogenous agency over an indigenous one are necessarily involved, settler colonial phenomena are intimately related to both colonialism and migration. And yet, not all migrations are settler migrations and not all colonialisms are settler colonial: this book argues that settler colonialism should be seen as structurally distinct from both.