The World Turned Inside Out

Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea

Lorenzo Veracini

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839763830
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in 'empty lands' somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands were never empty, sometimes these communities failed miserably, and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries. Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, this book uncovers and critiques an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition - a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and the failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing new economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. They displaced, and moved to other islands and continents, beyond the settled regions, to rural districts and to secluded suburbs, to communes and intentional communities, and to cyberspace. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is.

1

The World Turned Inside Out
up to The Beginning of the
Global Settler Revolution

The world turned inside out was imagined before it was established. Adventurer and member of parliament Humphrey Gilbert had argued in 1583 that England should seek to ‘populate’ the ‘pagan or barbarous countries which are not really possessed by any Prince or Christian people’.¹ A ‘gentleman educated at Eton and Oxford’, Gilbert ‘enunciated the doctrine, carried it into practice’, and was instrumental in the establishment of a colony in Newfoundland ‘to which England would send its unemployed citizens’.² ‘Populate’ is crucial in this formulation, especially considering its explicit link with an alleged lack of sovereignty; Gilbert’s statement can be seen as the beginning of a new colonial tradition. It was presented as an alternative to other ways of colonising (the Iberians did colonialism differently), but it would not be an exclusively English-speaking tradition. The Jesuit ‘reductions’ in what would become today’s Paraguay and elsewhere in the Americas, for example, would achieve a remarkable autonomy – a de facto independence from the colonial world that surrounded them – and were predicated on the seclusion of a particular collective from a secularising world.³ Secularism was a kind of revolution. The Jesuits never approved of either.

And neither was settler colonialism an entirely new idea. The ancient Greeks had already opted for colonisation as an alternative to revolution, political discord and civil strife, after the emergence of the political structures of the polis.⁴ They had typically settled as refugees, or as traders residing in nonsovereign settlements that resembled ‘foreign concessions’; but then, as resources became scarce and aristocratic rule became entrenched, the poor, as well as many wealthier families excluded from ‘political privilege’, had become discontented.⁵ The solution was often a pre-emptive move, resulting in colonisation in all directions: Africa, Magna Graecia, the Black Sea. In some places these settlements were successful; in others they were not. Where they were, they were sovereign, and would not integrate with the natives, even though at times they did assimilate them.⁶ The new states established through this Hellenising wave were also immediately independent from the motherland. Eventually, however, revolution came anyway in the metropole, and tyrants took over (interestingly, revolution never came in the Greek settler colonies across the sea). The proponents of the new tradition in the sixteenth century knew very well how the ancient Greeks had enacted colonisation.⁷ And they knew about Roman colonisations, too – public programmes explicitly designed to increase military manpower while reducing the likelihood of social unrest.⁸

Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting (1584) can be seen as another possible starting point for this political tradition. It listed the reasons for colonisation, and insisted on the need to prevent trouble for a kingdom ‘swarminge at this day with valiant youthes rustinge and hurtfull by lacke of employment’.⁹ The principal aim of this colonialism was intrinsically different from that of previous colonial experiences. Rather than riches or glory, the main driver now was a desire to preempt social unrest:

By makinge of shippes and by preparinge of thinges for the same: By makinge of Cables and Cordage, by plantinge of vines and olive trees, and by makinge of wyne and oyle, by husbandrie and by thousands of thinges there to be don[e], infinite numbers of the englishe nation may be sett on worke to unburdenynge of the Realme with many that nowe lyve chardgeable to the state at home.¹⁰

The main purpose of this colonisation was not the exaction of tribute or the production of specific commodities to be traded in developing international networks (even though this would definitely be a welcome secondary outcome, and Hakluyt later emphasised that experienced artisans must be part of any successful expedition); rather, it was the ‘unburdening’ of the social body. A new economy was producing social tension and multiplying the discontented. But this colonial endeavour would ease social tension on a continental scale: ‘Wee shall by plantinge there inlarge the glory of the gospel and from England plante sincere religion, and provide a safe and fine place to receave people from all partes of the worlde that are forced to flee for the truthe of gods worde’.¹¹ Non-English Protestants would also be part of the colonising enterprise. Indeed, Hakluyt understood colonisation as a dissipator of tension that could help to ease all conflicts, including international ones. ‘Old World’ strife would not emerge in the ‘New Worlds’ created by the new colonialism, while, Hakluyt added, the colony would be an exceptional manufacturer of good soldiers: ‘If frontier warres there chaunce to aryse, and if therevpon wee shall fortifie, yt will occasion the trayninge upp of our youthe in the discipline of war and make a number fitt for the service of the warres and for the defence of our people there and at home’.¹² Concluding his Discourse, Hakluyt returned to the need to avoid impending social unrest: ‘Many men of excellent wittes and of divers singular giftes’, who ‘are not able to live in England’, may ‘be raised againe’ in the colonies, ‘and doo their Contrie goodd seruice: and many nedefull uses there may (to greate purpose) require the savinge of greate numbers that for trifles may otherwise be deuored by the gallowes’.¹³

The possibility of easing social tension sustains Hakluyt’s rhetorical climax: ‘the wanderinge beggars of England that growe upp ydly and hurtefull and burdenous to this Realme, may there be unladen, better bredd upp, and may people waste Contries to the home and forreine benefite, and to their owne more happy state’.¹⁴ The poor would be relocated, and through labour recover their virtue elsewhere. They were burdensome and restive in one place, but would eventually provide the Queen with ‘toll, excises and other duties, which without oppression may be raised’ in another.¹⁵ Hakluyt then concluded: ‘Th is Norumbega’, the provisional name of this potential colony, ‘offreth the remedie’ – displacement was thus the remedy against a world turned upside down. His project of North American colonisation insisted on the benefits for the metropole and on the possibility of avoiding revolutionary disturbances.

Closer to home, it was Ireland that became a veritable early laboratory of the world turned inside out. The concerns that prompted its recolonisation were similar. The notion that England was overpopulated was widely held, and with overpopulation came the prospect of social unrest. In 1619, an English writer urged transporting to Ulster ‘the superfluous multitudes of poor people which overspill the realm of England to the weal of both kingdoms; relatively underpopulated and underdeveloped, Ulster offered prospective colonists access and legal title to land.¹⁶ A reference to the ‘weal of both kingdoms’, however, marked a conceptual shift: the project was no longer only about relieving the metropole; attention was now focused on the receiving location too.

Crisis

Even closer to home, increasing revolutionary tensions had prompted similar imaginings and practices in England. The enclosures and a new economic dynamism were transforming society.¹⁷ Social tension was rising. New class antagonisms were an outcome of a new economy, but economic crisis in the years between 1620 and 1650 had exacerbated conflict.¹⁸ The ‘world turned upside down’ was indeed a real prospect during the fateful decades of the seventeenth century Christopher Hill explored. But if the prospect of revolution was rising, the politics of volitional displacement were also growing. Hill refers to a 1594 pamphlet advocating the colonisation of Ireland noting that it would remove out of the city ‘people poor and seditious, which were a burden to the commonwealth’ by drawing them ‘forth’.¹⁹ Widespread Anabaptist ideas were both revolutionary and supportive of the prospect of displacement: if baptism was to be the voluntary act of an adult, no national church could legitimately exist. This understanding of community had crucial implications for understandings of sovereignty, which became both diffuse and disconnected from place. According to this logic, voluntary congregations could legitimately constitute themselves anywhere. Anabaptism is the original religion of modern settler colonialism, but not the only one. Hill notes, for example, that Calvinists could not have ‘confidence in democracy’ because their religion ‘was for the elect, by definition a minority’.²⁰ But, should Calvinists settle a ‘new’ locale, a country that could be represented and understood as empty, democracy and election would coexist seamlessly, and even reinforce each other.

Revolutionary ideas spread in ‘heath and woodland’ areas, often located outside of the parish system. Revolutionary leader Gerrard Winstanley knew that these were the areas where revolutionaries could ‘live out of sight or out of slavery’.²¹ And yet, if settler colonialism is born with revolution, revolution is also born in a new type of geographical mobility: ‘forest squatters, itinerant craftsmen, and building labourers, unemployed men and women seeking work, strolling players, minstrels and jugglers, quack doctors, gipsies, vagabonds, tramps’ all moved.²² Facing new social experiences, many thought that ‘masterless people’, but also placeless ones and the poor in general should be ‘settled on new holdings carved out of the waste’.²³ Most could agree on reclamation: no land would be forcibly acquired if ther agricultural land that was to be distributed was to be reclaimed from ‘wastes’. Only genuine reactionaries objected.

The St George’s Hill Digger ‘colony’, located just outside London, ostensibly targeted unimproved land, and it was only one of many such colonies. Winstanley thought that ‘from a half to two thirds of England was not properly cultivated’, and wanted to ‘go forth and declare it’ by organising ‘us that are called common people to manure and work upon the common lands’.²⁴ He wanted to improve common land collectively; but it was a commonly held idea that the poor should be resettled elsewhere. William Covell, a conservative, and Milton also pleaded for the ‘just division of waste commons’.²⁵ But there was an essential ambiguity about where change should happen. The last line of the Diggers’ Song called for ‘Glory here, Diggers all’, envisaging no or little displacement.²⁶ The Ranters, a radical wing of the revolutionary movement, had no doubt: change was to be enacted right where they were – indeed, inside their very body and soul.

Improvement and commons are indeed central to understanding the evolving relationship between displacement and change. As Hill stressed, ‘The Revolution began with Oliver Cromwell leading fenmen in revolt against court drainage schemes; its crucial turning point was the defeat of the Leveller regiments at Burford, which was immediately followed by an act for draining the fens; it ended with the rout of the commoners and craftsmen of the south-western counties in the bogs of Sedgmoor’.²⁷ Mobility was also crucial; Hill remarked on the ‘importance of social and physical mobility in expanding the possibility of freedom’.²⁸

Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was, for Hill, the ‘greatest literary product of this social group, the epic of the itinerant’; those uprooted by social and economic upheaval dreamt of progressing (that is, literally moving forward), and eventually settling down.²⁹ It is the story of a displacement, individual and collective; and it is the pilgrim’s family that travels to the Celestial City – ‘that which is to come’. It is the tale of a permanent migration from the City of Destruction, the story of a preemptive move; it is the prospect of damnation that prompts a decision to remove, and it seems important that Christian, the main character, does not plan to return. Unlike similar travels, this is a literal displacement, the story of a collective movement through real places – the ‘Slough of Despond’, the ‘Hill Difficulty’, the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’, the ‘Doubting Castle’, the ‘Enchanted Ground’ – rather than an allegory of a soul’s path to salvation. Itself highly mobile, Bunyan’s text would be incredibly successful in the American colonies.³⁰

The alternative to turning outward was to turn inward. The Quakers toyed with revolution, but ended up espousing pacifism and non-involvement. William Penn, who understood this tension, established a settler colony and its administration for the Quakers who would go to America, but mandated quietism and withdrawal for those who would stay put.³¹ In Hill’s summation, these alternative stances were ‘simply the consequence of the organized survival of a group which had failed to turn the world upside down’.³² Both were non-revolutionary stances. Strategic defeat shaped this group’s options: the ‘openness of the religion of the heart’ was, for Hill, at first a ‘vehicle of revolutionary transformations of thought’, but after the Restoration had the ‘opposite effect’.³³ The revolution had been defeated, and the world turned upside down was no more (except for a few surviving and minoritarian undercurrents). But it eventually re-emerged in America; and ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ (the tune) was played when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, and by the Shakers, ‘a Lancashire group who were “commissioned of the Almighty God to preach the everlasting gospel to America” in 1774’.³⁴ Displacement was seen in this context as a remedy both to the prospect of a coming social war and to its outcome.

James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) also advocated displacement. In Oceana, Harrington envisages a complex political system ensuring a fairer distribution of landed property.³⁵ The ‘Commonwealth of Oceana’ is an ‘equal commonwealth’ founded on a distributive agrarian law that limits the size of landholdings to a defined threshold; this is, in Harrington’s account, the only genuinely stable form of government. Harrin...