The Settler Colonial Present

L. Veracini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137394040, 9781137372468
• eBook ISBN: 9781137372475
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The Settler Colonial Present explores the ways in which settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination informs the global present. It presents an argument regarding its extraordinary resilience and diffusion and reflects on the need to imagine its decolonisation.

1

Settler Colonialism is not Colonialism

In November 2011 Science published a paper presenting research conducted by a team led by population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Montreal. This work repackaged in a geneticsinflected language a recurring tenet of settler colonial discourse, a point initially suggested by the apologists of the settler ‘transition’ of the nineteenth century and repeated since by their followers. The transition had transformed the anxious perception of rebarbarised Europeans living at the edge of civilisation. In Belich’s analysis, this was a momentous nineteenth-century transformation in the political imagination of emigration, a shift that radically altered the prospects of those who left the colonising cores for the settler peripheries of the ‘Angloworld’.¹ One result of this shift was that settler pioneers could be represented as inherently better humans – better than the peoples they had left behind and certainly better than the indigenous peoples they encountered. If this discourse was once framed in racial terms against indigenous peoples and other colonised populations (the settlers’ ‘Others’), or as a regenerative experience on the ‘frontier’ against those who had not moved there (the settlers’ other ‘Others’), in 2011 it was expressed with reference to a more efficient capacity to shape the genetic pool of future populations. It was in the present that the superiority of an historical experience could and should now be measured:

Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than 1 million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.²

These researchers’ work ‘scientifically demonstrated’ an ostensible evolutionary advantage associated with one’s ancestor’s decision to ‘pioneer’. Not only pioneers had more babies, their babies had more babies, provided they still inhabited ‘unsettled’ environments. A crucial corollary of this work was that an accelerated reproductive capacity is consistent with the reproductive patterns of other species in comparable conditions, a point emphasised by one of its reviewers.³

Unlike weeds, humans are ‘slow growers’, but a change in environment, and specifically, a move to an ‘empty’ frontier, could transform them. Moreover, pioneering produces inheritable traits, these authors claimed; that is, it produces a genetically defined new (and evolutionarily improved) human ‘type’. ‘Professor of the Science of Society in Yale University’ Albert Galloway Keller had already argued in 1907 that the ‘many analogies between man’s occupation of a new habitat and what is well known to naturalists concerning the migrations and struggles of plants and animals scarcely need to be pointed out’.⁴ Much earlier still, Thomas Malthus had identified British North America as an idealtypical social context where his theory of population growth and distribution could be properly tested.⁵ But for him, a point that is often neglected, it was not America specifically that was interesting, it was the settler colonial condition in general. Malthus considered Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales in later editions of the Essay on the Principle of Population.⁶ Excoffier and his team (and indeed Science’s referees) seem to have barely moved from these notions.

In reality, despite the name of the prestigious journal their work appeared in, rather than contributing to ‘science’, Excoffier and his team contributed to settler colonial discourse and may have simply reflected on a specific region’s relative isolation and lack of economic development, on a consequent absence of subsequent immigration into the area, on a resilient patriarchal regime, and on a sustained lack of educational opportunities. Were the pioneers who settled elsewhere, or those who remained in the settled areas, less virile because further migration diluted their contribution to the genetic pool, or because they actually achieved what they had set out to do in the first place, which was to rapidly ‘develop’ their districts and turn them into locales as similar as possible to the colonising cores they had left behind? What about those who were exceptionally good or lucky farmers and were able to sell and move on? Should the extraordinary reproductive rates that some Third World countries were able to sustain in recent decades also be considered in terms of ‘fitness’?

After all, economic disadvantage is a trait that is passed on from one generation to the next, even if we probably do not need a team of genetic researchers to grasp this point. What is most remarkable in this work, however, is the foreclosure of indigenous presences, a disavowal that Excoffier and his team share indeed with Keller and Malthus. It seems important to remind these scientists that these locations were not at the edge of human settlement: they were at the edge of European settlement. In this sense, and it is quite an important sense, the very notion of ‘range expansion’ that their work is premised on disavows indigenous people to the point of questioning their actual humanity. The extraordinary persistence of this discourse is significant in itself, a demonstration of the extraordinary resilience of foundational imaginaries pertaining to settler colonial endeavours in settler societies and indeed globally – the very topic of this book. Excoffier and his team’s work, however, also provides an opportunity to similarly reflect on the dissimilarities separating colonialism and settler colonialism. Without this distinction, an analysis of the settler colonial present loses cogency.

As mentioned in the Introduction, a growing body of literature has characterised settler colonial phenomena as ‘distinct’, and called for the establishment of dedicated interpretative tools. ‘Distinct’, however, begs the question: distinct relative to what?⁷ To articulate this distinction, this chapter heuristically suggests that reference to the diverse operation of viral and bacterial phenomena can help in understanding the distinct functioning of colonial and settler colonial modes of domination. While both viruses and bacteria are exogenous elements that often dominate their destination locales, viruses need living cells to operate, while bacteria attach to surfaces and may or may not rely on the organisms they encounter.⁸ Similarly, while both colonisers and settler colonisers are exogenous elements that assert their dominance over their destination locales, a colonial system of relationships, unlike a settler colonial one, is necessarily premised on the presence and subjugation of exploitable ‘Others’.

There is, however, a crucial difference between my approach and that of Excoffier and his team. While they understood this comparison literally, they argue that human reproductive patterns are like those of other life-forms, in my work reference to natural phenomena as a way to understand human processes is strictly limited to its heuristic potential.⁹ These are loaded concepts and a note of caution seems necessary. While I have no particular preference for colonial over settler colonial formations, or for bacteria over viruses (or for other organisms for that matter), in the following pages I do not say that colonisers and settler colonisers are like viruses and bacteria, or that colonialism and settler colonialism should be necessarily understood as diseased conditions. I am also aware of the risk of possibly ‘naturalising’ colonial and settler colonial processes by explaining them with reference to naturally occurring phenomena. I intend to compare separate modalities of operation for the purpose of explanation; the analogy is between two sets of relationships, not between the things themselves. It is like, for example, when ‘revolution’ is used as a term indicating regime change; as this expression’s etymology indicates, it does not mean that political parties are like planets, only that their ascendancy and fall resemble their movement.¹⁰ Likewise, I am suggesting that the different operation of colonial and settler colonial phenomena resembles the different operation of viruses and bacteria, and that they operate in accordance with viral and bacterial logics. Thus, I am not positivistically comparing social processes with dynamics characterising the natural world. This chapter’s purpose is to explore the heuristic potential of a metaphorical approach, and while there is value in an effective heuristic device, I am willing to take the risk.

Colonialism as a viral form

Viruses, imperialism, and colonialism are related. The link between colonial forms and infection was, after all, influentially made by John A. Hobson in Imperialism (1902), which was presented as ‘a study of social pathology’ that does not attempt ‘to disguise the malignancy of the disease’, and ‘proceeds rather by diagnosis than by historical description’.¹¹ Moreover, and not metaphorically, viruses wiped out entire populations in the ‘New World’ and in the Pacific, and aided immensely colonial and indeed settler colonial expansions in the first place.¹² This connection, however, works the other way round as well: ‘diseased’ environments and the ways in which they inevitably shape different colonial formations have also been traditionally used to explain colonial failure. The impossibility of establishing ultimately successful settler societies in tropical settings was and is routinely linked to disease in the context of localised and global comparative analyses.¹³ Why building ‘hill stations’ where Europeans could ‘recreate’ themselves if a debilitating environment is not taken into consideration? As viruses can be used to explain both colonial success and colonial failure the relationship that links viral forms and colonialism should not be neglected.

Viruses first attach to host cells. They then penetrate them. They do not have, however, their own metabolism and require host cells to replicate. Similarly, in the context of a typical slave–master relationship, colonisers need colonised peoples.¹⁴ Some viruses are ‘virulent’ and cause disease; others are latent and allow the host cell to function normally. At times this normalcy is only temporary; indeed, viral infections are characterised by more or less prolonged incubation periods. Likewise, colonial phenomena affect distinct colonised peoples in very different ways. As the most virulent viruses invariably kill their host and are therefore the least durable, the most violent colonial formations (i.e., exacting tribute, raiding, massacring, pillaging and their combination) are also typically primitive and unstable.¹⁵ It is the least visible types of colonial subjection – informal colonialism, trade imperialism, different forms of exogenous cultural hegemony, even ‘crypto-colonialism’ – that have proven most widespread and resilient.¹⁶

Moreover, viruses have a specific and often limited host range, but so do different colonial forms. Most colonial relationships can only be instituted if a number of preconditions are already in place: targeting recognisable indigenous sovereigns allowed the Iberian Conquistadores to conquer complex societies, mercantilist economic extraction prefers highly organised indigenous communities that are not unused to formal tribute systems, trade colonialism only needs to directly control a few trading enclaves but relies on already existing markets and hinterlands, and plantation colonialism needs local or distant collaborators supplying a dependable flow of slaves and other coerced labour, as well as metropolitan consumers of colonial staples.¹⁷ Consequently, for example, while Spanish colonial endeavours in what would become Latin America actually had a quite mixed record of achievement that crucially depended on local conditions (some areas putatively covered by Spanish colonial claims were never effectively subdued), local circumstances also shaped very different patterns of colonial activity in the case of British efforts.¹⁸ That different regions were integrated in different networks of colonial subjection at different times can thus be understood as one result of different colonial forms’ ‘host range’: some areas could only become subjected to colonising metropoles after colonial endeavours had evolved in ways that would allow them to virally penetrate as well as to attach to new areas. Even if he relied on a different metaphor, Eric Wolf’s authoritative insight sustains the notion that colonial phenomena operate in a virus-like manner:

merchants used money and goods bought with money to gain a lien on production, but remained outside the process of production itself. They implanted their circuits of exchange in other modes of deploying social labor, using a mixture of force and sales appeal to obtain collaboration and compliance.¹⁹

‘Implant’ is a key term here, indicating an exogenous influence that does not immediately control processes of material production but begins affecting them until it is able to take over a weakened social body.

Similarly, Donald Denoon’s seminal comparative work on the settler societies of the southern hemisphere was premised on the intuition that Europeans had intentionally avoided the temperate grassland regions ‘whenever they had a choice’ until the early decades of the nineteenth century.²⁰ This realisation echoed Richard Pares’ early exploration of the economics of colonialism, a survey that demonstrated how the territories that would eventually become engulfed in the ‘great land rush’ were actually the least appealing ones from a colonial standpoint.²¹ It is important to note that the areas that would be subject to settler invasion were initially unsuitable for colonial activities. They were for a long time – indeed until the beginning of the nineteenth century – beyond the limit of colonialism’s (metaphorical) ‘host range’. It was technological improvement that expanded the colonial capacity to penetrate locales previously inaccessible and enabled an expanded ‘range’. Organisms stop viral infections from spreading by being diverse. This is why some areas were able to resist colonial incursions: a lack of centralised indigenous political organisation provided protection from a ‘viral’ contagion. Conversely, lack of centralisation exposed indigenous peoples to successive ‘bacterial’ onslaughts.

Viruses can be transmitted vertically, from one generation to the next, or horizontally, through contact or proximity. Likewise, colonial relationships can be reproduced vertically (one is born into colonial subjection; unless the ‘rule of colonial difference’ is subverted, colonised people can only give birth to colonised offspring) and horizontally (through the colonial ‘encounter’ and the resulting subjection of colonised collectives). On the other hand, different viruses can coexist within the same cell. Some viruses, for example, are dependent on the presence of other viruses in the host cell and are called ‘satellites’. Likewise, colonial settings are inevitably complex situations where different colonising agencies operate side by side, and where the very presence of some colonisers and their activities may depend on the enabling presence of other colonisers and their influence. The presence of missions, for example, can benefit from the existence of already established colonial relationships and can in turn enable the institution of regular trading relations.²² Similarly, integration in international markets can precipitate social transformation and often allow the encroachment of yet more colonial forms. The imperial scramble for Africa during the late nineteenth century could be likened to an epidemic that followed centuries of incubation. Like all virulent manifestations, it did not last long.

Generally, organisms have an innate immune system, but there also are adaptive immune systems that produce specific antibodies as a consequence of particular stimuli. Similarly, anticolonial resistance can be entirely autochthonous or result from the interaction between transformations resulting from the presence of colonising agents and indigenous responses.²³ Immune systems...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Settler Colonial Present
• 1. Settler Colonialism is not Colonialism
• 2. Settlers are not Migrants
• 3. Settler Colonialism is not Somewhere Else
• 4. Settler Colonialism is not Finished
• Conclusion: Transcending the Settler Colonial Present
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index