Precarious Intimacies in Colonial Economies
Violence and interracial intimacy were intertwined at all levels of the settler colonial encounter and, in equal measures, were fundamental to the shaping of modern settler states. The development of settler colonial cultures was deeply dependent upon the everyday proximity of Indigenous and settler workers, and yet we know surprisingly little of how the intimacies arising from that proximity were intrinsically connected to forms of colonial violence. Inspired by new insights derived from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, this collection sets out to interrogate the nexus between violence and intimacy and to explore their intermixed place in the formation of settler colonial societies around the Pacific Rim. In particular, it charts the precarious intimacies of cross-cultural violence in various Pacific Rim settler economies, and the ways that they both enabled multiple forms of Indigenous dispossession and gave rise to new and complex social relations.
In so doing, the collection aims to move beyond familiar understandings both of ‘intimacy’ as primarily domestic or sexual relations and of ‘colonial economies’ as primarily the domain of labour relations. The notion of intimate empires has been highly influential in reorienting studies of colonial contact, as has scholarship re-evaluating the kinds of intercultural negotiations and accommodations that took place in settler colonial settings.1 Historian Ann Laura Stoler’s incisive observation that intimate and often violent bonds could be by turns ambivalent ‘tense and tender ties’, and that these ties figured influentially ‘in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule’, is a signal cue for this volume.2 Work such as Stoler’s has revealed the key role of the ‘domains of the intimate’ in the consolidation of colonial power. As she asserts, the intimate domain reveals how ‘the categories of difference underlying colonialism—the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer’s rule of the colonized—were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom’.3
Such scholarship has extended analyses of colonial contact and relationships to show how colonial governance and power were strongly inflected by affect and personal connections as well as moulded by policy. It has highlighted the inadequacy of any neat division between public and private realms in explaining the imperial state and its interest in regulating all spheres of life. In particular, scholarship on the intimate empire has been highly influential in re-examining colonial cross-cultural relationships in terms of gender, domesticity, and mixed relationships.4 Yet it also points towards the many ways in which colonial intimacies and cross-cultural proximities developed and evolved through unequal distributions of power far beyond the domains of colonial domestic and sexual life. As scholars have also argued, intimate connections in colonial settings must be understood as being embedded across the wider social and political structures of colonial life.5 They were also central to the performances of friendship and diplomacy—failed, true, or feigned—that over the course of centuries provided a starting point for the colonial endeavour itself.6 The sites of intimacy and violence considered in this volume are as diverse as cross-cultural maritime communities, the pastoral station, the mission, Indigenous cultural spaces, networks of exploration, and the frontier colonial home.
In a similar way, this volume takes an expansive approach to the intimate forms of violence that were embedded in economies of the settler colony. As elaborated in the key work of settler colonial scholars, the distinctive place of settler colonialism within broader histories of colonialism is shaped by the fact that settlers came to stay as founders of a transplanted political and cultural order who ‘carr[ied] their sovereignty with them’.7 Settler colonialism thereby became a transnational phenomenon that took on global scale through its assumed possession of diverse colonial territories.8 While other, exploitative forms of colonialism extracted economic wealth from colonial territories in fixed forms such as mining and labour, settler colonialism extended the jurisdiction of empire outwards through the coterminous processes of permanent settlement and Indigenous replacement and dispossession.
In this respect, Patrick Wolfe has famously argued, settler colonialism has a more enduring and eliminative logic than other forms of colonialism: it was, and remains, a ‘structure’ rather than an ‘event’, for it entails the ongoing alienation of Indigenous peoples from their land, their polities, and their cultures.9 Rather than experiencing the dramatic rupture of decolonization and the move to a postcolonial state that are characteristic of many colonies, settler colonies and their structures of power and dispossession endure today, and are thus marked by their historical continuity. Not only do settlers never go home, but the settler colony is notorious for its ‘ever vanishing endpoint’, as Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun write provocatively.10
Despite such thoroughgoing vectors of dispossession, Indigenous labour was required and was often crucial to the formation of settler colonies and their economic viability. Although for Wolfe the requirement for ‘native labour’ would always be ‘subordinate to territorial acquisition’, he registered the exploitative, gendered, and sexualised nature of colonial conquest and importantly its biopolitical exigencies in nominally ‘white’ settler colonies’, arguing that ‘settler colonization relied on Indigenous labor at every stage and in every site of its development’.11 This collection shows the variegated and strategic importance of Indigenous workers and their agency within the settler colonies in question, through the lens of an always-precarious intimacy that arose from both proximity and gendered relations.
Yet it is also clear that examinations of intimate violence in the settler colony need to account for a wider range of colonial economies of dispossession beyond the economic dynamics of formal labour relations. In addition to colonised people’s labour, the settler colonial world was shaped by the powerful discursive effects of ideological and moral economies that helped structure the nature of colonial relationships. The British historian E.P. Thompson has familiarised the workings of a moral economy through his analysis of group rights that played out in tension with economic forces.12 This understanding, however, has been revisited in recent scholarship to revive a wider conceptual history of moral economy as the ideological forces that underpinned civil society, including economic forces.13 In the nineteenth-century settler colonial world, for instance, a vigorous moral economy circulated through humanitarian calls for the ‘protection’ of Indigenous peoples in ways that sought to mitigate the impacts of the empire but not necessarily threaten its economic development. As work in this volume shows, a counter-moral economy also worked to establish the boundaries of acceptable violence.
Alongside new analyses of the moral economies of colonialism, scholars have also turned to closer exploration of how an economy of colonial knowledge circulated around the British Empire, and have come to understand the exchange of colonial knowledge as another form of imperial and cross-cultural intimacy, well beyond sexuality and family formation.14 Along with people, goods, and new technologies of the industrial era, new economies of colonial knowledge burgeoned around the nineteenth-century Anglophone settler world, influenced by wider colonial market forces and political ideas, absorbing or reinscribing Indigenous knowledge systems and in other ways taking inspiration from them. Likewise, new kinds of domestic economy formed a backbone to colonial political and economic systems, and were infused with emotional economies that traversed these histories. In these ways, the dynamics of broader kinds of colonial economies filtered through all economic settings where labour was required. The range of contexts for cross-cultural exchange considered here, then, include not only those that involved paid, unpaid, or indentured labour, but also the exchange of material culture, language, emotional life, and colonial knowledge in which the working currencies were rather different and sometimes far less tangible than money.
As we know, the mass movement of people worldwide generated by settler colonialism gave rise to new, plural modernities.15 These modernities were frequently defined by exploitative regimes based on the usurping of Indigenous people’s lands, resources, and labour, and resulting in the displacement of their diverse nations and cultures. From the late eighteenth century, Anglophone settlers of the Pacific Rim—including British colonies but also the newly acquired territories of the Pacific coast, to the south and north of North Amercia—secured control over large tracts of Indigenous land, harnessed Indigenous resources, and sometimes articulated entire Indigenous economies for their own use in ways that gave rise to new global commodity markets and economies. In this ‘second empire’, new Pacific Rim colonial cultures were established, built out of the foundations of earlier colonial ventures and existing cross-cultural networks of labour and trade.16 Purportedly free of imperial restrictions, they were distinctively marked by mobility, racial intermarriage, and intercultural exchange.17 They were also marked by coercion, exploitation, and the repression of Indigenous political and legal autonomy. In this respect, settler colonial modernity was grounded both in the violence of dispossession and subjugation, and in the movement and resignification of Indigenous cultures and bodies in new, mixed, and fragile colonial polities. Such relations were shaped by what Damon Salesa terms ‘strategic intimacies’: that is, the importance of managing intimacy in colonial spaces in ways that could yield strategic benefit.18
Through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the global world of empire changed again as settler societies moved to forms of self-government and eventually to nation-state status.19 Key to such developments were questions around the position, role, and treatment of Indigenous peoples in their relationship both to non-Indigenous colonial society and to the apparatuses of state government. These developments gave rise to new, mixed polities that were increasingly regulated through powerful discourses of race, which by the latter part of the nineteenth century became thoroughgoing in their promulgation of ideas of white superiority and of the colonial desire for the realisation of ‘white men’s lands’.20 Colonial violence was deployed at all stages of evolution in settler states of the Pacific Rim, hand in hand with the forces of intercultural proximity. The effects and legacies of intimate exchange and proximate violence structured the character of labour relations, influenced the nature of gendered relationships and cross-cultural domestic lives, and stretched across families, generations, and cultures.21 The effects of violence were always ...