The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism

Edward Cavanagh, Lorenzo Veracini, Edward Cavanagh, Lorenzo Veracini

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134828548
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism examines the global history of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination from ancient times to the present day. It explores the ways in which new polities were established in freshly discovered 'New Worlds', and covers the history of many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Liberia, Algeria, Canada, and the USA.

Chronologically as well as geographically wide-reaching, this volume focuses on an extensive array of topics and regions ranging from settler colonialism in the Neo-Assyrian and Roman empires, to relationships between indigenes and newcomers in New Spain and the early Mexican republic, to the settler-dominated polities of Africa during the twentieth century. Its twenty-nine inter-disciplinary chapters focus on single colonies or on regional developments that straddle the borders of present-day states, on successful settlements that would go on to become powerful settler nations, on failed settler colonies, and on the historiographies of these experiences.

Taking a fundamentally international approach to the topic, this book analyses the varied experiences of settler colonialism in countries around the world. With a synthesizing yet original introduction, this is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of settler colonial studies and will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the global history of imperialism and colonialism.

Part I

Settler colonialism in the ‘Old World’

Introduction to Part I

Edward Cavanagh

Introduction

The chapters collected in this first section demonstrate that many of the expanding polities of the ancient world relied on settler colonialism as a mode of domination. This part opens with the contribution of Mark W. Graham, which tracks the movement of Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans across the Near East and Mediterranean. Multiple sites of settler colonialism are identified here, and the picture is far from simple. As Graham reveals, the settler polities of the ancient world came in all shapes and sizes, and they were connected to central governments, and often each other, in complex ways. These are the contexts that provide us with so much of the modern language of imperialism, though it remains telling that no political qualification equivalent to ‘settler’ is straightforwardly detectable in Greek or Latin. That we do not speak of a ‘settler polis’ or a ‘settler colonia’ suggests, perhaps, that ancient settler colonialism often went without saying.

Even if a similar absence is characteristic of the language of early biblical texts, Pekka Pitkänen suggests in his chapter that several settler colonial narratives can be detected from Genesis to Joshua. These texts depict the history of human interaction in this period of early Judaism as an epic of conquest, annexation, enslavement and possibly genocide. Above all, Pitkänen shows, Ancient Israel presents an example of settler colonialism. Incoming settlers erased indigenous identities and those of their gods and replaced them with their own identity (the Israelites) and their own god (Yahweh).

After the fall of the Roman Empire, fixed European communities gradually came to be organised in a variety of feudal formats. It can be argued that two of the most significant migrations of this period – the Barbarian völkerwanderung and the Islamic occupation of the Iberian peninsula – are instances of settler colonialism, but it is in the wake of these developments that the next chapter resumes the global history of settler colonialism. In his chapter, Patrick O’Flanagan follows the trajectory of ‘the Reconquista’ from what would become Spain and Portugal into the peopled and unpeopled archipelagos of nearby Atlantic Islands during the fifteenth century. O’Flanagan, a historical geographer, argues that the cultural landscapes of settler colonialism in these regions developed in a characteristically Iberian way, which barely resembled the simultaneous movements of settlers from greater England into Ireland.

Ireland is the specific concern of the following chapter by Sean Connolly. English plantations got underway during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Munster, Connacht, Leinster and Ulster, and particularly the latter of these plantations is most exemplary of settler colonialism. Connolly reminds us, however, that this story cannot be told without an understanding of the earlier intrusions, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by those who became known as the ‘Old English’. It is significant, as Connolly points out, that the specific political environment which led to the emergence of this ethnic identifier began to disappear after 1660, as new settlers moved into Ireland seemingly without any need to distinguish between ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Old English’ populations.

It is equally significant that these distinctions became important again in the twentieth-century political context. Engaging both with history and politics and encroaching upon the present day, Stephen Howe’s chapter ties off the ‘Old World’ section of the Handbook by revealing some of the ongoing and unresolved dilemmas that continue to emerge well after the medieval and early modern periods of expansive settlement in Ireland. Ultimately, Howe leaves it up to the reader to decide whether a unique hybrid form of settler colonialism can be identified in Northern Ireland or if there are better ways to explain its twentieth-century history.

1
Settler colonialism from the Neo-Assyrians to the Romans

Mark W. Graham

Now off their harbor there lies a wooded and fertile island not quite close to the land of the Cyclopes, but still not far. It is overrun with wild goats, that breed there in great numbers and are never disturbed by foot of man; for sportsmen – who as a rule will suffer so much hardship in forest or among mountain precipices – do not go there, nor yet again is it ever ploughed or fed down, but it lies a wilderness untilled and unsown from year to year, and has no living thing upon it but only goats…. There is level land for ploughing, and it would always yield heavily at harvest time, for the soil is deep.

Homer, The Odyssey, Book Nine¹

The ancient world – if only through the words we use – informs all modern discussion of colonialism in one way or another. The cognates of colonialism itself and most related terms – empire, imperialism, province, hegemony, govern, etc. – have their ultimate origins in ancient discourse, even if the nineteenth century has shaped our understanding of many of these terms.² A diachronic overview of the ancient world can provide case studies across a particularly large swath of time, revealing a long history to the ways in which two modes of domination, colonialism and settler colonialism, interpenetrate and overlap. This chapter offers a thematic analytical narrative spanning approximately 1,200 years of Near Eastern and Mediterranean history, highlighting major examples of colonialism, settler colonialism and other settler dynamics which should help sharpen distinctions and definitions of the basic framework of this collection. The extent to which various ancient settler communities exhibited specific characteristics of settler colonialism is a major analytical question driving the narrative. Conclusions are often preliminary and even tentative, and the goal is to provoke further study, analysis and discussion within the framework of settler colonial studies.

Settler colonialism is taken here to describe the dynamic by which communities of settlers move out of their original polity and eventually establish a new one elsewhere. For the ancient communities we will encounter in this chapter, large and small, defining original polity can be difficult, as the polities we will encounter are sometimes themselves expansive and come to include and/or engulf communities which had originally been separate or distinct from themselves, even those founded from imperial centers. Amidst the expansive logic of ancient imperialisms, as we will see, experiments in what might be called settler colonialism appear from time to time, and in perhaps unexpected places.³

While empire, as such, can be traced much earlier in Mesopotamia and the Near East, a solid and more or less continuous succession of ancient empires began in the ninth century BC.⁴ By the middle of that century, the Neo-Assyrians had expanded beyond their traditional Assyrian heartland in Mesopotamia to launch what Paul-Alain Beaulieu calls a new sort of ‘imperial idea.’ This idea was expressed in the ‘irreversible fact’ of empire; empire became entrenched ‘so deeply in the political culture of the Near East that no alternative model could successfully challenge it, in fact almost up to the modern era.’⁵ The age of specifically ancient empires arguably stretched into the seventh and eighth centuries AD.⁶ During this long age, some of the world’s most enduring ideas, value systems and institutions arose among those building and, just as importantly if not more so, among those responding to ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean empires. Some of the earliest and most striking examples of colonialism and settler colonialism will, in fact, emerge in direct and indirect response to the formation of large empires rather than, as might be expected, emanate from the imperial centers themselves.

The Neo-Assyrians and the land of Ashur: empire and response

Although they are often remembered simply for cruelty and brutality (‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold …’), the Neo-Assyrians were impressive innovators in many areas – offensive military technology, urban beautification, libraries. They were also apparently one of the first groups in history to deploy a systematic process of settlement and resettlement designed to further an imperial program. Their practice developed alongside a system of ‘elite replacement’, in which the highest level of conquered elites was simply replaced by Neo-Assyrian elites upon conquest. The Neo-Assyrian political dynamic was fairly complex in its outworking, but can be explained briefly for our purposes here.⁷ Below the Assyrian king, who served as the high priest of the chief god Ashur, were elite administrators known as Mâr Banûti or ‘sons of creation’. These elite administrators received from the king conquered lands to administer as royal estates, whose size depended on how much the king wished to honor the specific administrator. The land itself belonged to the king, who was tasked with building Ashur’s kingdom on earth: ‘men and women were invited from every part of my land’, declared the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC) concerning a large banquet he hosted.⁸

As conquered elites were simply replaced with native Neo-Assyrian elites, their land became Assyria, the Land of Ashur. The colonizers, as often, named the land. The large estates on which the elite Assyrians were settled would supply Assyrian troops and laborers. The most successful administrators received further rewards of land and the possibility of attracting and amassing more settlers and soldiers. Nonelite Assyrian settlers (such as farmers, craftsmen, merchants) were attracted to the estates of the upper-level elites as well. The local inhabitants likely continued as an agricultural labor force, as in many later colonial situations.

One innovative Neo-Assyrian method of ‘colonization’ indelibly shaped demographic and settlement patterns of the Near East. The Neo-Assyrians invented a system of deportation and reportation in which a local conquered population would be taken en toto and forcibly settled far from its home, or two distant populations would simply be switched and settled. A recent estimation holds that, in a little over a century toward the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as many as 4.5 million people were thus displaced; 470,000 during the reign of a single king, Sennacherib.⁹ Deportation and reportation settlement underscored the fact that the land no longer belonged to any previous inhabitants; it was Assyria, the Land of Ashur. Practically speaking, this was surely an effective way of keeping revolts down by preventing local groups from defending ancestral lands. It likely functioned as a way of replenishing depopulated lands in order to regularize the imperial food supply. Assyrian families also moved into new areas to take up various administrative and social positions in support of the system – a distinct form of colonialism and settlement, but not settler colonialism as such.

The influence of the Neo-Assyrians within their own context and well beyond was deep and both direct and indirect. One contemporary polity, the Urartian Empire of the ninth through seventh centuries BC, competed with the Neo-Assyrians by essentially adopting many of their techniques.¹⁰ From their own heartland in what is today eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and Armenia, the Urartians expanded, contracted and expanded once again, their high points generally corresponding to Neo-Assyrian weak moments and vice versa. They instituted a similar system of land distribution among their own nobles as well as a system of deportation, furthering this innovative form of colonialism.

Often the responses to empire in the ancient world were longer-lasting and more significant than the direct actions of the empires themselves. The Neo-Assyrians may have unwittingly helped to provoke the first straightforward example of settler colonialism in history. While many smaller entities and kingdoms simply collapsed or disappeared in the face of the Neo-Assyrian rise – polities such as Syria and Israel, for example – one set of city-states from the eastern Mediterranean reacted in a decidedly different and far-reaching way. Phoenicians of the Levant never formed an actual empire, and yet they were arguably the first and certainly one of the most extensive long-distance settler colonizers in history.

The first settler colonists? Phoenicians and Greeks

Long distinguished as sailors and traders during the latter half of the Near Eastern Dark Age (roughly 1200–900 BC) and then into the age of ancient empires to follow, Phoenicians from Levantine city-states such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos responded in part to Neo-Assyrians conquest by forming far-flung colonies and settler colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Their particular motivations were various and seem to have evolved over time.¹¹ The earliest Phoenician colonies (in Cyprus, Cilicia and Crete) seem to have been founded simply for acquiring iron to meet the demands of the growing Neo-Assyrian Empire. Other factors, however, soon came to play critical roles in what appears to be the earliest historical instance of settler colonialism. Colonization intensified as the Neo-Assyrians reached their zenith of power in the Near East, and many Phoenicians simply desired to move beyond the reach of Assyrian armies and tax collectors. As will be seen in many later settler colonial settings, settlers were escaping consolidating sovereigns. Internally, related twin forces of land-hunger and overpopulation likewise fueled Phoenician settler colonialism, both prompted by a major climate change in the tenth and ninth centuries BC which resulted in higher agricultural yields.

Phoenician settler colonialism intensified as settlers escaped Neo-Assyrian imperialism and took advantage of opportunities to help meet Neo-Assyrian demands for raw materials. Importantly, for our purposes, as they moved out from the Le...