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Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which one population attempts to supplant another by dispossessing them of their land, creating a class relation between the settler population (which owns the land) and the indigenous population (which is being dispossessed). This involves the destruction of the previously-existing society and the annihilation of its people through mass murder, deportation, and/or forced assimilation. Modern examples of settler colonial states include Australia, Canada, South Africa, the Zionist Entity, New Zealand, and the United States as well as states throughout Latin America.[1] The ruling class often uses settler colonialism as a tool to appease disgruntled members of society, allowing them to settle on indigenous land as a concession to prevent revolution.[2][3][4]
Resistance[edit | edit source]
United States[edit | edit source]
The Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa organized a pan-indigenous resistance against settler colonialism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the late 19th century, the Paiute leader Wovoka founded the Ghost Dance movement.[5]
Palestine[edit | edit source]
See main article: Hamas
Zimbabwe[edit | edit source]
In the 1890s, indigenous peoples of Zimbabwe fought against the invading settler-colonial forces of the British South Africa Company's "Pioneer Column" in a series of battles and uprisings, including what is known as the First Chimurenga in 1896.[6] The word "chimurenga" is a Shona word which means rebellion or resistance.[7]
Though these initial uprisings did not ultimately repel the settler forces, the peoples of Zimbabwe continued to resist settler colonialism.[6] Over time, organizations such as the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and their respective military wings were formed to combat the settler regime. As ZANU leader Herbert Chitepo explained in 1973, "No doubt our old people then, our grandfathers in 1893, '94, '95, '96, '97, during those wars, fought gallantly with bows and arrows [...] and they were faced against muskets, they were faced against Maxim guns. And they were defeated. To that day our African people have never accepted that position. Quietly, sometimes, without words, they have continued to look upon that land as theirs, continued to prepare the day, for the day when they must wrest it back into their own control."[7]
The later phase of national liberation struggle in Zimbabwe against the settler regime of "Rhodesia" came to be known as the Second Chimurenga.[6] The Battle of Chinhoyi in 1966 is often regarded as the opening battle of the Second Chimurenga.[6] Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980,[6] although the struggle against imperialism, neocolonialism, and the effects of settler colonial rule and land dispossession have continued.[8][9][10]
Mechanisms[edit | edit source]
Structural genocide[edit | edit source]
A settler colonial entity and the settlers which further its existence engages in various tactics aimed at obtaining and maintaining access and domination over territory, including not only acute episodes of "frontier homicide" and genocidal mass murder targeting the indigenous peoples of that territory but also a broader "logic of elimination" or "structural genocide" consisting of a variety of methods, some of which are less recognized in bourgeois and settler colonial definitions of genocide than others.[11][12] The specific methods by which the indigenous population is faced with structural genocide may change over time or differ by circumstances, with the settler typically attempting multiple and combined forms of elimination against the indigenous peoples of that territory over time.[12] Some examples of methods of "elimination" other than direct physical annihilation include expulsion, segregation, and assimilation.[13]:26
The concept of structural genocide may in some regards be compared to the concept of social murder as described by Friedrich Engels, in which Engels highlighted that when society places masses of individuals "in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death [...] when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live" it constitutes "disguised, malicious murder" in which "no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission."[14] Similarly, structural genocide consists of a variety of methods which attack the existence of indigenous peoples in ways which may, in some cases, disguise the logic of elimination underlying them and instead appear (to some) as a supposedly "natural" phenomenon.[12][14]
Settlers[edit | edit source]
Pressure valve for contradictions in metropole[edit | edit source]
Settler-colonialism is one way in which the ruling class of the imperial core attempts to suppress revolution and relieve internal pressures generated in their society.[3][15][4] One form of this is encouraging the movement of some of the metropole's discontented population to become settlers in a colonial territory. The settler, who was previously (for example) a poor peasant, an unemployed proletarian, or a failed entrepreneur, sees a chance to raise their standard of living and/or their social status in the colonial territory. The prospect of land ownership, of employment, of special benefits awarded to settlers by the colonial administration, of the chance to start a business, of a cheaper cost of living, of a raised social status, or even the idea of a supposed "adventure"[16][17] or a supposed identity-affirming experience[18][19] are among some of the various points which are promoted to settlers to draw them to colonial territories.[3]
One declaration by Angola's UPA issued in 1960 described the dynamic of Portuguese settlers in Angola as follows: "For years the Portuguese colonialist policy has been to send to Angola all the poverty stricken, the failures from the metropolitan areas, and the poor and illiterate peasant families of Portugal in order to establish them as colonists on this land wrested from the native peoples. [...] To reduce the number of unemployed Portuguese, the colonial administration grants them a monopoly over all kinds of labour". As the declaration describes, Portuguese settlers gained exclusive access to certain jobs and higher pay while Africans were forced to work for low pay in subordinate or unskilled positions, as well as being pressed into a form of slave labor when unable to find work.[20]
Herbert Chitepo, a leader in Zimbabwe's national liberation struggle, highlighted the motivations and living standards of the post-WWII cohort of white settlers in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, summarizing that they were essentially seeking fortune, status, ease, and comfort: "they left England after it had been war-torn, they left Europe after the war, to seek greater opportunities, to seek more fortunes, more money, more status in society which they couldn't even have got in their own country. In short, what they were seeking is comfort. Big homes, servants, large salaries, an economy that made life easy for them."[7] Similarly, a 1977 article in The Atlantic quotes a "Rhodesian" journalist who described the life of the "average white Rhodesian" as "idyllic" and emphasized "In America you clean your own shoes. Not here. In Rhodesia, your wife is not cleaning your clothes, cooking your meals. The black man is. He brings you breakfast in bed. [...] You've got someone to look after the garden, someone else to take care of the swimming pool." The journalist concludes, "Nobody wants to give this up. It's bloody paradise on earth."[21]
Another form by which the ruling class has attempted to relieve internal pressures of the metropole was via systems of penal transportation in which individuals convicted of crimes in the metropole would be sent to colonial territories, often to serve out their sentence by doing convict labor, bolstering the labor available to private settlers or to the colonial authority, depending on the colony's practices for distributing convict labor. Such systems varied over time as well as by the specific legal systems of each colonial power, with some transported convicts living in closely-guarded prisons while others were able to own property and work relatively freely and even be given land grants and their own access to convict labor after their own sentence was completed.[22][23]
Invasion, terror, and occupation force[edit | edit source]
The so-called "frontiersmen" or "pioneers" or "homesteaders" of settlement serve as an initial force to surveil, invade, terrorize, displace, murder, and steal from the original indigenous inhabitants of a place in their process of "settling" the land, on which they then become an occupying force. As Mohamed Adhikari explains in Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, "civilian-driven violence" is inherent in settler colonial frontier relations and in settler society even after the occupation has become more established:
Because settler colonialism is predicated on the invasion and expropriation of foreign land by largely civilian populations, civilian-driven violence against Indigenous peoples has always been congenital to frontier relations, and intrinsic to settler society after the closing of the frontier. [...] In many settler colonies, the destruction of Indigenous societies was clearly genocidal and the violence perpetrated by civilians, especially settlers, a primary contributor to Indigenous social erasure. In most settler colonies, especially where frontier conflict radicalised into genocide — in places as far apart as Queensland, the Cape Colony, California and Tierra del Fuego — the historical record is littered with calls from civilian sectors of the population for the extermination of indigenes.[13]:18-19
Adhikari emphasizes that settler violence continues after the initial invasion phase has moved into the occupation phase, and that violence and constant threats of violence by individual settlers and the settler state against the indigenous population become institutionalized in settler society. This takes a variety of forms, including continued mass atrocities, but also forms such as child confiscation, incarceration, economic exclusion, cultural suppression, and deliberate deprivation of basic needs.[13]:31 Regarding the settler society's ongoing drive to continue its "work of conquest", Adhikari observes, "in settler societies the ‘work of conquest’ continues for as long as there are Indigenous survivors, and even when there are no longer any survivors left. One suspects that for as long as a settler consciousness exists there will always be a need for discursive and symbolic ‘elimination of the native’, indigenisation of the settler and reinforcement of settler claims to the land."[13]:30-31
In addition to settlers' acts of ethnic cleansing, physical "settlement", or occupation, of the land by settlers contributes to the reduction of the land base of the indigenous peoples, contributing to the strategic diminishment of indigenous nations' sovereignty.[24][25] As observed in a 2024 study on the colonization of Turtle Island, particularly on the expanding wave of settler occupation that occurred in what is now the "US" from 1900-1930, encouragement of rapid settlement and physical occupation by settlers was a mechanism for complicating any attempt by indigenous peoples to physically reclaim their stolen lands, as physical occupation of the land by settlers entailed a disruption of indigenous uses of the land, disruption of indigenous infrastructure, a transformation of the land by construction of settler society's infrastructure, and created a "vested political interests in maintaining non-native settlement". The researchers assert that this was calculated not only to solidify the "enormous and questionable land transfers that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century" regardless of any resulting legal battles that would arise from such blatant theft, as well as to prevent the "rekindling" indigenous peoples' "embers of sovereignty".[24][25]
Such efforts to steal land and remove indigenous populations often start out or else come to be officially boosted, authorized, or streamlined by the colonial power, whether that is the original colonizing power which started the colonizing endeavor, another colonial power which has stepped in, or a settler colony which has split from its original sponsor. Examples of settlement officially backed by a colonizing government include the United States' Indian Removal Act[26] and Homestead Acts which promoted rapid expansion of the settler colonial entity across Turtle Island,[27] or the Zionist entity's official backing of various settlement endeavors in Palestine.[28][29] In some cases, the colonizing power may disingenuously put on a disapproving facade toward "pioneer" settlement outside of whatever it considers its current borders to be, employing plausible deniability and a veneer of criticism, later following this up with a formalization of the occupation by bringing it under official administration.[28][29]
"Frontier" settlement may occasionally be at actual odds with the colonizing entity's short-term goals or geopolitical concerns, though this does not mean the colonizer is opposed in principle to settler-colonialism or to expansion of the colonial entity. For example, the settler-colonial USA's leader George Washington had claimed ownership over large tracts of land to the west of the USA's supposed territory at the time, and he regarded frontiersmen on that land as criminal trespassers and squatters who would endanger the value of his real estate, as it could only hold its value if he could control its sale and settlement.[30] On top of this, frontiersmen's activities could potentially draw the USA unprepared into unfavorable conflicts with indigenous nations of the region and with competing colonial powers, or the frontiersmen could themselves attack the USA. Though Washington, who ruled over a settler-colonial entity, was not opposed to the concept of settlement and expansion entirely, this represents an example of a case where the colonial power might temporarily express some self-interested antagonism toward some particular frontier settlement activity.[30] This attitude may be contrasted with the USA's later adoption of the Indian Removal Act[26] and the Homestead Acts which strongly promoted settlement expansion and under which ensued a period where white squatters were accommodated to become homesteaders without penalty, while indigenous peoples were forced and terrorized off of their lands.[27]
Source of tax revenue for metropole[edit | edit source]
While settlers are a key agent in the seizing and occupying of land and taking its resources, another function which they serve for the metropole or colonizing entity is to be a source of tax revenue. For example, the British South Africa Company which colonized Zimbabwe was not primarily interested in mining and selling Zimbabwe's minerals themselves but instead in attracting settlers to become prospectors, whom they would then tax by having the settlers pay royalties on all mined minerals.[31] Another example is the tax on mining operations in Spanish colonies, the "royal fifth" or quinto real, which required 20% of the profits from all mining operations to go to the Spanish crown, one of its major sources of revenue derived from colonization.[32]
It should be noted that colonial projects also have a tendency to tax the indigenous peoples in the occupied region, though in many cases the purpose and form of taxes levied on the indigenous population often differs in some regards. Taxes on the colonized population often serve mainly the purpose of forcing that population to participate in the colonial economy. For example, in cases where the population is able to sustain themselves through their own economy and subsistence methods, introducing a tax on them creates a requirement for them to obtain money or else face further persecution and violence by the colonial state, having the effect of forced proletarianization (or in some cases, near or total enslavement) with the dual purpose of providing laborers to settler enterprises as well as siphoning away the labor base of the indigenous economy, promoting its weakening and collapse. In many colonies this took the form of what is called the "hut tax".[33][34]
Fraudulent and broken agreements[edit | edit source]
Settler-colonialism, as well as colonialism and neocolonialism more broadly, has been accompanied by a variety of fraudulent agreements, contracts, and treaties created by colonizers (whether on behalf of individuals, corporations, or states) as well as a multitude of mutual agreements, contracts, and treaties which the colonizing entity has later unilaterally broken,[35] or re-interpreted and weaponized, or in some cases never formally adopted despite leaving an impression that it was.[36]
The content and nature of a particular agreement, contract, or treaty will be particular to the context under which it was formed and how it has been utilized or interpreted since. However, an overall pattern on the part of the colonizer is the use of lawfare, coercion, and deception in order to achieve further primitive accumulation, forced removals and elimination of indigenous peoples, and entrenchment of colonization, including the further advance of settlers in the case of settler-colonization.[35][37][38][39]
In some cases, a colonizing entity may tactically agree to a treaty with an indigenous nation or nations when not in a favorable position to launch a war or land grab.[30] In many cases, the function of an agreement document from the colonizer's point of view is to fulfill a formality within the colonizer's own legal framework or belief system, providing a veneer of legality and permission and creating plausible deniability for whatever may ensue.[40][38]
Displacement[edit | edit source]
Reservation systems[edit | edit source]
Land allotment[edit | edit source]
Allotment refers to the breaking up of communally held lands into individual, alienable parcels of land, imposing a model of individual land tenure.[41] The process of allotment can be intertwined with various other mechanisms of settler-colonial entrenchment. For example, the 1887 Dawes Act created by the "United States" government not only parceled land held by indigenous nations, but also stipulated adoption of so-called "habits of civilized life" in order for individuals to (supposedly) gain legal protection[42] and ended up stripping over 90 million acres of tribal land and selling it to settlers, as any remaining tribal lands after allotments were made were declared "surplus" land and sold to settlers. Via allotment, the Dawes Act ultimately promoted land transfer to settlers, assimilation of indigenous peoples, erosion of social cohesion among indigenous nations, and disruption of indigenous land use and access.[43]
In some regards, allotment may be compared to the enclosure of the commons which occurred in England and later in other parts of Europe, notably accelerating in England from 1450 to 1640 and again from 1750 to 1860,[44] though the specific motivations, unique impacts, and interrelationship of each must be taken into account. The history, ideology, and effects of the enclosure of the commons in England informed the approach regarding property in British colonial endeavors throughout the world, including in its settler colonies. As noted in a 2022 study of enclosure, "Through its empire, the British belief in enclosure defined the land-use practices of half the arable world."[45]
Race[edit | edit source]
The pseudo-scientific concept of race in its various manifestations has been a common idea accompanying the establishment, organization, and maintenance of settler-colonial societies as well as of colonial endeavors more broadly, influencing the form and rhetorical justifications of a variety of settler-colonial institutions and practices.[46][47][48][49] Racial theories have included concepts of racial superiority/inferiority (for example, the idea of supposed white supremacy), have been part of the rationalization and enforcement of caste and apartheid systems and genocide campaigns, and can also serve to collapse, delegitimize, and obscure the identities of various nations into a supposed "race" or "races" as defined by the colonizer.[46]
It may be noted that modern idea of race developed largely in Spain during the 1400s, out of the historical context of the Crusades and during the Spanish Inquisition and the rise of Spanish (and Portuguese) involvement in the slave trade in Africa.[48][49] A focus on the notion of supposed purity/cleanliness of blood (Spanish: limpieza de sangre) arose as a rationalization of the ongoing suspicion and scapegoating of "new Christians" with Jewish or Muslim ancestry who faced various legal limitations and persecutions and were required to prove four generations of affiliation with Christianity due to the "perverse lineage" of their "blood".[49][48] Europeans continued to develop racial theories which were employed in justifications of colonialism and slavery[48] and the Spanish concept of supposed "blood purity" came to refer not just to an absence of Jewish or Muslim ancestry but also an absence of black ancestry.[49] Spanish colonizers in the Americas were required by the Spanish crown to prove their supposed blood purity and this was also adopted by the Portuguese in Brazil.[49] Meanwhile the British had been influenced by these ideas of race as well as combining it with their own ideas developed while colonizing Ireland.[48]
Assimilation[edit | edit source]
While processes of adaptation, acculturation, and exchange between societies is a common feature of human history, in the context of settler-colonialism and structural genocide, assimilation has generally consisted of the attempted forced assimilation of indigenous peoples into the settler's chauvinist and idealized notion of their own "civilization" and/or their supposedly superior culture or supposed "race". Whether conducted with outright contempt or disregard for the indigenous societies and peoples, or conducted with a paternalistic, supposedly progressive or humanitarian aim, the underlying logic of elimination found in settler-colonialism ultimately promotes to varying degrees the destruction and erasure of indigenous national, cultural, and physical existence in order to subjugate or eliminate indigenous peoples as a threat to settler domination.[50]
A non-exhaustive list of colonial assimilation policies includes forms such as: forced religious "conversion",[12] forced labor,[51][52] the kidnapping of children,[53] abuse and torture in school systems,[52] racialization and monitoring of genetics and phenotype,[54][55] coercion into settler society's hegemonic notions of gender and sexuality,[56] imposition of dietary changes,[57] strict regulation of language, dress, and behavior,[52] dismantling of indigenous economic and political systems, erasure of traditional knowledge and ways of life, and numerous other stipulations.[12]
In Mexico, the idea of the "cosmic race" or "fifth race" was promoted by figures such as the eugenicist José Vasconcelos. This concept is sometimes romanticized and portrayed as progressive "embrace" of indigeneity,[50]:2 yet, as one analysis points out, "mestizaje is a project of elimination under the logics of elimination in settler-colonial theory that can be better understood as cultural genocide of indigenous peoples in Mexico"[50]:ii, that "[Vasconcelos's] vision of mestizaje centered whiteness and Europeanization",[50]:2 and that "The new mestizaje project aimed to assimilate and culturally kill indigenous peoples to eliminate them as an obstacle to the state", with the Mexican state co-opting indigeneity in order to rupture indigenous peoples' claims as unique peoples and thereby to eliminate their claims to their lands.[50]:4-5
Apartheid[edit | edit source]
See also[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ “The logics of dispossession and elimination, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects.”
M. Bianet Castellanos (2017). Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America, vol. 69, No. 4. American Quarterly. - ↑ Stephen Gowans (2018). Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom: 'Imperialism' (p. 54). [PDF] Montreal: Baraka Books. ISBN 9781771861427 [LG]
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 “But Algeria wasn’t just where a repressive military machine made its figurative and literal bones. It wasn’t just a place to send political exiles. It was also where France’s Second Republic (1848–1852) wanted to export the unemployed and turn them into settlers, thereby neutralizing dissent in the metropole. “Colonization promised to simultaneously satisfy workers’ demands for employment and ally these worries [of the political threat of poverty and unemployment],” writes Sessions.”
Matthew Wills (2023-11-12). "What Are Colonies For? France and Algeria, 1848" JSTOR Daily. - ↑ 4.0 4.1 “The journalist, Stead, relates the following remarks uttered by his close friend Cecil Rhodes, in 1895, regarding his imperialist ideas:
“I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread,” “bread,” “bread,” and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”
This is what Cecil Rhodes, millionaire, king of finance, the man who was mainly responsible for the Boer War, said in 1895.”
Vladimir Lenin (1916). Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: 'The division of the world among the great powers'. - ↑ Nodrada (2021-05-19). "Decolonization and Communism" Orinoco Tribune. Archived from the original on 2022-06-06. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 "History of Zimbabwe". Official Government of Zimbabwe Web Portal.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Herbert Chitepo. Herbert Chitepo at the National Press Club (ca. 1973). YouTube.
- ↑ Michelina Andreucci (2019-04-17). "ESAP and the West’s double standards" The Patriot.
- ↑ Gregory Elich and Sam Moyo (2009-01-02). "Reclaiming the Land: Land Reform and Agricultural Development in Zimbabwe: An Interview with Sam Moyo" MR Online.
- ↑ George T. Mudimu and Gregory Elich. "The Dynamics of Rural Capitalist Accumulation in Post-Land Reform Zimbabwe" MR Online.
- ↑ “Why, then, logic of elimination rather than genocide? As stated at the outset, settler colonialism is a specific social formation and it is desirable to retain that specificity. [...] [The logic of elimination], in its specificity to settler colonialism, is premised on the securing—the obtaining and the maintaining—of territory. This logic certainly requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way. To this extent, it is a larger category than genocide. [...] When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. [...] How, then, when elimination manifests as genocide, are we to retain the specificity of settler colonialism without downplaying its impact by resorting to a qualified genocide? I suggest that the term “structural genocide” avoids the questions of degree—and, therefore, of hierarchy among victims—that are entailed in qualified genocides, while retaining settler colonialism’s structural induration”
Patrick Wolfe (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. [PDF] Journal of Genocide Research. doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240 [HUB] - ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 “The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. [...] as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. [...] the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others.”
Patrick Wolfe (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. [PDF] doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240 [HUB] - ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Mohamed Adhikari (2021). Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies: 'Chapter One: ‘No Savage Shall Inherit the Land’: Civilian-driven Violence in the Making of Settler Genocides'. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-003-01555-0
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Friedrich Engels. The conditions of the working class in England. Marxists Internet Archive.
- ↑ Jennifer E. Sessions (2015). Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the French Revolution of 1848. The Politics of Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Spring 2015), vol.Vol. 33, No. 1. French Politics, Culture & Society.
- ↑ “While I was mining for gold in Arizona, my attention was vigorously caught by the personality of Cecil Rhodes. [...] Thrilled to the core of my being, I was as one summoned by an irresistible call, and I determined to go to Africa and cast my fortune with this unknown leader who so constantly fired my imagination. I believed that my knowledge of scouting, gained on the American frontier and in fighting Indians, could be made of value to him. [...] After a great storm, ridden out by the help of oil bags, we neared the coast of Africa, toward which all eyes were strained. I was the first to sight land. How I had longed for this moment! Here at last, after years of striving and many defeats, lay the kingdom of my heart's desire before my eyes! Its dream shores stretched before me, inviting exploration of the unknown. However the adventure might end, I felt I could die content. Those who know me intimately will understand why I was more thrilled by the first low, sandy dunes of Africa than by all the wonders of Europe. The lure of this oldest yet newest of lands had held me in thrall for many years.”
Frederick Russel Burnham (1926). Scouting on Two Continents (pp. 80-88). - ↑ “For more than a hundred years, Americans have been attracted to Rhodesia. [...] For Americans, Rhodesia offered limitless freedom and the challenge of an open frontier, as well as the excitement of the chase. There was also the lure of gold. Several Americans served with distinction in the Pioneer Column.”
Bernadine Bailey (1973). Rhodesia in Pictures (p. 28). - ↑ “Another important book set in German South West Africa was Verschüttete Volksseele: Nach Berichten aus Südwestafrika (The Buried Folk Soul: Reports from South-West Africa). It was the work of Dr Mathilde Ludendorff, the mystic philosopher and wife of General Erich Ludendorff—the man who had been one of the driving forces behind schemes for German settlement in Poland, the Baltic and the Ukrainian Crimea during World War I. Verschüttete Volksseele was based on a collection of letters from settlers in German South-West Africa that had been collated by Mathilde Ludendorff over several years. It painted the settler society, as it had existed in German South-West Africa just before World War I, as one in which the settlers had discovered their true German identity.”
Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga (2010). The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism: 'A People Without Space'. - ↑ “Since 1999, the organization Birthright Israel has offered all-expenses-paid trips to Israel to Jewish people around the world between the ages of 18 and 26. [...] The organization, funded by both the Israeli government and individual donors, “seeks to ensure the future of the Jewish people by strengthening Jewish identity, Jewish communities, and connection with Israel,” according to its website. [...] “I came out of the trip with a renewed sense of identity,” wrote student Ali Senal of her Birthright trip, “and, even more shockingly, I had decided to move to Israel when I graduate in two years.””
Leila Ettachfini (2019-08-15). "What Is Birthright and Why Is It So Controversial?" Vice News. - ↑ “For years the Portuguese colonialist policy has been to send to Angola all the poverty stricken, the failures from the metropolitan areas, and the poor and illiterate peasant families of Portugal in order to establish them as colonists on this land wrested from the native peoples. As a result, the natives, to whom the land rightfully belongs, know only the blackest misery.
The influx of peasants has brought competition between Portuguese and African workers. To reduce the number of unemployed Portuguese, the colonial administration grants them a monopoly over all kinds of labour; taxi drivers, waiters in hotels and restaurants, street sweepers, clerks in shops - all such occupations are reserved for Portuguese workers. In construction work, the foremen and artisans are all Portuguese, while only the unskilled labour is left to the Africans. Because of this gross discrimination, the Portuguese labourers are better paid and enjoy all the social advantages that are denied to their African colleagues.
All the Africans who fail to find work, either in the cities or in the country, are recruited with or without their consent as contratados. Thus, it is that today, in spite of the abolition of forced labour by the International Labour Conference held at Geneva in 1931, Portuguese colonialism upholds a slave economy, of which Angola is an outstanding example.”
Aquino de Bragança and Immanuel Wallerstein (1982). The African Liberation Reader, Volume 1: The Anatomy of Colonialism: 'Portuguese Settlement in Angola (1960)'. [PDF] - ↑ Joseph B. Treaster (1977). "Twilight in White Rhodesia" The Atlantic.
- ↑ “In many ways convicts in early colonial Australia were surprisingly free. Contrary to British law, convicts could hold property, use the courts, and generally function as citizens (Kercher, 1995). [...] In the first three decades of settlement it was also common to provide former convicts freedom dues meaning land grants and their own access to convict labour, mirroring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic practice. In some North American colonies time-expired indentured servants were provided with blocks of land of between twenty and eighty acres (Ekirch, 1990). Archaeological evidence suggests that the communities of serving and former convicts living in Sydney’s Rocks district enjoyed a higher standard of living than working-class Britons. They ate a diet that was richer in protein and some possessed Chinese imported porcelain and other luxury items (Karskens, 1999).”
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Emma Watkins. "Transportation" Digital Panopticon. Archived from the original on 2025-08-15. - ↑ “Most assigned convicts worked without restraint and were for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from other members of the colonial lower orders.”
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Emma Watkins. "Transportation" Digital Panopticon. Archived from the original on 2025-08-15. - ↑ 24.0 24.1 “[W]hy would the state be interested in allowing homesteaders on these lands rather than cash entrants? [...] The answer is found in the signature characteristic of homesteading: occupation by actual settlers. Settler occupation disrupted tribal land uses, physical development, and infrastructure; it also created vested political interests in maintaining non-native settlement. These irreversible effects of settlement meant that even a future legal loss could only result in a payment to tribes, not the return of the land. This reduction of the tribal land base furthered federal efforts to continually diminish tribes’ sovereignty, which was inextricably linked to their ownership of the lands that comprised their territories (Carlos, Feir, and Redish Reference Carlos, Feir and Redish2022). By using homesteading to occupy these particular lands, any legal threats against dispossession became moot; any future court settlement effectively became a forced sale of the land.Footnote 15 Thus, the federal state strategically allowed homesteading to continue in order to solidify the transfer of lands away from tribes. This strategy complemented the various political forces that wanted lands to remain in the hands of non-native settlers.”
Douglas W. Allen and Bryan Leonard (2024). Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation, vol. 119. American Political Science Review. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001466 [HUB] - ↑ 25.0 25.1 “We claim that the value of homesteading to the federal government always came from one key feature: homesteaders had to live on the land. When land was occupied, homes and barns were built, roads and stores arose, a certain type of development took place, and eventually population growth and cities made “going back” impossible. In the words of Justice Ginsburg, this would “…preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.””
Douglas W. Allen and Bryan Leonard (2024). Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation. American Political Science Review. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001466 [HUB] - ↑ 26.0 26.1 “The American Indian Removal policy of President Andrew Jackson was prompted by the desire of White settlers in the South to expand into lands belonging to five Indigenous tribes. After Jackson succeeded in pushing the Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830, the U.S. government spent nearly 30 years forcing Indigenous peoples to move westward, beyond the Mississippi River.”
Robert McNamara (2025-05-06). "American Indian Removal Policy and the Trail of Tears" ThoughtCo. - ↑ 27.0 27.1 Douglas W. Allen and Bryan Leonard (2024). Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation, vol. 119. American Political Science Review. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001466 [HUB]
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 “In 56 years, Israel has built well over 100 settlements scattered across the West Bank. Settlers also have built scores of tiny unauthorized outposts that are tolerated or even encouraged by the government. Some are later legalized.”
Caleb Diehl and Joseph Federman (2024-07-06). "A look at how settlements have grown in the West Bank over the years" AP News. - ↑ 29.0 29.1 “While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law and by much of the international community, Israel distinguishes settlements it has authorized from those it hasn’t. The vast majority of settlements are built by government order, but some unauthorized settlements, known as settlement outposts, have been established by ideologically- driven Israeli civilians with the hope that they will one day be authorized by the government. Israel occasionally cracks down on them, but it often retroactively legalizes them once they grow into communities.”
Abbas Al Lawati (2024-02-02). "Who are Israeli settlers and why are they so controversial?" CNN. - ↑ 30.0 30.1 30.2 Daniel Immerwahr (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States: 'The Fall and Rise of Daniel Boone'.
- ↑ “The Company itself was not interested in prospecting for and mining the sought after minerals. Rather, the company recruited European immigrants, or settlers, as they were called, to move to Zimbabwe to prospect for and mine minerals. To attract European settlers the BSAC publicized reports of the potential mineral wealth of Zimbabwe and promised each settler 15 mining claims and large tracks of land (3,175 acres per settler) on which to prospect for minerals. Minerals found and mined by the settlers would belong to them, but they would have to have to pay royalties (taxes) to the Company on all mined minerals.”
"The Land Question". Exploring Africa (African Studies Center, Michigan State University). Archived from the original on 2024-12-03. - ↑ James S. Olson (1992). Historical dictionary of the Spanish Empire, 1402-1975: 'QUINTO (p. 507); REVENUE (p. 517)' (pp. 507-517). Greenwood Press.
- ↑ “Often the drive to collect hut and [poll] tax was a thinly-veiled prolongation of the aggression of conquest, involving hut-burning, the seizing of cattle and snatching of women. [...] German East Africa was a typical colonial situation in which taxes were imposed on Africans not so much for the revenue which resulted but as a means of propelling them into the labor market and the money economy, and thereby drawing off the surplus.”
Walter Rodney (1974). The political economy of colonial Tanganyika, 1890-1939 (pp. 4-5). [PDF] United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP). - ↑ “Beginning as early as 1896 the BSAC exacted a tax on each house in every village (the tax was referred to as a “hut” tax). Each village chief or headman was expected to collect the tax from the families that occupied the houses. Zimbabweans were not allowed to pay the tax in kind, that is in items they produced (crops, cattle, metal tools, etc.), but were required to pay the tax in British currency. Some Zimbabweans were able to raise money to pay the tax through selling agricultural products that they produced, but many were forced to “sell” their labor to European settlers to earn money with which they could pay their taxes.”
"The Land Question". Exploring Africa (African Studies Center, Michigan State University). Archived from the original on 2024-12-03. - ↑ 35.0 35.1 “Treaties, and the U.S. government’s history of unilaterally breaching them, have had a profound effect on Native people. To be blunt, we were lied to. Treaties were used as a ruse to coax tribes out of defending their territory and to steal Native lands and resources.”
Ruth Hopkins (2019-11-12). "Treaties Between the United States and Indigenous Nations, Explained" Teen Vogue. Archived from the original on 2025-09-22. - ↑ “The mandate from the federal government was to get tribes to forfeit all their land claims west of the Cascades and move to reservations further east. The tribes would be compensated in various ways. [...] "What happened to the tribes quite often is that they thought they had a binding agreement. … They perhaps moved to the restricted area they had agreed to. And then money never came from the Congress because the treaty was not ratified."”
Eric Cain and John Rosman (2017-03-21). "Broken Treaties: An Oral History Tracing Oregon’s Native Population" Oregon Public Broadcasting. Archived from the original on 2025-06-23. - ↑ “[T]he substance of the deal was this: Fredericks would sell to Lüderitz a strip of coastal land stretching from the Orange River in the south up to a latitude of twenty-six degrees in the north. For this Joseph Fredericks and his people would receive £500 and sixty Wesley-Richards rifles. The treaty defined the coastal strip as a ribbon of land twenty 'geographical miles' in width. This 'geographical mile' was a German measurement that will have meant nothing to Fredericks, but is almost five times the distance of a normal (or English) mile. Fredericks had been tricked into selling off the bulk of his people's land. In a letter to Vogelsang, Lüderitz ordered his agent to 'Let Josef Fredericks believe for the time being that the reference is to 20 English miles'.13 So outrageous was this second treaty that a later German administrator was dispatched to investigate it, but he died on his way back to Germany and the Bethanie Nama lost their land for ever.”
Casper Erichsen and David Olusoga (2010). The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. - ↑ 38.0 38.1 “In 1888, representatives from Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company induced Lobengula, king of the Ndebele people, to sign an agreement allowing the company to mine gold. This agreement granted the company “the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals” in the region, as well as “full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same,” which the company was to interpret as permission to seize land. Unable to read the document he had signed, a dismayed King Lobengula sent a protest letter to Queen Victoria in which he objected that British negotiators deliberately misled him. “A document was written and presented to me for signature. I asked what it contained, and was told that in it were my words and the words of those men. I put my hand to it. About three months afterwards, I heard from other sources that I had given by that document the right to all minerals of my country.” Lobengula declared that he would “not recognize the paper, as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it.” The unsympathetic response from the Queen’s Advisor to Lobengula was that it was “impossible to exclude white men.””
Gregory Elich (2002-08-26). "Zimbabwe Under Siege" - ↑ “The Washington administration, unable to either ignore or dislodge the Cherokees, had signed a treaty with them [...] In 1828 the state of Georgia declared the Cherokee constitution invalid and demanded the Cherokees’ land. President Andrew Jackson approved. An Indian nation “would not be countenanced,” he declared. The Cherokees must either submit to Georgia’s authority or head west, to the territories. [...] The Supreme Court declared Georgia’s actions unconstitutional. But high-court rulings meant little in the face of the squatter onslaught. Cherokee landowners watched with alarm as Georgia divided the Cherokee Nation into parcels and started distributing it to whites by lottery. [...] Much of this was plainly illegal, but the Cherokees had little recourse. The secretary of war advised them that the only solution was “removal beyond the Mississippi” to the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase.”
Daniel Immerwahr (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. - ↑ “The Doctrine of Discovery deprived the Native Peoples of the Americas of their land in the colonial era, was recognized as legitimate by the United States Supreme Court in 1823, and remains on the law books in the present day despite being repudiated by Pope Francis in March of 2023 and challenged by modern-day legal scholars. The Land Back Movement, initiated and led by Native Peoples of North America, is presently challenging the legality and morality of the Doctrine which, even though recognized as unjust and racist, still informs the policies of Canada and the United States in their recognition of Native American land rights. [...] The Doctrine of Discovery not only justified the appropriation of the lands of non-Christians but also of their persons, condemning them to "perpetual slavery" as "enemies of Christ." Its first appearance was in the papal bull known as Dum Diversas ("Until Different") issued by Pope Nicholas V on 18 June 1452 to Alfonso V of Portugal to validate his appropriation of regions in West Africa. [...] The Doctrine of Discovery is rarely mentioned today in conversations concerning the land rights of indigenous peoples because it is so blatantly racist, unjust, and immoral, but it continues to inform the policies of Canada and the United States (as well as Australia and New Zealand) regarding the return of lands appropriated from the indigenous people.”
Joshua J. Mark (2023-10-11). "Doctrine of Discovery" World History Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2025-09-12. - ↑ "Allotment and Assimilation Era". Equality Before the Law. Retrieved 2025-11-23.
- ↑ "Dawes Act (1887)". Equality Before the Law. Retrieved 2025-11-23.
- ↑ "The Dawes Act". National Park Service. Archived from the original on 2025-09-24.
- ↑ “In England the movement for enclosure began in the 12th century and proceeded rapidly in the period 1450–1640, when the purpose was mainly to increase the amount of full-time pasturage available to manorial lords. Much enclosure also occurred in the period from 1750 to 1860, when it was done for the sake of agricultural efficiency. By the end of the 19th century the process of the enclosure of common lands in England was virtually complete.”
Britannica Editors. "Enclosure" Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 2025-07-15. Retrieved 2025-11-23. - ↑ Enclosing the English Commons: Property, Productivity and the Making of Modern Capitalism (2022). Global History of Capitalism: Case Study Series. University of Oxford.
- ↑ 46.0 46.1 “[P]eople of color have been racialized in ways that facilitate strategies intended to eliminate them, physically and conceptually, to exploit their labor, to contain and control them, and to force them into an assimilationist paradigm that nullifies their extant identities, thereby preempting them from exercising their inherent right to self-determination. This is why structural racism cannot and will not be eliminated if its colonial foundations are not recognized. [...] The dominant narrative attempts to transform hundreds of sovereign nations into “a race,” and then to racialize Indigenous people as inherently backward or—at best—ecologically conscious holdovers from a bygone era. The focus on “race” facilitates the incorporation of Indigenous peoples into a minority rights framework that presumes the legitimacy of the settler state and undermines their right to self-determination. [...] More generally, the racialization of Indigenous peoples as other than human, as uncivilized and always a potential threat, has facilitated the colonizers’ many attempts to “disappear” those whose very existence calls the legitimacy of settler sovereignty into question.”
Natsu Taylor Saito (2020). Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists (pp. 54-60). NYU Press. - ↑ "Book traces history of racism, race-based pseudoscience" (2015-01-27). Washington University in St. Louis.
- ↑ 48.0 48.1 48.2 48.3 48.4 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: 'Culture of Conquest; White Supremacy and Class'.
- ↑ 49.0 49.1 49.2 49.3 49.4 Jeffrey Gorsky (2016-12-22). "How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain" Atlas Obscura. Archived from the original on 2025-12-02.
- ↑ 50.0 50.1 50.2 50.3 50.4 Rosa Maria Navarro (2021). Settler-colonialism in Mexico: Mestizaje as a project of elimination. Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). [PDF] University at Albany. doi: 10.54014/67K5-A8CC [HUB]
- ↑ Steven Newcomb (2005-07-14). "A Native view of Catholic missions in California" ICT.
- ↑ 52.0 52.1 52.2 Matthew Brown (2024-10-25). "Forced assimilation and abuse: How US boarding schools devastated Native American tribes" AP News. Archived from the original on 2025-08-17.
- ↑ Clare Bradford (2020). The Stolen Generations of Australia: Narratives of Loss and Survival, vol. 13, Issue 2. International Research in Children's Literature. doi: 10.3366/ircl.2020.0356 [HUB]
- ↑ “As practised by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organizing grammar of race. [...] Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black. For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination.”
Patrick Wolfe (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. [PDF] doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240 [HUB] - ↑ "So What Exactly Is 'Blood Quantum'?". NPR. Archived from the original on 2025-10-05.
- ↑ Mohammed Elnaiem (2021-04-29). "The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned" JSTOR Daily.
- ↑ Malli A, Monteith H, Hiscock EC, Smith EV, Fairman K, Galloway T, Mashford-Pringle A. (2023). Impacts of colonization on Indigenous food systems in Canada and the United States: a scoping review. BMC Public Health. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-16997-7 [HUB]