Settler colonialism is a process by which settlers exercise colonial rule over a land and its indigenous peoples, transforming the land and replacing or assimilating its population with or into the society of the settlers. Assimilation has sometimes been conceptualized in biological terms such as the "breeding of a minority population into a majority", but in other cases, such as in some parts of Latin America, biological mixing of populations was less problematic.
Settler colonialism is a form of exogenous (of external origin) domination typically organized or supported by an imperial authority, which maintains a connection or control to the territory through the settlers. As settler colonialism entails the creation of a new society on the conquered territory, it lasts indefinitely unless decolonisation occurs through departure of the settler population or through reforms to colonial structures, settler-indigenous compacts and reconciliation processes.
Settler colonial studies have often focused on English-speaking settler colonies in Australia and North America, which are close to the complete, prototypical form of settler colonialism. However, settler colonialism is not restricted to any specific culture; it has been practiced by non-European nations like Japan, and among European cultures, as in the case of Ireland.
Origins as a theory During the 1960s, settlement and colonization were perceived as separate phenomena from colonialism. Settlement endeavours were seen as taking place in empty areas, tending to disregard the indigenous inhabitants. Later on, in the 1970s and 1980s, settler colonialism was seen as bringing high living standards in contrast to the failed political systems associated with classical colonialism. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the field of settler colonial studies was established distinct from but connected to Indigenous studies. Although often credited with originating the field in his Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999), Australian historian Patrick Wolfe stated that "I didn't invent Settler Colonial Studies. Natives have been experts in the field for centuries." Additionally, Wolfe's work was preceded by others that have been influential in the field, such as Fayez Sayegh's Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965), Settler Capitalism by Donald Denoon (1983) and Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis in Unsettling Settler Societies (1995).
Definition and concept Settler colonialism is characterized as both a logic and structure, and not a mere occurrence. Settler colonialism takes claim of environments for replacing existing conditions and members of that environment with those of the settlement and settlers. Intrinsically connected to this is the displacement or elimination of existing residents, particularly through destruction of their environment and society. As such, settler colonialism has been identified as a form of environmental racism.
Wolfe's model of settler colonial theory posits that settler colonialism is categorically distinct from other forms of colonialism by its drive to "eliminate the native", instead of exploiting them. For Wolfe and his "intellectual successor" Lorenzo Veracini, settler colonialism is "structural, eliminatory, and land based, which—they argued—distinguish it from franchise colonialism, which is based on the exploitation of the native population instead." Therefore, colonial settling has been called an invasion or occupation, emphazising the violent reality of colonization and its settling, in contrast to the more domestic meaning of "settling".
According to certain genocide scholars, including Raphael Lemkin—the individual who coined the term genocide—colonization is intimately connected with genocide. Some scholars further describe the process as inherently genocidal, considering settler colonialism to entail the elimination of existing peoples and cultures, and not only their displacement (see genocide, "the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part"). Depending on the definition, for Wolfe settler colonial eliminationism may be enacted by a variety of means, including mass killing of the previous inhabitants, removal of the previous inhabitants and/or cultural assimilation.
However, the opposite argument has been made by Veracini, who argues that all genocide is settler colonial in nature but not all settler colonialism is genocidal. Sai Englert also argues against the Wolfe model, proposing that settler colonies have used both elimination and exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples, and often transitioned from one to the other: "By assuming that exploitation, by definition, lays outside the realm of its field of study, SCS has privileged the analysis of the Anglo-settler world—primarily North America and Oceania." For him, the specificity of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism is its social relations of class struggle within settler societies over the distribution of "colonial loot".
Settler colonialism is distinct from replacement migration due to integration of immigrants into an existing society and not replacement with a parallel society. Mahmood Mamdani writes, "Immigrants are unarmed; settlers come armed with both weapons and a nationalist agenda. Immigrants come in search of a homeland, not a state; for settlers, there can be no homeland without a state." Nevertheless, the difference is often elided by settlers who minimize the voluntariness of their departure, claiming that settlers are mere migrants, and some pro-indigenous positions which militantly simplify, claiming that all migrants are settlers.
A settler state is an autonomous or independent political entity established through settler colonialism by and for settlers. This occurs when a migrant settler society assumes a politically dominant position over the indigenous peoples and forms a self-sustaining state that operates independently of the metropole, the homeland of a colonial empire. Countries that have been described as settler states include the United States, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Taiwan, and formerly Liberia, South Africa, and Rhodesia.
Examples The settler colonial paradigm has been applied to a wide variety of conflicts around the world, including New Caledonia, Western New Guinea, the Andaman Islands, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Australia, British Kenya, the Canary Islands, Northern Cyprus, Fiji, French Algeria, Generalplan Ost, Hawaii, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italian Libya and East Africa, Kashmir, Hokkaido, Korea and Manchukuo, Jazira and Kirkuk, Latin America, Liberia, New Zealand, northern Afghanistan, the United States, Canada, Posen and West Prussia and German South West Africa, Rhodesia, Sápmi, South Africa, South Vietnam, and Taiwan.
Africa
Canary Islands
During the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Castile sponsored expeditions by conquistadors to subjugate under Castilian rule the Macaronesian archipelago of the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco and inhabited by the Indigenous Guanche people. Beginning with the start of the conquest of the island of Lanzarote on 1 May 1402 and ending with the surrender of the last Guanche resistance on Tenerife on 29 September 1496 to the now-unified Spanish crown, the archipelago was subject to a settler colonial process involving systematic enslavement, mass murder, and deportation of the Guanches, who were replaced with Spanish settlers, in a process foreshadowing the Iberian colonisation of the Americas that followed shortly thereafter. Also like in the Americas, Spanish colonialists in the Canaries quickly turned to the importation of slaves from mainland Africa as a source of labour due to the decimation of the already small Guanche population by a combination of war, disease, and brutal forced labour. Historian Mohamed Adhikari has labelled the conquest of the Canary Islands as the first overseas European settler colonial genocide.
Ethiopia
Following the conquests of Menelik II in the late 19th century, a system of imperial conquest effectively based on settler colonialism, involving the deployment of armed settlers in newly created military colonies, was widespread throughout the southern and western territories that came under Menelik's dominion. Under the 'Neftenya-Gabbar scheme' the Ethiopian Empire had developed a relatively effective system of occupation and pacification. Soldier-settlers and their families moved into fortified villages known as katamas in strategic regions to secure the southern expansion. These armed settlers and their families were known as the neftenya and peasant farmers who were assigned to them the gabbar.
The Neftenya () were assigned gabbar from the locally conquered population, who effectively worked in serfdom for the conquerors. The majority of the neftenya were Amhara from Shewa. The neftenya-gabbar relationship was a 'feudal-like patron client relationship' between the northern settlers and southern locals. As land was taken, the northern administrators became the owners and possessed the right to dispose of land as they pleased. Those conquered found themselves displaced, often reduced to tenants on their own lands by the new Amhara ruling elite. The feudal obligations imposed on the gabbar were so intensive that they continued to serve the family of a neftegna even after the latter's death. The gabbar system worked efficiently for nearly half a century in financing the garrisoning and administration of the south until its formal dissolution in 1941.
Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara
Since 1975, the Kingdom of Morocco has sponsored settlement schemes that have encouraged several thousand Moroccan citizens to settle Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara as part of the Western Sahara conflict. On 6 November 1975, the Green March took place, during which about 350,000 Moroccan citizens crossed into Saguia al-Hamra in the former Spanish Sahara after having received a signal from King Hassan II. As of 2015, it is estimated that Moroccan settlers constitute two-thirds of the population of Western Sahara.
South Africa
In 1652, the arrival of Europeans sparked the beginning of settler colonialism in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company was set up at the Cape, and imported large numbers of slaves from Africa and Asia during the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station for ships sailing between Europe and the east, initially planning to maintain a small community around the new fort, but the community continued to spread and settle further. In 1948, the policy of Apartheid was introduced South Africa in order to segregate the races and ensure the domination of the Afrikaner minority over non-whites, politically, socially and economically.
Liberia
Liberia is regarded by some scholars as a unique example of settler colonialism and the only known instance of Black settler colonialism. It is described as an African American settler colony tasked with establishing a Western form of governance in Africa.
Liberia was founded as the private colony of Liberia in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, a White American-run organization, to relocate free African Americans to Africa, as part of the Back-to-Africa movement. U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison publicly endorsed and funded the project. Between 1822 and the early 20th century, around 15,000 African Americans colonized Liberia on lands acquired from the region's indigenous African population. The African American elite monopolized the government and established minority rule over the locals. As they possessed Western culture, they felt superior to the natives, whom they dominated and oppressed. Indigenous revolts against the Americo-Liberian elite such as the Liberian–Grebo War in 1875–1876 and Kru Revolt in 1915 were quelled with U.S. military support.