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The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy
Abstract
This article criticises the political-economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s concept of surplus populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself.
... For important criticisms of this notion of the 'logic of elimination', see SaiEnglert (2020) and JackDavies (2023).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
Today, the ‘pluriverse’ is considered to be a radical new concept capable of decolonising political thought. However, it is not only decolonial scholarship that has taken up the concept of the pluriverse; far-right intellectuals, too, have been cultivating a decolonial imaginary based on the idea of the pluriverse. This article compares the way the concept of the pluriverse appears in certain strands of Latin American decolonial theory exemplified by Walter Mignolo, on the one hand, and the ethnopluralism of the European New Right represented by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, on the other. Despite Mignolo’s pluriverse being an ‘open pluriverse’ of entanglement between peoples, while the European New Right’s is a ‘closed pluriverse’ of ethnic separation, I argue that these uses of the pluriverse are nevertheless underpinned by a shared analytical and normative framework. This framework is defined by a simple refrain: that what oppresses the world is ontological and epistemological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological and epistemological difference. I argue that this schema, which misapprehends imperialism as a form of epistemic domination geared purely towards homogenisation, rather than as a set of material relationships that also produce (e.g. racial, sexual, and class) difference, does not provide a solid foundation for contesting colonial relations.
... For the reception of this notion in Palestine/Israel studies, see Sabbagh-Khoury (2021). For critiques, see Bhandar and Ziadah (2016) and Davies (2023). 2 Thus, non-Jewish (and non-Arab) immigrants from the former USSR have been accepted as "practically" Jewish for most purposes, while East African asylum seekers, much like Arabs, have been subjected to racialised incitement (see Kalir, 2015). ...
There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidating control over broad stretches of frontier, as well as the ideological purpose of emblematising the Jewish people’s return to its land (Shafir, 1989; Neumann, 2011). However, pace the emergent orthodoxy in settler-colonial studies – which has recently been subjected to strident critiques, not least in the Palestinian/Israeli context – Israeli agriculture has not, for the most part, been characterised by an “eliminationist” attitude towards indigenous labour or by a serious commitment to exclusively employing the labour of settlers.[1] In fact, Israeli agriculture, like other low-wage sectors of the economy, has nearly always depended on Palestinian labour. When the First Intifada of 1987 to 1991 convinced Israeli policymakers that this dependency was dangerous, their response was to replace it not with the more expensive labour of Israeli citizens, but with the similarly cheap and skilled labour of migrant workers. The farm sector would quickly come to recruit the bulk of its workforce from Thailand, while continuing to employ thousands of Palestinians.
... Contemporary settler colonial studies, with its fixation on white supremacist eliminativism in North America and South Pacific, looks past the "Chinese colonist" in Southeast Asia and its theoretical implications for the study of race and capital (cf. Davies 2023). Recovering this figure opens up a new window to the institutional and ideological terrain of colonial capitalism on which the hierarchies of race were configured. ...
The literature on “racial capitalism” exhibits a tension between the term’s evocative power and its conceptual imprecision. This article navigates this tension by developing the mid-level concept of “capitalist racialization,” which specifies the role of capitalist abstractions in the construction of racial hierarchies. I elaborate this notion around the racialization of Chinese migration in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I focalize the figure of the “Chinese colonist” as an index of the capitalist standards by which British observers ordered colonial populations in their reflections on imperial political economy. I argue that the racial stereotype of “the Chinese” as commercial, industrious, and “colonizing” people emerged from the subsumption of colonial land and labor under capital. Their “colonizing” capacity rendered Chinese migrants simultaneously an economic asset to the British Empire and a potential threat to the white world order. “Capitalist racialization” therefore highlights new inroads into the entwined histories of capitalism, racism, and empire.
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criticisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threatened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.
We gather a new database to conduct the first historically informed study of the importance of liquidity and credit for government bonds between 1880 and 1910. We argue that colonial and sovereign debt markets were segmented owing to differences in underlying information asymmetries. The result was heterogeneous pricing of colonial and sovereign debt, and different market microstructures and clienteles, themselves influenced by political, institutional, and financial arrangements. We find that sovereign spreads mainly reflected credit risks, while colonial spreads mainly reflected liquidity risks. Liquidity premia were economically large and significant, contributing between 10 percent and 39 percent of colonial spreads. These findings help understanding why the seemingly dry subject of colonial illiquidity inspired passionate disputes and ground-breaking reforms of financial imperial institutions.
A response to the forum, “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities,” edited by Chris A. Eng and Amy K. King. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the distinctive shifts toward examining Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism as 'a structure, not an event.' Kauanui argues that a substantive engagement with settler colonialism also demands a deep rethinking of the associated concept of indigeneity–distinct from race, ethnicity, culture, and nation(ality)–along with the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.
This response to the editors of “On Colonial Unknowing” both acknowledges the vital intervention of their special issue and contests their characterization of settler colonial studies as an “academic field formation” marked by dogmatic and hermetic methodological tendencies. Settler colonial studies, we argue, is a still emergent subfield marked by a dynamic interchange with related fields and disciplinary formations. Settler colonial studies and its critique of a specific and contingent structure of violence has continuing utility, we suggest, not as a hegemonic discourse (a condition the field never aspired to), but rather as a supplement to adjacent field formations engaged in the critique of racialization and empire.
Since 1950, the world’s urban labor force has expanded dramatically, a process that has been accompanied by a large increase in informal employment. Accounts of these phenomena generally assume that urban workers without formal work are mostly recent migrants from the countryside. This article shows that outside of China, most of the growth of the world’s urban workforce has been the consequence of demographic expansion rather than rural-to-urban migration. A large portion of the world’s growing urban-born workforce has ended up in informal employment. I develop a concept of demographic dispossession to explain the relatively autonomous role demographic growth has played, first, in the proletarianization of the global population and, second, in the informalization of the urban workforce. I then explore the reasons why demographic growth in low- and medium-income countries tended to be more rapid and urban than demographic growth had been historically in the high-income countries.
This essay focuses on settler colonialism as a developing mode of domination with contemporary manifestations. It highlights the similarities between historical settler colonialism and a contemporary global order fundamentally characterized by a logic of elimination and containment. On the basis of this analogy, the essay outlines what is here understood as the global settler-colonial present and a developing new category: endogeneity.
This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer valuable insights both in the interpretation of the historical evolution of the conflict and in the analysis of its current circumstances. The first section briefly outlines the possible benefits of such reframing; the second specifically targets exceptionalist claims.
The Color Line and the Assembly Line tells a new story of the impact of mass production on society. Global corporations based originally in the United States have played a part in making gender and race everywhere. Focusing on Ford Motor Company's rise to become the largest, richest, and most influential corporation in the world, The Color Line and the Assembly Line takes on the traditional story of Fordism. Contrary to popular thought, the assembly line was perfectly compatible with all manner of racial practice in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Each country's distinct racial hierarchies in the 1920s and 1930s informed Ford's often divisive labor processes. Confirming racism as an essential component in the creation of global capitalism, Elizabeth Esch also adds an important new lesson showing how local patterns gave capitalism its distinctive features. © 2018 by Th e Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.
This book deals primarily with the effect of whitness on race relations in the United States as they relate to labor and the American working class. Roediger argues that working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the US white working class. He urges a systemic analysis that examines both race and class without privileging one over the other, as many Marxists tend to do. He traces the history of whiteness' effect on the formation of a working class in the United States. White workers becames the standard of this class, and all other races were considered intruders, a view with origins in antebellum America and the tradition of slavery. Other "outsiders," however, were gradually accepted into white America's working class, such as the Irish. Roediger's study establishes the foundations for contemporary whiteness and discrimination in the American workplace.