Settler colonialism is a specific colonial formation whereby foreign family units move into a region and reproduce. Land is thus the key resource in settler colonies, whereas natural (e.g. spices, cotton, oil) and human (e.g. labour, existing trade networks, convertible souls) resources are the main motivation behind other forms of colonialism. Colonialism typically ends, whereas settler colonialism lasts forever, except in the rare event of complete evacuation, or settler decolonization. The historian of race and settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe writes "settler colonialism destroys to replace", and insists that "invasion", in settler colonial contexts, is "a structure, not an event".[1]
This definition, by contrast, comes from the Settler Colonial Studies website:[2]
Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. There is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends. Not all migrants are settlers: settlers come to stay, and are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity. And settler colonialism is not colonialism: settlers want Indigenous people to vanish (but can make use of their labour before they are made to disappear). Sometimes settler colonial forms operate within colonial ones, sometimes they subvert them, sometimes they replace them. But even if colonialism and settler colonialism interpenetrate and overlap, they remain separate as they co-define each other.
Contents |
Settler colonialism has occurred extensively throughout human history, including in the ancient world.
Greek settlers cloned their city-states through much of the coastlines of the Mediterranean. Under the Macedonian Empire, the Hellenistic pattern of settler colonies extended deep into Asia. However, many of the people living in these cities were non-ethnic Greeks who had adopted the dominant Ancient Greek language and its concomitant Hellenistic civilization.
The Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire commonly established settler colonies in newly conquered regions. The colonists in these colonies were often veterans of the Roman army, who received agricultural land to develop. These agricultural communities provided bastions of loyal citizens in often hostile areas of the Empire, and often accelerated the process of Romanisation among the nearby conquered peoples. For examples of such colonies: near the city of Damascus in present-day Syria, the contemporary settlements of Mezze and Deraya can trace their origins back to villages opened for settlement by the Romans during the third century CE. Philip the Arab, the Roman Emperor from 244 to 249 designated this area around Damascus a colonia, and encouraged settlement by veterans of the VI Ferrata legion, as commemorated by coins minted in the city around this time.[3]
During the early modern period, some European nation-states and their agents adopted policies of colonialism, competing with each other to establish colonies outside of Europe, at first in the Americas, and later in Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
Europeans came and settled in Australia, in many cases displacing Indigenous Australians. The Indigenous Australian population, estimated at about 350,000 at the time of European settlement,[4] declined steeply for 150 years following settlement from 1788, mainly because of infectious disease combined with forced re-settlement and cultural disintegration. The removal of children, that historians and Indigenous Australians have portrayed as genocide,[5] may have made a contribution to the decline in the indigenous population. Such interpretations of Aboriginal history are disputed by some, such as Keith Windshuttle, as being exaggerated or fabricated for political or ideological reasons.[6] This debate is known within Australia as the History Wars. Following the 1967 referendum, the Federal government gained the power to implement policies and make laws with respect to Aborigines. Traditional ownership of land — native title — in Australia first gained legal recognition in 1992, when the High Court case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) overturned the notion of Australia as terra nullius at the time of European occupation.
and
Jews have lived in Palestine continuously since ancient times, particularly in the Four Holy Cities: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron.[7] Nevertheless, founders of Zionism such as Theodore Herzl and Ahad Ha'am envisaged colonising from the outset. In 1967 the French historian Maxime Rodinson wrote an article later translated and published in English as Israel: A Colonial Settler-State?[8] Lorenzo Veracini treats Israel's colonial nature as a given and writes that Jewish settlers could expel the British in 1948 only because they had their own colonial relationships inside and outside Israel's new borders.[9] Veracini believes the possibility of an Israeli disengagement is always latent and this relationship could be severed, through an "accommodation of a Palestinian Israeli autonomy within the institutions of the Israeli state" (Veracini 2006)[10] Other scholars, such as Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis,[11] and Joseph Massad in the "Post Colonial Colony: time, space and bodies in Palestine/ Israel in the persistence of the Palestinian Question".[12] have included Israel in their global analysis of settler societies.
Some Palestinians express similar opinions - writer and sociologist Jamil Hilal, member of the Palestinian National Council lives in what he describes as "the heavily-colonised West Bank", and drew parallels in 1976 between South African and Israeli settler colonialism, noting that "as in Southern Africa, stretches of land were acquired by the Zionist settlers [...] and their Arab tenants thrown out". Hilal also argues that the defence industries of the two nations collaborated against the sanctions on South Africa, especially on their respective nuclear programs in the 1980s.[13] Former Palestinian Foreign Minister Dr. Nasser al-Qidwa opposes the policy of Israeli settlements and has described those efforts as colonialism.[14]
Ambassador Rastam Mohd Isa, former permanent representative of Malaysia to the United Nations, speaking on behalf of the non-aligned movement (NAM) in 2003 expressed grave concern about "the continuing and escalating Israeli military campaign ... excessive and indiscriminate use of force, and continuing settler colonial activities"[15]
|
|
||||||||