Settler Colonialism

The category was given its decisive formulation by the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe in “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” published in the Journal of Genocide Research in December 2006 (vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 387–409). Wolfe’s argument turns on a distinction: colonialism of the extractive kind wants the native’s labour, and therefore wants the native present; settler colonialism wants the land, and therefore has no structural use for the people already on it. “Territoriality,” he wrote, “is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” — and the primary motive for elimination “is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory.”

What follows is the sentence the field is built on: “settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base — as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.” Wolfe was careful about the relation to genocide: settler colonialism is not simply a form of it, and its outcomes “have not manifested evenly across time or space.” Elimination in his sense includes assimilation, the breaking down of native title into alienable freeholds, child removal, religious conversion and resocialisation — not only killing.

Wolfe himself worked Zionism into the analysis, discussing Herzl’s writings and Gershon Shafir’s account of the doctrine of “Hebrew labour” — the campaign to replace Palestinian workers with Jewish ones in the Yishuv’s economy — as a case where a European ideology “evolved” on importation into Palestine into a struggle against the indigenous workforce. The framework has since become central to Palestinian historiography, most prominently in Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which reads the period from the Balfour Declaration onward as a settler-colonial war rather than a communal conflict between two symmetrical nationalisms.

The category is descriptive rather than pejorative, and it is what makes certain otherwise puzzling patterns legible: the Jewish National Fund’s land-purchase and inalienability rules, the “transfer” literature documented by Nur Masalha, the demolition of villages so that returnees would have nothing to return to, the settlement of Area C. It is also contested. Israeli and Zionist scholars argue that the framework misdescribes a movement of refugees returning to an ancestral homeland, without a metropole to serve; critics of that objection reply that settler-colonial formations frequently lack a sponsoring metropole — the Boer republics and the United States among them — and that the analytic question is what the movement did to the existing population, not what motivated the settlers.

Used carefully the term names a structure, not a moral verdict on individuals, and not a claim about any people’s right to exist. Used carelessly it collapses into invective. The archive uses it in Wolfe’s sense: a description of how a society is organised in relation to the land it occupies and the people who were on it.

Sources

• Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (December 2006), pp. 387–409 (PDF)
• Settler colonialism — overview of the field and its key formulations
• Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)