Settler colonialism is hard labour: Shiri Pasternak, ‘Labour, Settler Colonialism, and Economies of Extraction: The Wages of Settlement’, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is hard labour: Shiri Pasternak, ‘Labour, Settler Colonialism, and Economies of Extraction: The Wages of Settlement’, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context, 2025

12Jun25

Abstract: Indigenous resistance to colonization can intersect uncomfortably and often violently with a fight by workers to access Indigenous lands for extraction and jobs. Jobs have always been a literal frontier of settler colonial conflict because, simply put, colonization takes work. When immigrants began to settle through recruitment programmes en masse in Canada, they benefitted from a scale of colonial land seizure unknown anywhere else in the world at that time. The means by which to settle was the work— both required and provided—by corporations like the railroads, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and colonization enterprises. By the late 19th century, the market for wage labour on farms and in the central manufacturing regions was underway as industrialization took hold; the emergence of capitalism was born through its deep reliance on colonial land policy. For this reason, the political economy of colonialism can be studied through a long history of intersecting class formation and colonial land policy in Canada. We might call this dynamic the wages of settlement.

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