Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch (eds), Settler Economies in World History (Brill, 2013).

Settler colonialism was a major aspect of the imperial age that began in the sixteenth century and has encompassed the whole world unto the present. Modern settler societies have together constituted one of the major routes to economic development from their foundation in resource abundance and labour scarcity. This book is a major and wide-ranging comparative historical enquiry into the experiences of the settler world. The roles of indigenous dispossesion, large-scale immigrant labour, land abundance, trade, capital, and the settler institutions, are central to this economic formation and its history. The chapters examine those economies that emerged as genuine colonial hybrids out of their differing neo-European backgrounds, with distinctive post-independence structures and an institutional persistence into the present as independent states.

Contributors include Stanley Engerman, Susan Carter, Henry Willebald, Luis Bertola, Claude Lützelschwab, Frank Tough, Kathleen Dimmer, Tony Ward, Drew Keeling, Carl Mosk, David Meredith, Martin Shanahan, John K Wilson, Bernard Attard, Grietjie Verhoef, Tim Rooth, Francine McKenzie, Jorge Alvarez, Jim McAloon, as well as the editors. 

Robert Nichols, ‘Indigeneity and the Settler Contract’, Social Criticism 16 (2013).

This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content of its claims, but also with respect to its general mode of argumentation and its political function in specific contexts. Read in this light, social contract theory may function to unduly deny the claims of indigenous peoples, oftentimes by shifting the register of debate to a relatively abstract and counter-factual level and relieving settler-colonial societies of the burden of proof. Insofar as social contract theory operates to this effect, it is analysed in terms of a ‘Settler Contract’.

Capitalism produced not only the advanced industrial societies of the West and Japan, but also colonialism and underdeveloped countries. South Africa is a by-product of this twin process. To know how poverty, unemployment and inequality can be eliminated requires not only a correct knowledge of how the problem arose, but also of the economic history of the world.

Regarding the historical roots of our problem, it is not enough to refer to apartheid. It is simply an Afrikaner term for a policy and process that existed before 1948.

The roots of our problem lie in colonial conquest. Colonialism gave rise not only to a colonial state, but to a colonial economy and ideology. Here is a peculiar phenomenon: the death of the colonial state is survived by the colonial economy and the colonial ideology. The colonial state died in South Africa, but is survived by the colonial economy. Our economy bears the scars and shape of a colonial economy.

The representatives of England settled here together with a population from other parts of Europe, hence the designation “settler-colonial society”. The European population in this colony became the largest in Africa, giving rise to a strong emotional bond between this settler community and the West, which is untouchable.

 

This gave rise to two grossly unequal parts of South African society. One is black, forming the vast majority of society, a large part of which is in pre-industrial rural areas. Africans became the primary labourers, and this vast sector is poor, with the worst facilities and infrastructure.

The other part is the white community, a tiny minority, which is by and large wealthy. It has the best facilities and industrial infrastructure and is linked with the industrial Western capitalist economy.

From Business Report.

Paul S. Landau. Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 300 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-19603-1.

Reviewed by Edward Cavanagh (University of Ottawa)

Underlying each of the book’s nuanced arguments is the idea that highveld polities, in all their complexity and diversity, barely correlate with the “tribal” titles that were attached to them, labels that remain “political” today. Words used to differentiate “tribal” affiliations were simply that–words–which may have conveyed political realities (albeit problematically), but always seemed to miscommunicate matters relating to culture, tradition, and “the religious sphere.” Moreover, they were titles that too often glossed over the hybridization of lived experience. And many of these misinterpretations, Landau points out, continue to pervade historical and anthropological scholarship (and, though he doesn’t suggest as much, popular discourse as well). Thus, “[o]nce we stop thinking in terms of ‘peoples’, who had ‘beliefs,’” he argues, “the highveld’s political tradition, in its real situation in history, comes better into focus” (p. 248). He’s being modest here. What also comes into focus are the many parallels between the prehistoric and the historic, the past and the present, and believe it or not, the black, the brown, and the white of South Africa.

Needless to say, I find this the most important finding of the book. Although it has been a long time in the making. Martin Legassick, back in 1988, in what was quite clearly a reiteration of a number of revisionist lines of enquiry proposed by himself and others in the 1970s, claimed that all “attempts to differentiate Bantu-speakers from Khoisan, Khoikhoi and ‘San’, Sotho from Nguni, and, within each, subtribes from subtribes” were flawed. But, enamored of a Marxist theoretical framework, Legassick in these years believed that only “the social relations of production” united and differentiated communities.[3] With hindsight, Legassick’s reductionism seems overly simplistic; surely the picture is more complicated than that. Paul S. Landau (albeit with minimal reference to Khoekhoe and San) shows just how complicated that picture was. Irrespective of this revelation of complexity (which, funnily, more and more historians seem driven to reveal these days), his main points, reduced to their simplest form–namely, that religion was imposed from outsiders and turned into political discourse by converts, that tribal names and ethnic labels are historically problematic–are really not all that objectionable, and are, in fact, probably universal in the history of settler colonialism. For this reason, one suspects Popular Politics in the History of South Africa will find its way into many footnotes, and this work deserves the wide readership it will receive.

 

This lecture was delivered on December 6, 2012 at Princeton University for the 10th Annual Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture.

Mahmood Mamdani is an academic, author, and political commentator. In 2008, Mamdani was voted as the 9th “top public intellectual” in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US). From 1998 to 2002 he served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). He is the author of, among other books, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2002), Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2010), and, most recently, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012). His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, the history of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights.

He is presently the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University in New York, and also Professor and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, and. He grew up in Uganda and acquired his B.A from the University of Pittsburgh, before going on to attain his Masters degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1969 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1974.

This event was sponsored by the Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture Fund, the Princeton Committee on Palestine, the Department of English, and the Program in African Studies.

Watch the video here.

Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘Destabilizing the Settler Academy: The Decolonial Effects of Indigenous Methodologies’, American Quarterly 64, 4 (2012).

The academy forms within settler societies as an apparatus of colonization. Indigenous researchers critically engage its colonial power by practicing Indigenous methodologies: an act that also implicates non-Indigenous people in challenging the settler academy. Indigenous methodologies do not merely model Indigenous research. By exposing normative knowledge production as being not only non-Indigenous but colonial, they denaturalize power within settler societies and ground knowledge production in decolonization. An activist impetus thus informs Indigenous methodologies, yet “activism” typically fails to invoke their full implications. Whereas “activism” in a settler society may invest social justice in state rule, decolonization anticipates that rule’s end. Decolonization is activist, but activism need not be decolonizing. Indigenous methodologies arise within the larger pursuit of Indigenous decolonization, a project that Indigenous critics theorize variously as ontological, psychic, governmental, and relational.

Mark Neocleous, ‘International Law as Primitive Accumulation; Or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization’, Eur J Int Law 23, 4 (2012).

The fact that the settler population is mostly white, English-speaking, and has European ancestors creates an illusion of identity. Politicians encourage this by constantly talking of Australia as a “Western country”, a nonsense term that a surprising number of social scientists still use.

Current trends in universities are worsening the problem. Neoliberal policy-makers drive Australian universities and academics to compete with each other. The key metrics for this competition involve recognition in the metropole, especially, publication and citation in highly-ranked metropolitan journals. Since metropolitan journals operate within metropolitan intellectual cultures (we can’t expect them to do otherwise!), the message for Australian scientists is clear: do it the US/EU way, if you want promotion and grants in Australia.

Social science in a settler-colonial society therefore tends to split between an abstractedtheoretical discourse, conducted as if in the metropole with little or no local reference, and an applied social science in which methodologies developed in the metropole are applied to empirical studies of local social problems.

From Southern Perspectives.

F. C. McGrath, ‘Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory’, Irish Studies Review 20, 4 (2012).

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.