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Revision as of 13:42, 29 October 2025
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which one population attempts to supplant another by dispossessing them of their land, creating a class relation between the settler population (which owns the land) and the indigenous population (which is being dispossessed). This involves the destruction of the previously-existing society and the annihilation of its people through mass murder, deportation, and/or forced assimilation. Modern examples of settler colonial states include Australia, Canada, South Africa, the Zionist Entity, New Zealand, and the United States. The ruling class often uses settler colonialism as a tool to appease disgruntled members of society, allowing them to settle on indigenous land as a concession to prevent revolution.[1][2][3]
Resistance
United States
The Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa organized a pan-indigenous resistance against settler colonialism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the late 19th century, the Paiute leader Wovoka founded the Ghost Dance movement.[4]
Palestine
See main article: Hamas
Zimbabwe
In the 1890s, indigenous peoples of Zimbabwe fought against the invading settler-colonial forces of the British South Africa Company's "Pioneer Column" in a series of battles and uprisings, including what is known as the First Chimurenga in 1896.[5] The word "chimurenga" is a Shona word which means rebellion or resistance.[6]
Though these initial uprisings did not ultimately repel the settler forces, the peoples of Zimbabwe continued to resist settler colonialism.[5] Over time, organizations such as the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and their respective military wings were formed to combat the settler regime. As ZANU leader Herbert Chitepo explained in 1973, "No doubt our old people then, our grandfathers in 1893, '94, '95, '96, '97, during those wars, fought gallantly with bows and arrows [...] and they were faced against muskets, they were faced against Maxim guns. And they were defeated. To that day our African people have never accepted that position. Quietly, sometimes, without words, they have continued to look upon that land as theirs, continued to prepare the day, for the day when they must wrest it back into their own control."[6]
The later phase of national liberation struggle in Zimbabwe against the settler regime of "Rhodesia" came to be known as the Second Chimurenga.[5] The Battle of Chinhoyi in 1966 is often regarded as the opening battle of the Second Chimurenga.[5] Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980,[5] although the struggle against imperialism, neocolonialism, and the effects of settler colonial rule and land dispossession have continued.[7][8][9]
Mechanisms
Settlers
Pressure valve for contradictions in metropole
Settler-colonialism is one way in which the ruling class of the imperial core attempts to suppress revolution and relieve internal pressures generated in their society.[2][10][3] One form of this is encouraging the movement of some of the metropole's discontented population to become settlers in a colonial territory. The settler, who was previously (for example) a poor peasant, an unemployed proletarian, or a failed entrepreneur, sees a chance to raise their standard of living and/or their social status in the colonial territory. The prospect of land ownership, of employment, of special benefits awarded to settlers by the colonial administration, of the chance to start a business, of a cheaper cost of living, of a raised social status, or even the idea of a supposed "adventure"[11] or a supposed identity-affirming experience[12] are among some of the various points which are promoted to settlers to draw them to colonial territories.[2]
One declaration by Angola's UPA issued in 1960 described the dynamic as follows: "For years the Portuguese colonialist policy has been to send to Angola all the poverty stricken, the failures from the metropolitan areas, and the poor and illiterate peasant families of Portugal in order to establish them as colonists on this land wrested from the native peoples. [...] To reduce the number of unemployed Portuguese, the colonial administration grants them a monopoly over all kinds of labour". As the declaration describes, Portuguese settlers gained exclusive access to certain jobs and higher pay while Africans were forced to work for low pay in subordinate or unskilled positions, as well as being pressed into a form of slave labor when unable to find work.[13]
Herbert Chitepo, a leader in Zimbabwe's national liberation struggle, highlighted the motivations and living standards of the post-WWII cohort of white settlers in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, summarizing that they were essentially seeking fortune, status, ease, and comfort: "they left England after it had been war-torn, they left Europe after the war, to seek greater opportunities, to seek more fortunes, more money, more status in society which they couldn't even have got in their own country. In short, what they were seeking is comfort. Big homes, servants, large salaries, an economy that made life easy for them."[6] Similarly, a 1977 article in The Atlantic quotes a "Rhodesian" journalist who described the life of the "average white Rhodesian" as "idyllic" and emphasized "In America you clean your own shoes. Not here. In Rhodesia, your wife is not cleaning your clothes, cooking your meals. The black man is. He brings you breakfast in bed. [...] You've got someone to look after the garden, someone else to take care of the swimming pool." The journalist concludes, "Nobody wants to give this up. It's bloody paradise on earth."[14]
Invasion, terror, and occupation force
The so-called "frontiersmen" or "pioneers" or "homesteaders" of settlement serve as an initial force to surveil, invade, terrorize, displace, murder, and steal from the original indigenous inhabitants of a place in their process of "settling" the land, on which they then become an occupying force. In addition to settlers' acts of ethnic cleansing, physical "settlement", or occupation, of the land by settlers contributes to the reduction of the land base of the indigenous peoples, contributing to the strategic diminishment of indigenous nations' sovereignty.[15]
Such efforts often start out or else come to be officially boosted, authorized, or streamlined by the colonial power, whether that is the original colonizing power which started the colonizing endeavor, another colonial power which has stepped in, or a settler colony which has split from its original sponsor. Examples of settlement officially backed by a colonizing government include the United States' Indian Removal Act[16] and Homestead Acts which promoted rapid expansion of the settler colonial entity across Turtle Island,[17] or the Zionist entity's official backing of various settlement endeavors in Palestine.[18][19] In some cases, the colonizing power may disingenuously put on a disapproving facade toward "pioneer" settlement outside of whatever it considers its current borders to be, employing plausible deniability and a veneer of criticism, later following this up with a formalization of the occupation by bringing it under official administration.[18][19]
"Frontier" settlement may occasionally be at actual odds with the colonizing entity's short-term goals or geopolitical concerns, though this does not mean the colonizer is opposed in principle to settler-colonialism or to expansion of the colonial entity. For example, the settler-colonial USA's leader George Washington had claimed ownership over large tracts of land to the west of the USA's supposed territory at the time, and he regarded frontiersmen on that land as criminal trespassers and squatters who would endanger the value of his real estate, as it could only hold its value if he could control its sale and settlement.[20] On top of this, frontiersmen's activities could potentially draw the USA unprepared into unfavorable conflicts with indigenous nations of the region and with competing colonial powers, or the frontiersmen could themselves attack the USA. Though Washington, who ruled over a settler-colonial entity, was not opposed to the concept of settlement and expansion entirely, this represents an example of a case where the colonial power might temporarily express some self-interested antagonism toward some particular frontier settlement activity.[20] This attitude may be contrasted with the USA's later adoption of the Indian Removal Act[16] and the Homestead Acts which strongly promoted settlement expansion and under which ensued a period where white squatters were accommodated to become homesteaders without penalty, while indigenous peoples were forced and terrorized off of their lands.[17]
Source of tax revenue for metropole
Coercive contracts and broken treaties
Displacement and reservation systems
Apartheid
See also
References
- ↑ Stephen Gowans (2018). Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom: 'Imperialism' (p. 54). [PDF] Montreal: Baraka Books. ISBN 9781771861427 [LG]
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 “But Algeria wasn’t just where a repressive military machine made its figurative and literal bones. It wasn’t just a place to send political exiles. It was also where France’s Second Republic (1848–1852) wanted to export the unemployed and turn them into settlers, thereby neutralizing dissent in the metropole. “Colonization promised to simultaneously satisfy workers’ demands for employment and ally these worries [of the political threat of poverty and unemployment],” writes Sessions.”
Matthew Wills (2023-11-12). "What Are Colonies For? France and Algeria, 1848" JSTOR Daily. - ↑ 3.0 3.1 “The journalist, Stead, relates the following remarks uttered by his close friend Cecil Rhodes, in 1895, regarding his imperialist ideas:
“I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread,” “bread,” “bread,” and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”
This is what Cecil Rhodes, millionaire, king of finance, the man who was mainly responsible for the Boer War, said in 1895.”
Vladimir Lenin (1916). Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: 'The division of the world among the great powers'. - ↑ Nodrada (2021-05-19). "Decolonization and Communism" Orinoco Tribune. Archived from the original on 2022-06-06. Retrieved 2022-06-17.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 "History of Zimbabwe". Official Government of Zimbabwe Web Portal.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Herbert Chitepo. Herbert Chitepo at the National Press Club (ca. 1973). YouTube.
- ↑ Michelina Andreucci (2019-04-17). "ESAP and the West’s double standards" The Patriot.
- ↑ Gregory Elich and Sam Moyo (2009-01-02). "Reclaiming the Land: Land Reform and Agricultural Development in Zimbabwe: An Interview with Sam Moyo" MR Online.
- ↑ George T. Mudimu and Gregory Elich. "The Dynamics of Rural Capitalist Accumulation in Post-Land Reform Zimbabwe" MR Online.
- ↑ Jennifer E. Sessions (2015). Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the French Revolution of 1848. The Politics of Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Spring 2015), vol.Vol. 33, No. 1. French Politics, Culture & Society.
- ↑ “While I was mining for gold in Arizona, my attention was vigorously caught by the personality of Cecil Rhodes. [...] Thrilled to the core of my being, I was as one summoned by an irresistible call, and I determined to go to Africa and cast my fortune with this unknown leader who so constantly fired my imagination. I believed that my knowledge of scouting, gained on the American frontier and in fighting Indians, could be made of value to him. [...] After a great storm, ridden out by the help of oil bags, we neared the coast of Africa, toward which all eyes were strained. I was the first to sight land. How I had longed for this moment! Here at last, after years of striving and many defeats, lay the kingdom of my heart's desire before my eyes! Its dream shores stretched before me, inviting exploration of the unknown. However the adventure might end, I felt I could die content. Those who know me intimately will understand why I was more thrilled by the first low, sandy dunes of Africa than by all the wonders of Europe. The lure of this oldest yet newest of lands had held me in thrall for many years.”
Frederick Russel Burnham (1926). Scouting on Two Continents (pp. 80-88). - ↑ “Another important book set in German South West Africa was Verschüttete Volksseele: Nach Berichten aus Südwestafrika (The Buried Folk Soul: Reports from South-West Africa). It was the work of Dr Mathilde Ludendorff, the mystic philosopher and wife of General Erich Ludendorff—the man who had been one of the driving forces behind schemes for German settlement in Poland, the Baltic and the Ukrainian Crimea during World War I. Verschüttete Volksseele was based on a collection of letters from settlers in German South-West Africa that had been collated by Mathilde Ludendorff over several years. It painted the settler society, as it had existed in German South-West Africa just before World War I, as one in which the settlers had discovered their true German identity.”
Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga (2010). The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism: 'A People Without Space'. - ↑ “For years the Portuguese colonialist policy has been to send to Angola all the poverty stricken, the failures from the metropolitan areas, and the poor and illiterate peasant families of Portugal in order to establish them as colonists on this land wrested from the native peoples. As a result, the natives, to whom the land rightfully belongs, know only the blackest misery.
The influx of peasants has brought competition between Portuguese and African workers. To reduce the number of unemployed Portuguese, the colonial administration grants them a monopoly over all kinds of labour; taxi drivers, waiters in hotels and restaurants, street sweepers, clerks in shops - all such occupations are reserved for Portuguese workers. In construction work, the foremen and artisans are all Portuguese, while only the unskilled labour is left to the Africans. Because of this gross discrimination, the Portuguese labourers are better paid and enjoy all the social advantages that are denied to their African colleagues.
All the Africans who fail to find work, either in the cities or in the country, are recruited with or without their consent as contratados. Thus, it is that today, in spite of the abolition of forced labour by the International Labour Conference held at Geneva in 1931, Portuguese colonialism upholds a slave economy, of which Angola is an outstanding example.”
Aquino de Bragança and Immanuel Wallerstein (1982). The African Liberation Reader, Volume 1: The Anatomy of Colonialism: 'Portuguese Settlement in Angola (1960)'. [PDF] - ↑ Joseph B. Treaster (1977). "Twilight in White Rhodesia" The Atlantic.
- ↑ “[W]hy would the state be interested in allowing homesteaders on these lands rather than cash entrants? [...] The answer is found in the signature characteristic of homesteading: occupation by actual settlers. Settler occupation disrupted tribal land uses, physical development, and infrastructure; it also created vested political interests in maintaining non-native settlement. These irreversible effects of settlement meant that even a future legal loss could only result in a payment to tribes, not the return of the land. This reduction of the tribal land base furthered federal efforts to continually diminish tribes’ sovereignty, which was inextricably linked to their ownership of the lands that comprised their territories (Carlos, Feir, and Redish Reference Carlos, Feir and Redish2022). By using homesteading to occupy these particular lands, any legal threats against dispossession became moot; any future court settlement effectively became a forced sale of the land.Footnote 15 Thus, the federal state strategically allowed homesteading to continue in order to solidify the transfer of lands away from tribes. This strategy complemented the various political forces that wanted lands to remain in the hands of non-native settlers.”
Douglas W. Allen and Bryan Leonard (2024). Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation, vol. 119. American Political Science Review. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001466 [HUB] - ↑ 16.0 16.1 “The American Indian Removal policy of President Andrew Jackson was prompted by the desire of White settlers in the South to expand into lands belonging to five Indigenous tribes. After Jackson succeeded in pushing the Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830, the U.S. government spent nearly 30 years forcing Indigenous peoples to move westward, beyond the Mississippi River.”
Robert McNamara (2025-05-06). "American Indian Removal Policy and the Trail of Tears" ThoughtCo. - ↑ 17.0 17.1 Douglas W. Allen and Bryan Leonard (2024). Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation, vol. 119. American Political Science Review. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423001466 [HUB]
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 “In 56 years, Israel has built well over 100 settlements scattered across the West Bank. Settlers also have built scores of tiny unauthorized outposts that are tolerated or even encouraged by the government. Some are later legalized.”
Caleb Diehl and Joseph Federman (2024-07-06). "A look at how settlements have grown in the West Bank over the years" AP News. - ↑ 19.0 19.1 “While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law and by much of the international community, Israel distinguishes settlements it has authorized from those it hasn’t. The vast majority of settlements are built by government order, but some unauthorized settlements, known as settlement outposts, have been established by ideologically- driven Israeli civilians with the hope that they will one day be authorized by the government. Israel occasionally cracks down on them, but it often retroactively legalizes them once they grow into communities.”
Abbas Al Lawati (2024-02-02). "Who are Israeli settlers and why are they so controversial?" CNN. - ↑ 20.0 20.1 Daniel Immerwahr (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States: 'The Fall and Rise of Daniel Boone'.