Settler States

and how they relate to colonial capitalism and white supremacy

What is a settler state? Since it’s a common term, an important term, and one I’m going to be addressing in several upcoming pieces, I thought it would be useful to clearly define settler states, to situate them historically, and to go into some of the social dynamics particular to settler states.

What is a settler state? A settler state is a type of colony in which the colonizing country (usually based in Europe) sends a significant population to “settle” and occupy the territories of other people. All settler states are founded on genocide and to continue to exist, they maintain the results of their genocides as an active colonial force within their society.

Multiple states outside of Europe, particularly China, Japan, and Indonesia, have also engaged in forms of genocide, colonialism, and imperialism, including forms of permanent colonial occupation that could fit the definition of settler states or probably would have produced settler states given more time, before they were interrupted by the temporary reality of Western dominance. It’s important to remember that dominant state institutions around the world originated in Europe and the US, but capitalism developed globally, and there are other oppressive hubs of state development on other continents, some of them with far longer continuity and more military, economic, and—increasingly—cultural power than any European state.

Because I know far less about these other states and because the last centuries have been predominantly shaped by European colonialism, even if Europe and its settler states have lost their hegemony, I’m going to focus on them.

How did they develop?

At the bloody birth of the modern age, sea power was far more decisive than land power for expanding the dominion and wealth of the newly developing nation-states. Largely landlocked states that lacked reliable bluewater ports—namely Russia, Prussia, the Habsburg monarchy, and Poland until it was devoured by the former three—were consigned to growing by conquering neighboring territories.

Portugal and the Netherlands used their naval power primarily to capture and develop strategic trade hubs around the world, typically port cities or well positioned islands. They also established the standard sort of colony from South America to Indonesia: captured territory that would serve largely as a site for brutal resource extraction worked largely by slave labor. This form of colonization was the primary form used by countries with strong navies and also large armies, namely the dual monarchy of Castilla and Aragón (which would become “Spain” more than two centuries after the two monarchs sponsored and then organized the invasion of the Americas). France and Britain also began creating extractive/plantation colonies about a century after Castilla and Aragón. All three (France, Britain, and proto-Spain) fought over the Caribbean and North America (with the Netherlands and Sweden making minor appearances in both theaters).

Unlike the standard colony, which was essentially a distant land brutally conquered and turned into a plantation or a mine, the settler state primarily came to be inhabited by emigrants from the colonizing country and from allied, culturally similar nations. Over time they developed a more independent economy and a political class led by local elites who could develop geopolitical strategies from their own standpoint (rather than the standpoint of London, Paris, or Madrid). Sometimes they gained the independence to form a government of their own through political revolutions (rather than social revolutions), as in the case of the United States, Argentina, and Chile, or they were granted gradual independence by their colonial overlord, as in the case of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Many settler states were in some ways unsuccessful as traditional plantation colonies. To better understand this, let’s look at the competition between the French and British to colonize North America after they had shouldered out the Dutch and Swedish. What were they after? A better geopolitical position, and areas of extraction to boost their economies with prime materials stolen from the ecosystem with forced human labor. Let’s look at those in turn.

Geopolitical position

Britain and France wanted to discover a Northwest Passage, a theorized gap in North America that would allow more direct transit from Europe to the profitable colonies and trade centers in eastern and southern Asia, namely India, China, and the multiple archipelagos of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia that geographically and culturally ignorant Europeans lumped together as the “East Indies.” After discovering that gap, they wanted to be able to occupy territory and establish ports and forts along the coastline so if it turned out to be a narrow passage, they would have military control of it. (Similar to how Iran has military control of the Strait of Hormuz, Egypt has military control of the Suez Canal but Yemen can threaten marine passage through the Red Sea and thus the Canal, the US has military control of the Panama Canal, and—the two biggest sea lanes by shipping volume—the UK and France control the English Channel, and Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand cooperate to keep open the Strait of Malacca.)

The reason a Northwest Passage would have been so important is that, at the time, all the profitable shipping of resources extracted from southern and eastern Asia had to go all the way around South Africa, or (and in this case including the gold and silver from what are today called Chile, Bolivia, and Peru) all the way around the southernmost tip of South America. And longer ocean voyages meant higher expenses, higher risk of shipwreck or piracy, and lower profits.

Back then, a Northwest Passage did not exist. The northern limits of the continent around Alaska and Nunavut extend fully to the permanently frozen northern ice cap. But as global warming causes ice around the North Pole to melt, such a passage is starting to appear, which is the reason for Trump’s claims on Greenland, Norway’s incipient militarization of Svalbard, and accelerating levels of ocean floor prospecting and fossil fuel claims around the Arctic. In other words, the same geopolitical consideration still exists today.

Areas of Extraction

From the perspective of the ruling class in Toledo, Lisboa, Amsterdam, and London, the primary purpose of a colony was to create an area for extraction where some valuable good could be produced at great quantity and low expense, in a way that devastated complex ecosystems, leaving behind wastelands that were more legible to the State (e.g. easier to surveil than an ecosystem); and in a way that devastated the Indigenous populations, enabling the exponential expansion of conquest and colonization. It was an engine for economic, military, and social power at a time of increasing competition between European states, religious strife that broke the unity of the Church, and rebellions by the peasants and urban lower classes. To those using a military lens, it was a way to promote and organize economic accumulation that could finance their growing armies and navies. To those using a mercantile lens, it was a way to increase profit margins and trade volume, to corner or monopolize the market for high value commodities, to create derivatives markets in insurance and loans, and to fuel an incipient industrialism in Europe that was based on a similar process of colonization and enclosure waged against their own peasantry.

Put simply, colonialism provided the fuel for this new engine of global domination, the capitalist state.

To do colonialism well, European elites needed to create positive feedback loops between economic accumulation and state power, a codependency we can refer to as social control.

Colonial extraction in North America focused on beaver pelts in the territory of the Huron, Erie, and Haudenosaunee; tobacco in the territory of the Tsenacommacah; indigo dye in the territory of the Catawba; cotton in the territory of the Muscogee, Choctaw, Yamasee, and Guale; and sugar cane in the territory of the Chitimacha and Choctaw. This brief summary, of course, leaves out a number of colonial exports and a great many colonized or dispossessed peoples, but a pattern that we can see, from the French colonies of Quebec and Louisiana to the thirteen British colonies that formed the United States, is a focus on raw materials for the clothing industry (pelts, dye, and cotton) and addictive products for the military and the proletariat (tobacco, and sugar cane for making distilled alcohol like rum).

The clothing industry—mainly textiles but also animal skins—was one of the first in Europe to industrialize: to move from the control of artisanal guilds or peasant women to the control of wealthy merchants, property owners, and the banks they depended on to invest in the new machines that would standardize, deskill, and speed up the production process. As for the drugs (keeping in mind that the colonizers transformed tobacco from a sacred, ritual plant into an addictive consumer product), they were like a gift from Heaven. As far as the State was concerned, addiction was a wonderful alternative to mutiny or rebellion. Remember that colonialism required constant foreign wars, resulting in hundreds of thousands of soldiers traumatized by their own brutality and dying of diseases in faraway lands, and it was integrated with the enclosure of the commons in Europe, which meant the end of the peasant class: millions of people deprived of their autonomy and a direct connection to the land, consigned to poverty, famine, and wage labor. In such conditions, addictions can flourish, and where addiction is the norm effective resistance becomes scarce.

Settler states as failed colonies

US patriots are infamous for their self-importance, but there are two things about the invention of their country that almost none of them know. And I’m not talking about facts that they pretend not to know, like how without slavery and genocide there is no US.

Here are the two things:

1. it was primarily France and not the colonial militias (led by the richest man and largest slave owner on the continent) who won the war against the British.

2. Britain decided to give up its thirteen North American colonies to focus on protecting its Caribbean colonies, like Jamaica and Barbados, and to improve its position in the Caribbean in general. In other words, when push came to shove, the future US was a backwater and the Caribbean was far more important.

There was, however, another important factor at work in the emergence of settler colonies, and it’s one that shows the strategic superiority of decentralization even in extremely anti-anarchic circumstances like colonization. The local Euro-descended elite, who played a managerial role in the colonies, developed their own class interests and their own strategies of accumulation and social control that tended to be more effective and more intelligent, because the local elite had access to local knowledge and an on-the-ground perspective.

For the European states, the colonies were nothing but plantations and mines that existed to augment their own wealth and dominance. But in those colonies, there were intense power struggles. At the bottom there were enslaved Africans, enslaved or dispossessed Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and indentured Europeans who were a mishmash of criminals, rebels, heretics, kidnapping victims, and peasants forced into debt. All of them were fighting for their survival, their dignity, and their freedom, even the Europeans, who faced high death rates during their contractually limited period of enslavement. These peoples were most dangerous when they came together in solidarity, which is why the colonizers legislated the concept of race into existence, criminalized solidarity, engineered situations that pitted one group against another, and viciously repressed rebellion.

Over more than a century, this process led to an entirely new invention: white people, who might compete and fight against one another for influence and ranking, but apparently God or Nature had given them rights, and in exchange they had to cooperate, rich and poor, to maintain order.

In the American colonies, the local white elite enlisted the white lower classes and a substantial part of the mestizo or mixed population to defeat their European overlords and create independent governments under their own control, free to pursue more intelligent and more genocidal military and economic policies. As a function of both whiteness and this new, non-aristocratic white elite that had strong connections to the financial and mercantile sub-elite of Europe, the newly independent colonies—from Venezuela to the United States—reestablished alliances with European powers. The US only took a couple decades to get cozy again with Britain, whereas others, like Venezuela, sought support from France. And seeing which way the wind was blowing, Britain in particular began to give greater autonomy to colonies like Canada.

At this point, the divergence between settler states and ex-colonies starts to become clear. Settler states became extensions of Europe without the baggage of Europe: white societies spreading on a territory with no remaining trace of the commons, primed for industrialism, private property, and liberal democracy. To fulfill this evil dream, they needed to attract a huge volume of immigration from Europe, which also helped Europe as a technique of social control, a pressure release valve for skyrocketing populations worked to the bone, clothed by industrialism, and fed by plantation economies.

As a case study, consider the Irish. Facing genocidal campaigns by the English over the course of centuries, settler colonies gave the Irish the option of emigrating. Emigration could be an escape from the necessity of rebellion and the likelihood of famine or summary execution. Later, the Brits would use this forced emigration pipeline to colonize Australia, and the Dutch would try to do the same in South Africa.

In the end, settler colonies were those that achieved a racial hegemony that allowed whiteness to be universalized as a self-referential norm. From Buenos Aires to Boston, citizens could pretend that they lived in a white society (they would use the term “civilized”) and anyone who wasn’t white was an exception, a minority, a marginal fact that didn’t merit attention from anyone other than the police.

Ex-colonies that did not achieve this hegemony remained plantations and mines, ruled by a white elite but still dependent on outside support. This meant they were never allowed to fully develop a locally situated strategy that would optimize state power. Simultaneously, they were encouraged to see their own country as a pile of resources to plunder and their subjects as a horde of savages to exploit, kill, or starve. Settler states grew in power, but the most important colonies, those that had been valued as mines and plantations—Bolivia, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti—gradually became the poorest countries in the hemisphere. (Haiti, the poorest of these, was and continues to be deliberately punished as a Black country that overthrew its European colonizer and the local white plantation owners.)

---

The first settler states were:

• the United States

• Argentina

• Chile

• Uruguay

The next generation of settler states were:

• Canada

• Australia

• New Zealand

Examples of failed settler states (defeated in wars waged by the colonized population or by competing colonizers) include:

• Algeria when dominated by French landowners

• South Africa under the Dutch (the VOC, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the apartheid government)

Settler state invented in the 20^th century:

• Israel (explicitly modeled on white supremacist/apartheid South Africa)