Are we the baddies, too? “Settler Colonialism”

As a US Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, “We know it when we see it”, the definitions of what exactly a “Settler State” is are nebulous and open to wide interpretation. 

Oxford Bibliographies defines Settler colonialism as “an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of indigenous peoples and cultures”. But what is “ongoing”? 

The author, Alicia Cox, expands her definition to limit the term somewhat: “settler colonizers are Eurocentric and assume that European values with respect to ethnic, and therefore moral, superiority are inevitable and natural. However, these intersecting dimensions of settler colonialism coalesce around the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands, resources, and cultures.

However, as the Decolonial Atlas points out, and Lachan MacNamee argues in an essay for Aeon, “Settler Colonialism is not distinctly western or European“, taking, for example, the Japanese colonial occupation of Manchuria, and the Indonesian attempts to take West Papua. And, one might add, “disposesion of indigenous people’s lands, resources, and cultures” have been SOP in one form or another going back at least to Alexander imposing Greek/Maceconian regimes thoughout central Asia and the “near east” (near to whom, east of what? Our definitions — relatively near, but east of Macadonia, showing just how much European assumptions affect our world view).  

Cox also limits her definition further, or rather attempts to do so, when she distinguishes between “colonial” and “post-colonial” studies: 

… postcolonial studies and critiques the post- in “postcolonial” as inappropriate for understanding ongoing systems of domination in such places as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where colonialism is not a thing of the past because the settlers have come to stay, displacing the indigenous peoples and perpetuating systems that continue to erase native lives, cultures, and histories. 

So are countries like Mexico… part of the larger post-colonial “global south”, but with a strong overlay of “Eurocentric” settler colonial states?

Maybe there is some sort of “statue of limitations” on colonization. When the Castillians showed up in 1521, they were themselves the heirs to earlier waves of colonizers … Catheginians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Goths. And the same could be said about the other North American colonizers… the English, Dutch, French. 

Intent and effect

In everyday use, we limit Settler Colonialism to relatively recent (from the late 18th century to now) colonialism — “post colonial” as Cox would have it — leaving the messy past to its own devices. By this metric, the Spanish Conquest wouldn’t count: It was a late medieval expansion of European (West European) territorial and resource control. That is, settlement — finding territory for people from the old country to live on — was less important for Spain than access to, and exploitation of, Mexican (and other colonial) resources. And at the same time, Spain was “interally colonizing” the Peninsula — or attempting to impose “European values” assumed to be morally and ethically superior”, to borrow from Alicia Cox. She might further see the forced assimilation and expulsion of the Jews and Moors as a crude attempt to “repress […] indigenous peoples and cultures (although Both Jewish and Moorish cultures were the earlier migration, and when you come down to it, Spain (or Castille) were very late when it came to expelling religious minorities… the last in a series of Jewish expulsions from Western Europe, beginning with England in 1290).

The “ethno-state” was not really a thing in the late medieval world. A “country” wasn’t so much defined by culture or language so much as by where you lived, and who ruled. Even without its New World possessions, “Spain” was a collection of peoples with different cultures and languages (and still is, to some extent) not to mention various spots thoughout Europe, in southern Italy and even Flanders. The Americas were just another chunk of territory, with a different population than Europeans were used to. That they engaged in massacres, rapes, pillages, and the other not-so-niceties of conquest of the time isn’t questioned. What is questionable is whether they were fully invested in impsoing those “European values”.

In a way, yes.

But, not by clearing out the native population.. as the British colonists in North America and Australia were keen to do, and supplant them with their own people, but with the “time honored” techniques used by conquerors forever… my way or the highway (bye!!!!).

Religion provides the most obvious example , and one with which the Europeans had had experience. Converting the Scandivanians, the Slavs, and earlier the Germans was more a matter of “convincing” (even if at the point of a sword) to convert, with the with the assumption that most of their dependents and subjects will go along. And, maybe just leaving a small remainder of people that need more forceable “persuasion”. Also, remember that during the Age of Exploration… that late medieval-early modern period, … it wasn’t only the Americas that saw attempts at mass conversion. The Jesuits, espcially, were active in China and Japan seeking to win over the elites. That the Church (was open to incorporating … or subverting… local customs and practices in a “Catholic “Christian” package — in Mexico leaving the “Gods under altars” — the identication of various saints with the earlier gods or deified forces of natuire — was no different that the incorporation of some mythic Roman or Irish or Scandinavian folk beliefs and customs with a “Christian” overlay (something even encouraged in the Catholic Church up until the Council of Trent).

Even by the 17th century, it was widely noted that there was a separate Mexican culture, not Spanish, not imitation Spanish, but one in which the native cultures (even in religious observation) adapted European technology and practices for the most part, although subverting them to their own ends. Is the Virgin of Guadalupe a native godess, the mother of Jesus, or something of both?

Other europeanizing features — agricutural patterns, technolgies, popular culture — might be labeled “cultural appropriation” by the colonized. Not to say it was always by choice, or that the intent wasn’t to force indigenous people to adopt “the right way” of doing things, or conforming to the expectations of the colonizers (as in a demand that “Indians” wear shirts and pants… or on the missions, to enforce attendance at Sunday Mass).

I’d argue that outside of a few regions in “Las Americas” (not English North America) there really wasn’t “settler colonialism” for the simple reason the Europeans for the most part never intended to settle in any systemic fashion. As colonialist, the Spanish were still of a medieval mindset.. not necessarily looking for settlement so much as exploiting those resources for the “metropol”. What “settlers” there were overwhelming those neecded to exploit and return to the metropol those resoures… crown officials, managers, skilled workers in those trades that served European interest.

Overwhelmingly men. Even though we sometimes assume the Conquistadores raped every woman they could (and no doubt the did), mesiaje was more just the by-product of a shortage of European woman, and while we sometimes forget it (or want to forget it), women’s lives sucked if they couldn’t get a husband back then. Women had the agency to improve their unenviable lot by “marrying up”, and naturally took, advantage of it. Or, with a dearth of indigenous men, thanks to wars and diseases, often had to take what they could get… as did the Europeans. Who, at least in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, were even encouraged to do so, or at least, faced less stigma than English settlers who married “Indians”. 

Post Colonial? Neo-Colonial?

Spanish America is free,and if we do not mismanage our affairs she is English.

British Prime Minister George Canning, 1825

Post-independence, perhaps we can begin to talk about a “post-colonial” society… one is which while the “yoke” of foreign cultural and political control was thown off, it was still strugging with the contradictions between the imposed culture (which had been around for 300 years) and traditions. Obviously, over those 300 years of colonialism, culture had changed (both in the “mother country” and in the “colonies” and there was no going back.

However, the British, and later the US Empires were at their height and quick to scoop in. Canning was very much in the “old” imperialist mode, less concerned about imposing his culture than in taking over the exploitation of now ex-colonial resources. Humbolt (in his 1803 “Political Essay on New Spain”) and Henry George Ward’s “Mexico in 1827” didn’t so much set off a British (and to a lesser extent, French) land rush as it made Mexico a target for speculative investments. And, a likely target for exports.

Being good Liberals, the English were willing to do business with the “dusky hordes” … with a proviso. Liberalism merely implied all money and business is equal, not “all men are equal”. Of course, the post colonial ruling class, while more ethnically mixed, were those who’d been elites, but not the political ruling class, under the old regime. In other words, already “Hispanicized” in their manners and cusoms. Although non-Europeans were absorbed into the new leadership, it was with the assumption that they confomed to the mores adopted over the long colonial period. These included a deference to European (and presumably “better”) thinking especially when it came to more theoretical questions about politics and economics.

That deference to foreigners is something of a cliché, but one that appears to be a feature of post colonialism… trying to adapt whatever the outside power (which became the United States, especially after the US invasion, occupation, partial annexation of 1846-48) as close as possible to the original, “their” way.

You can see this in immigration. Even by independence, the percentage of Europeans was a small fraction of thw whole (2% European born, 10% total of all what today we call “white”, the majority of mixed indigenous and European, African and Asian descent, with a quarter still considered indigeous, according to Alexander von Humboldt and extant census data there was). 

The suggestion from the census data would suggest that wiping out the indigenous populatin was never intended… and I have argued that it wasn’t, with no “conscious genocides” (with a few exceptions) having ever been sanctioned. The “American holocaust of the 16th century (with the population dropping anywhere from 50 to 90%) had more to do with the accidental (an uninteded) introduction of “old world” diseases than anything else. It wasn’t until the English began their sporadic “smallpox blanket” campaigns in the 18th century that we hear of intentional biological warfare. 

As an aside, I might point out that one example of “settler colonialism” I read often in US discussions is the California missions… which one can’t argue were not concentration camps for indigenous people. And, whatever good intentions the missions might have had, as we know, the road to hell… and the California holocause was in the 1850s and into the 1880s, after US annexation. 

But… as the English, USA, and other Europeans developed a “racial science”, Mexico, and other Latin American nations, were desperate to “whiten” their populations. If not to become European, than at least to become “less Indigenous”. Today, even those who claim “Spanish” ancestry trace their families arrival in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America only to the 19th or 20th century. That even these “new” Mexicans were mostly men, and married “native” women (whether of complete, or mixed indigenous, or African, or Asian, or all of the above, background) may havwe fulfilled the scientific racists of the 19th century’s goal of “whitening” the population somewhat, but the “Cosmic Race” (as José Vasconcelos dubbed it in his own race-obsessed work) has never been seen in the context of a autochthonous culture, as Russians, Chinese, Scandinavians … who’ve certainly changed over time… are.

Are we (in Mexico) the baddied, or is it the “great power” to the north? “Post-colonial”, given the onslaught of cultural dominance by, or, maybe “neo-colonial” given it’s economic dependence on, and constraint on its foreign affairs by, the whims of the “great power” to the north.

As the judge said, “we know it when we see it.”