Monolithic theorizations of settler colonialism are ahistoric and foreclose material analysis which cements racial capitalism.

The study of settler colonies has in recent decades consolidated into a discrete academic inquiry calling itself “settler colonial studies.” This is the most sustained, though not the only, academic attempt to consider the settler colony. Beginning life in the Australian academy, it finds its classic introduction in Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 monograph, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Today the project is carried forward by an eponymous journal, and cemented by academic touchstones like a Routledge Handbook.[1] Settler colonial studies argues for the analytical distinction of the settler colony from other colonial formations, premised upon its drive to secure land rather than labour, and its consequent organisation around the elimination of native societies rather than their enslavement or exploitation.[2] The settler colony, moreover, and unlike other genocidal events, persists. It is, in Wolfe’s phrasing, a ‘complex social formation’ and a ‘continuity through time.’[3] In the settler colony, ‘the colonisers come to stay – invasion is a structure not an event.’[4]x

These formulations take Australia and Australian scholarship as their ‘key paradigm’ or ‘premier exemplar.’[5] That continent’s history, according to this literature, crystallises these core dynamics of settler colonialism and exemplifies their persistence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – an ‘endless cycling of attempts to eliminate or absorb the Indigenous population.’[6] Unalloyed by elements like chattel slavery, Australia held the keys that unlocked the peculiar racialisation of settler colonialism in the Anglo settlements of the Americas and Australasia. In quick time, the paradigms of settler colonial studies extended beyond these continents, with its scholars developing a particularly enduring interest in Palestine.[7] In Lorenzo Veracini’s symptomatic phrasing, ‘As a scholarly field and as paradigm for analysis, settler colonial studies has gone global.’ It has ‘no geographical, cultural or chronological bounds.’[8]

This article, to an important extent, is about the globalisation (or universalisation) of this paradigm as a bad abstraction from an Australian model, which was itself inadequate to the Australian case, and particularly the Marxian concepts used to achieve this. In this regard, Wolfe’s final monograph, Traces of History, is a synecdoche. It begins, appropriately enough, with Wolfe himself, writing history on his verandah looking out over Healesville, Victoria. The local history – indeed, what transpired on the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station visible from Wolfe’s perch – permits him to establish the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism. From here, Wolfe fans out comparatively to variously racialised and subjugated populations in North and South America, Central Europe, and Palestine, where this logic reappears, or asserts itself in attenuated or alloyed forms, or is absent.[9] Nineteenth-century Australia, or the Coranderrk Station, duly abstracted, is adequate to index much of the world. This motion models the deeper way in which settler colonial studies conceives the history and present of its object, the settler colony. The formerly peripheral and exceptional moment becomes constitutive and central in every sense. The world was turned inside out in the process of colonisation, as surplus populations in Europe were displaced outwards; now it is folded back in, on the level of theory, and is suddenly adequate to account for the entire world.[10]

Settler colonial studies comes to rely, for its claims, almost singularly upon an expansive notion of primitive accumulation. This, in turn, leans on a prolific post-Cold War trend of Marxist thought in which “primitive accumulation” is, at once, unmoored from the transition debates and endogenous developments in the history of global capitalism – its crises, imperialism, financialisation, and myriad restructurings – and also taken to explain all of it. From here, the theorist may claim that primitive accumulation is exceptional to capitalism and capitalist accumulation not in a weak sense, but in a constitutive sense. All accumulation, we eventually learn, is deeply and secretly an ongoing form of primitive accumulation or dispossession, and this is the deep problem with capitalism – that it is a mode of predation. This, in a word, is the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the commons.

On this basis, Veracini may declare that settler colonialism is ‘perpetual primitive accumulation.’ The two theoretical paradigms are more or less identified; settler colonialism and ongoing primitive accumulation are ‘essentially alike.’[11] Ongoing primitive accumulation, or one of its cognate concepts (most famously, David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”) is taken to define the neoliberal present. The settler colony may then be said to ‘fundamentally define present dispensations.’[12] More specifically, the re-emergence of surplus populations around the world evinces, in this argument, the ongoing centrality of the “logics” of settler colonialism in global capitalism.

Capitalism today, and especially financialised capitalism, we should believe, is a settler colonial present, a rapacious global mode of predation.[13] Under the laws of universal settler colonialism, dispossession occurring before capitalism is functionally equivalent to dispossession during imperialist expansion and to dispossession under contemporary finance. The enclosure of the English commons, the incorporation of the New World and Antipodes into capitalist circuits, and mechanisms of financial accumulation today are essentially alike. The critique of capitalism and financialisation becomes self-explanatory. The problem with capitalism is, as it has always been, that it is predatory; and predation, on capitalism’s own ideology of justice and fairness, is immoral. This moralism evaporates the analytic distinctions that would specify the settler colony and acquits its theorist of historical study. Even the firm and gritty matter of land, settler colonialism’s ‘irreducible element,’ is airily abstracted into phenomenological standpoint theories and metaphysical assertions about the “logic of elimination.” Such theory can only endlessly rediscover its own premises in new phenomena across all history: an interminable enclosure of infinite commons, a universal settler colony.

This is not, it should be stated clearly, to argue that land dispossession and spoliation in historical settler colonies no longer occurs or has no political relevance today; this would be absurd. It is to dispute, however, that this fact contains a shortcut to an analysis of global capitalism and racialisation, or that it offers an adequate metaphor for the contemporary moment of outsourced production and financialisation. Against all the impulses and intuitions of settler colonial studies, we require a historical and materialist account of the settler colony capable of seeing in the dramatic restructuring of the settler economies and global capitalism something other than the universalisation of its own original “logics” and “structures.” It is one thing to argue that the evils of settler colonialism are not, or not only, past; it is quite another to see the world as a settler colony.[14]

The following pages develop these arguments through an immanent critique of settler colonial studies’ most famous practitioners and a critical genealogy of the recent deployment of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation.