The other day, I was arguing with someone israel and Palestine, and they brought up the whole “everybody has done settler colonialism before” trope. While it’s an idiotic argument even if true (directly contradicting their whole “rules based international order” sthick), it did get me wondering.
I’ve assumed up until now that settler colonialism is a phenomena unique to the capitalist phase of history, but how true is that exactly?
They’re confusing migration (violent or otherwise) and imperial urban rule with settler displacement and the annihilationism that goes with it
Also the defining character of settler colonialism has been its use of industrialization and market building to shore up a racialized ideology and vice versa
That was rarely or never the case with the old empires which were agrarian tribute systems that usually relied on their subject peoples being semi autonomous to relive pressure on imperial bureaucracy, that’s not to say there wasn’t settlers, it simply means the ruling mode of production didn’t always cater or center around them
For instance, if the Roman Empire had been settler colonialist in the capitalist sense of today, Greek wouldn’t have remained the lingua franca of the eastern half of the empire, and every Roman emperor would’ve remained an Italian or “ethnic” Roman
This is more medieval than ancient, the Crusader states in modern-day Palestine and Lebanon might be considered settler states, and Germans settler-colonized East Prussia (modern-day Kaliningrad) and completely wiped out the natives.
Even if settler-colonialism was common throughout the ancient world, that doesn’t excuse it happening today. Remind them that rape and slavery were common throughout the ancient world as well.
The point is that collectively speaking, the vast majority of humanity rightfully agrees that rape, genocide, slavery, colonialism, and unprovoked murder should belong in the dustbins of the past, to not be repeated going forward.
Israel, the U.S., Britain and India (the Kashmir region is arguably Indian colonialism) are the only or primary countries still engaged in settler-colonialism, and actively holding humanity back, and these countries must be completely destroyed or rebuilt into socialist states.
Even if settler-colonialism was common throughout the ancient world, that doesn’t excuse it happening today
It’s important to make a distinction between the “imperialism” of the Roman empire and the 20th century imperialist structure which coalesced in the 20s-60s, likewise we must distinguish between the existence of torture throughout history (often tenuously supported by Victorian hobnobbing and the ability to make a shitty little website that shows up on Google and little else) and the trail of forensic evidence we have stretching back from the SBU’s detention centers where they electrocuted babushkas thru the kidneys (I’m not kidding) all the way to Malaysia
European colonialism is an entirely new phase of history that began 1000 years ago.
Can you elaborate more on the differences?
At least when it comes to imperialism, you should read lenin’s imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism to understand modern imperialism. Modern imperialism is a distinctly capitalist phenomena.
I’ve read that work of Lenin, but I haven’t read it in years, and I was hoping if you had an in-depth analysis of pre-modern colonialism. But I understand.
I don’t know anything about pre-modern colonialism. That’s why I asked this question in the first place.
It’s a pretty serious historical investigation. I’m not an actual historian, I can only gesture to the words of world systems theorists. I just do takes and book reports for now. Not a real Marxist.
Before nationalism and monotheism, as far as warlords were concerned a peasant was a peasant; what language they spoke did no impact their ability to plow. As such, Settler Colonialism was rare but not unheard of. Best examples are the crusades, Germany’s colonization of Prussia (see Baltic crusades), Japan vs the Ainu, and the Bible (Jewish conquest of philistine).
The far more common occurrence was that invaders would replace the ruling/warrior class with their own people and the commoners would be left to work. Sometimes the two classes would form a common culture (Saxon invasion of England, Norman invasion of England, Roman Europe, French invasion of Gaul), other times they would not (Ottoman Turks outside Anatolia, the Selucid Empire).
What even was the point they were trying to make? It happened before and that makes it okay now?
It was something like “everybody has done settler colonialism, therefore, Palestinians should just accept Israeli annexations”.
Perhaps everyone did but the Palestinians surely didn’t, so why are the Palestinians being punished for the crimes of other nations?
Ben-Gurion wrote:
The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming … They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.
Source: David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present
Colonialism is how we got capitalism developed as a mode of production, consuming others in the historic centers of human civilization. Spread from Europe into West Asia, India, and China. A millenium ago, so recently rly
This is a super lazy answer, but the Wikipedia page on this lists nearly only European colonisation on non European peoples. The few counter examples seem to be Morocco, Indonesia, and Japan.
