The Transformation of the World (81 page)

An American “wilderness” concept does not seem to have played a major role in Russia. On the other hand, a particularly high degree of ideologization was reached when expansion was dressed up as a struggle against Islam. Propagandists attuned to a philosophy of history argued that the “historical decline” of Christendom in relation to Islam could and should be reversed. Archaeologists went in search of “pure” (that is, pre-Islamic) cultural forms in the conquered periphery. Islam was discursively defined as a foreign import, and Christian outposts such as Georgia were incorporated into God's plan for salvation;
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the purifying effect of the frontier experience would stand Russians in good stead. Similarly after 1830, partly to protect its heartlands from heretical contamination, the Russian state preferred to populate the periphery with religious dissenters—Old Believers, for example, whose persuasions had distanced them from the Orthodox Church since the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1890s heterodox Christians made up the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians in Transcaucasia.
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As usual, however, the imperial discourse was shot through with contradictions. The same Islamic fighters who in Dagestan were demonized as enemies of Christian civilization might appear in a different context as mountain warriors or “noble savages.” Such romantic-Orientalist themes linked Russian thinking about “the alien” with the ideologies of other empires, such as the glorification of the Berber in French North Africa or the British admiration for martial races in India and East Africa.
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Sixth
, unlike with the North American Indians, a few success stories can be reported in the case of the Tsarist Empire. Under pressure from the forces of expansion, many peoples displayed a high degree of cultural resistance as well as adaptability. One of these, the Siberian Bukharans, stood out among the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Central Asia by virtue of their urbanity, their relative loyalty to the Russian government, and their widespread literacy in Arabic and Persian; they formed the core of a merchant stratum and maintained intra-Islamic contacts between Bukhara and the Tsarist Empire. Other examples are the Yakuts and the Buryats. As one of only two Mongol peoples in the Russian Empire (the other was the Kalmyks), the Buryats were seen by Russians as
representing a higher stage of development than that of the “primitive” shamanistic peoples of Siberia, especially since they had a differentiated social structure with a clearly recognizable aristocracy inclined to act as colonial “collaborators.” Despite all manner of importunities from state officials and missionaries, the Buryats were able to command respect and to maintain a freedom of action that no Indian people in the Americas enjoyed. In particular, they set out to develop a modern, educated middle-class elite alongside the traditional political and ecclesiastical hierarchies—one that would articulate their interests both publicly and within the bureaucracy.
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All over the world, the worst-placed ethnicities and societies were those unable to fulfill at least one of three long-term criteria: to be feared militarily, to be useful economically, and to gain representation in the forums of modern politics.

5 Settler Colonialism

State Settlement Projects in the Twentieth Century

Frontiers can be places of annihilation and places of regeneration. Destruction and construction are often dialectically intertwined; Joseph Alois Schumpeter called this, in a different context, “creative destruction.” In the nineteenth century, whole peoples in frontier regions were decimated or reduced to poverty while constitutional democracies were taking shape there for the first time. Frontiers may thus be sites of archaic violence as well as birthplaces of political and social modernity.

Let us first cast a glance beyond World War I. There were still frontiers in the twentieth century, some of which continued processes from the previous century. But it would appear that they lost their ambiguity. Constructive developments were few and far between, as frontiers turned into peripheral zones of tightly controlled empires far removed from the internal pluralism of the British Empire.

The period after 1918 brought an intensification of ideology and state intervention in the opening up of new farming settlements. In general, the settlers in question were not enterprising private individuals, such as those who emigrated around the same time to Canada or Kenya, but people from the lower depths of poverty, sent out in the wake of conquering armies to secure “boundary markers” under harsh conditions. The idea that strong nations needed living space to escape the danger of resource shortage that came with overpopulation, and that they had a right and duty to take inadequately “cultivated” land from less efficient or even racially inferior peoples, can be found among numerous farright movements and opinion makers in the early twentieth century. It became official policy in the new empires that appeared in the 1930s: fascist Italy in the case of Libya (and to a lesser extent Ethiopia), post-1931 Japan in Manchuria, and Nazi Germany in its short-lived
Drang nach Osten
. All three combined visions
of a nation tested in frontier warfare with a special emphasis on the soil. Hitler, an admirer of the exotic adventure novels of Karl May, drew direct parallels between the Wild West of May's resourceful hero Old Shatterhand and the Wild East that he began to create in the early 1940s.
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Frontiers were stylized as experimental spaces where new men and new types of society could develop without hindrance from tradition: a utopian military order in Manchuria, an Aryan racial tyranny in conquered Eastern Europe. Germany's “blood and soil” ideology, in which ethnic cleansing and mass killing were preprogrammed, represented the extreme form of such thinking. The settlers were not meant to carry out these murderous objectives themselves, but in each case they served as instruments of policy. It was the state that recruited and dispatched them, providing marginal land in foreign colonies and convincing them of their sacred duty to endure the inevitable rigors for “the good of the nation.” The settlers of fascist imperial dreams—whether in Africa, Manchuria, or on the Volga—were guinea pigs for a state-directed
Volkstumspolitik
. They lacked the essential features of Turner's pioneers: freedom and self-reliance.

A further dimension that appeared in the twentieth century, and not only in fascist or (in Japan) ultranationalist systems, was what the sociologist James C. Scott termed the “social engineering” of rural settlement and production. Nature, it was widely believed, could be rationally exploited to the maximum through planned labor inputs and uniform conditions of agrarian production.
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One side effect of this was always greater state control over the rural population. The collectivizations in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, each associated with programs to bring “new land under the plough,” had this momentum, as did many projects (fundamentally less illiberal in design) of the Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In the Communist version, the element of settler freedom totally disappeared, and the actual clearing of land was often undertaken by soldiers or state farms. But the idea that the molding of space could be taken beyond ecological or “civilizational” limits was common to all twentieth-century variants of state-initiated land clearance and to older forms of settler colonialism.

The key term “settler colonialism” is usually found in the context of empires and imperialism. There it is mostly treated—at least for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as a special case, since before 1930 there were not very many colonies in which European settlers made up a considerable part of the total population and where political processes occupied a dominant role. The only instances—apart from the British dominions, which had long resembled nation-states in their forms of government—were Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, and Mozambique. There were no European settler colonies anywhere in Asia, and Northern Ireland was a particular exception in Europe. Histories of colonialism therefore focused little on settler colonies; only Algeria, the most important component of France's overseas empire, attracted greater attention. To discuss settler colonialism under the theme of the frontier involves
a reference shift, so that it appears not as a special type of colonial rule but as an outcome and expression of special forms of expansion.

Settler Colonialism: The Congealed Frontier
¹⁵⁵

Not all frontier expansion by nonstate players leads to a permanent and recognizable line of divide between types of economy and society. The early Canadian frontier was an undemarcated zone of contact between Indians and white fur hunters and traders, all highly mobile people poles apart from settlers, and the Amazonian frontier was never anything more than a space of plunder and overexploitation. Frontier
colonization
is therefore a subcategory of frontier
expansion
,
¹⁵⁶
a phenomenon known in most civilizations, which denotes a push into the “wilderness” beyond the existing cultivation boundary to develop land for agriculture or mineral extraction. Such colonization is by its very nature coupled with settlement; the economic objective is to bring the mobile production factors—labor and capital—closer to location-dependent natural resources.
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It does not necessarily have to involve a new political entity, since the colony is often founded at the edge of an existing area of settlement: for instance, the gradual extension of the Han Chinese agricultural zone at the expense of the pastoralist economy of Central Asia, which reached a peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But such colonization may take place in a secondary relationship to core overseas areas of new settlement; the best-known example of this is the opening up of the North American continent from its east coast outward. Industrial technology enormously increased the extent—and the environmentally destructive impact—of colonization. The railroad, in particular, strengthened the role of the state in a process that was in most cases historically organized by nonstate communities. The most extensive state-driven railroad colonization was the opening up of Asiatic Russia from the late nineteenth century on.
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Settler colonies are a special form of frontier colonization that first appeared in Europe in Greek antiquity (and before that in Phoenicia): a city would plant offshoots across the sea, in regions where only a relatively small commitment of military power was possible and necessary. In both ancient and modern times, this involved a decisive logistical difference with other kinds of frontier colonization. The sea, but also forbidding distances on terra firma (Gulja in Xinjiang, in preindustrial times, took longer to reach from Beijing than Philadelphia did from London), stood in the way of the regular links that alone permit social continuity.

Under such conditions it was possible that colonization would give rise to genuine colonies, in the sense not only of frontier settlements but of communities with their own distinct political structures. The classic example is the early English settlement of North America. The groups that founded settler colonies sought to create bridgeheads with a large degree of economic independence, reliant for supplies neither on the mother country nor on their local surroundings. Unlike the Romans in Egypt, the English in India, or the Spanish in Central and South America, European settlers in North America, Argentina, and Australia
did not find efficient systems of agriculture capable of generating a surplus to sustain a militarily protected apparatus of colonial rule. It was therefore not possible to divert a structurally existing tribute from the coffers of the old rulers into those of the new; nor were Indian peoples or Australian aborigines suitable for forced labor in European-style agriculture. These were the circumstances that gave rise to the
first
, “New England” type of settler colonization: that is, to the growth of an agrarian population that filled its labor requirement out of its own families and indentured servants while ruthlessly driving off the land a small indigenous population of no use to it economically. Around 1750, regions had arisen in North America—and
only
there in the world outside Europe—that had a high degree of social and ethnic homogeneity and the potential to become the core of a neo-European national state. The British followed the same model of colonization in Australia, in the special conditions resulting from forced migration of convicts, as well as later in New Zealand (despite especially strong resistance from the native Maori).

A
second
type of settler colonialism emerged where a politically dominant minority, with the help of the colonial state, was able to drive the majority population off the best land, yet remained dependent on its labor and constantly competed with it for resources. Unlike in the New England model, settlers in this second type—which we may call “African” because of its main modern locations (Algeria, Rhodesia, Kenya, South Africa)—were economically dependent on the indigenous population.
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This also explains the instability of the second type. Only the European colonization of North America, Australia, and New Zealand became irreversible, whereas powerful decolonization struggles eventually developed in the African settler colonies.

A
third
type of settler colonialism solved the labor supply problem due to expulsion or elimination of the indigenous population by importing slaves and putting them to work on medium-sized to large plantations. This may be called the “Caribbean type,” after the region where it was most in evidence, but it was also found as a less dominant form in British North America. Demographic proportions were an important variable. In the British Caribbean in 1770, blacks made up approximately 90 percent of the total population, whereas in the northern colonies of the future United States they accounted for only 22 percent, and in the future Southern states for no more than 40 percent.
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Type 3 is a limiting case, however. With the exception of the American South in the half-century before the Civil War, no coherent planter oligarchies with an independent political vision and capacity for action developed anywhere on the basis of modern slavery. This was anyway virtually impossible in places such as Jamaica or Saint-Domingue, where many large plantation owners resided in Europe. Hence plantation owners may be only loosely described as settlers at all.