From Settler Colonialism to a New Postcolonial Settlement
In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” Notably articulated by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in his article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” this approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world.
Settler colonialism is seen as an ongoing process with enduring impacts on indigenous communities and serves as a framework for explaining the complex dynamics of power, domination, and resistance supposedly inherent in settler-colonial societies. Any perceived settler eruption is said to be governed by what Wolfe labels “the logic of elimination,” meaning that settler colonialism seeks to permanently occupy and transform indigenous lands through violent dispossession, forced assimilation, and cultural erasure. As such, narratives of settler colonialism offer no hope of redemption or reconciliation.
Widely taught and embraced on today’s college campuses, and increasingly featured in the media, the settler-colonial concept has vague connections to the original Marxist-Leninist gospel, but is more directly connected to postcolonial movements headed by figures such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Mao, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kwame Nkrumah, as well as intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Herbert Marcuse, Efraín Morote Best, and Michel Foucault. Less attention is paid, however, to this ideology’s empirical effects and actual history: the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed, and often cause their own societies a great deal of harm.
It’s Not All about Racism
The latest version of the settler-colonialist narrative ties imperialism and slavery to the triumph of “white privilege.” In reality, however, colonialism has a long, and diverse, history. Today’s primary promoters of anti‑Western imperialism—China and Russia—are themselves “settler” states, built over centuries through the displacement of indigenous cultural minorities. Even in North America and Africa, well before the conquest of the New World, there were constant wars and incidents of mass enslavement. The early settlers of southern Africa, the Khoisan, for example, have been reduced to just over 1 percent of South Africa’s population, having been displaced through a series of racially diverse migrations and gold rushes before and after the arrival of Europeans. They have faced notable levels of discrimination in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, by both the European and Bantu settlers.
We seem to forget that Africans were quite capable of building their own exploitative empires, such as Great Zimbabwe and the Kingdom of Mapungubwe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, which conquered and exploited other people, much like their European settler counterparts. Later, South Africa saw the conquests of the Natal by Shaka Zulu—who notably launched the genocidal Mfecane against the Swazi and Sotho tribes.
Genocides and ethnic cleansings are not unique to any tribe or continent. They have occurred throughout precolonial Africa, in primitive Scandinavia, and pre-Columbian America. As Steven Pinker has noted, in his treatise on the history of violence, several ancient gravesites contain bodies that had their skulls cracked open before they died.
The settler school also often chooses to racialize oppression, forgetting that imperial expansion transcends race and faith. Not all settlers, for example, were demonic tools of capitalism; many came as refugees, such as the persecuted Huguenots following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in Catholic France, or Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during the Nazi era. Others, like the Afrikaner, also were oppressed; they were herded into concentration camps and their language banned during the height of the British Empire.
Slavery, likewise, has existed since the most ancient times, widely employed both in Africa and the Middle East, where the practice still exists. Slavery is an unfortunate part of history, but not a monolithic one. The Romans enslaved peoples not based on race but through conquest; later, descendants of slaves became citizens, military commanders, and even emperors. Muslims, from the original caliphate to the Ottoman Empire, were among the greatest, and for a period, most successful imperialists, conquering peoples from Palestine and Persia to India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Spain. They enslaved captives as eagerly as the Romans and long indulged a preference for white slaves, largely from the Slavic countries, as well as establishing a long-standing trade in humans with African princes such as the Sultanate of Zanzibar. It was only through the lifelong efforts of Christian missionaries such as David Livingstone that these practices came to an end.
These historical realities contradict the revisionist political gloss on colonial history. Many progressives argue that racism lies at the root of Western civilization. (Some of the settler oppression school also specifically insist that the United States has been largely built on slavery and the slave trade; this was the basic thesis of the New York Times’ 1619 project, widely dismissed by historians on the right and left for its egregious overstatements.) The upshot is that “bipoc,” an acronym for black, indigenous, and people of color, should constitute a permanent political bloc, one seeking and deserving “allyship and solidarity.” Following the anti-settler line, such progressives propose a united front of the colored against “white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.”
Yet it turns out that class interest has always crossed racial lines; Chinese and Indian merchants, for example, were critical to British imperial economics, notes the strongly anti-imperialist author Amitav Ghosh, in explaining the workings of “the atrocity” of the opium trade. Today, the notion that widely diverse groups like Chinese, Mexicans, Indians, and recent African immigrants to the United States—each with long and complicated histories—are somehow united as “people of color” in “a shared struggle against white supremacy” seems absurd on its face. These groups all have differing trajectories, economically and politically, with many succeeding rapidly within societies defined as bastions of “white supremacy.” It’s hard to lump immigrants from India, far better educated and wealthier than virtually any other U.S. group, with the nonwhite poor from rural Central America, or those living in the rural South, or on Native American reservations.
Far from a simplistic racial binary, colonialism is often impossibly complex and diverse. Just take Palestine, conquered in waves by the Hebrews, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and then the Arabs again, followed by the Turks. The comparatively recent British Mandate followed, and in 1947, the state of Israel was established. Nor is Israel purely a product of European migration. Close to half of Israel’s own population consists of Jews expelled from Arab countries and their descendants.
Not always reducible to an extraneous element, a virus, or “land thieves,” as colonial theory would have it, settlers both adopt and modify the culture of natives. Today’s Israelis, many with roots in Palestine stretching back seventy years or more, have created their own blended culture consisting of Middle Eastern and Ashkenazic influences. Afrikaners, meanwhile, have become long-time residents, settling in South Africa longer than many black Africans. Roughly 7.2 percent of the black South African population was born in other African countries—essentially black “settlers”—about equal to the percentage of white South Africans; the black immigrant presence has caused a rise in black-on-black xenophobia in recent decades.
What made European settlement unique was that it expanded timeless practices of regional migration and conquest to a global, then industrial, scale. Despite the shameful elements of this history, however, the West also pioneered early notions of human rights and racial justice, as pointed out in a new book by scholar John Ellis. Denial of this fact, notes Ellis, is among the “dangerous delusions” that inhabit our pedagogy. Antislavery movements, argues historian Nigel Biggar, emerged not in Africa or the Middle East, where the practice continues even today, but in the heart of imperialist nineteenth-century Great Britain and France. Additionally, some of the most prominent independence leaders of colonial liberation movements, such as China’s Sun Yat-sen and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, drew much of their inspiration from Western sources.
A Debilitating Ideology
Disputes over the history of settler colonialism are not just academic. They have a real-life significance because political movements based primarily on opposition to settler colonialism have a miserable track record in terms of improving outcomes for their citizens.
In the most extreme cases, anticolonialism can be used to justify liberation movements’ own violations of the rule of law. In the name of “liberation,” the African National Congress ran torture camps in Angola and bombed civilians in Durban’s restaurants. The Irish Liberation Army infamously used the “Irish six pack,” a brutal method involving shooting a person six times, typically in the limbs, to punish or mark them as a traitor or informant during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Violent attacks on white farmers in Zimbabwe have been perpetrated by Robert Mugabe’s North Korean–trained Fifth Brigade, and the lynching of the Harkis in Algeria following the “war of liberation” remains a warning that formerly oppressed people are also capable of oppression. In the estimation of radical philosophers like Frantz Fanon, the settler, even after independence, “never ceases to be the enemy.” More recently, Natan Sharansky notes, settler ideology has been used to excuse blatant anti-Semitism and even calls for the elimination of Jews, in Palestine and in some cases around the world.
Even when such attitudes do not result in violence and oppression, obsession with endless anticolonial struggle can crowd out practical and constructive reform efforts. Anti-colonialist intellectuals tend to disparage people’s ability to exercise agency beyond agitation and attacks on existing institutions. The dominant school, observed historian Arthur Schlesinger three decades ago, is fundamentally negative and nihilistic, “see[ing] little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes.” These attitudes have been incubating since the 1960s, and have now infected not only tertiary but also secondary education, where many students, for example in California, are exposed to “decolonial” indoctrination even in grade schools.
Whether in Palestine or in elite universities, blaming the failures of nonwhite groups solely on “settler colonialism” and European oppression often diverts energies away from pragmatic efforts to improve results in the classroom, the marketplace, and the workplace. In the United States, academics and activists often imply that racial minorities, especially African Americans, cannot succeed on their own against a hopelessly oppressive system. They stigmatize successful behaviors as “acting white,” and attack subjects like algebra as “racist.” (Algebra’s Arab roots apparently do not matter in this case.)
In other countries, blaming every problem on colonial legacies is a tactic often employed to excuse poor governing performance on the part of the postcolonial party-state. Ironically, the search for scapegoats doesn’t always stop at European settlers. Many anticolonial intellectuals were equally intolerant and racist toward other nonwhites. For instance, Robert Sobukwe had a cynical attitude toward South African Indians, claiming they were “tainted with the virus of cultural supremacy and national arrogance,” and others such as Steve Biko and Malcolm X sought to stigmatize those who preferred cooperation, such as “house negroes” and ersatz “white liberals.” This is the kind of purist thinking that paved the way for “an illiberal totalitarianism” seen during the last half of the twentieth century in Idi Amin’s Uganda, Pol Pot’s murderous Cambodian regime, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
Critically, such approaches have done little to improve the situation in America’s inner cities, nor have they made life better in the banlieues around Paris, the townships of Johannesburg, the flats of Cape Town, or in the British Midlands. This ideology has proven especially disastrous in countries lionized as “anti-imperialist,” from Palestine to Zimbabwe.
The African case is particularly salient. When Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, it was regarded as the jewel of Africa, with a strong agricultural sector that the UN ranked highly for yields in maize, wheat, soy, ground nuts, and cotton. In contrast, Botswana had only 1.8 miles of paved road at the time of its independence in 1966. Today, the situation is reversed: Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa per capita, while nearly 30 percent of Zimbabweans now live in other countries following the economic devastation that came with the land expropriation policies of the early 2000s.
To its credit, South Africa has maintained democracy despite significant divisions, and just recently handed the African National Congress a stinging electoral setback. But the “liberation” policies adopted over the past thirty years have undermined government efficiency, as the party kicked many qualified whites out of the professional civil service. In fact, South Africa employed more civil engineers twenty years ago than today, despite training more black graduates. Pali Jobo Lehohla, the statistician-general of South Africa from 2000 to 2017, suggests that this decline in the capacity of the public sector has undermined the once rapid progress made in the early post-apartheid years.
To be sure, policies seeking to boost indigenous power in South Africa have benefited the politically connected, leading to the creation of a new black oligarchical class, but at the cost of rising inequality and poor economic performance. Electricity outages are now common, and Africa’s richest city, Johannesburg, has become a crime-infested, deteriorating, and dysfunctional place. In recent decades, as Lehohla demonstrates, blacks have actually regressed in terms of skilled jobs, education, incomes, and unemployment.
In Latin America, countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, which emphasize liberation from “Yanqui” oppression, have struggled economically, whereas relatively liberal Costa Rica and Chile have thrived in comparison to other Latin American states. Millions flee the “popular” revolutionary states around the world, if they can, and those left behind often live in misery. Cuba has fallen well behind even modest Latin American growth rates, suffers rampant inflation, and has experienced the loss of millions of residents, upward of 15 percent of its total population. Nor has this exodus ended: last year alone, a quarter-million Cubans sought to enter the imperial center, the United States.
The Case for Hybridity
A better postcolonial settlement requires a different paradigm, what we call hybridity. Perhaps aware of its unique place as an entrepôt, the city-state of Singapore consciously built on its British heritage, notably in the courts, the civil service, and its lingua franca. American civil libertarians may find Singaporean democracy, even today, a bit heavy-handed, but it is arguably the best-governed city in the world. Among the poorest nations at its birth in 1965, with a per capita income equal to that of Ghana, it now enjoys a per capita income higher than that of the United States or the Gulf States, not to mention its former ruler, Great Britain.
Singapore, from colonial times, was a “melting pot,” and since independence has worked to become a tolerant, hybrid society. As Lee Kwan Yew noted, Singapore is predominantly Chinese and Confucian in outlook, but has powerful Christian as well as Muslim communities. The former chief minister before independence, and later a longtime ambassador to France, David Marshall, was Jewish with Baghdadi roots. Singapore also, in Lee’s words, “locked in” parts of the colonial heritage—fundamentally British notions of merit, science, and jurisprudence. These are the very things often denounced by the Western cultural elite and throughout the political class in developing countries.
Mauritius similarly has maintained a stable and inclusive democratic system since gaining independence in 1968, with regular free elections, respect for the rule of law, and effective institutions that encourage both domestic and foreign investment. Today, the Indian Ocean island is richer per capita than any country on the African continent.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the value of hybridity may be seen in India. Although India is much less of an economic success story than Singapore, it is, nevertheless, arguably the world’s next superpower. India’s intellectuals tend to decry their British colonizers, but they usually do so in English and aim their appeal largely at Western audiences. The British heritage, whether in the electoral system, education, or the railways, remains a powerful force in the country’s growing interaction with the world economy. In 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked, upon gaining an honorary degree at Oxford, “Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish.”
Postcolonialism Today
Hybridity is not about eliminating the original culture or bowdlerizing history but finding ways to incorporate both “settler” and indigenous perspectives. A “sustainable” multiculturalism—whether in Singapore, Cape Town, Paris, or New York—is very different from the “diversity” that calls for self-segregated college graduations or seeks to normalize lower standards for “oppressed” groups. Successful multiculturalism is about borrowing what works, and rejecting what doesn’t.
The notions of sharing and interdependence are particularly critical at a time when Western and East Asian resident populations are shrinking, forcing them to look to the developing world, particularly Africa, for labor and markets. Since 1900, noted the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1998, the share of the world population controlled by Westerners dropped from over 44 percent to barely 10 percent, while the regions controlled by Africans, Hindus, and Muslims have expanded rapidly. Between 2022 and 2050, the United Nations projects that nearly 55 percent of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high.
Today, it is increasingly people of the developing world who largely constitute the new “settlers.” No army of whites is about to invade Africa or Latin America, as they did in eras when their own populations were surging. Instead, the developing world is expected to export an average of 2.2 million people annually to high-income countries through 2050.
Many Western countries have lowered their immigration barriers, though Asian countries generally are less amenable to mass immigration. The postcolonial era represents a particular challenge to China, which faces a severe demographic implosion in the second half of this century. China, even while claiming leadership of the developing world, is recasting itself again as something of a colonial power. Rather than allowing migrants to boost its diminishing workforce, the Middle Kingdom brings weaker countries into its sphere of influence, strategically offering huge loans while dominating trade through relentless mercantilism. This time, the colonial ideology is not Christian or Marxist but one based on supposedly superior Han values and Chinese economic models.
Building the Postcolonial Future
Whether dealing with China or the West, developing countries will not succeed by positioning themselves as the purest victims in some “oppression Olympics,” or ascribing all their problems to a history of “settler colonialism.” Instead, they need to look at how to turn colonial legacies into a permanent advantage.
The benefits of doing so can be seen in Botswana, Singapore, Mauritius, and at least among hundreds of millions in India, who see no shame in building on the legacies of the colonial past to create a better future. Even battered Gaza would benefit greatly from Israeli and Western investment, technology, and markets, far more than the nihilism that threatens both sides. Rejection of any kind of settlement short of Israel’s elimination has not served the Palestinians, or the Israelis (mutatis mutandis), well.
Similarly, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, and other examples show that a fixation on the anticolonial struggle often results in dismal governance. Property seizures or reparations for “people of color” do not turn the illiterate into skilled workers or strengthen families and neighborhoods. Heightening hostility toward “settler” populations or colonial legacies does not seem to be the best way to promote interracial harmony or economic development.
The paramount lesson is one of embracing reconciliation, recognizing that both former oppressors and oppressed can still offer valuable contributions to societal advancement. Notably, Nelson Mandela, before being sentenced to Robbin Island, said that he had always taken a principled stance against both black and white domination, and that “South Africa belongs to all the people who live in it, and not to one group, be it black or white.”
Countries that have emerged successfully from the colonial era differ but share a common pattern. Rather than emphasize ideological purity, their policy agenda tends to be Fabian in nature, looking to results rather than rhetoric. This is true internally in Western countries where racial minorities—Indian, African, Mexican, Arab—have adopted the mores that some consider “white” but also work. Intact African American families do far better, for example, and achieve middle-class status far more often than those lacking the kind of stable household denounced by “anticolonialism” groups like Black Lives Matter.
As with nonwhites in the West, successful postcolonial countries generally adopt a pragmatic, often market-oriented approach. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, noted the French historian Fernand Braudel, “the miracle of toleration was to be found wherever the community of trade convened.” Openness to outsiders, even former “oppressors,” works when it suits the national purpose. Botswana, for example, has maintained ties, and free trade deals, with Great Britain and later the United States; in fact it even hosts a small military base. It has also leveraged its diamond wealth to advance its own human capital and infrastructure rather than, as in so many former colonies, simply enriching its ruling elites.
To be sure, many of these states—including Singapore, Botswana, and Namibia—are hardly models of competitive democracies. But they are far more open to diverse groups than those in thrall to anticolonial ideology. Rather than use race as a key driver of policy, all these countries have retained English, the dominant language of technology and commerce, as an official language. In a remarkable sign of openness, both Namibia, which endured the ravages of apartheid and genocide, has recognized both German and Afrikaans as minority languages. Botswana, when it obtained independence, did not force white missionaries to leave, as was the case in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, but invited them to help with the education of children.
It may be fashionable among racial activists to denounce such things as hard work, punctuality, individualism, and family as “white.” But many nonwhites embrace the capitalist work ethnic and allegedly “European” values with enthusiasm, as evidenced by immigrants’ greater proclivity to start businesses than most Americans. In the United States, where 13.9 percent of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2 percent of the self-employed workforce and 25 percent of start‑up founders.
Success depends on the attitudes adopted both by the former oppressors and the oppressed. Nativism could threaten Western societies by choking off entrepreneurial talent. But some of the onus of assimilation must be on the migrants themselves. Immigrant communities who promote ideologies hostile to women’s rights, gay rights, capitalism, and democratic processes should not be surprised that their host societies become concerned about their influence. Natural concern about economic competition has been made far worse by radicals who import Islamic fundamentalism and other extreme ideologies and legal structures into relatively tolerant societies.
Similarly, Westerners cannot simply look back and hope to restore the perceived comforts of a bygone past. Multicultural societies are perpetually evolving, and their improvement depends on ethnic groups learning to live successfully with each other. Rather than ignoring or obsessing over past history, societies need to find ways to embrace those newcomers who are willing to adopt the norms of the host societies. Rome rose, as historian Michael Grant suggests, by incorporating other peoples into its culture; when Romans turned against the newcomers, even banning trousers, they deprived Rome of the ambitious people needed to keep the empire alive.
It is on the streets and in the marketplaces—not in the fever swamps of our increasingly absurd universities or grade school “ethnic studies” classes—that the colonial experience can be turned into something positive, both for those long oppressed and the settlers. Only by leaving behind simplistic settler-colonial narratives, and embracing a more nuanced analytical framework, can we gain a deeper understanding of the struggles inherent in postcolonial societies and effectively navigate the challenges and opportunities they present in the twenty-first century.