The horror of the end performance of the last settler colony which we are witnessing in the genocide in Palestine, with burning alive, the massacres of children, the denial of food and medicine, is not something new.
Settler colonialism
Sai Englert in his “Settler Colonialism,” traces the development of this blight upon humanity.
The spread of racism, of industrial level slavery, indigenous dispossession and genocide, can be traced to the conquest of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.
In the same year, the voyage of Christopher Columbus, funded by the monarchs, initiated an era of European global dominance.
This would, according to Engert, “… unleash unprecedented violence and destruction on the people of the Americas, Africa and Asia.”
Jews and Muslims who refused to accept Catholic Christianity, were expelled from Spain.
Some converted, but they soon became the targets of the Inquisition and the stake.
Racism was developed as a central aspect of social control. At first the distinction was on the basis of faith.
But it became ‘purity of blood,’ even after conversion to Christianity, denoting the out group.
The spread of colonialism was not evidence of European superiority, but was due to its relative backwardness.
Unable to break the control of the Muslim empire over trade routes to India, the Europeans had to look for alternative routes.
Colonial expansion was enabled through the accumulation of stolen capital.
Industry flourished, peasants were forced off the land and took their labour to the new cities.
Surplus populations could be despatched to the settler colonies where they exploited the stolen land, supervised or provided labour for the mines and controlled the subject population.
The plunder eventually flowed to bankers in northwestern Europe, increasing demand for commodities from the settler colonies, facilitating industrial growth.
This transfer of wealth began with the mighty blunder of Columbus who did not envisage a continent between Europe and India.
The exploitation of the indigenous population
The first settlement established on Haiti provided the pattern.
“The settlers, discovering that the island was rich in gold, set out to accumulate as much of it as possible. “
Forced labour was imposed on the locals in the gold mines and in food production.
By 1580 about 658,000 had been sold into slavery.
Pope Alexander VI decreed that all lands in the New World were to be divided between Portugal and Spain.
The Doctrine of Discovery, emerged from a series of Papal Bulls, granting Portugal and Spain the right to claim lands they discovered in West Africa and the Americas, even if already inhabited and cultivated.
“The so-called Terra Nullius paradigm, identifying colonised lands as belonging to no-one, formed a key justifying narrative for settler expansion around the globe.”
As late as 1831 the US Supreme Court recognised the Doctrine of Discovery giving European and their agents in the New World the right to claim native lands by their physical act of discovery.
The Dutch and the British followed this doctrine hence the British claim on Australia.
Racism
Since the very first settler colony established by Columbus, the indigenous people have constantly rebelled.
Although the first settlement was wiped out, Columbus returned with 1000 settlers and established a slave system to exploit the mines.
Eventually Haiti waged the first successful slave revolt in the Americas.
The settlers learned very early on that it was necessary to divide the labourers in order to reduce the effectiveness of their opposition.
The demarcation between settlers on the one hand and the indigenous and the enslaved on the other, was emphasised from the beginning.
It was also necessary to divide the exploited class as well.
At first white bonded labour was elevated above the general labourers, then stratification, often on degree of whiteness, was established in the legal system itself.
A sad legacy
Englert credits the experience of Spain and its conquerors, the wealth of the New World, the availability of Indigenous labour to exploit, the opening of the African slave trade and the growth in demand for commodities in a growing European economy, with transforming the world.
The foundations of this system in human suffering, is hidden beneath triumphalism about European superiority in economic expansion and standard of living at home.
The Gaza genocide, the last flourishing of settler colonialism, has forced us to reconsider so many of our assumptions.
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