Settler colonies within European imperialism

Detail

The shift from Iberian to north-west European empires

• Spain and Portugal built the first American empires. After the seventeenth century these empires stopped growing.
• France, Holland and England then took the lead. They pushed trade outward and set up colonies in America, Africa and Asia.
• Ireland was virtually a colony of England. Most of its landowners were English settlers. So "colony" did not always mean a far-away land across an ocean.
• Profit was the driving motive everywhere. But the way control was exercised changed from place to place.

Three variants of control — the core comparison

• Settler colony — America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland.
• European immigrants come and stay permanently.
• They push out the native people and take their land.

• When independence comes, the colony becomes a 'state' run by the settlers' descendants — not by the natives.

• Direct imperial rule — British India, through the East India Company.

• A trading company turns into a political power.
• It defeats Indian rulers, takes over territory, and keeps the old administrative system to collect taxes.

• Later come railways, mines and plantations.

• Semi-colony — China, nineteenth to early twentieth century.

• Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan interfered without taking over state power.

• They took resources and cut down China's sovereignty (a country's full power to rule itself), but no one formally ruled China.

• Key exam contrast: in a settler colony the outsiders replace the population; in direct rule they govern the population; in a semi-colony they only squeeze the economy.

Who counts as a 'settler'

• The word 'settler' is used for:
• the Dutch in South Africa,
• the British in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia,

• Europeans in America.

• The official language became English everywhere. Canada also kept French.

• Africa was different. Europeans mostly traded on the coast (South Africa was the exception). They entered the interior only in the late nineteenth century, and then agreed among themselves to divide Africa.

The legal excuse — terra nullius

• British settlers reaching Australia in 1788 declared the land terra nullius — Latin for "nobody's land" [2].
• terra nullius in law means land not owned by any nation — used for land seen as empty, or whose people were not accepted as having a real claim under European law [2].
• The land was not empty. Aboriginal peoples had lived there for tens of thousands of years [2].
• Why the claim stuck: Aboriginal people did not treat land as property to be bought and sold. They moved within their tribal lands and saw themselves as part of the land, not its owners. Europeans read this as "no ownership" [2].
• Land-grabbing on the ground: pastoralists called "squatters" pushed past the official land grants and set up cattle and sheep stations on Aboriginal land. This wrecked the habitats and resources the natives lived on, and led to violent clashes in which large numbers of Aboriginal people were killed [2].

  Note: In New Zealand, Australian graziers were already buying land from the Māori in the late 1830s as settlement schemes grew [3]. This extends, and does not change, the scaffold's picture of settler expansion.

European-given names on native land

• America — named after Amerigo Vespucci, whose travel accounts were published.
• Canada — from kanata, meaning 'village' in Huron-Iroquois, as heard by the French sailor Jacques Cartier in 1535.
• Australia — from the Latin austral, meaning 'south'.
• New Zealand — named by Tasman of Holland, who first sighted it in 1642; zee is Dutch for 'sea'.
• Over a hundred place-names begin with 'New' — the settlers copied home onto the map.
• Native names survived in places: Ohio, Mississippi, Seattle, Saskatchewan (America/Canada) and Wollongong, Parramatta (Australia).

Recovering native histories

• Till the mid-twentieth century, school textbooks in the USA and Australia began the story with the European 'discovery'. Natives appeared only as hostile people in the way.
• From the 1840s, anthropologists (scholars who study human societies and cultures) began studying natives. The discipline had developed in France. Some of them predicted the natives would 'die out'.
• From the 1960s, oral history changed this. Natives wrote or dictated their own histories instead of being written about.
• Today: history and fiction written by natives themselves, galleries of native art, and the National Museum of the American Indian, curated by American Indians themselves.
• Museum detail: it was created by an Act of Congress in 1989 and its Washington building opened in 2004; it has branches in Washington D.C., New York City and Suitland (Maryland), all three designed in consultation with Native American peoples [4].
• Its holdings: more than 800,000 cultural objects and about 90,000 photographs — the largest such collection in the world [4].
• International echo: at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2012), speakers demanded that the 'Doctrine of Discovery' — used for centuries to justify seizing indigenous land — be repudiated [5].

Prelims Hooks

• Spain and Portugal's American empires stopped expanding after the seventeenth century; France, Holland and England took over the lead.
• Ireland was virtually a colony of England, with mostly English settler landowners.
• Semi-colony = foreign powers interfere without taking state power — the chapter's example is China.
• Canada comes from kanata = 'village' in Huron-Iroquois, heard by Jacques Cartier in 1535.
• Tasman of Holland first sighted New Zealand in 1642; zee is Dutch for 'sea'. Australia is from Latin austral = 'south'.
• terra nullius = "nobody's land"; British settlers declared Australia terra nullius in 1788 [2].
• Anthropologists began studying natives from the 1840s; the discipline developed in France.
• Oral history of natives began from the 1960s.
• National Museum of the American Indian — Act of Congress 1989, Washington museum opened 2004, over 800,000 objects [4].
• In Africa, Europeans stayed on the coast (except South Africa) and entered the interior only in the late nineteenth century.

Mains Points

• Compare the three models of colonial control. Settler colonies replaced the native population and turned into settler-run states; direct rule in India kept the existing administration and taxed through it; semi-colonial China lost economic sovereignty but kept formal state power. Same profit motive, three different political outcomes.
• Law as a tool of dispossession. terra nullius turned a legal fiction into a title deed: because Aboriginal people did not "own" land in the European sense, their land was declared empty and open [2]. Link this to the Doctrine of Discovery, still debated at the UN in 2012 [5].
• Naming is power. Renaming America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand after European persons, languages and directions erased native geography; surviving names like Wollongong and Mississippi show what the map lost.
• Who writes history. Textbooks that began at 'discovery', anthropologists from the 1840s predicting natives would die out, then oral history from the 1960s and the native-curated National Museum of the American Indian [4] — a clean case study of history shifting from the coloniser's voice to the native's voice.