Settler Colonialism Through History

A significant part of the protests roiling our campuses, and university history courses involve Settler Colonialism.  We explore the history of this concept and see how it fits into today's discourse. 

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Settler Colonialism Through History

May 2024

“Guilt, in principle, is simply not among the things baby humans can inherit. However, white settler colonial guilt is a horse of a different color.”

 Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.

Moshe Dayan, Former Minister of Defense of Israel

Definition of Settler Colonialism: The concept of settler colonialism can be defined as a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism that aims to displace a population of a nation (often indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.

When we consider the protests roiling our campuses, the demonstrations in our cities, and those of capitals throughout Europe, there is a disconnect between the general worldview of the protesters and that of the cause to which they are supporting: Palestine and, by extension, the Palestinian leadership of Hamas.  We see women protesters rallying for an organization that sees women as second-class citizens.  We witness LBGTQ communities protesting for people who believe that homosexuality is an abomination, a sin.  

I find myself, a believer in women’s equality and the right for same-sex couples to marry, in contention with some of the most liberal people in our nation. Where is the demand for diversity, inclusion, and equity in a group whose official policy on gays is forcing them to take an oath on the Quran that they wouldn't "be gay again."  And of course we know the fate of someone in Gaza, ruled by Hamas, who would violate an oath sworn on the Quran.  I have to contend the falsity of statements of Israel genocide, 15,000 casualties out of 3 million people, with the stated goal of Hamas eradicate all Israelis-whereever they happen to be.

I have noted in previous podcasts about the oppressor narrative so embraced by the left. In this belief system, capitalist, democratic nations, traditionally led by white European-descended males, are the oppressors, and all other peoples are the oppressed.  

So why not side with the Jews, for whom a strong argument could be made that, for the last 2000 years, were the most oppressed people on the planet?  Because the Israel of today is capitalist, democratic, and led by many Jews descended from white Europeans.  Against that is the Arab populations of Palestine, who are none of those things.  

A critical part of this narrative is a concept called Settler Colonialism, in which the same white male Europeans stole all of the land from indigenous peoples (or indigenous in the minds of leftists who promote this narrative).  Even though Hamas is one of the most venal groups to grace our planet and enjoys strong Palestinian support, the story of Palestine vs. Israel fits this narrative of oppressed vs oppressor, and the Settler conolialism practiced by Israel since the late 1800s.  

The following are some examples from university curriculums that support the modern perception of Settler Colonialism. This Course from the University of California at Berkeley: 

Engage students in a critical investigation of the origins of the University of California through a settler colonial lens to decolonize the University’s narrative history. Decolonization is a process by which narratives, world views, cultures, and institutions, once erased by colonization, are returned, respected, and honored. Drawing upon the work of the UC Berkeley Truth & Justice Project, this Course will explore the history of UC and its racial and colonial foundations. We will focus on decolonization and, therefore, center on Indigenous and other racialized communities, discussing injustice in various communities and from various perspectives.

Before we move on, here are a few words about the UC Truth and Justice Project. Part of this is “The right to criticize and to call to higher levels of intellectual and moral honesty.  This Project seeks to educate people about ways of responding to historical harms and their current legacies.’ And who is the perpetrator of harm?  Well, the “developing reparations commissions” probably provide a clue.  The concept of African American reparations is utterly fascinating to me.  A legitimate cause was the jailing of Japanese Americans, which the US Government gave to those who were jailed, not to their descendants.  And even here, there is a bit of injustice as I pay the tax for Japanese American reparations, but I did no jailing.  But reparations for slavery are simple and insidious, giving to those who were never slaves from those who never enslaved them.  But I digress.  

Let’s go to the source of real fun over these past few months, Columbia University! 

Settler Colonialism in North America:

Examines the relationship between colonialism, settlement, and anthropology and the specific ways these processes have been engaged in the broader literature and locally in North America. We will re-imagine North America in light of the colonial project and its “technologies of rule,” such as education, law, and policy that worked to transform Indigenous notions of gender, property, and territory. Although this Course will be comparative in scope, it will be grounded heavily within the literature from Native North America.

Choosing two extreme left-wing colleges may subject me to the accusation of cherry-picking. The University of Florida, under the tremendous leadership of Ben Sasse (in my alternative AD universe, forget U of F President; THAT guy is president of the whole US). U of Florida is not currently the bastion of DEI having fired that team-hooray-but does feature a course germane to our topic. 

Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Women’s Resistance 

This Course explores the linkages between settler colonial genocide and anti-Black racism in what is now known as the United States, paying particular attention to intersections of race and gender. We will engage with scholarship that directly analyzes these linkages, intersections, and entanglements but also looks at the work of Native feminists and Black feminists to look for opportunities for a dialogue that, in many respects, has only recently been growing in emphasis.

Et tu Ben Sasse?!

I always wonder if when these are written, anyone in the academy takes a fresh look and says this is gobbly gook, a giant word salad with croutons and bacon bits.  It is all intersectionality this and racism/feminism/decolonization that.  Was it explicitly written so one could not fully understand the Course to which students’ parents (and increasingly us, the taxpayer-thanks to Joe Biden) are forking over money? 

I will now ask you valued listener to indulge a trip to a time well before the Sumerians, about 40,000 years ago.  

When a species called Homo Sapiens (a group of which I have a particular affinity on a par with Canis Familaris) moved out of Africa, they encountered a member of the same genus, but different species.  That would be Homo Neanderthal, who already populated much of Africa and Europe. So why are we here and the Neanderthals are not?  Many theories. One by Pat Shipman speculates that we domesticated dogs, but they did not.  When the groups came into conflict, it was like bringing a gun to a knife fight.  

Others suggest something more benign.  Homo Sapiens may have begun to breed cross-species and, eventually, birthed them out.  A paper published in 2022 in the journal Paleoanthropology raises the prospect that interbreeding with our ancestors would have reduced the number of Neanderthals breeding with each other, leading to their eventual extinction.

The idea of prolonged interaction with Neanderthals fits in with the discovery made in 2010 that modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating that the two species interbred, adds professor Chris Stringer.  

"We don't know if it was a peaceful exchange of partners. It might have been grabbing, you know, a female from another group. It might have been even adopting abandoned or lost Neanderthal babies who had been orphaned. All of those things could have happened. So, we don't know the full story yet. But with more data and with more DNA, more discoveries, we will get closer to the truth about what really happened at the end of the Neanderthal era.”

Or we were just a bit more organized.  Pallab Ghosh, writing for the BBC Newsletter, states,   

"We were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better, and we built on that knowledge." 

This is the Conservative Historian, not the Conservative Anthropologist, so why this trip to prehistoric times?  Settler Colonialism just slightly predated the modern era. From the start, humans moved into new land and took it over. It is not an exclusive purview of one ethnicity, but something practiced in one form or another, by all of them. 

This is paleoanthropology.  

According to Lisa Hendry, writing for the Natural History Museum in London, 

“A scientific study by Natural History Museum scientists from 2017 study suggests that more than 90% of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was replaced with the coming of a people genetically related to the Beaker people of the lower-Rhine area at the start of the Bronze Age. In short, ancient DNA shows that the culture that brought Bronze Age technology to Britain was connected to a migration that almost completely replaced the island's earlier inhabitants.”

This is archeology.  

The Battle of Megiddo (1457 BCE) was fought between Egyptian forces under the command of Pharaoh Thutmose III and a large rebellious coalition of Canaanite vassal states led by the king of Kadesh. It is the first battle recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail. 

But this was not the stuff of settler colonialism, not yet anyway.  Assuming we take the bible as history, that would have occurred some 300 years earlier than Thutmose with Abraham’s movement into the land of the Canaanites.  Aha! Even then, those Jews were up to no good!  Again, assuming this is history no less than the Quran extols Abraham, was the invasion Jewish or Proto-Arab?

In ancient times, Macedonians spread Greek culture and language throughout the Near East after the conquests of Alexander and his successor generals. Yet the Macedonians were never numerous enough to make a genuine ethnic and cultural replacement.  

A better example would be Rome.  In an article entitled Roman Colonies in Republic and Empire, Amanda Jo Coles states, 

The Romans founded colonies throughout Italy and the provinces from the early Republic through the high Empire. Far from being mere ‘bulwarks of empire,’ these colonies were established by diverse groups or magistrates for various reasons that responded to the cultural and political problems faced by the contemporary Roman state and populace.

And this is history.

As Coles later notes, there was not a one-size-fits-all to this colonization.  In some regards, it was to find land for troops.  In the late Republic and Imperial periods, land was conveniently away from the capital. In the case of Gaul, it was to quickly bring the various tribes into line as a bulwark against German incursions.  In Africa Province it was to ensure the grain supply—different colonies serving the greater power of the central state.  

Since I began this story with comments about the Middle East, I would like to go there, but in the medieval period. We will start with Egypt circa 500 CE. There were three different groups in Egypt: the Byzantine Greco-Romans, who controlled the province and were a small minority; the Egyptian Coptic Christians, who were the majority and all over Egypt; and the Nubians, who were in the South past Thebes. Christianity had been present for 300 years but became the dominant religion in the early 400s. 

The Arab conquest of Egypt, led by the army of Amr ibn al-'As, took place between 639 and 642 CE and was overseen by the Rashidun Caliphate. In this context, a Caliph means a successor to the Prophet or Mohammad, who died in 632. The successful invasion ended the seven-century-long Roman period in Egypt, which began in 30 BCE, and the widely speaking Greco-Roman period, which lasted about a millennium.

Shortly before the conquest, Byzantine (Eastern Roman) rule in the country had been shaken, as Egypt had been conquered and occupied for a decade by the Persian Sasanian Empire in 618–629 before being recovered by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius. The Caliphate took advantage of the Byzantines' exhaustion. They also took advantage of Persian weakness, so Iraq, long a bastion of Persia and before them the Parthians, became Arab.

During the mid-630s, the Romans had already lost the Levant to the Caliphate. The loss of the prosperous province of Egypt and the defeat of the Byzantine armies severely weakened the Empire, resulting in further territorial losses in the centuries to come.

Within the context of Egyptian internal history alone, this era saw Egypt cast off its past heritage to embrace a new language and religion—in other words, a new culture. It is clear that the civilization of Islamic Egypt diverged sharply from that of the previous Greco-Roman period. 

Therefore, the subsequent history of Egypt essentially studies the processes by which Egyptian Islamic civilization evolved, particularly Arabization and Islamization. In 706, Arabic displaced Greek as the official language of the state.  The traditional capital of Alexandria was replaced by a town, Al-Fusṭāṭ, which is probably an Arabized form of the Greek term for “encampment” and gives a good indication of the nature of the earliest settlement.  

An interesting thing happened on the way to the Arabization of Egypt.  The Abbasid Dynasty, ruling from Bagdad and holding the title of Caliph, came up with the bright idea of using Turkish slaves, Mamluks, as mercenaries, and, as the dynasty became stretched thin, increasingly relied on this group. The 9th century, 150 years after the Arab conquest, saw the advent of the Ṭūlūnid dynasty.  Led by a Mamluk leader, the dynasty restored a measure of Egypt’s ancient glory and inaugurated a new phase of Egyptian history. Egypt became virtually autonomous for the first time since the pharaohs, and most of its revenues remained within its borders. Moreover, Egypt became the center of a small empire when Aḥmad, the Mamluck leader, conquered Syria and Palestine in 878–879. These developments were paralleled in other provinces of the Abbasid Empire and directly resulted from the decline of the Caliph’s power.

However, the Mamluks were later replaced by the Fatimid dynasty. This Arab political and religious entity dominated an empire in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East from 909 to 1171 CE and tried unsuccessfully to oust the Abbasid caliphs as leaders of the Islamic world. It took its name from Fāṭimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, from whom the Fatimids claimed descent. They were also members of the Shia branch of Islam, which previously had been subordinated to the Sunni branch.   The Fatimids established Cairo as the capital of Egypt, a title still held to the present day.  

The Arabization of Egypt, somewhat interrupted by the Mamluks, regained steam. The Fāṭimids are said to have used thousands of nomadic Arabs in the Egyptian cavalry and further stimulated Arabization by settling large numbers of Arabian tribesmen in Upper Egypt. 

Similar to Egypt, the region of Palestine was not originally Arab – its Arabization was a consequence of the gradual inclusion of Palestine within the rapidly expanding Islamic Caliphates established by Arabian tribes and their local allies. The people of Palestine are not necessarily of pure Arab ethnicity, such as residents living in Abu Dhabi or Muskat, yet nor are the Coptics, the Phoenicians, or residents along the Tigris the same as before the 700-1000 period.  By the definition to which I started this podcast, the Arabs were settler-colonists.  

Over the following several centuries, Palestine's population drastically decreased, from an estimated 1 million during the Roman and Byzantine periods to about 300,000 by the early Ottoman period. Over time, the existing population adopted Arab culture and language, and most converted to Islam. The settlement of Arabs before and after the Muslim conquest is thought to have played a role in accelerating the Islamization process.

So when we hear about settler colonialism, it is odd how little attribution occurs to this period when the Arabs took existing lands, replacing the languages, cultures, and, in many regards, the people themselves. The reason this is seldom mentioned is the inconvenience of the fact that one of the best examples of settler colonialism is a group of people in what our progressive intelligentsia would consider a protected class of the oppressed.  

Matt Hern is a community organizer, independent scholar, writer, and activist and frequent listeners will know what I think of that moniker. He is the co-founder and co-director of Solid State Community Industries, which is building a network of worker cooperatives with migrant communities in Canada.  In his book On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land, the author states, 

“Those claims are always bound up with rationalities of whiteness and colonial ordering: parks bring structured comprehensibility and access to the otherwise unruly “wilds,” cleansed of any savage and uncooperative residents, and disallow any activities that do not adhere to certain orders. A lot of work is expended on park design to ensure that they adhere exactly to settler colonial re-orderings of occupation.”

Hern does not like…parks.  Wondering how believers in settler colonialism can also denigrate deep-dish pizza and puppies in the white colonialist narrative. 

We also come to the hypocrisy of someone touting their degree from a university named after Christopher Columbus but then decrying the man himself.  Columbia University was originally Kings College so that we can see the reason for the name change.  Since I think there is rot in the academy, as I explained a few podcasts ago, I really do not care what they call the place but the denizens of the university are quick to attack the institution of which they are part.  "The university stole the land, so this place is terrible!" or "This university supports Israel!" OK, but their deep set convictions never extend as far as their pocket books.  With the Genocidal Genoan’s last name the students resume will not have that sterling college signal of approval so coveted by certain employers, and they will forgo a zero or two from the paycheck.  The fact that students and many alums want to take down statues and sub in the term primary for master bedroom, but not change the name of Columbia or Yale, a guy who was in the slave trade, is complete and utter hypocrisy.  

For the progressive historian, history often begins not at the time of the first writing or when the concept of civilization created roles other than hunter, gatherer, or farmer, but around 1500.  This is intentional in that it also, not coincidentally, marks the era of Western hegemony, something good progressives view with disdain because the progenitors of Western culture tended to be white and tended to be male.  

Charles Heinrich, writing for the LakeFront Historian, notes, 

When one studies pre-modern, non-American societies, can he or she go about the task of public history? Ostensibly, those publics are long dead. In a world (and a field) that largely sees the United States as its frame of reference, looking to a distant past – whether it be Han China or 8th-century Gaul – seems eclectically antiquarian at best, and puffed-up navel-gazing at worst.

A progressive historian sees the lens of the world through oppression, particularly that of white Europeans, so it is easy to dismiss Arab Settler colonialism, the enslavement of people on the part of Africans, Indians, and Chinese, or simply the prosperity that has accrued to the vast majority of humanity since the advent of the modern world with its capitalism and classical liberalism that above all, celebrates the agency of the individual.  That agency precludes state-run command and thus the power of the progressive, who would use state-run power to command others.  

This is not really about the ills of settler colonialism but a different way to drive the overarching narrative of leftist history and academia, a condemnation of Western belief systems unless that belief system is Rosseau and Marx.  Collectivism equals good, for at the heart of Colonial Settler condemnation is that collectivist attitude.  The land belongs to no one and everyone.

It is why the progressive would preclude that nearly all areas of the globe in 2024 once belonged to people who were not the original residents.  There were no Persians on the Iranian plateau prior to 1000 BCE.  There were no Turks in Anatolia before 700 CE and no Slavs in Eastern Europe prior to the 700s.  I could tell of untold migrations in which peoples were forced off their land before the modern era, including in Africa. Ironically, one of the few people with a valid claim to the land before the Arab migrations would be the Jews themselves, having lived in the land along the Jordan River and the Eastern Mediterranean for nearly 1800 years. But this entire narrative of Israel Bad Palestine Good is not really a story of Settler Colonialism but an indictment of our Western and American values of capitalism, democracy, and individual agency.