Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito

which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society,” a control that is “achieved by force, by political collaboration, [or] by economic, social or cultural dependence.”36

      According to Osterhammel, external colonies were “usually the result of military conquest, often after extended phases of contact without land claims.”37 They were primarily acquired for purposes of economic exploitation and governed in an “autocratic” manner by a “relatively insignificant” number of colonial administrators “who return[ed] to their mother country after completing their assignments.”38

      The logic and law of colonialism were developed by and among those European states that recognized each other as “civilized.”39 International law as we now know it evolved from the agreements initially entered into between these powers, each interested in minimizing conflicts with the others so that its economic and military resources could be put to more profitable ends. The sovereignty of non-European societies was not recognized within this legal framework, and the colonizing states developed what were, in essence, non-compete agreements to respect each other’s claims to territories not encompassed within recognized states.40

      Colonial boundaries were artificially imposed, often from afar, as a result of these agreements.41 Territorial demarcation tended to reflect the relative political, economic, and military strength of the European states involved rather than the local population’s historic understanding of the (often permeable) geographic boundaries and patterns of land use that had evolved in relation to local topography or ecosystems. As a result, the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples were often divided between colonial powers, and any given colony might incorporate many different nations and peoples.42

      Colonial regimes developed extensive political and administrative structures to ensure the subjugation of these peoples and the efficient exploitation of their resources.43 Local systems of law and governance were rendered dysfunctional, and dual legal systems frequently imposed different rights and responsibilities on the colonizing and colonized populations.44 As Europe industrialized, colonial administrations increasingly emphasized the creation of roads, railroads, and communication infrastructure, the consolidation of agricultural plantations, and the development of sanitation and educational or training programs. These initiatives were often described in terms of the colonizers’ “civilizing mission,” but in fact were vital to their goals of efficient resource extraction and the creation and maintenance of a productive—that is, profitable—workforce.45

      In external colonies, the representatives of the colonizing powers tended to identify with and maintain allegiance to their countries of origin. Assigned to colonial outposts for some fixed period of time, these residents did not see themselves as permanently settling in the colony; rather, they intended to return to their homes in the metropolis, or “mother country,” at the end of their assignments or upon retirement. For this reason, Veracini describes classic colonial narratives as circular, “an Odyssey consisting of an outward movement followed by interaction with exotic and colonised Others in foreign surroundings, and by a final return to an original locale.”46 While in the colonies, the administrators’ self-identification as British, or French, or Belgian, for example, may have intensified as a result of their immersion in a society that was structured to ensure that their rights and status were contingent upon not being “native” to the colony.47

      By contrast, the identities of colonized peoples were eviscerated by the pervasive control exercised over all aspects of their lives and societies. The complex forms of colonial administration that developed over time required the participation of “native” overseers, functionaries, or collaborators of some sort, a process facilitated by the creation and exploitation of distinctions among the colonized.48 Thus, while colonial administrations ultimately relied on the military power of their home states, internal control was often maintained by privileging one Indigenous people over others.49 One result is what anthropology professor Gwendolyn Mikell describes as the emergence of “static and intransigent” understandings of ethnicity.50 Observing “that African cultural groups have traditionally moved in pluralistic environments, and that peaceful and integrative interactions with others having different identities has been common in Africa until recent periods,” Mikell concludes that “what we now call African ‘ethnicity’ was very much the outcome of the nineteenth-century period of colonial conquest, when western metropolitan or settler groups used force to divide, conquer, and then politically subjugate the African indigenous populations.”51

      This phenomenon is but one facet of perhaps the most destructive dynamic of colonial relations. Because ideological justifications of European colonialism rested on the presumed superiority of Western civilization, the colonial project required the denigration and attempted eradication of the identity and knowledge base of the colonized. In the words of French Tunisian author Albert Memmi, the colonized was “removed from history,” stripped of a role in “every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.”52 This was achieved not only by brute force but also by what Kenyan scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls the “cultural bomb” that “annihilate[s] a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves,” thereby eventually “mak[ing] them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves.”53

      Today, classic colonialism is largely deemed a thing of the past. As a result of intense struggles for national liberation—waged “amid tears, fire, and blood,” to quote Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo54—most external colonies were recognized as independent states in the mid- to late twentieth century.55 Thus, as the international legal order began to acknowledge the right of colonized peoples to self-government, “the scramble for colonies that started at the end of the nineteenth century . . . ultimately produced colonial polities that could be turned over to successor states in a symmetrical process of counter-scramble.”56 Despite these changes, much of the colonial world order remained firmly in place. European rule had constructed political entities that possessed most of the attributes of a contemporary state—with the glaring exception of genuine sovereignty. These attributes included internationally recognized territorial boundaries, bureaucratic structures designed to provide relatively uniform governance throughout the territory, and internal political, legal, and educational institutions established by the colonizers. And it was these entities that were recognized as independent and purportedly postcolonial states.

      Insofar as the new countries were only recognized in accordance with colonially imposed boundaries, “national” identities were thrust upon peoples who had been “coercively amalgamated into unitary, foreign-ruled states, without any regard whatsoever for extant economic, demographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and other social factors.”57 These states were then precluded from exercising sovereignty over their own wealth and natural resources by the Western powers’ insistence that concessionary rights acquired by foreign interests prior to independence be honored and that any nationalization of property required compensation in accordance with international legal standards that had been developed by and for the colonial powers.58 As Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah explained, they were now subjected to “neocolonialism,” a situation in which a purportedly independent state “has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty” but “in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”59 “Decolonization” has thus resulted in both the internal colonization of subordinated peoples and the continuation of external colonialism in other forms.

      Internal Colonialism

      One can see from this very rudimentary description of classic colonialism that there are many similarities between the experiences of colonized peoples around the world and peoples of color in the United States. These parallels explain why scholars and activists have described racialized Others within the United States as internally colonized and why that characterization has a compelling resonance. There are, however, conceptual limitations to a model that relies extensively on analogies derived from political, economic, and cultural contexts that are structurally distinct from the situation at hand.

      In a seminal work published