The Wages of Settlers: Settler Colonialism in the Geography of Imperialism

Keywords: settler colonialism, imperialism, disposssession, wages, migration
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Scholars have come, increasingly, to conceive the post-Cold War period of capitalist history through the overlapping “logics” of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006) and accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003). This theoretical trend pretends to an anti-Eurocentric reading of Part VIII of Capital, where Marx’s apparently teleological and stageist formulations are corrected, such that we may observe the ongoing quality of primitive accumulation in the world today. We then recognize, in globally dispossessed surplus populations, the economically superfluous native theorized by Patrick Wolfe in his landmark study of settler colonialism. In Wolfe’s schema, the native is subject to dispossession and elimination, not exploitation. We thus see contemporary global capitalism as an interminable enclosure, a global settler colony (Veracini 2015). This analysis, I argue, imposes concepts from the New World on the Third World, obscuring the study of superexploitation (Smith 2016) and labor informalization (Davis 2006; Benanav 2019), in particular.

On the back of this critique, my paper turns to economic histories and Marxian theories of capitalist development. Through this, it recasts the theory of settler colonialism within an earlier tradition of scholarship on imperialism and its geography. Here, the historically high wages of Anglo settlers, a fact so obvious that it is usually passed over, becomes a decisive factor, cipher to the riddle of “dependent development” in places like Australia. This high-wage migration (Patnaiks 2021) alerts us to a history of spatialized wage spreads, creating arbitrage opportunities and patterns of development that remain of critical material importance in today’s imperial arrangement.