The Transformation of the World (82 page)

What then, in the long history of settler colonialism, was specific about the nineteenth century, when type 1 became so pronounced as a culmination of older trends and a model for the future? The answer falls into five parts.

First
, as Adam Smith already saw in 1776, this type of colonialism corresponded to the principle of voluntary settlement and therefore to an individualist market logic. Settlers, as small entrepreneurs, flowed to places where they saw opportunities for optimum use of their own resources (labor power and sometimes capital) in conjunction with extremely cheap land. They were not officially sponsored colonists or imperial agents. Their form of economy rested on family businesses, but did not, after the early pioneering days, aim at total self-sufficiency. Settler agriculture, based on a division of labor, produced staples for internal and domestic markets and obtained its own provisions through trade.
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It employed wage laborers and abstained from forms of extra-economic compulsion. In many cases in the nineteenth century—from Argentine cereals to Australian wool—it achieved above-average productivity and was cost effective and internationally competitive. In short, frontiers in the nineteenth century, or at least those run on capitalist lines, became global granaries. This process of putting grassland under plough and incorporating it into the capitalist world economy reached a climax around the turn of the century. In 1870, Canada and Argentina were still relatively poor countries with little attraction for immigrants. But between 1890 and 1914 they made immense strides, achieving prosperity not through industrialization but as leading suppliers of wheat. In the period from 1909 to 1914, Argentina produced 12.6 percent and Canada 14.2 percent of the world's wheat exports.
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What made this possible was the development of an open frontier—a process concluded by the outbreak of the First World War.

Second
, classic settler colonialism rested on a surplus of cheap land, which settlers made their exclusive possession by a variety of means, ranging from purchase to deception to violent expulsion.
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It would not be quite correct to say that it was always “stolen” from its previous owners, since in many cases mixed use and unclear property relations prevailed
before
the settler invasion. The decisive point is that the previous users—very often mobile tribal societies—were denied further access to the land. The producers were separated from their means of production or driven into marginal areas; nomads lost their best grazing land to agriculture or the settlers' fenced-in pens, and so on.

Settler colonialism everywhere ushered in a modern European conception of “property,” in which the individual owner had exclusive disposal over precisely measured and delimited pieces of land. Clashes between different ideas of ownership were an ubiquitous accompaniment of
European
frontier expansion.
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The dispossession of indigenous overseas communities followed from processes in Europe, earlier or contemporary, especially those involving the privatization of common land. On the European side too, however, a distinction must be drawn between various legal concepts in play. Of cardinal importance was the freedom to buy and sell land. In the British Empire and its successor states (e.g., the United States), land became a freely tradable or pledgeable commodity, whereas in the Spanish legal tradition, family links played a much greater role and, even after the end of the colonial period, latifundia could not be simply
divided up and sold. This was a crucial element in the stabilization of rural oligarchies in Spanish America and may have been an obstacle to economic development there.

Third
, classic settler colonialism, unlike the twentieth-century fascist variant, stood in an ambiguous relationship with the colonial state. The Spanish monarchy of the early modern period already made it difficult for land to be permanently accumulated in private hands, thereby preventing the early conquistadores from crystallizing into a landowning class resistant to state control. In the nineteenth century, the British Crown by no means always acted as a cat's paw for settler interests. In New Zealand, for example, in the early decades after colonization began in 1840, the authorities went to great lengths to protect Maoris from land-grabbers, prohibiting direct transfers of ownership to private individuals of British origin. Like the North American Indians, the Maoris did not have a conception of land as independent of tribal communities and the authority of their chiefs; use rights could be surrendered or even sold, but not the earth itself. The European legal framework was therefore at first completely incomprehensible to them. The colonial state stuck to royal prerogatives over the disposal of all land, exercizing a kind of right of first refusal and using grants of Crown land as a way to stem the anarchy of private interests. Such grants were, of course, a stepping stone to permanent land transfers, and in principle the courts gave “security of tenure” precedence over what were regarded as fictitious “aboriginal rights.” However, Crown grants could be withdrawn if the land was not “improved” through use. In all British colonies (and many others) the authorities took action at some point to protect indigenous people from settlers' exactions, though naturally within the framework of a general affinity between state and settlers. One major common interest was the curbing of mobile population groups. But the motives were often different: settlers viewed “wandering tribes” as competitors for land, while the state saw them as a threat to order and an untapped source of tax revenue.
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Fourth
, classic settler colonialism had an inherent tendency toward
semi
autonomous state building. Settlers want to govern themselves and strive for a democratic, or at least oligarchic, political system. The abrupt secession on which the majority of North America's British settlers embarked in 1776–83, and the declarations of independence by the South African Boer republics in 1852–54, remained exceptions. Not until 1965, in Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), was there another settler revolt concerning the political form of the state. Most settlers needed the protective umbrella of an empire: the mother country was supposed to let them get on with things but to make its instruments of power available to them in an emergency. For this reason the position of settlers—especially in African-type colonies with native majorities—could only be one of semiautonomy. Under no circumstances were they mere tools of the metropolis; indeed, they often sought to gain influence over the political process there. The Algerian
colons
were especially good at this: their representation in Parliament
in Paris was a source of strength, but their dependence on the colonial military served as a constant reminder that their position might one day be threatened. The British dominions chose another path. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, in its special way, South Africa, settlers took over the colonial state and its main instruments of coercion in the course of the nineteenth century without tying their hands through formal incorporation into the British political system. No British colony ever sent MPs to Westminster, and time and again the dominions opposed plans for greater integration within the empire. Long before national liberation movements appeared on the scene, settlers were the main source of unrest in the European overseas empires. From the point of view of the colonial state, these “ideal collaborators” were also a headstrong and unmanageable clientele. “Settler democracy” was an objective that invariably pointed beyond empire.

Fifth
, classic settler colonialism was a historical force with huge transformative energy. The natural realm experienced this more than any other. Seldom in history have relatively small groups of people made such radical changes to the environment in such a short space of time as the settlers did in neo-European regions of world. This took place before the great technological revolutions that came with the tractor, artificial fertilizer, and the motor-driven chainsaw. For a long time European and Euro-American settlers knew very little about nature in the regions where they sought to make a new life for themselves, and so their first reflex was to carve out familiar kinds of agrarian landscape.
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Their main initial successes were in areas where the natural conditions resembled those of Europe. But over time they came to recognize the potential of uninhabited spaces, as well as the natural limits of all options open to colonizers. The Rocky Mountains, the Australian outback, the Canadian Far North, the swamplands of western Siberia, the Saharan South of Algeria: these all presented challenges on a scale beyond what Europeans had been anticipating. Settlers destroyed ecosystems and created new ones in their place. They wiped out animal species and introduced new ones—sometimes intentionally, sometimes as unknowing bearers of an “ecological imperialism” that spread life forms, from the microbe up, across the planet. New Zealand, a territory so distant that Europeans did not travel there expecting to return soon or at all, had its biological setup revolutionized. Captain Cook's ships had seemed like Noah's Ark when they put ashore there in 1769, in a country lacking mammals apart from dogs, bats, and a small species of rat. Decades before the first settlers made their appearance, tiny pathogens and splendid hogs arrived with Cook and his men—and stayed behind. Then the settlers brought horses, cattle, sheep, rabbits, sparrows, trout, and frogs, as well as game that English gentlemen, even in the colonies, depended on for their favorite sport. The Maoris, seeing this invasion not only as a threat but also as an opportunity, took up pig farming with considerable success. Wool became the colony's main export item: the two islands had 1.5 million sheep by 1858, and 13 million twenty years later.
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New Zealand was only a particularly dramatic
example of environmental changes that settler colonialism triggered everywhere. In the nineteenth century, the “Columbian Exchange” of plants and animals developed from a transatlantic into a global phenomenon, and the encroachment of settler agriculture went wider and deeper than ever before.

6 The Conquest of Nature: Invasions of the Biosphere

Frontiers interact with one another. Certain kinds of experience that occur in one can be subsequently transferred to similar general frameworks elsewhere. The frontier war of the medieval Spanish nobility against the Islamic kingdoms and the later assaults on the indigenous population of the Canary Isles formed a character type well equipped for the conquest of America. And men who in the seventeenth century had served the English Crown in Ireland could later be made good use of overseas. Linked up by international trade, frontiers became subject to adaptive pressures from the world market; those producing the same export goods—such as wheat, rice, or wool—were locked in sharp competition. Often they adopted similar strategies to secure their interests. For example, in the late nineteenth century, both California and Australia saw horticulture and fruit farming as a protection against world cereal price fluctuations.
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Frontiers also stood in ecological relationships with one another. Exchanges among them were increasingly planned, so that Californians, for example, imported Australian eucalyptus as the key to afforestation of arid landscapes, while Australia adopted the Monterey pine from California as its favorite plantation tree.
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Political visions lay behind the apparent innocence of botanical experiments: many in Australia dreamed that the Fifth Continent might become a second America.

At least since Owen Lattimore's work we have known that the frontier has ecological as well as demographic, ethnic, economic, and political dimensions. Large parts of environmental history could even be written as a history of frontier expansion. This is true especially of the nineteenth century, the most important but also the last phase of
extensive
development, before the last remaining frontiers (save the Arctic and the rainforest) closed in the first third of the twentieth century. This book does not have a special chapter on environmental history. There is one chief reason for this: “environment” and “nature” are virtually ubiquitous factors making themselves felt in many of the various fields covered by our survey: migration, cities, industrialization, and so on.
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This section will look at some ecological frontier processes, each involving a dramatic expansion of human control over natural resources, and each continuing trends from earlier periods.

Of course, industrialization created unprecedented levels of pollution, generated totally new demand for farm produce, and developed technologies that made human intervention in nature incomparably more effective than before. But very often it was only modifying processes of more ancient origin. Frontiers to nature also emerged where no extension of arable land was involved. Mountains, for example, came into human purview to an extent unknown in the past;
demographically driven migration to ever higher valleys and slopes, together with new associated forms of land cultivation, was observable in many places on the planet, from the Alps to the Himalayas and the mountains of southwestern China (where a special kind of anarchic frontier, more or less outside state control, arose in the eighteenth century in sharp contrast to the agrarian-bureaucratic order on the plains).
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Only in Europe, however, did the eighteenth-century aesthetic admiration of the high mountains—at first a special interest of intellectual circles in Geneva and Zurich—mutate into a sport of mountaineering that united foreign gentlemen-climbers with rustic local guides.
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Alpinism began around 1800 on Mont Blanc and the Grossglockner, at exactly the same time as Alexander von Humboldt's extraordinary feats in the Andes, which took the German naturalist to heights at which no European had ever before stayed for long. In the nineteenth century, mountains on every continent were climbed, surveyed, and named. This, too, involved the opening and closing of a frontier, which symbolically concluded with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. The sporting challenge would intensify with the selection of new and more difficult peaks or the refusal of oxygen equipment; but the extensive conquest of the high mountains closed in much the same way as that of Antarctica had done in 1911.