Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Wakefield was what can retrospectively be termed an entrepreneur and systematic thinker of settler colonialism in the British empire’s future white dominions. He was the first of an important series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advocates of a ‘Greater Britain’. The movement bearing that name would appear later, but with hindsight Wakefield can be seen as the one who had set the tone.Footnote ¹³ His thinking, however, went beyond merely colonial or British issues, and from an initial position of solidarity and partnership with the chief political economists he produced an influential early critique of their theories.Footnote ¹⁴

Wakefield was born in 1796 in Tottenham, London. The family matriarch, Priscilla, his grandmother, was a formidable Quaker, though Edward Gibbon grew up Anglican. He had a meagre education: brief stints at Westminster and Edinburgh High School. For six years (1814–20) he held a minor diplomatic post in Turin. He had a propensity for eloping with very young women: in 1816 he eloped with a sixteen-year-old heiress, Eliza Pattle, and married her in Edinburgh. She died in 1820 while giving birth to their third child. Desirous of a political career and more fortune, he carefully concocted with his brother William the abduction from her boarding school of fifteen-year-old Ellen Turner, the heiress to a wealthy silk merchant from Macclesfield. He convinced her to marry him, but the contract that had formalized their marriage was later annulled by Parliament. Edward Gibbon and William were prosecuted for abduction, and in 1827 the former was sentenced to three years of imprisonment, most of which he served in London’s Newgate Gaol.

This residency is important because it was in Newgate that Wakefield’s fascination with settler colonization was formed, out of a reflection on what was wrong with current social circumstances. He felt that it was not normal that normal people such as he were forced into considering desperate actions. The first expression of this interest was the initially anonymous A letter from Sydney (1829). He knew that his prospect of career, either in Parliament or in the civil service, had vanished. From that point on, Wakefield’s life was dedicated to and influenced by settler colonization. He wrote numerous works and pamphlets on the subject, most notably England and America (1833) and A view of the art of colonization (1849).

His analysis of the political economy–colonization nexus had significant political outcomes. He was involved in various settler colonial schemes and companies, and spearheaded the Colonial Reform Movement, which included MPs and colonial administrators, most notably Charles Buller and Robert Torrens. Karen O’Brien subtly observes the ‘limited affinity’ between Wakefield and the Romantic Tories. Both extolled settler colonization but, whereas for the Romantic Tories, not unlike Jefferson, a community of homesteaders was an idyll, for Wakefield the absence of wage labour was tantamount to barbarism.Footnote ¹⁵

He also played a central (if controversial and unofficial) role in the 1838 Durham Report on Upper and Lower Canada, an official policy document that had – for the first time in the context of the British empire – recommended settler-responsible government.Footnote ¹⁶ Wakefield had tortuous relationships with British politicians, civil servants, and the political economists of his time, many of whom disliked him (J. S. Mill and Lord Durham were notable exceptions) but could not ignore his pronouncements.Footnote ¹⁷ The most interesting of these relationships was the one he entertained with the Colonial Secretary of the late 1840s, Viscount Howick, who abhorred Wakefield the person but was highly appreciative of Wakefield the theoretician of colonization.Footnote ¹⁸

Wakefield’s theory of what he called ‘systematic colonization’ stemmed from a concern that the white settler colonies of his time (primarily America) were eminently defective societies. In his analysis, cheap land and its infinite availability resulted in ‘dispersion’. It was not a minor defect: in his understanding dispersion prevented the very development of what he defined as ‘capitalist civilization’. He liked capitalism, even if he did not use this term, and did not approve of what he saw as a return to pre-capitalist conditions in the settler colonies. In Wakefield’s opinion, contra laissez-faire, the developing settler colonies needed the guiding hand of a metropole in an aggressively interventionist manner in order to place the budding settler colony on the road to ‘capitalist civilization’. The ‘invisible hand’ of a free market in what were deemed empty lands was anathema to Wakefield. The fundamental feature of his colonization theory was that the colonial government should impose a ‘sufficient price’ on ‘wastelands’ in the colonies.

That sufficient price would achieve two goals. The first would be to prevent newly arrived settlers from immediately owning land and to force them to become wage labourers in the employment of wealthier settlers. Wakefield’s systematic colonization then provided the hope or the pacifying delusion that a sustained period of employment coupled with frugality would enable wage labourers eventually to meet the sufficient price and purchase their own land. The second goal of the sufficient price was to furnish a fund that would pay for the importation of more immigrant families, thereby keeping the colonial labour market well supplied. The gendered dimension of Wakefield’s scheme was crucial: it was the sufficient price of land that would guarantee appropriate gender balance and provide for the expansion of the settler labour force via procreation rather than uncontrolled immigration. The resulting division between wage and domestic labour would also sustain a more pacified social body. Wakefield’s system would thus offset ‘dispersion’, for only at the already settled areas could employment be sought. It should already be possible to see why Wakefield was irresistible for Marx: within the latter’s analytical framework the former had understood that capital accumulation was predicated on the prior denial of access to means of subsistence and on the subsequent prevalence of wage labour.

At the same time, Wakefield thought that establishing settler colonies around the globe was an especially good idea because they, in turn, would allow the mother country to escape over-capitalization and revolutionary tensions. The colonies would provide an inexhaustible ‘field of employment’ for over-accumulated capital. Wakefield believed that this was a major contribution to politico-economic analysis, a category that would amend the capital-centric view of Ricardian orthodoxies. He saw unconstrained capitalism producing unsustainable contradictions and unconstrained settler colonialism dissipating capitalist relations. His ‘systematic colonization’ scheme was to be capitalist civilization’s global saviour.

The idea that settler colonialism could constitute a pre-emptive response to social revolution remained a minority position. The opposing alternatives of social revolution and settler colonialism were never clear in the minds of Wakefield’s contemporaries, and most of the political economists at the time argued that the problem of ‘overcapitalization’ and attendant social troubles could be resolved without colonial expansion. While Wakefield’s success in breaking this orthodoxy was due to his theory’s appeal to conservative opinion and a few liberal political economists, most notably Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Marx fully recognized the significance of Wakefield’s project and explicitly set out to criticize it in Capital’s thirty-third chapter.Footnote ¹⁹ As Wakefield and Marx were talking about capitalism, primitive accumulation and the prospect of an impending revolution, they were actually talking about settler colonies as specific social formations, formations that in their understanding were crucially distinct from those characterizing both the Old World and the rest of the colonial world.

Settler colonialism

A letter from Sydney was the first expression of Wakefield’s interest in settler colonization. It was a Prison notebook of sorts, in which, through reading and mental exertion, Wakefield crafted an epistolary conversation between the author, a colonist in Australia, and a statesman in England. Both its form and content evince the influence upon Edward Gibbon of his grandmother Priscilla. Barely stepping outside London, she had nevertheless written several books describing geographies which she had never visited. In Excursions in North America (1806) she had decried the ‘regression’ of the New World societies and remarked on the ways in which the colonists had dispersed and polite society had disappeared. She had blamed generous land grants: simple houses, hunting, and enhanced mobility had followed, with colonists often ‘quitting the spot on which they have bestowed some labour, before it is completely clean, and remove further into the forest’.Footnote ²⁰A letter from Sydney reproduced these notions.

In that text Wakefield offered a condensed definition of colonization’s primary characteristic. This definition contains a multiplicity of meanings precisely because it is so condensed and because he was not intentionally endeavouring to craft a definition at that point: ‘colonisation means the creation and increase of everything but land, where there is nothing except land’.Footnote ²¹ We should dwell on this definition’s significance. In Hegelian terms the statement is both objective and subjective: it validly describes what settler colonies were and how they would develop, and it constitutes an articulation of white settler perspective and consciousness.

To address perspective and consciousness first: by stating ‘where there is nothing except land’, Wakefield’s succinct definition already assumes that, prior to white colonization, the said geography had been terra nullius. There is no settler consciousness and imagination without terra nullius, a concept that can be expressed variously, from the use of the concept in Australian law until the 1990s, through a Judaeo-Protestant narrative in which Exodus is liberation but not elimination, to the Zionist slogan of ‘a land without a people to a people without a land’.Footnote ²² Carole Pateman examines the foundational importance of terra nullius to the settler consciousness in a masterful essay outlining ‘the settler contract’. The notion of the settler contract emerges from her collaboration with Charles Mills, a partnership that brought together her The sexual contract and his The racial contract. Their joint study broaches the extent to which a contract entails domination and powerfully questions one of Western civilization’s most distinctive traits: the assumption of a voluntary entry into contracts by equal, free, thinking subjects. Pateman’s critical approach to the contract as such is underlain by a Marxist critique of liberalism. In ‘The settler contract’ she offers a narrative of terra nullius in the context of three settler societies: the US, Australia, and Canada. She explores through this term the ideological mechanisms used by the settlers to justify and legitimize their projects, and offers a reading of Grotius and Locke that runs against the grain of Whig scholarship on early modern political theory.Footnote ²³

Specifically, Pateman’s concern with the settler contract is stimulated by her engagement with Mills’s discussion of an ‘expropriation’ contract. She then offers a succinct definition of her own:

While this definition significantly resonates with Wakefield’s, the conceptual distinction between settler colonialism and metropole-centred colonialism that is embedded in his definition should also be noted (even if he did not use these terms). When Wakefield and many other nineteenth-century writers used the terms ‘colonization’ and ‘colonies’ they meant the settler ones – for them the only ‘real’ colonies. Observing that in a typical colony of exploitation such as India, for example, ‘there is nothing except land’, would have not occurred to them. Marx shared this perception (even if he also did not use ‘settler colonialism’ as a term). He could not have been more explicit than in Capital’s thirty-third chapter: ‘We are dealing with true colonies, i.e. virgin soil colonized by free immigrants’.Footnote ²⁵

Marx realized how the distinction between colonial and settler colonial phenomena depended on the colony’s subordinate integration in international markets and, consequently, on its native policy: ‘The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself.’Footnote ²⁶ For Marx it was a lack of exploitable indigenous peoples and plantation-produced commodities that defined settler colonialism. The antithetical conceptualization of the two types of colonialism has been much reflected upon and systematized by the developing field of comparative settler colonial studies. The distinction, however, was very clear in the nineteenth century, even if it became less so in the twentieth.Footnote ²⁷

In addressing the objective side of Wakefield’s definition, it is crucial to understand, as Pateman does, that there is a qualitative difference between the labour and sexual contracts and the ‘settler contract’. The former contracts do, indeed, entail domination, but the dominated remain a party to the contract because they are essential for the socioeconomic formation that is thereby made legal. The settler contract is unilaterally created by the settlers among themselves, in the context of a relation of some sort to the metropolitan power. The indigenous communities who own and people the land are absent from the contract even as a dominated party because they have become superfluous in the socioeconomic formation that the settlers have the ability to force upon them. It is in this sense that Wakefield’s definition is meaningfully valid both subjectively and objectively. Put differently, the objective validity condensed into Wakefield’s ruthless statement lies not in the fact that objectively there were no natives on the land, but in the fact that the settlers were successful in creating a land-labour formation in which ‘there is nothing except land’, on which, in turn, capital can exercise its expansionary drive without obstruction. This drive is, in Wakefield’s formulation, ‘the creation and increase of everything but land’.

This objective aspect of Wakefield’s definition is further illuminated by the seminal intervention of another scholar, Patrick Wolfe. The originality and insight of Wolfe’s writings on this issue lie in his appreciative critique of anti-colonial writers such as Amilcar Cabral and Franz Fanon, and of later ones such as Gayatri Spivak. Wolfe also underscores the antithetical distinction between metropole-centred and settler colonialisms. ‘For all the homage paid to heterogeneity and difference,’ he observes, ‘the bulk of “post”-colonial theorizing is disabled by an oddly monolithic, and surprisingly unexamined, notion of colonialism.’ He argues that one of the reasons for this

Wolfe attributes decisive explanatory significance to the fact that, in contrast to the colonial formation that Cabral or Fanon confronted, the settler colonies were ‘not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour’. Rather, they were ‘premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land’. The bottom line is a formulation that other scholars of settler colonialism understandably cite: ‘Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of the native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay – invasion is a structure not an event.’Footnote ²⁹

Within the scholarly taxonomy of settler colonies, Wolfe is really interested in what D. K. Fieldhouse called the ‘pure settlement’ colony.Footnote ³⁰ The gist of the land–labour formation in this case is that it is based exclusively on white settler labour, a point already outlined by Donald Denoon in his 1983 comparative book.Footnote ³¹ What is desired from the indigenous society is all the land and none of the labour (true, some indigenous labour may be required, but, crucially, either in marginal areas or as a temporary measure). In this formation, from a settler perspective, the indigenous people are superfluous. In the present context we want to emphasize that, although he obviously did not use this terminology, and even if he aimed to stunt their autonomy and tie them to the metropolitan power, the colonies that Wakefield was interested in were pure settlement formations: Australia, New Zealand, the northern US (he objected vehemently to the slavery-based plantations), Canada, and Argentina (specifically Buenos Aires and its hinterland in the pampas).

This relation between Wolfe’s insight and Wakefield’s concerns makes the former’s insight appear tailor-made to illuminate the ‘nothing’ in the latter’s definition of colonization. Wolfe observes that the pure settlement formation created a situation in which it was ‘difficult to speak of an articulation between colonizer and native since the determinate articulation is not to a society but directly to the land, a precondition of social organization’.Footnote ³²

A starting point in the form of bifurcation

In 1833 Wakefield published his largest work: England and America. Towards the end of the second volume we find a section in which he devastatingly criticizes slavery on the grounds ‘of its moral evils’ and because in his opinion it hinders the very development of capitalism. He then turns ‘to those new countries in which the people [i.e. settlers] have had superabundance of good land without slavery. Not a single one of these societies has greatly prospered: many have perished entirely, and some remain in a deplorable condition. From these last, two striking examples may be selected.’Footnote ³³ The two negative examples that Wakefield examined in greater detail were Argentina, ‘the pampas of Buenos Ayres [sic], and the last colony founded by Englishmen … on the west coast of New Holland [Australia]’.Footnote ³⁴

The latter was then known as the Swan River colony. Here is how Wakefield described and explained that failure, with special reference to Thomas Peel, the founder of the abortive colony:

Marx found Wakefield’s analysis so thought-provoking that the final chapter of the first volume of Capital is actually entitled ‘The modern theory of colonization’. The chapter is essentially a debate with Wakefield, three decades after England and America was first published. This commentary, however, goes deeper than the analysis of an episode in the early colonization of what would become Western Australia. Indeed, as Marx set out to criticize capitalism, he explicitly noted that Wakefield had ‘discovered’ it by looking at the settler colonies. Marx was indeed following Wakefield; after all, he had begun writing Capital after realizing the fundamental impact that the discovery of gold in California and Australia had had on the world economy.

Significantly, this chapter not only concluded the volume as a whole but also the final section on what he called ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. This is not just any passage; it is the moment when the ‘secret’ of primitive accumulation is finally revealed.Footnote ³⁶ From the outset Marx makes it clear precisely what made Wakefield so interesting: ‘It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not something new about the colonies, but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country …. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things’ (Marx had, however, already analysed money as a ‘social relation’ in the Grundrisse).Footnote ³⁷

To illustrate how Wakefield’s basic understanding of capitalism resembles his own, even if their politics would always remain adversarial, Marx immediately refers in a note to an observation he had already published in Wage labour and capital (1849):

Marx then proceeds to relate Wakefield’s description of Mr. Peel’s woes in the abortive Swan River colony. Quoting verbatim Wakefield’s horrified description, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river’, Marx, the ironist par excellence, concludes: ‘Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River!’Footnote ³⁹

As mentioned, we believe that Marx’s ironic response to Wakefield’s rendering of the Swan River failure can be seen as an Ansatzpunkt, a starting point, the moment when two political paths become visible. We borrow this method from Carlo Ginzburg’s developing thought on microhistory. Ginzburg, in turn, borrows the notion of Ansatzpunkt from Erich Auerbach, who asked: ‘How can a philologist from a single cultural tradition approach a world in which so many languages, so many cultural traditions interact?’ Ginzburg’s response is as follows: ‘Auerbach believed that one has to look for Ansatzpunkte, that is, for starting points, for concrete details from which the global process can be inductively reconstructed.’ It is noteworthy that the subject matter of Ginzburg’s study is the settler-colonization schemes of an eighteenth-century Calvinist from Neuchâtel, Jean-Pierre Purry, in South Africa, Australia, and later South Carolina.Footnote ⁴⁰

Marx’s remark on Mr Peel and his predicament, and his response to Wakefield’s work, is an Ansatzpunkt for an inquiry of two related traditions: ‘the world turned upside down’ and its antithetical opposite, ‘the world turned inside out’. It is the moment when two traditions take shape. Arguing that each individual emigrant-settler in the nineteenth century had a ‘world turned inside out’ consciousness, or assuming that such a sensitivity is documentable, would be inappropriate. We deal here, however, with the history of thought on colonization and with articulate theoreticians and planners of settler colonies. They left substantial corpora of texts and documents, and even if they did not use our expressions to refer to this contradiction, the opposition between revolution and settler colonialism was very clear to many of them. Many ‘languages’ and ‘cultural traditions’ interact, and we seek an Ansatzpunkt, even if, as already clarified in the introductory passage, by seeking a starting point we do not search for a chronological beginning.

After the Napoleonic Wars, Wakefield’s formative decades in Britain were the 1820s and 1830s. In his last large composition, A view of the art of colonization, published not long before he migrated to New Zealand, he revealed his anxiety vis-à-vis what he perceived as a brewing ‘world turned upside down’. This anxiety had, however, informed the whole of his opus:

This was in the metropole. What then would happen in the white settler colonies that were to come? After all, the core of Wakefield’s life work was to ensure that these colonies, too, would become locales characterized by ‘capitalist civilization’. What would prevent an eventual eruption of the conflict between capital and labour that Wakefield had identified as inherent to capitalism at home?

This is where the organic bond between settler colonialism and primitive accumulation is added to our analysis of the world turned upside down versus the world turned inside out bifurcation. What Wakefield envisaged for the settler colonies, even though, again, he did not formulate it in this language, was perpetual primitive accumulation, at least in the sense that social conflict is deferred ad infinitum because those whose labour is rendered a commodity are given the seemingly realistic prospect that they themselves will one day become landowners.Footnote ⁴² Marx’s ironic response was underlain by the fundamental intuition that this was ultimately impossible: like Wolfe’s notion of settler colonialism, he understood capitalism as a dynamic structure and not as an originary event.

Noting that ‘both primitive accumulation and settler colonialism are increasingly theorized as structures’ and their ‘ongoing or continuous character’, Nicholas Brown has recently argued that the two should be regarded as essentially alike.Footnote ⁴³ We agree, even if we do not insist on the rigidity of the bond between the histories of primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, on whether these histories should be collapsed into one narrative or whether they remain intimately entwined. We do insist that the bond was real, however, both objectively and in the minds of important nineteenth-century thinkers (and indeed earlier ones). This connection comes forth forcefully in Wolfe’s apt formulation:

Primitive accumulation thus relates to the temporarily dispossessed settlers, who would in due course be replaced by newly temporarily dispossessed ones via the enforcement of a government-regulated ‘sufficient price’ of land, to permanently dispossessed slaves, and to indigenous peoples disappearing forever. Thus, as the Wakefieldian scheme thundered against the existence of the second group and comprehensively foreclosed the third, his settler ‘worlds turned inside out’ were to be characterized by perennial primitive accumulation.

Convergence and divergence

As outlined above, Wakefield’s most effective and succinct definition of settler colonization assumes both terra nullius and capital’s expansionary needs. But the Wakefieldian project is also necessarily premised on considering both capital and population as inherently mobile factors of production. While Marx also responded to the political economists, he equally saw capital and population as typically mobile, but the issue of settler colonialism disappeared from successive renditions of his critique and from later orthodox Marxism. In the context of a discussion of the role of settler colonialism in the development of Marxist theory, we want to emphasize the notion of transfer that arises from an emphasis on mobility. Whereas metropole-centred colonialism is characterized by exploitation, settler colonialism is primarily characterized by transfer: the transfer of indigenous peoples and land ownership, but also the transfer of settlers from one locale to another, and the transfer of specific social forms.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is a selective type of transfer. What we define here as the ‘world turned inside out’ is, after all, a set of political traditions concerned with the possibility of transferring everything except growing contradictions; even land, though obviously not literally, is to be transferred.

Wakefield was equally preoccupied with England’s revolutionary potential (hence the need for colonization) and with American unconstrained realities (hence the need for ‘systematic’ in ‘systematic colonization’). It is significant that, faced with revolutionary possibilities and what they perceived as Jeffersonian adventurism, between the 1790s and 1810 US federalists had also espoused a theory of ‘systematic’ colonization.Footnote ⁴⁶ At the same time, Wakefield thought that the transfer of sociopolitical bodies and appropriate social relations could be seamless and that the mechanism he had devised could prevent contradictions from either being imported from the outside or from eventually germinating within. Marx disagreed, and his intuition that contradictions are inevitable and that one cannot transfer a sociopolitical body without transferring its contradictions informs the whole of his opus. ‘Unhappy Mr. Peel’, Marx noted in Capital, as we have seen, discovering Wakefield discovering capitalism:

Marx was thus aware that settler colonialism is a formation initially charged with a fundamentally non-capitalist character. A capitalist with capital but no capitalism: ‘Unhappy Mr. Peel’ indeed!

Wakefield’s project envisaged a controlled and self-managing system: in our expression, a world turned inside out rather than upside down, a world controlled through the surreptitious reintroduction of primitive accumulation via the ‘sufficient price’ and through governmental intervention. This was a proposition that went against the most cherished tenets of classical political economy. But as well as disrupting laissez-faire a century before Keynes outlined his economic theories, Wakefield’s project also disrupted imperial centralization. At that point, colonialism had been primarily about the ways in which the mother country could benefit from overseas possessions. For Wakefield, ‘systematic colonization’ was about the mutual benefits that would follow displacement and decentralization.

Wakefield aimed to give form to the world turned inside out, to control it, and simultaneously to exorcise the world turned upside down. After intense engagement with Wakefield and with the possibility of emigrating to America – as a young man, he had asked the mayor of Trier for an Auswanderungschein (an emigration certificate) – Marx decisively embraced the revolutionary option.Footnote ⁴⁸ And yet Wakefield’s significance in this context was neglected for a long time. Indeed, much of the scholarship on him is primarily concerned with the interaction between him and the classical economists and almost completely ignores Marx. Winch’s book is typical of this interpretative stance.Footnote ⁴⁹ In that rendition, Wakefield responded to those who preceded him, dared to break away from them, and was thus a renegade best forgotten. Accordingly, the worlds turned inside out that he hoped to create and control dissolve in a multiplicity of polities at the periphery. These dispersed ‘fragments’ would be appraised together only in the 1960s by Louis Hartz, but their role in shaping the evolution of the political traditions of the Old World would not be recovered.Footnote ⁵⁰

Winch also fails to emphasize the opposition of many to Wakefield and those who had preceded him in advocating settler colonial expansion, and the general hesitation of even those who supported emigration. Moreover, he does not deal with Marx although he could have. Earlier in Capital, Marx explains why surplus – that is, unemployed – labour is so crucial for the industrial capitalist. He offers a taxonomy of that surplus labour force, of which the most important category is what he calls ‘floating labourers’. We think that the political economists’ main objection to emigration, as capitalism’s organic intellectuals, may be related to the potential loss of ‘floating labour’. On the other side of the political spectrum, the Chartists would be mostly in favour of ‘emigration’, as Wakefield was, but consistently opposed the Wakefieldian attempts to reintroduce primitive accumulation (even if they did not use this term), because they realized that Wakefield’s plan was fundamentally premised on a determination to reproduce the workers’ subjugation. Unlike Wakefield, the Chartists thought that the sociopolitical bodies that were to be exported to the colonies needed to be endowed with inherently novel social relations; they did not seek Wakefieldian replication, or, to use his words, the replication of the ‘stratified society of England to the colonies by means of a strictly enforced social constitution’.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, Winch is also not cognizant of the profound difference between Wakefield’s plans and the proposals of those who had advocated emigration before him. The underlying difference is evinced by the language. They debated ‘emigration’ as an issue, and thereby retained the mother country’s vantage point. Wakefield’s title, on the contrary, was ‘colonization’ and thus shifted the concern to the settler colony rather than England. The former focused on the absolute need to prevent the local explosion of contradictions, and they were primarily social reformers who aimed to offload social pressure on the outside. Wakefield envisaged the new societies he aimed to build elsewhere as constituting a template model that would eventually be re-imported to the metropole, a perspective that would have horrified people who thought that, by definition, nothing good could ever come from a colony.

An imaginative transfer had transformed Wakefield’s consciousness. A global gaze from the Antipodes is already in evidence in A letter from Sydney. There he imagines a farewell from his grandmother, whose significance is overlooked by those who remain solely focused on the Old World. She had noticed how marginal Australia and New Zealand were on the map, but he had torn it, reattached it at the opposite margin, and turned it upside down.Footnote ⁵² His act shifts the focus from the mother country to the settler colony. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this de-centring would develop into a significant historiography, which one could call ‘history from the Antipodes’. The most sophisticated articulation of this is probably Pocock’s The discovery of islands, but Belich’s global history and even settler colonial studies as a global intellectual endeavour also emanate from ‘remote outposts’.Footnote ⁵³ It is remarkable that Wakefield somehow viscerally sensed this possibility through sheer mental exertion. After all, A letter from Sydney was a fictitious epistolary book.

Similarly, as also noted in a recent essay on Marx’s thought on colonialism, orthodox Marxism has generally neglected the Wakefield–Marx nexus.Footnote ⁵⁴ Scholars in this field typically see the Marxian critique as a direct response to the capitalist mode of production, not as a response to an ultimately hopeless attempt to escape growing contradictions through displacement, and focus on what he wrote on the colonial question, not the settler colonial one.Footnote ⁵⁵ Linking Marx with a settler-thinker famous for contributing to the establishment of some of the most thoroughly capitalist societies on the planet was apparently counterintuitive. But this attitude should be corrected, and Marx always emphasized the significance of the white settler dominions as a potentially important development in the trajectory of capitalism.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ultimately, neither the liberal nor the Marxist tradition sees the bifurcation between revolutionary and world-turned-inside-out traditions, even if there are different reasons for their lack of vision.

However, beside the previously mentioned recent articles that deal with these issues, there is an important exception to earlier oversights. In a 1951 article, O. H. Pappe highlighted the remarkable convergence between Marx and Wakefield. We have already noted that he, too, had failed to set apart settler from metropole-centred colonization. Nonetheless, he emphasized how Wakefield and Marx had started out from parallel critiques of the political economy and from an expectation of its crisis.Footnote ⁵⁷ He saw them as largely agreeing on the analysis, even if they disagreed on the remedies. While Wakefield wanted to tame the revolutionary potential of the new colonies established on ‘empty lands’, and Marx knew that growing contradictions could not be permanently escaped, Pappe pointed out that both stressed the importance of wage labour in creating wealth, and both opposed ‘those political economists who worship capital’.Footnote ⁵⁸ He concluded by remarking on a ‘significant affinity’:

Pappe’s ‘significant affinity’ can also be used to magnify the two thinkers’ political divergence. Wakefield and Marx were both suspicious of the disappearance of primitive accumulation in uncontrolled frontiers, but for different reasons: Wakefield resented a mode of production that did not reproduce the hierarchical structure of the Old World and the primary conditions of capital accumulation, while Marx understood that the availability of free land constituted an alluring and dangerous alternative to embracing a revolutionary consciousness. Wakefield especially resented what he perceived as the threatened disappearance of a middle class and the inherently revolutionary prospects that its disappearance implied. In England and America he had suggested that ‘one chief end of colonization is to prevent tumults, to keep the peace, to maintain order, to uphold confidence in the security of property, to hinder interruptions of the regular course of industry and trade, to avert the terrible evils which, in a country like England, could not but follow any serious political convulsion’.Footnote ⁶⁰ He called this endangered middle class ‘the uneasy class’, a remarkably insightful definition of the ‘settler classes’, and set out to recreate it in the colonies.Footnote ⁶¹ A surreptitiously reintroduced form of primitive accumulation would enable and drive this replication.

Primitive accumulation: finite or repeatable?

Whereas Wakefield argued for a return towards primitive accumulation, Marx envisaged a forward movement through it. Marx knew the structural difference between Europe and the settler colonies, between a maturely capitalist order and a world turned inside out: in England especially, primary accumulation was a done deal, but this was not so in the colonies. For him, in the ‘empty lands’ characterizing the settler colonies (as we have noted, in Marxian terms the only ‘colonies proper’), ‘the capitalist regime encounters on all hands the resistance of the producers who own the means of production with which they work and who gain wealth for themselves by their own labour instead of working to enrich a capitalist’.Footnote ⁶² His laboratory for the discovery of how capitalism had ‘become’ should therefore be sought at the end of the world in a ‘wasteland’ entirely surrounded by salt and sand, not only in the locales identified by his most quoted passage on ‘the chief moments of primitive accumulation’:

The organic bond that we identify between settler colonization and primitive accumulation in the nineteenth century requires a brief revisiting of the split in Marxist thought into two interpretative traditions of primitive accumulation. Massimo De Angelis offers a helpful reconstruction. He calls the first ‘historical primitive accumulation’ and the second ‘inherent-continuous primitive accumulation’ and he identifies Lenin’s The development of capitalism in Russia (1899) as the foundational text of the first tradition and Rosa Luxemburg’s The accumulation of capital (1913) as that of the second. Among the more recent articulators of these approaches he mentions Maurice Dobb and Robert Brenner for the first, and Samir Amin for the second.Footnote ⁶⁴

For the first tradition, primitive accumulation was a prerequisite for the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Divorcing a growing number of people from their means of subsistence, it would force them to sell their labour in order to survive, a situation commonly epitomized by the enclosures in late medieval and early modern England. This tradition contends that primitive accumulation, having occurred once and ushered in mature capitalism, is an unrepeatable socioeconomic formation. The second tradition, on the contrary, depicts a ‘messy’ capitalism, insisting that mature capitalism has itself created the ongoing recurrence of primitive accumulations. Most crucially, the second tradition emphasizes the extra-economic way of primitive accumulation’s ‘becoming’, as distinguished from the economic reproduction of capitalism’s ‘being’. ‘Becoming’ and ‘being’ are Marx’s metaphors and they may evince his Hegelian formation; the insight on the resort to extra-economic means for primitive accumulation ‘to become’ is Luxemburg’s. De Angelis, however, does not address settler colonialism as a distinct formation and is more interested in an exploration of the contemporary North–South divide.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg emphasized the structural and inevitable simultaneity of capitalist and primitive accumulation, but, departing from the Marxian text, sought this coexistence in the dependent colonies rather than in the settler ones. It is striking that, again, unlike Marx, this approach failed to notice the intimate connection between settler colonialism and primitive accumulation in the nineteenth century, the period that Belich identifies as fundamentally characterized by the ‘settler revolution’.Footnote ⁶⁶

De Angelis lays much emphasis on ‘separation’ as primitive accumulation’s underlying feature, a characteristic that opens up the investigation of various forms of primitive accumulation temporally and spatially, and notes that it is ‘separation’ that distinguishes primitive accumulation from accumulation proper.Footnote ⁶⁷ But whereas settler colonization is predicated on a multi-layered series of transfers, as we have argued, transfer is indeed a form of separation. First, the indigenous peoples are separated from their land. Then – and this was the cornerstone of Wakefield’s colonization theory – large numbers of arriving settlers are separated from the land they could access and, rather than being allowed to subsist from it directly, are forced to earn wages from labouring on it, albeit only for a time. Finally, the separation of settler and indigene must be kept rigid in the spheres of both land (and space writ large) and labour. In congruity with Luxemburg and De Angelis, the ‘becoming’ of settler colonization as primitive accumulation thus entails ongoing extra-economic measures. These chiefly comprise warfare and violence at both the frontier and statehood stages, and ‘lawfare’ (for example, the terra nullius doctrine, the so-called treaties that US governments imposed on American Indian tribes, and the 1950 Law of Absentees’ Property in Israel).Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, Wakefield’s very mechanism of a government-sanctioned sufficient price, devised precisely to separate immigrant settlers from the land, was an extra-economic measure put forth by a passionate proponent of ‘capitalist civilization’ who was nonetheless suspicious of the market when left to its own devices.

Marx was similarly suspicious of the market, but his criticism of Wakefield focuses primarily on the ‘unnatural’ character of Wakefield’s scheme. He realized that enforcing Wakefield’s ‘sufficient price’ inevitably involved extra-economic coercion. It operated through the market, even as it regulated it, but he knew that it was not by chance that Wakefield sought to test his theories in colonial contexts, where governments could operate in an unrestrained fashion and routinely resort to dictatorial powers. Primitive accumulation was also eminently unnatural for Marx, and at the same time he understood that as long as ‘empty lands’ remained available, an anti-capitalist charge was still present:

Marx knew that a settler society is primarily focused on reproduction, not production. Settlers produced for global markets, but, as Belich has demonstrated, this articulation was not what ultimately fuelled their astonishing growth.Footnote ⁷⁰

Marx did not think that the transfer of sociopolitical bodies was impossible. As noted, he always remained interested in the settler colonial world and the revolutionary possibilities that it opened up. However, unlike many of his comrades and defeated 1848 revolutionaries, he did not emigrate from Europe.Footnote ⁷¹ At the same time, he thought that Wakefield’s project of selectively exporting specific social relations without attending contradictions was ultimately hopeless. For Marx, the frontier was only initially a classless world, and briefly so. He explained why the Wakefieldian measures were not needed and could not ultimately work:

Primitive accumulation did not need to be surreptitiously reintroduced. It was rapidly proceeding anyway, especially in the US, where the Wakefieldian policies had not been introduced.

And yet, despite their divergences, Marx and Wakefield importantly shared the fundamental intuition of impending upheaval. Wakefield’s plan was born in the explicit understanding that ‘the crisis is coming’. He noted that, as the condition of labouring poor ‘must be worse before it can be better, the crisis is coming’.Footnote ⁷³ Unless something was done – and done fast – the revolution would come. In his analysis, there is a constant and direct connection between the prospect of revolutionary upheaval and the need to create settler colonies. As we have seen, in A view of the art of colonization he had prophesied that Chartism and socialism ‘will be able to disturb the peace in this country’. The world turned inside out is routinely imagined as an alternative to growing revolutionary possibilities.

Wakefield’s fear of socialism is linked to an expansive idea of revolution: for him any distortion of what he understood as the natural order was inherently revolutionary. This included workers organizing and educating themselves, as well as, crucially, the possibility that the ‘middle class’ would disappear. His 1849 observation that the ‘hurtful competition of labourers with each other is an old story among political thinkers’, but that competition between the other classes ‘had not been noticed till it was pointed out by the colonizing theorists of the 1830s’, is also crucial.Footnote ⁷⁴ His project is not primarily designed to reduce social pressure from below; it is designed to reduce what he perceived as the enormous social pressure that was squeezing the middle class.

In The art of colonization Wakefield noted ominously that a ‘ruined man is a dangerous citizen’ and that ‘there are at all times in this country more people who have been ruined than in any other country’.Footnote ⁷⁵ And of course he knew: he was one of them. His imprisonment and the very public nature of his fall made him an exemplar of this trend. For him an existential challenge to the middle class was as much a revolutionary development as popular education. That the working poor were poor and often not even working was entirely normal, but the replicas of England about which he fantasized were to be reserved exclusively for ‘the uneasy class’.