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Emptiness in the Colonial Gaze: Labor, Property, and Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2011

Robert L. Nelson
Robert L. Nelson
Affiliation:
University of Windsor
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Extract

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

Type
Review Essay
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 79 , Special Issue 1: Labor Migration to the Middle East , Spring 2011 , pp. 161 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2011

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References

NOTES

I would like to thank the excellent students who partook in my “Colonialism” seminar at the University of Windsor for their incisive comments and enthusiasm in discussing the themes laid out in this essay. I also thank Kim Nelson, Miriam Wright, Conal Calvert, and the three anonymous reviewers at International Labor and Working-Class History for their helpful suggestions. Finally, many thanks to Kate Brown for her suggestion to write this review essay and encouraging me to review books published over two decades, as well as to move beyond the normal parameters of reviewing and actually make a (hopefully provocative) argument.

1. Nelson, Robert L., “From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East,” Social History 35 (2010): 439–457CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. The best introduction to the “spatial turn” is Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York, 2009). See also Banivanua-Mar, Tracey and Edmunds, Penelope, eds., Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

3. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London, 2008 [orig. 1992]), 12Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., 151–152.

5. An extensive discussion of the link between liberalism and property can be found in Arblaster, Anthony, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (London, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Singer, Joseph, Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property (New Haven, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldron, Jeremy, The Right to Private Property (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar.

6. Arneil, Barbara, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Cambridge, 1996), 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. In light of the renewed interest in the importance of the genocide of the Herero in German South-West Africa, 1904–1907, it is important to note that the Herero were cattle-grazers, not farmers, and thus it was remarkably easy for the Germans to see Herero land as empty. For a seminal account of the structure of space in this colony, see Noyes, J. K., Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Chur, 1992)Google Scholar.

8. For a similar story concerning Natives in the Canadian Prairies, see Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairies, Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal, 1990).

9. It should be noted here that, somewhat akin to the Maori, the Natives of the West Coast and Interior of British Columbia had a rather sophisticated form of land use and tenure. Extended family groups, or numayams, within each community “owned” specific hunting, fishing, and berry-picking spots, and these usage rights were passed down through subsequent generations. This was not, however, “farming” to the European eye. See Sterritt, Neil et al. , Tribal Boundaries of the Nass Watershed (Vancouver, 1999)Google Scholar; Mills, Patricia Dawn, For Future Generations: Reconciling Gitxsan and Canadian Law (Saskatoon, 2008)Google Scholar.

10. Harris, Cole, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver, 2002), 85Google Scholar.

11. For a fascinating study analyzing the manner in which Poles were “darkened” in nineteenth-century German “colonial” novels of the East, see Kristen Kopp, “Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben as Colonial Novel,” in Robert L. Nelson, Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (London, 2009), 11–37. See also note 15 below.

12. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (London, 1992 [orig. 1974])Google Scholar. For this paragraph, and help navigating Lefebvre, I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Leif Jerram at the University of Manchester.

13. Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 4Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 73

15. Ibid., 82.

16. Braun, Bruce, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada's West Coast (Minneapolis, 2002), 8Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., 122.

18. See Raibmon, Paige, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham and London, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Further to these thoughts: Heath, Joseph and Potter, Andrew, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed (Toronto, 2004)Google Scholar.

20. Akin to Banner, the work of Patrick Wolfe is global in its comparative cases of colonialism, though with a helpful focus upon race. As the title of his seminal paper in the American Historical Review indicates, he equally recognizes the importance of capitalism in racial-thinking: “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” In his fascinating analysis of the treatment of Australian Aborigines, American Natives and Blacks, and Brazilian “non-whites,” Wolfe demonstrates the degree to which race-thinking in all of these cases has everything to do with whether or not the colonizer (a) wants to steal the land, or (b) requires free labor, and little, if anything, to do with Renan's essays back in “old Europe.” See Wolfe, Patrick, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 20 (2001): 866–905CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. The concept of the “Black Irish,” when used negatively, is further proof of the use of race after the fact. The Irish, like the Poles (see note 7 above) are, of course, not “dark” peoples, yet, in the English/German rationalizations of their colonization/mistreatment, an absurd attempt to racialize is made. With regard to another “darkened” people, the Jews of Germany, this essay is about colonialism and thus anti-Semitism cannot fruitfully enter the discussion without massive twists and turns that I am not yet prepared to follow.

22. In describing the “imperial history” of Australia, the mapping of the continent from Cook onward, Paul Carter brilliantly pushes the notion of invisibility into time itself. Only through incorporation into Western history did time begin in Australia: The centuries-old wrecks of Dutch and Portuguese ships on “lonely” bays represented events that happened “before”—that is, before Cook, as opposed to after the arrival of Aborigines forty thousand years earlier. Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London, 1987), 158Google Scholar. Similarly, in Canada, the Viking village discovered in Newfoundland occurred “before” John Cabot, not “after” the Beothuks.