This book offers a simple answer to a simple question. What is “we”?

“We” – I propose – is a method. Not a who to be specified. Not a collective to join or from which to be expelled. “We” is a method: a technique; a procedure; a means to some end (actually, many ends); a craft; a systematic mode of arrangement. “We” is a method through which the world is structured and ordered, from the micro-unit of “we two”1 to the macro-units of geopolitical or even interspecies alliance. As a method, “we” can be repeated – and is – with varying degrees of intentionality. As a method, “we” conscripts and recruits, sometimes frankly, sometimes slyly. “We” is a method that underpins the ordering structures of our selves, our societies, and our worlds.

Which means, of course, that there is nothing simple about it. What is “we”? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “we” is “the subjective case of the first-person plural pronoun.” It is a pronoun “used indefinitely in general statements in which the speaker or writer includes those addressed, i.e., his or her contemporaries, compatriots, fellow human beings, etc.” Dictionary.com defines “we” simply as the “nominative plural of I.”

“We” is not just me, not just you, not just I, but rather meplus, you-plus, I-plus. I-pluralized. More than me. When queried, ChatGPT writes that “we” wouldn't earn a player many Scrabble points, but it is nevertheless a “common and essential word in English for expressing group membership … a fundamental part of language used to talk about ourselves in relation to others.”

In 2013, I became a mother.

In 2011, I became a wife and daughter-in-law.

In 1987, I became a sister.

In 1985, I became a daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin.

I was born into a sphere of relation. We all are. Whether by volition or happenstance, each of our lives unfolds a serial process of becoming in terms of who we are and who we have been – not as individuals, but as subjects in relation to other people. Someone's friend. Someone's neighbor. Someone's child. Chief among these people are those whom we call family, whether immediate or extended, nuclear or chosen. This is not because familial relations are always more important, vital, or meaningful than other relations, but rather because of the privileged biological, legal, and social status of the family.

The family is the dominant mode of organizing human relationships the world over. In technical terms, this dominance is ideologically constructed. I am using the term “ideology” in the sense specified by Marxist cultural theorist Louis Althusser: as “the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group,” and on which the capitalist class depends for the maintenance of the social order.

Evidenced through the company colony cases in this book, proprietary settler colonialism is expressed as political, economic, labor, and legal forms, with racialized aspects throughout. Manifest distinctions worthy of a modified moniker (“proprietary”) include: the simultaneously fractured (Crown-company) and fused (political-economic) nature of formal governance, the unfree condition of settler labor, the highly commercialized orientation of the colony, and the adaptation of feudal law to simplify economic development. John Locke's famous late-seventeenth-century theory of property and private land appropriation described the Christian God as “[giving] the World to Men in Common,” but surmised “it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 34). A justificatory logic common to proprietary settler colonialism, Locke's interpretation of divine will transcended the ages, influencing discourse across centuries and coercive treatment of an uncultivated “wild Indian, who knows no enclosure” (Locke 1690, Chapter V, Of Property, section 26) and a bonded English underclass composing the workforce of company colonies.

The activities and powers of company colonies offer another angle on the more typical focus in the critical literature on settler colonialism characterized by a militarized sovereign domestic or imperial state imposing western law, values, and forms of landownership and production on racialized populations through enslavement, extermination, and dispossession (Coulthard 2014; Englert 2020; Ford 2010; Hall 2014; Hixson 2013; King 2019; MacMillan 2012; Reid & Peace 2017; Tomiak 2017; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006).

It passed without mention, the cataclysm that was to forever transform life on the northern prairie and later coastal ways west of the Rockies. England's oldest newspaper, The London Gazette, was silent on the land grant of 2 May 1670 that made corporate monopoly investors “true and absolute lords and proprietors” of Rupert's Land in perpetuity; the journal of record opted instead to report on ships at Hull freighted with wine and prunes from Bordeaux, laden with thread and cloth for Amsterdam and Hamburg (London Gazette 1670a). Ricardian trade, ever newsworthy for its mutually advantages, illustrates perfectly, if not anachronistically, the narrow mercantile lens through which the Hudson's Bay Company has been often (mis)understood. As Fitzgerald (1849: 135–6) described some time ago, the Hudson's Bay Company was seen by many as “a despotism, whose severity no legislative control can mitigate, and no public opinion restrain. It knows but one limit, and obeys but one law – ‘Put money in thy purse’,” the latter in reference to a famous line from Shakespeare's tragedy Othello.

A royal charter empowering a joint-stock company to engage in overseas trade was nothing new, by the late seventeenth century England had seen dozens come and go – Virginia, Plymouth, Somers Isles, Massachusetts Bay, Newfoundland Companies and many more the same had all left their mark on the New World, although most were long since defunct (see Chapters 1 and 2; Whiteside 2022). A week after the Hudson's Bay charter was granted, The London Gazette reported on tobacco arriving from Virginia at Plymouth (London Gazette 1670b). The newspaper is mute here too on the corporate connection, although for our purposes it is noteworthy that tobacco was first planted by the Virginia Company at its privately-owned Jamestown colony, an English company colony directed by Plymouth's merchant investors.

4.1 METAPHYSICS UNDER SIEGE FROM SCIENCE

Notwithstanding the failure of neuroscience to account for consciousness, or for the transition from what-is to that-it-is, many thinkers, including quite a few philosophers, believe that the spectacular advance of science has discredited any independent contribution philosophy may make to advancing our understanding of the fundamental nature of what-is. Metaphysical inquiry, we are now told, should be guided by physics. The special sciences, notably biology, may have something to add; indeed, as we shall discuss in Chapter 10, biology can seem to justify radically revisionary views of the nature of the natural world. That said, fundamental physics is the place to which philosophers inclined to scientism usually turn.

If philosophy has any role in guiding our thoughts about the fundamental nature of things, it is merely secondary, that of commenting on science, helping us to understand what scientists are up to, and trying to make sense of the relationship between the world as it is experienced in everyday life and the profoundly counter-intuitive, even unintelligible, accounts of reality as it is described in cutting-edge science. Trying, for example, to make sense of Eddington's Two Tables.

Two years into the first term of Barack Obama's presidency, I got engaged to a man who grew up in the American Midwest. A white man – or, a man who presents as white. One side of his family is from Mississippi; they trace their ancestors back to the Jamestown settlers. Southern aristocrats, with status if not urban levels of wealth, they are landowning farmers in the poorest state in the country. For years, they grew cotton. Then, faced with competition from foreign-grown product, they switched to rice, soybeans, and catfish.

I’ve been married to this man for over a decade. We have two children, who, according to American racial logics, are hybrid, ethnic. My husband has a brother with a Korean wife, and they too have a mixed-race child, who looks East Asian. “She asked me how I feel about having a Korean grandchild,” my mother-in-law tells me one day, noting with something like pride that in fact she has multiple mixed-race grandchildren. Though she does not quite say it, I think she likes what the children represent: the promise of a liberal, multicultural America. I nod in recognition, although those words – liberal, multicultural, America – mean something different to me.

In 2022, the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary surveyed Google searches and the newspapers of record and chose “gaslighting” as the word of the year. Distinguishing the practice of gaslighting from other forms of deception, such as “lying” and “fraud,” they noted that gaslighting is at once personal, political, structural, and institutional; it can happen between individuals as well as on a broader social scale. They defined gaslighting as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one's own advantage.”

This chapter responds to a specific species of gaslighting that unfolded in very recent history – indeed, that is unfolding still – and which was premised on the widescale misleading utilization of “we.” “We are all in this together.” “We have the tools.” The epigraphs attribute these locutions to US President Joe Biden, speaking in 2021, but both of these statements were voiced by scores of others over multiple years, from journalists and policymakers, to preschool principals and factory owners, to the directors of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO).

The first – “We are all in this together” – was a widely articulated sentiment in the early months of 2020, when the Covid pandemic began to take hold globally. It was briefly empirical, then aspirational, then delusional, before becoming entirely coercive. A period of genuinely unprecedented fellow feeling and togetherness in the first couple pandemic months swiftly gave way to the mass disillusionment, anomie, and fragmentation that historian Nate Holdren, quoted in Chapter 4, has termed our “broken sociality.”

What does China want? This was a commonly asked question by businesspeople, politicians and commentators not just in the UK, but throughout the world as they engaged with this newly emerging power through the 2000s and into the 2010s. Throughout Asia, North America, Central Asia, the Middle East, and into Eastern, Central, and finally Western Europe and the rest of the world, figuring out China's plans and desires towards itself and the international community were of central concern. Interpreting these desires correctly, working out how to leverage them or gain benefits from them, and whether to see them as benign or more assertive and threatening, became the work of diplomats, businesspeople, analysts and politicians the world over.

By the end of 2020 it seemed the world had reached its conclusion. China, whatever the specifics of what it wanted, was after things that were antagonistic, threatening and against the interests of the political West. It was a threat, at times described as existential in its depth. As already noted, British politicians sometimes started to echo this language. From 2020 to 2024 many indulged in the luxury of pretending there was a global future where China could be painted into the corner and shouted at or shamed into compliance. Whatever interpretation of this period we might wish to adopt, one thing is clear. It marked a watershed. Even the most complacent and parochial could no longer regard China as marginal and insignificant. The question of what it was, and what it wanted, became not less but more urgent.

Lucky … ?

Knocking on the door of a terraced house on the edge of a Manchester suburb, we were greeted by Alyssa, a participant who you are yet to meet. Her youngest child perched on her hip, Alyssa smiled, invited us in and ushered us to sit down. As we crammed onto the single small sofa in the living room, we were struck by the lack of furniture. The house looked like it had only recently been moved in to, despite the fact that Alyssa and her family had been living there for almost a year. When we asked what the house had been like when she first moved in, Alyssa recalled that it had been totally bare, no furniture, no white goods, not even flooring. Nervous about taking on new debts, Alyssa has been slowly furnishing the house as best she can with her limited funds, prioritizing the flooring and her children's beds. There's no room in her budget for an extra sofa, despite being a household of five – they have to pile on together, or take turns sitting on the floor. Alyssa shrugs: she's been through worse.

Originally from Mozambique, Alyssa and her family moved to Portugal when she was in her early twenties, although her mother and some of her siblings moved to Manchester shortly afterwards in the hopes of finding better work opportunities. After nearly a decade apart, and by this point with two children of her own, Alyssa decided to move to Manchester to be closer to her family.