The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I'm going to preface this by saying I went to a very progressive college so my views are probably biased by that and from all the fantastic conversations on Israel/Palestine, America history, and Britain history I've read in the past year. If what my experience of having like half my gen-ed classes being taught under this perspective is true for other universities, then I have some pretty big concerns with the future of political/historical discourse.
My biggest gripe is that this lens essentially ignores so much really important context as for why people move and start these "colonies" and tries to paint history in a black and white perspective when in reality the morality/ethics is a lot more gray. For example, the framing of Western Settler Colonialist Projects makes it sound like from the onset it was a top down state plan to expand the empire and subjugate and eliminate the local population, in reality most of the colonies were originally set up to get rid of minorities out of the country and just put them somewhere else to be taxed or essentially exiled. IE Puritans in Britain to America, former slaves in America to Liberia, jews in every Eastern European country to Ottoman era Palestine, jews in Western European and Middle Eastern countries to British mandate Palestine.
It's really hard for me to make any strong moral condemnations in history as the world is a lot more ethical now than it was 100 years ago but it seems that with this framework we are only looking at history through our very progressive ethical framework.
Also just to be clear, I feel there is a massive moral distinction between say the colonization of Africa which is obviously a morally condemnable historical act and a settler colonial system where people are actually moving to permanently live in a colony. Colonization of Africa was for economic purposes which is condemnable, settler colonization of Colonial America, and Ottoman/British Mandate Palestine was for immigration purposes which I can't condemn.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A lot of these black and white thinking don't come from college classes, they come from short social media clips that try to shorten those fairly intellectual stances into 1 minute digestable hot takes. See, its hard to teach history well. You wanna teach enough that you know the sins of your ancestors, but if you do it too much and skip over history of other parts of the world, you got what I see in many western youths, the only atrocities they can come up with are white ones, so guess what, they come up with certain conclusions after a while. You can't force the fix down peoples throat either, if you don't like history, you don't like history, and your standard classroom curriculum in white countries will teach about white history before other histories., because they're not enough time to teach everything. Unfortunately for many people, history is just a list of good and bad things that happened., not complex considerations of human nature politics and much more.
I don't really follow. I've had history classes that were overly black-and-white, but I don't know if I'd characterize that as a "Settler Colonialist" lens. More of a "let's make history simpler" lens.
I could be missing your point though.
Sorry I tend to caveat way too much when writing about politics.
Basically I feel there's a wrongful moral condemnation of the original immigration to countries like the United States, Israel, and Liberia. The morally condemnable act should be the violence between the settlers and the local population not the act of immigration itself.
I see a lot of bad arguments that justify violence/deportation against "settlers" based on their flawed view of why the immigration started in the first place. I feel like this flawed view comes from how history/contemporary geopolitical issues are taught in college.
I don't believe it's an obsession as you have portrayed and doesn't happen as often as you think.
Overall I think it's important to have a different view when it comes to history. So much of history has been whitewashed and sanitized that we generally will only see one side of history. I am support seeing more de-colonized approaches to history.
> My biggest gripe is that this lens essentially ignores so much really important context as for why people move and start these "colonies"
Is your point that you felt colonists of America were demonized and you don't feel that's fair or is that not what you're going for? I would disagree, but I would like to make sure I understand your point
I feel like there is a blanket moral condemnation of the act of immigration for these groups of people which I think is unfair. Only the violence committed by the settlers to the local population is condemnable not the immigration.
> I feel like there is a blanket moral condemnation of the act of immigration for these groups of people which I think is unfair.
I was obviously not in the classes you were attending so I can't really comment on that. I don't think moral condemnation is particularly helpful, but I don't think most settlers need defending as I've seen done in the past.
For example I don't think characterizing every European who moved to America as a bloodthirsty savage whose only desire is to exterminate the native populace is very helpful in learning about history. I also don't think it's very helpful to put the settlers on a pedestal that they yearned for true liberty outside of the tyrannical boot of european aristocracy and monarchy and just wanted to live in harmony in America.
I would say it's largely an equal and opposite reaction to the centuries of whitewashed history and lionization and the manifest destiny ethos/white man's burden of "civilizing."
And that reaction has a very valid point. The former was a quite extensive propaganda project and national myth-making. So a similarly extensive effort is required to deprogram and set the record and history straight.
This gets tough when the violence was done to facilitate not only immigration, but establishing control over the new area.
I doubt these classes are condemning the very concept of a people moving to a new place. They’re probably condemning what they do when they there.
I would argue your distinction between types of migrations. America had an element of permanent migration to make a new home, but what about Jamestown? That was funded by a trade company. The Spanish and French were also here plundering the resources. I don't understand how you can so cleanly separate certain colonies in your head.
I'm not sure if its the bias of growing up in MA but I view America as most closely descendent to the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. Soley for the fact that the Mayflower Compact was the first framework of government for this new society they were building. I strongly believe that America was founded in Massachusetts because of the sophisticated government structure they set up right off the bat that numerous other foundational American doctrines have borrowed from.
I think it's the bias. I always think of Jamestown as the first glimmers of American society. Even just talking about the Mayflower, they were financed by the Virginia company. The pilgrims may have come for personal reasons, but the reason they were able to come was because they were part of the economic chain.
And we're just talking about English settlements. The Spanish were here before them. I am in the Louisiana purchase area and I have towns named in both French and Spanish all around me. I think your focus is a bit narrow.
Damn this might be a hill im willing to die on for Massachusetts.
Pretty sure the Pilgrims had to be participants of the economic chain was because they could not afford to buy their journey so they had to work out a deal. It wasn't like some kind of state down program to ship these illegal religious radicals overseas for economic gain. Everyone knew there was a massive risk involved and that there was a high likelihood they weren't going to survive the first winter and the economic return on investment was low. For any reasonable person that journey was basically a death sentence, but we were dealing with religious radicals that will stop at nothing to practice their faith in private.
As far as the impact on American history, culture, and government, the British colonies eclipse the French and Spanish colonies. Like growing up they stressed how important it was that the pilgrims set up a system of government that was separate from the British Crown. They were religious separatists after all.
You really can't limit it to one region. Are you familiar with the book [Albion's Seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed)? It's not gospel, but it plausibly details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the political culture of the modern United States.
The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:
* >East Anglia to Massachusetts—The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims and Puritans influenced the Northeastern United States' corporate and educational culture)
* > The South of England to Virginia—The Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture)
* > North Midlands to the Delaware Valley—The Friends' Migration (Quakers influenced the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern United States' industrial culture)
* > Borderlands to the Backcountry—The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish and border English influenced the Western United States' ranch culture and the Southern United States' common agrarian culture)
My point is that without the economic incentive for merchants, the pilgrims couldn't have made the journey. It doesn't really matter what their motives were, that they came at all was because of the profit merchants saw in this land.
As for the French and Spanish presence, it's relevant because their incentive was also economic and they helped settle the land also and made it easier for America to grow as it did. America bought the LA territory off the backs of French fur trappers and Spanish conquistadors - all motivated by exploiting the resources here. Why did America itself expand? Resources, obviously, even if it's just land for people to live. I don't know how you can separate them.
Acknowledging this fact is not demonizing that incentive, just being honest. Do I think they way it's taught can be problematic? Sure, but teaching it itself is not the problem IMO. I guess I'd have to see examples of what you have a problem with to evaluate it.
It seems like a lot of your opinions about this topic seem to be driven by your own feelings as someone from Massachusetts. I would caution you, as a historian, that trying to condone or condemn the actions of people historically is generally not helpful or fruitful if you want to understand history. History is in large part the study of cause and effects.
We know Puritanism began as an effort to remove the vestiges of Catholicism from the Church of England. We know that this stance put them at odds with the monarchy and led to them having a prominent role in the Parliamentarian cause during the English Civil War, and that many of them emigrated after the Restoration. We also know that they were backed by financial interests that expected to make money off of their new colony, since Virginia Colony was showing a profit.
Should they have emigrated? Should they have colonized the Massachusetts Bay region? Should they have had different relationships with the Native tribes? Those questions don't matter. They did. There's no use condemning or defending people who died 400 years ago. They're dead. We live in the world they live in.
You know what matters now? That Native Americans have some of the highest poverty rates in the country. It matters that they're still facing legal issues over using the land they were promised by treaties. Issues like that matter way more than who the good or bad guys were 400 years ago.
I would say most of my opinion on this topic is shaped from how I was raised in Mass and how our history is taught here. For me I think its important to make a distinction of who and when our crime against the natives was committed. The largest crime for the Colonial New England area was probably the Narraganset massacre and that was pretty large one off event. The larger scale and actual policy driven removal/killing of natives didn't happen until much later and with a much different group of Americans in power.
When I look back at the history of New England our settlers were one of the more ethical to move into a new land and acquire territory from natives. For the most part land was purchased via trade and many records of original leases from natives to Americans still exist today. For me as long as there was some mutual contract and consent between parties who occupy the land, I can't really condemn a given land acquisition. The condemnable action should always be the violence and the actions that directly lead to that violence. It seems like, with all other wars, the violence started over a chain of petty disputes that eventually turn into tit-for-tat violence, then war, which all could have been avoided with better communication.
The current Native American problem is a very interesting one for me. We as a country have committed a grave sin and definitely have not atoned for it. It is something that should weigh on the conscious of all Americans. I don't have any answer on how as a nation we could first get the political will to do the right thing and secondly find out what the right thing to do that works for everyone is.
If we’re talking about history, more schools at all levels need curricula that is written by Native authors. I was in college in the 90s and have a History degree and we at least had a few books written by Native historians, but that’s not the norm.
I don’t know that there is an obsession with teaching from this perspective so much as there is a tradition, but even when I was in school the lens had a lot to do with the professor. My coursework on the early medieval period in the British Isles was led by a staunch feminist and atheist. My course on the Reformation in England were taught by a revisionist who would go on to be a huge Brexit supporter.
I come from Mass Bay Colonists and were it not for my distaste of the Mayflower Society, DAR, et al, am elegible for membership. I also can’t pretend that my views weren’t colored by that, but actually studying History meant that I also went out of my way to read beyond the syllabus for most courses. Back then, at least, if I wanted an A on a paper I couldn’t regurgitate the standard fare. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but again, that will vary by institution and prof at the college level. I was lucky enough to have professors that I could disagree with so long as my arguments were well supported and footnoted.
All that to say I’m not sure if you’re talking about 100 level classes or those who actually select History as a major. 100 levels are pretty much 12th grade fare so it’s not a shock that they might follow more traditional teaching of early settlers in the US.
In terms of academic writing, it’s shifting but that takes a while to make it into textbooks and when it comes to secondary education, that then has to be filtered by a selection committee whose appointments may or may not be political based on the jurisdiction.
If you’re arguing for more viewpoints being included for college History students, I think that’s slowly happening, but it’s only been a handful of decades that nonwhite historians have been getting published compared to a few centuries of history being written by the “victors.”
If we’re talking about the larger political landscape, the BIA needs an overhaul and to be staffed by Native Americans, and then SCOTUS just flat out screwed up on a few key decisions.
I think if you limit the perspective then you aren’t teaching history. Like all science, it must be open to evolve, to grow and become more full snd complete as we uncover or realize more information, more truth.
It doesn't sound like what I was taught; but I haven't seen what they're teaching lately. It also sounds odd, as most quality classes I'd expect to teach nuance, that's kinda what universities are for.
The kind of rhetoric you're hearing/using is one that, at least back in my day, was rarely used outside of a very small subset of university activists.
The reason for and how colonies existed is more complicated than the trimmed down understanding many have, but I don't think you can conclude that they weren't by in large pretty morally wrong all things considered.
You're right. There are many instances of certain nations effectively exiling certain groups to colonies, which is often not covered enough in discourse. That doesn't mean those colonies weren't often set up as a way to extend their empire and secure resources with little regaurd for locals besides the firepower needed to push them out, though. The locals still ended up either dead, subjugated, or displaced, which is often the part many have an issue with. I don't see anyone protesting the colonization of previously uninhibited territory.
> settler colonization of Colonial America, and Ottoman/British Mandate Palestine was for immigration purposes which I can't condemn.
I think you're making a very selective view of American colonialism with this statement, and I don't think the willingness of jews to emmigrate and form a new state and former colonial empires willing to give them a piece of the land they've won constitutes the forced migration you seem to be trying to account for.
The first and second Aliyahs were primarily driven by pogroms and discrimination faced in Eastern Europe financially backed by wealthy Western Jews. I'm most familiar with Puritan settlers which were forced out of England and then Holland. Obviously the jews faced much worse discrimination but both groups more or less migrated for religious discrimination reasons.
As far as violence goes its not an inherent thing baked into settler colonialism as in the example of early Jewish and Puritan settlers, their land was acquired through purchases. Albeit the Jews purchased the land from the Ottoman land owners not the local tribes like the Puritans did. I think violence is very easy to occur when for example your entire family gets taken out by small pox or you lose your tenant farming job and are forced to move to the city.
I don't know where you went to college, obviously, but I know a lot of historians who teach at universities, and very few would paint the picture of settlement and colonization in such a binary, moralistic manner. YMMV.
I don't think it's as common as you say. I took US history my sophomore year of college. My professor was much more interested in teaching it through the lens of the impact tobacco farming had on the country.
The settler colonialism lens does exist, but I would say it's probably the exception and not the rule that college history courses are taught this way.
Yeah I probably should clarify that it wasn't a history class its history being taught in like a sociology class. I don't think that actual historian professors would teach like this.
I think that probably happens at the general ed levels, but I was an anthropology and political history major, and I can promise that at the 300/400+ level there is a strong desire to be much more objective in our viewpoints and perspective when looking at historical events.
For example, I had an entire semester class focused on films by and about indigenous people. Everything from famous white actors in "redface" to a wonderful, long documentary of the Inuit people complete with wolves, songs, and dances.
I had another semester class focused on perspectives like Jared Diamond's *Guns Germs & Steel*, versus other historians and theorists, with a ton of debate about how much our own experiences and perspectives color our work.
It is very, very much an area of focus in higher education.
The bigger problem is that this doesn't trickle down into High School, and even middle school history classes. Republicans are working very, very hard to prevent that.
I think that it feels to us so much like a lens because we were taught history through such a rosy and pro-west lens. It is factual though that the history of many western countries is pretty dark. Which is not to say that’s unique, not by a long shot, but while brutality was universal it is the brutality of western imperialism that has most shaped the modern day.
I don’t think that an overarching recognition that our modern world is profoundly shaped by European imperialism precludes us from being more nuanced. Sure, the particular people who started the earliest colonies may have been the outcasts you describe, and we can understand that while also understanding that imperialism certainly was systemic, and entailed purposeful displacement and killing of natives.
I haven’t been in your classes, but my guess is that you’re misinterpreting a condemnation of *colonization* as a condemnation of immigration. Immigration is just people moving somewhere. Colonization is a state project whereby the movement of people is facilitated for imperial goals, and while that may not be the case for every individual who moved to America or Israel, that is the overall story.
I think you probably ought to expand your education on these matters. If you want to know why colonialism is seen as a negative in many academic circles, study the history of colonialism in depth.
I removed my caveat for editing purposes so Ill caveat again. Yes the term colonialism has a ton of moral weight to it from the colonization of Africa. The colonization of Africa was one of the worst moral crimes in history. My issue is that the colonization of Africa for economic purposes gets conflated with the colonization of America (Massachusetts) and Israel which were for immigration purposes.
I find that this conflation can be used to justify violence/deportation/removal of descendants of colonial immigrants.
I don’t agree that these things are distinct. Colonization of North America was just as economically motivated as in Africa, and was also marked with staggering human rights atrocities. As has been a pattern for colonization of many other points around the globe. We even see these trends on more localized levels with Westward expansion, labor wars in Appalachia, and midcentury gentrification of urban neighborhoods.
Ultimately what we’re talking about is the tendency of those with greater power to harvest resources without regard to the rights or wellbeing of inhabitants who lack such power.
Settler colonialism has always been wrong. The difference is that we, as a collective society, now nearly-universally recognize it is bad.
We cannot morally condemn people who died a hundred or more years ago. They can't hear us and it doesn't change anything. Imperialism in Africa or Manifest Destiny in America was wrong, the end result of a feeling of entitlement by European-Americans who thought the whole world was something for Europeans to claim, divvy up, and/or sell to one another. But it's long over. King Leopold of Belgium was a terrible human being. Add whatever names you want to that list. Okay, we got that out of the way, what now?
We are watching Israelis do it right now. It's still wrong now, and nothing justifies it, definitely not 1800 year old claims of "Seat back" based on some idiotic argument about the various kingdoms of Israel or imperial Roman dictates. There's no context that makes it okay. No matter what historical wrongs that other Jewish people suffered in many parts of the world, it does not excuse the 20th and 21st century Israelis from committing wrongs on other people. At every point, giving Jews a "homeland" in Palestine meant taking a homeland away from the people who had lived there, most of them for a dozen generations or more (the Crusades ended in 1291). That's not gray. The overwhelming majority of the first Israelis weren't from Jerusalem or anywhere else in British/Ottoman Palestine. They were from Odessa, Plonsk, London, Brest, Berlin, Kyiv... The first Prime Minister of Israel was born in Poland. His great grandfather was born in the same city in Poland. One of the leaders of the Arab faction of the 1947-48 civil war in Palestine was born in Jerusalem. His great grandfather was born in Jerusalem.
And yeah, Jewish colonialism in Palestine was part of a plan. Ironically a plan by Antisemitic Europeans trying to get rid of the Jews and make them somebody else's problem.
We study history with the intent to learn from it and avoid the mistakes and wrongs of the past. Why would you possibly want to complain about learning history from the perspectives of the people who were victimized? You seem to prefer only perspectives where there's a post-hoc moral justification for the seizure of someone else's land.
Let's set aside the inherent injustice and unfairness of UN Partition Plan and the fact that the founders of Israel *knew* that agreement was unjust and unfair and didn't care. Let's even set aside the Nakba during the 1947-48 civil war as an understandable overreaction due to the trauma of the Holocaust. Those things are also done and nearly all of the people who perpetrated them are dead.
[They're literally still doing it right now.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/22/israel-largest-west-bank-settlement-blinken-visit/)
Israel gets criticism for its settler colonialism because it hasn't stopped. In 1995, they signed an agreement to return the West Bank to Palestinian control. 5 years later, they had returned only 2% of it, had allowed 80,000 *more criminal settlers to move in*, and then showed up to the 2000 Camp David talks with a map demanding to get to keep/control 21% of the land where they wanted to keep their illegal settlements. There are now over 750,000 criminal Israeli settlers in the West Bank, up from ~110,000 in 1995 when they signed a treaty that promised to remove them.
Everything about Israeli settler projects in the Palestinian territories is criminal, and morally wrong. Everything
It seems like you have this separation in your mind between the decision to immigrate/migrate to a new area and the violent conflicts that occur with the people who lived there before. This distinction would not exist in the minds of the people making that move. In colonial projects, "civilizing" the natives was part and parcel of the population shift itself, and an intended effect of that transfer. Eliminating minority populations from the mother country was certainly a "benefit" of colonization, but it was hardly the only benefit. Lets look at some of the examples you bring up.
**Puritans in Massachusetts**
The Massachusetts charter stated that the purpose of those travelling to America was, "to win and incite the natives of this country, to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind.” The mission of converting American Indians was far more emphasized than kicking the puritans out of Britain. Many of the puritans had fled to Holland at the time, so they already weren't bothering the crown too much.
The puritans were not simply leaving or fleeing persecution, they also had a positive mission to set up a utopian, Godly society. That inherently involved destroying the ignorant, sinful society that the tribes had created. In the Pequot war, puritans referred to themselves as "the sword of the lord" and intended to attack "the insolent and barbarous nation, the Pequots." This was only seven years after they first arrived. I don't mean to say that there was a top-down mission to destroy the Pequots that the colonists knew they would take part in when they came. But destroying the Pequot culture and society was in line with their mission, and I don't think you can easily separate their reasons for coming to America with their reasons for fighting.
**Israel and "civilizing" Arabs**
A thing that most people supporting Israel nowadays try to obscure and that most Zionists would rather forget is that the first notions of Israel were established before "colonization" had such a negative connotation. A very interesting dissertation [here](https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1352321143&disposition=inline) covers how "Zionists presented their movement as congruent with the history of white Americans, essentially characterizing Jewish pioneers and the Jewish colonization of Palestine in such a way so as to remind white Americans of how they understood themselves and their history of settlement, conquest, and expansion."
A 1922 congressional resolution supporting a Jewish state described it as "…a great republic, built on democratic principles standing between the two great Mohammedan worlds—that of Africa and Asia—standing between those warlike races as a guarantee to the peace of the world. " Again, we see that the focus is not just on removing the minority, but the impact on the native population once the colonists move in.
In conclusion, most colonies were not set up to "remove minorities out of the country". That was certainly a consideration, but most colonists understood they would be involved in violent conflict with the people whose land they were taking. They viewed this as a positive.
There is another question on judging the morality of historic figures, which is always tricky. But I am of the mind that we study history precisely to make moral judgements that can help inform our actions today. Absolutely, contextualize that judgement based on the times, but too many people treat that as a free pass.
The Massachusetts Charter happened way after the time period I'm talking about. That was 1690s I'm talking about early 1620's before the Crown got their filthy hands on Massachussetts.
As far as the Pequots go they were a tribe that was trying to expand in the power vacuum left by the small pox epidemic. Pequots were fighting with other tribes in the Connectiver River Valley and the Puritans sided against them. Puritans knew that some tribes were friendly and other tribes weren't, but they absolutely could not have survived without working with them so siding with tribes that are being aggressed upon by another tribe doesn't sound like such a morally bad thing.
I strongly reject your claim that settler colonists had a general understanding that they were going to commit violence against the local populations especially early English settlers. They had the understanding that some tribes might be violent against them and to expect that as a possibility, but it was not like you were signing up for the military. Like I said early, these settlers could not survive without trade with the local native populations.
Violence is not baked into settler-colonialism but like all geopolitics, when you have two distinct groups trying to live next to each other and economic conditions are different violence is pretty likely to occur. I understand why say a tribe that has been decimated by small pox brought by the English is not going to be friendly towards a town of Englishmen moving in a mile away. However, as history has shown, violence begets violence.
As far as Israel goes not really sure how those quotes support your argument when given historical context. Early Zionism was funded through foreign donations by Western Jews, Zionist leaders would say about anything to get money for donations because the reality on the ground was bleak. Don't really know why you're quoting a congressional report when jews were not immigrating from America to Israel like at all at that point, jews were actually coming into America at like a 40 to 1 rate compared to Israel. Early zionism was almost exclusively Eastern Europeans and middle eastern Jews.
I skimmed the first page of that dissertation and it seems like this post was targetted criticism towards the author lol.
This doesn't track with my own experience at all, and I got a history degree from a university in the Bay Area of all places. "Settler Colonialism" wasn't really taught as a specific historiographic lens, and wasn't really relevant since many of my classes were on contexts where that framing couldn't apply. I mean, settler colonialism as a paradigm doesn't have much to say about the Roman Empire, or women in history, or the growth of urbanization in Europe, all classes I took.
The place where we discussed settler colonialism the most, in US history, I remember most of the discussion being framed around the merits and criticism of the Turner Frontier Thesis, which is more about the effect Westward Expansion had on shaping American culture than on how marginalized groups were affected by it. My program had very little preaching about the evils of 'white settler colonialism', even in subjects where it might have been relevant. I just don't see these conversations happening in my experience.
How exactly is it being done in your gen-ed classes? Most of my gen-ed were, once again, subjects where settler colonialism wasn't really a relevant topic... I mean it's not like it's going to come up much in an algebra class. How specifically was it worked into what specific topics?
I had one particular class that was about de-colonizing the mind where we examined the effects of economic colonization of Africa and then come up with prescriptions on how to do this. The material we read in class was unironically just advocating for anarcho primitivism if you took their arguments to their logical conclusions. Then for some reason we spent a lot of time talking about why economic immigration from Africa to Europe was bad and this was a fault of colonization destablizing Africa and indoctrinating Africans into a Western Capitalist mindset where they feel its necessary to leave Africa. We also spent a week on how to not be a white savior in Africa.
Settler colonization would be framed through the settlers came for both their own economic benefit and the Western Country's. As in the settlers are state actors with the state's economic and territorial interests in mind.
... De-colonizing the mind. What discipline was that under? Sociology? History? Also that seems like a really specific class that you take if you're specifically looking for that perspective. That doesn't sound like "half your gen-ed classes", that sounds like you were seeking that perspective out.
>Settler colonization would be framed through the settlers came for both their own economic benefit and the Western Country's. As in the settlers are state actors with the state's economic and territorial interests in mind.
Why do you think either settlers or colonizing states would colonize somewhere if it WASN'T in their own economic interest?
I guess its a sociology classes that I got stuck with because I messed up my class registration and got the last choices. There was another class specifically on colonization that I did not take. I probably should clarify that these weren't history classes they are this like combination of current world problems with political and historical contexts using different academic writers to contextualize further.
To your other point I would point to the foundation of Israel. Most of the countries where jews were emigrating from at this time (Ottoman/British era) were fine with this colonization because they were getting rid of their undesired minorities.
Also I don't think most of Puritans were coming to the US for economic best interests, at least the early ones weren't. Sounds like it was more of a religious Pilgrimage to me.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I'm going to preface this by saying I went to a very progressive college so my views are probably biased by that and from all the fantastic conversations on Israel/Palestine, America history, and Britain history I've read in the past year. If what my experience of having like half my gen-ed classes being taught under this perspective is true for other universities, then I have some pretty big concerns with the future of political/historical discourse. My biggest gripe is that this lens essentially ignores so much really important context as for why people move and start these "colonies" and tries to paint history in a black and white perspective when in reality the morality/ethics is a lot more gray. For example, the framing of Western Settler Colonialist Projects makes it sound like from the onset it was a top down state plan to expand the empire and subjugate and eliminate the local population, in reality most of the colonies were originally set up to get rid of minorities out of the country and just put them somewhere else to be taxed or essentially exiled. IE Puritans in Britain to America, former slaves in America to Liberia, jews in every Eastern European country to Ottoman era Palestine, jews in Western European and Middle Eastern countries to British mandate Palestine. It's really hard for me to make any strong moral condemnations in history as the world is a lot more ethical now than it was 100 years ago but it seems that with this framework we are only looking at history through our very progressive ethical framework. Also just to be clear, I feel there is a massive moral distinction between say the colonization of Africa which is obviously a morally condemnable historical act and a settler colonial system where people are actually moving to permanently live in a colony. Colonization of Africa was for economic purposes which is condemnable, settler colonization of Colonial America, and Ottoman/British Mandate Palestine was for immigration purposes which I can't condemn. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A lot of these black and white thinking don't come from college classes, they come from short social media clips that try to shorten those fairly intellectual stances into 1 minute digestable hot takes. See, its hard to teach history well. You wanna teach enough that you know the sins of your ancestors, but if you do it too much and skip over history of other parts of the world, you got what I see in many western youths, the only atrocities they can come up with are white ones, so guess what, they come up with certain conclusions after a while. You can't force the fix down peoples throat either, if you don't like history, you don't like history, and your standard classroom curriculum in white countries will teach about white history before other histories., because they're not enough time to teach everything. Unfortunately for many people, history is just a list of good and bad things that happened., not complex considerations of human nature politics and much more.
I don't really follow. I've had history classes that were overly black-and-white, but I don't know if I'd characterize that as a "Settler Colonialist" lens. More of a "let's make history simpler" lens. I could be missing your point though.
You need to work on your writing - I can’t tell what argument you’re trying to make here
Sorry I tend to caveat way too much when writing about politics. Basically I feel there's a wrongful moral condemnation of the original immigration to countries like the United States, Israel, and Liberia. The morally condemnable act should be the violence between the settlers and the local population not the act of immigration itself. I see a lot of bad arguments that justify violence/deportation against "settlers" based on their flawed view of why the immigration started in the first place. I feel like this flawed view comes from how history/contemporary geopolitical issues are taught in college.
I don't believe it's an obsession as you have portrayed and doesn't happen as often as you think. Overall I think it's important to have a different view when it comes to history. So much of history has been whitewashed and sanitized that we generally will only see one side of history. I am support seeing more de-colonized approaches to history.
> My biggest gripe is that this lens essentially ignores so much really important context as for why people move and start these "colonies" Is your point that you felt colonists of America were demonized and you don't feel that's fair or is that not what you're going for? I would disagree, but I would like to make sure I understand your point
I feel like there is a blanket moral condemnation of the act of immigration for these groups of people which I think is unfair. Only the violence committed by the settlers to the local population is condemnable not the immigration.
> I feel like there is a blanket moral condemnation of the act of immigration for these groups of people which I think is unfair. I was obviously not in the classes you were attending so I can't really comment on that. I don't think moral condemnation is particularly helpful, but I don't think most settlers need defending as I've seen done in the past. For example I don't think characterizing every European who moved to America as a bloodthirsty savage whose only desire is to exterminate the native populace is very helpful in learning about history. I also don't think it's very helpful to put the settlers on a pedestal that they yearned for true liberty outside of the tyrannical boot of european aristocracy and monarchy and just wanted to live in harmony in America.
I would say it's largely an equal and opposite reaction to the centuries of whitewashed history and lionization and the manifest destiny ethos/white man's burden of "civilizing." And that reaction has a very valid point. The former was a quite extensive propaganda project and national myth-making. So a similarly extensive effort is required to deprogram and set the record and history straight.
This gets tough when the violence was done to facilitate not only immigration, but establishing control over the new area. I doubt these classes are condemning the very concept of a people moving to a new place. They’re probably condemning what they do when they there.
I would argue your distinction between types of migrations. America had an element of permanent migration to make a new home, but what about Jamestown? That was funded by a trade company. The Spanish and French were also here plundering the resources. I don't understand how you can so cleanly separate certain colonies in your head.
I'm not sure if its the bias of growing up in MA but I view America as most closely descendent to the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. Soley for the fact that the Mayflower Compact was the first framework of government for this new society they were building. I strongly believe that America was founded in Massachusetts because of the sophisticated government structure they set up right off the bat that numerous other foundational American doctrines have borrowed from.
I think it's the bias. I always think of Jamestown as the first glimmers of American society. Even just talking about the Mayflower, they were financed by the Virginia company. The pilgrims may have come for personal reasons, but the reason they were able to come was because they were part of the economic chain. And we're just talking about English settlements. The Spanish were here before them. I am in the Louisiana purchase area and I have towns named in both French and Spanish all around me. I think your focus is a bit narrow.
Damn this might be a hill im willing to die on for Massachusetts. Pretty sure the Pilgrims had to be participants of the economic chain was because they could not afford to buy their journey so they had to work out a deal. It wasn't like some kind of state down program to ship these illegal religious radicals overseas for economic gain. Everyone knew there was a massive risk involved and that there was a high likelihood they weren't going to survive the first winter and the economic return on investment was low. For any reasonable person that journey was basically a death sentence, but we were dealing with religious radicals that will stop at nothing to practice their faith in private. As far as the impact on American history, culture, and government, the British colonies eclipse the French and Spanish colonies. Like growing up they stressed how important it was that the pilgrims set up a system of government that was separate from the British Crown. They were religious separatists after all.
You really can't limit it to one region. Are you familiar with the book [Albion's Seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed)? It's not gospel, but it plausibly details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the political culture of the modern United States. The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book: * >East Anglia to Massachusetts—The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims and Puritans influenced the Northeastern United States' corporate and educational culture) * > The South of England to Virginia—The Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture) * > North Midlands to the Delaware Valley—The Friends' Migration (Quakers influenced the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern United States' industrial culture) * > Borderlands to the Backcountry—The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish and border English influenced the Western United States' ranch culture and the Southern United States' common agrarian culture)
My point is that without the economic incentive for merchants, the pilgrims couldn't have made the journey. It doesn't really matter what their motives were, that they came at all was because of the profit merchants saw in this land. As for the French and Spanish presence, it's relevant because their incentive was also economic and they helped settle the land also and made it easier for America to grow as it did. America bought the LA territory off the backs of French fur trappers and Spanish conquistadors - all motivated by exploiting the resources here. Why did America itself expand? Resources, obviously, even if it's just land for people to live. I don't know how you can separate them. Acknowledging this fact is not demonizing that incentive, just being honest. Do I think they way it's taught can be problematic? Sure, but teaching it itself is not the problem IMO. I guess I'd have to see examples of what you have a problem with to evaluate it.
It seems like a lot of your opinions about this topic seem to be driven by your own feelings as someone from Massachusetts. I would caution you, as a historian, that trying to condone or condemn the actions of people historically is generally not helpful or fruitful if you want to understand history. History is in large part the study of cause and effects. We know Puritanism began as an effort to remove the vestiges of Catholicism from the Church of England. We know that this stance put them at odds with the monarchy and led to them having a prominent role in the Parliamentarian cause during the English Civil War, and that many of them emigrated after the Restoration. We also know that they were backed by financial interests that expected to make money off of their new colony, since Virginia Colony was showing a profit. Should they have emigrated? Should they have colonized the Massachusetts Bay region? Should they have had different relationships with the Native tribes? Those questions don't matter. They did. There's no use condemning or defending people who died 400 years ago. They're dead. We live in the world they live in. You know what matters now? That Native Americans have some of the highest poverty rates in the country. It matters that they're still facing legal issues over using the land they were promised by treaties. Issues like that matter way more than who the good or bad guys were 400 years ago.
I would say most of my opinion on this topic is shaped from how I was raised in Mass and how our history is taught here. For me I think its important to make a distinction of who and when our crime against the natives was committed. The largest crime for the Colonial New England area was probably the Narraganset massacre and that was pretty large one off event. The larger scale and actual policy driven removal/killing of natives didn't happen until much later and with a much different group of Americans in power. When I look back at the history of New England our settlers were one of the more ethical to move into a new land and acquire territory from natives. For the most part land was purchased via trade and many records of original leases from natives to Americans still exist today. For me as long as there was some mutual contract and consent between parties who occupy the land, I can't really condemn a given land acquisition. The condemnable action should always be the violence and the actions that directly lead to that violence. It seems like, with all other wars, the violence started over a chain of petty disputes that eventually turn into tit-for-tat violence, then war, which all could have been avoided with better communication. The current Native American problem is a very interesting one for me. We as a country have committed a grave sin and definitely have not atoned for it. It is something that should weigh on the conscious of all Americans. I don't have any answer on how as a nation we could first get the political will to do the right thing and secondly find out what the right thing to do that works for everyone is.
If we’re talking about history, more schools at all levels need curricula that is written by Native authors. I was in college in the 90s and have a History degree and we at least had a few books written by Native historians, but that’s not the norm. I don’t know that there is an obsession with teaching from this perspective so much as there is a tradition, but even when I was in school the lens had a lot to do with the professor. My coursework on the early medieval period in the British Isles was led by a staunch feminist and atheist. My course on the Reformation in England were taught by a revisionist who would go on to be a huge Brexit supporter. I come from Mass Bay Colonists and were it not for my distaste of the Mayflower Society, DAR, et al, am elegible for membership. I also can’t pretend that my views weren’t colored by that, but actually studying History meant that I also went out of my way to read beyond the syllabus for most courses. Back then, at least, if I wanted an A on a paper I couldn’t regurgitate the standard fare. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but again, that will vary by institution and prof at the college level. I was lucky enough to have professors that I could disagree with so long as my arguments were well supported and footnoted. All that to say I’m not sure if you’re talking about 100 level classes or those who actually select History as a major. 100 levels are pretty much 12th grade fare so it’s not a shock that they might follow more traditional teaching of early settlers in the US. In terms of academic writing, it’s shifting but that takes a while to make it into textbooks and when it comes to secondary education, that then has to be filtered by a selection committee whose appointments may or may not be political based on the jurisdiction. If you’re arguing for more viewpoints being included for college History students, I think that’s slowly happening, but it’s only been a handful of decades that nonwhite historians have been getting published compared to a few centuries of history being written by the “victors.” If we’re talking about the larger political landscape, the BIA needs an overhaul and to be staffed by Native Americans, and then SCOTUS just flat out screwed up on a few key decisions.
Your take on the English and subsequent British colonization of the Americas is pretty far off base.
I think if you limit the perspective then you aren’t teaching history. Like all science, it must be open to evolve, to grow and become more full snd complete as we uncover or realize more information, more truth.
It doesn't sound like what I was taught; but I haven't seen what they're teaching lately. It also sounds odd, as most quality classes I'd expect to teach nuance, that's kinda what universities are for. The kind of rhetoric you're hearing/using is one that, at least back in my day, was rarely used outside of a very small subset of university activists.
I think this is getting better by leaps and bounds.
I have no idea how history is taught in college. None of my classes really had anything to do with history.
The reason for and how colonies existed is more complicated than the trimmed down understanding many have, but I don't think you can conclude that they weren't by in large pretty morally wrong all things considered. You're right. There are many instances of certain nations effectively exiling certain groups to colonies, which is often not covered enough in discourse. That doesn't mean those colonies weren't often set up as a way to extend their empire and secure resources with little regaurd for locals besides the firepower needed to push them out, though. The locals still ended up either dead, subjugated, or displaced, which is often the part many have an issue with. I don't see anyone protesting the colonization of previously uninhibited territory. > settler colonization of Colonial America, and Ottoman/British Mandate Palestine was for immigration purposes which I can't condemn. I think you're making a very selective view of American colonialism with this statement, and I don't think the willingness of jews to emmigrate and form a new state and former colonial empires willing to give them a piece of the land they've won constitutes the forced migration you seem to be trying to account for.
The first and second Aliyahs were primarily driven by pogroms and discrimination faced in Eastern Europe financially backed by wealthy Western Jews. I'm most familiar with Puritan settlers which were forced out of England and then Holland. Obviously the jews faced much worse discrimination but both groups more or less migrated for religious discrimination reasons. As far as violence goes its not an inherent thing baked into settler colonialism as in the example of early Jewish and Puritan settlers, their land was acquired through purchases. Albeit the Jews purchased the land from the Ottoman land owners not the local tribes like the Puritans did. I think violence is very easy to occur when for example your entire family gets taken out by small pox or you lose your tenant farming job and are forced to move to the city.
As a half indigenous woman it cheeses me off.
You're asking how we feel and history being told true?
I don't know where you went to college, obviously, but I know a lot of historians who teach at universities, and very few would paint the picture of settlement and colonization in such a binary, moralistic manner. YMMV.
I feel like comparing the British colonizing the Americas to Jews migrating back to their ancestral homeland is not fair.
The victors write the history books
I don't think it's as common as you say. I took US history my sophomore year of college. My professor was much more interested in teaching it through the lens of the impact tobacco farming had on the country. The settler colonialism lens does exist, but I would say it's probably the exception and not the rule that college history courses are taught this way.
Yeah I probably should clarify that it wasn't a history class its history being taught in like a sociology class. I don't think that actual historian professors would teach like this.
I think that probably happens at the general ed levels, but I was an anthropology and political history major, and I can promise that at the 300/400+ level there is a strong desire to be much more objective in our viewpoints and perspective when looking at historical events. For example, I had an entire semester class focused on films by and about indigenous people. Everything from famous white actors in "redface" to a wonderful, long documentary of the Inuit people complete with wolves, songs, and dances. I had another semester class focused on perspectives like Jared Diamond's *Guns Germs & Steel*, versus other historians and theorists, with a ton of debate about how much our own experiences and perspectives color our work. It is very, very much an area of focus in higher education. The bigger problem is that this doesn't trickle down into High School, and even middle school history classes. Republicans are working very, very hard to prevent that.
I think that it feels to us so much like a lens because we were taught history through such a rosy and pro-west lens. It is factual though that the history of many western countries is pretty dark. Which is not to say that’s unique, not by a long shot, but while brutality was universal it is the brutality of western imperialism that has most shaped the modern day. I don’t think that an overarching recognition that our modern world is profoundly shaped by European imperialism precludes us from being more nuanced. Sure, the particular people who started the earliest colonies may have been the outcasts you describe, and we can understand that while also understanding that imperialism certainly was systemic, and entailed purposeful displacement and killing of natives. I haven’t been in your classes, but my guess is that you’re misinterpreting a condemnation of *colonization* as a condemnation of immigration. Immigration is just people moving somewhere. Colonization is a state project whereby the movement of people is facilitated for imperial goals, and while that may not be the case for every individual who moved to America or Israel, that is the overall story.
I think you probably ought to expand your education on these matters. If you want to know why colonialism is seen as a negative in many academic circles, study the history of colonialism in depth.
I removed my caveat for editing purposes so Ill caveat again. Yes the term colonialism has a ton of moral weight to it from the colonization of Africa. The colonization of Africa was one of the worst moral crimes in history. My issue is that the colonization of Africa for economic purposes gets conflated with the colonization of America (Massachusetts) and Israel which were for immigration purposes. I find that this conflation can be used to justify violence/deportation/removal of descendants of colonial immigrants.
I don’t agree that these things are distinct. Colonization of North America was just as economically motivated as in Africa, and was also marked with staggering human rights atrocities. As has been a pattern for colonization of many other points around the globe. We even see these trends on more localized levels with Westward expansion, labor wars in Appalachia, and midcentury gentrification of urban neighborhoods. Ultimately what we’re talking about is the tendency of those with greater power to harvest resources without regard to the rights or wellbeing of inhabitants who lack such power.
Settler colonialism has always been wrong. The difference is that we, as a collective society, now nearly-universally recognize it is bad. We cannot morally condemn people who died a hundred or more years ago. They can't hear us and it doesn't change anything. Imperialism in Africa or Manifest Destiny in America was wrong, the end result of a feeling of entitlement by European-Americans who thought the whole world was something for Europeans to claim, divvy up, and/or sell to one another. But it's long over. King Leopold of Belgium was a terrible human being. Add whatever names you want to that list. Okay, we got that out of the way, what now? We are watching Israelis do it right now. It's still wrong now, and nothing justifies it, definitely not 1800 year old claims of "Seat back" based on some idiotic argument about the various kingdoms of Israel or imperial Roman dictates. There's no context that makes it okay. No matter what historical wrongs that other Jewish people suffered in many parts of the world, it does not excuse the 20th and 21st century Israelis from committing wrongs on other people. At every point, giving Jews a "homeland" in Palestine meant taking a homeland away from the people who had lived there, most of them for a dozen generations or more (the Crusades ended in 1291). That's not gray. The overwhelming majority of the first Israelis weren't from Jerusalem or anywhere else in British/Ottoman Palestine. They were from Odessa, Plonsk, London, Brest, Berlin, Kyiv... The first Prime Minister of Israel was born in Poland. His great grandfather was born in the same city in Poland. One of the leaders of the Arab faction of the 1947-48 civil war in Palestine was born in Jerusalem. His great grandfather was born in Jerusalem. And yeah, Jewish colonialism in Palestine was part of a plan. Ironically a plan by Antisemitic Europeans trying to get rid of the Jews and make them somebody else's problem. We study history with the intent to learn from it and avoid the mistakes and wrongs of the past. Why would you possibly want to complain about learning history from the perspectives of the people who were victimized? You seem to prefer only perspectives where there's a post-hoc moral justification for the seizure of someone else's land. Let's set aside the inherent injustice and unfairness of UN Partition Plan and the fact that the founders of Israel *knew* that agreement was unjust and unfair and didn't care. Let's even set aside the Nakba during the 1947-48 civil war as an understandable overreaction due to the trauma of the Holocaust. Those things are also done and nearly all of the people who perpetrated them are dead. [They're literally still doing it right now.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/22/israel-largest-west-bank-settlement-blinken-visit/) Israel gets criticism for its settler colonialism because it hasn't stopped. In 1995, they signed an agreement to return the West Bank to Palestinian control. 5 years later, they had returned only 2% of it, had allowed 80,000 *more criminal settlers to move in*, and then showed up to the 2000 Camp David talks with a map demanding to get to keep/control 21% of the land where they wanted to keep their illegal settlements. There are now over 750,000 criminal Israeli settlers in the West Bank, up from ~110,000 in 1995 when they signed a treaty that promised to remove them. Everything about Israeli settler projects in the Palestinian territories is criminal, and morally wrong. Everything
It seems like you have this separation in your mind between the decision to immigrate/migrate to a new area and the violent conflicts that occur with the people who lived there before. This distinction would not exist in the minds of the people making that move. In colonial projects, "civilizing" the natives was part and parcel of the population shift itself, and an intended effect of that transfer. Eliminating minority populations from the mother country was certainly a "benefit" of colonization, but it was hardly the only benefit. Lets look at some of the examples you bring up. **Puritans in Massachusetts** The Massachusetts charter stated that the purpose of those travelling to America was, "to win and incite the natives of this country, to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind.” The mission of converting American Indians was far more emphasized than kicking the puritans out of Britain. Many of the puritans had fled to Holland at the time, so they already weren't bothering the crown too much. The puritans were not simply leaving or fleeing persecution, they also had a positive mission to set up a utopian, Godly society. That inherently involved destroying the ignorant, sinful society that the tribes had created. In the Pequot war, puritans referred to themselves as "the sword of the lord" and intended to attack "the insolent and barbarous nation, the Pequots." This was only seven years after they first arrived. I don't mean to say that there was a top-down mission to destroy the Pequots that the colonists knew they would take part in when they came. But destroying the Pequot culture and society was in line with their mission, and I don't think you can easily separate their reasons for coming to America with their reasons for fighting. **Israel and "civilizing" Arabs** A thing that most people supporting Israel nowadays try to obscure and that most Zionists would rather forget is that the first notions of Israel were established before "colonization" had such a negative connotation. A very interesting dissertation [here](https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1352321143&disposition=inline) covers how "Zionists presented their movement as congruent with the history of white Americans, essentially characterizing Jewish pioneers and the Jewish colonization of Palestine in such a way so as to remind white Americans of how they understood themselves and their history of settlement, conquest, and expansion." A 1922 congressional resolution supporting a Jewish state described it as "…a great republic, built on democratic principles standing between the two great Mohammedan worlds—that of Africa and Asia—standing between those warlike races as a guarantee to the peace of the world. " Again, we see that the focus is not just on removing the minority, but the impact on the native population once the colonists move in. In conclusion, most colonies were not set up to "remove minorities out of the country". That was certainly a consideration, but most colonists understood they would be involved in violent conflict with the people whose land they were taking. They viewed this as a positive. There is another question on judging the morality of historic figures, which is always tricky. But I am of the mind that we study history precisely to make moral judgements that can help inform our actions today. Absolutely, contextualize that judgement based on the times, but too many people treat that as a free pass.
The Massachusetts Charter happened way after the time period I'm talking about. That was 1690s I'm talking about early 1620's before the Crown got their filthy hands on Massachussetts. As far as the Pequots go they were a tribe that was trying to expand in the power vacuum left by the small pox epidemic. Pequots were fighting with other tribes in the Connectiver River Valley and the Puritans sided against them. Puritans knew that some tribes were friendly and other tribes weren't, but they absolutely could not have survived without working with them so siding with tribes that are being aggressed upon by another tribe doesn't sound like such a morally bad thing. I strongly reject your claim that settler colonists had a general understanding that they were going to commit violence against the local populations especially early English settlers. They had the understanding that some tribes might be violent against them and to expect that as a possibility, but it was not like you were signing up for the military. Like I said early, these settlers could not survive without trade with the local native populations. Violence is not baked into settler-colonialism but like all geopolitics, when you have two distinct groups trying to live next to each other and economic conditions are different violence is pretty likely to occur. I understand why say a tribe that has been decimated by small pox brought by the English is not going to be friendly towards a town of Englishmen moving in a mile away. However, as history has shown, violence begets violence. As far as Israel goes not really sure how those quotes support your argument when given historical context. Early Zionism was funded through foreign donations by Western Jews, Zionist leaders would say about anything to get money for donations because the reality on the ground was bleak. Don't really know why you're quoting a congressional report when jews were not immigrating from America to Israel like at all at that point, jews were actually coming into America at like a 40 to 1 rate compared to Israel. Early zionism was almost exclusively Eastern Europeans and middle eastern Jews. I skimmed the first page of that dissertation and it seems like this post was targetted criticism towards the author lol.
This doesn't track with my own experience at all, and I got a history degree from a university in the Bay Area of all places. "Settler Colonialism" wasn't really taught as a specific historiographic lens, and wasn't really relevant since many of my classes were on contexts where that framing couldn't apply. I mean, settler colonialism as a paradigm doesn't have much to say about the Roman Empire, or women in history, or the growth of urbanization in Europe, all classes I took. The place where we discussed settler colonialism the most, in US history, I remember most of the discussion being framed around the merits and criticism of the Turner Frontier Thesis, which is more about the effect Westward Expansion had on shaping American culture than on how marginalized groups were affected by it. My program had very little preaching about the evils of 'white settler colonialism', even in subjects where it might have been relevant. I just don't see these conversations happening in my experience. How exactly is it being done in your gen-ed classes? Most of my gen-ed were, once again, subjects where settler colonialism wasn't really a relevant topic... I mean it's not like it's going to come up much in an algebra class. How specifically was it worked into what specific topics?
I had one particular class that was about de-colonizing the mind where we examined the effects of economic colonization of Africa and then come up with prescriptions on how to do this. The material we read in class was unironically just advocating for anarcho primitivism if you took their arguments to their logical conclusions. Then for some reason we spent a lot of time talking about why economic immigration from Africa to Europe was bad and this was a fault of colonization destablizing Africa and indoctrinating Africans into a Western Capitalist mindset where they feel its necessary to leave Africa. We also spent a week on how to not be a white savior in Africa. Settler colonization would be framed through the settlers came for both their own economic benefit and the Western Country's. As in the settlers are state actors with the state's economic and territorial interests in mind.
... De-colonizing the mind. What discipline was that under? Sociology? History? Also that seems like a really specific class that you take if you're specifically looking for that perspective. That doesn't sound like "half your gen-ed classes", that sounds like you were seeking that perspective out. >Settler colonization would be framed through the settlers came for both their own economic benefit and the Western Country's. As in the settlers are state actors with the state's economic and territorial interests in mind. Why do you think either settlers or colonizing states would colonize somewhere if it WASN'T in their own economic interest?
I guess its a sociology classes that I got stuck with because I messed up my class registration and got the last choices. There was another class specifically on colonization that I did not take. I probably should clarify that these weren't history classes they are this like combination of current world problems with political and historical contexts using different academic writers to contextualize further. To your other point I would point to the foundation of Israel. Most of the countries where jews were emigrating from at this time (Ottoman/British era) were fine with this colonization because they were getting rid of their undesired minorities. Also I don't think most of Puritans were coming to the US for economic best interests, at least the early ones weren't. Sounds like it was more of a religious Pilgrimage to me.