“If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we shall never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.. . .In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”
This is the first chapter in which we will meet perpetrators of murderous ethnic cleansing like this man. But he was no colonial desperado. He was Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States.
The previous two chapters suggested that murderous ethnic cleansing had been uncommon until quite recently. I traced the emergence of dangerous organic conceptions of democracy in 19th-century Eastern and Southern Europe, contrasting them with the more tolerant liberal democracy domi- nating Northwest Europe. Yet most liberal countries also had colonies. There both organic and liberal conceptions of we, the people coexisted. On the one hand, the settlers recognized themselves as divided into diverse interests and classes, and their political parties represented this diversity amid liberal in- stitutions. On the other hand, this entire people had the singular quality of being “civilized” and did not include “natives,” “savages,” “orientals,” and so on. The difference was later recast as racial. The “lower races” were not a part of we, the people.
Thus some of the states I earlier called liberal were in reality dual, with an extremely dark side many miles away in their colonies. Class compromise, representative rule, and tolerance among Europeans developed above terrible atrocities against very large out-groups. The worst cases, in the United States and Australia, amounted to the most successful cleansing the world may have ever seen. They were committed by settler democracies, at first de facto, then de jure. Such is the doleful story of this chapter.
a general model of colonial cleansing
Virtually all European colonies were conquered violently, but only some went on to murderous cleansing afterward. I study variations among Spanish Mexico, Australia, the United States, the Russian Caucasus, and German South West Africa. I argue that the more they embodied settler democracy, either de facto or de jure, the more the murderous cleansing. However (un- fortunately for such a simple causal analysis), they also differed by other
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factors that influenced the degree of cleansing – like type of economy or type of rule over natives. So I will pay more attention to variation between author- itarian and democratic periods within each colony than I will to differences between colonies.
Economic Power
Unlike other cases discussed in this book, underlying the ethnic conflict was a direct economic conflict over who should possess and use the land, the natives or the colonists (Smith,1997:229, calls itutilitarian genocide). But there were five main types of colonial economy bringing ascending levels of violence by settlers against natives.
1. Trade. Where Europeans merely traded with natives without settling their land, they were few in number, unable to impose much force. Where trade did lead to conquest, small numbers still usually ensured that they ruled indirectly, through native elites retaining many powers. This was of- ten so in Asia, which was near the rim of the European logistical reach.
Trading settlements did not often involve much ethnic cleansing after the initial entry. At the worst, this might degenerate into partial politicide, to eliminate part of the native leadership class. But other local elites were still needed as trading partners and client rulers. I will not discuss trading colonies further.
2. Plunder and tribute-taking. This was important in the early stages of colonization. Spanish incursions into America initially involved massive loot- ing of gold and silver. This could result in slaughter in seizing the loot, but not in subsequent ethnic cleansing. For tribute, the conqueror needs live subjects. I will discuss Spanish plunder and tribute-taking in Mexico. These first two types roughly correspond to the first of the four colonial regimes distinguished by Fieldhouse (1965) and Fredrickson (1988) – theoccupation colony, where the colonial regime seeks military and political control and economic tribute, but does not seek to control land or labor.
3. Settlement using a dispersed labor force. Much settler farming was small-scale, using native labor scattered thinly over the colony. Though the initial land seizure might involve violence, severe repression was thereafter impractical and cleansing was not desired – whether free, indentured, or even slave labor was used. This type of economy roughly corresponds to Fieldhouse’s and Fredrickson’smixedtype of colony, which they also see as typically associated with Spanish colonization. It will not figure much in this chapter.
4. Settlement using a concentrated labor force. Mining and plantations typically involved large, concentrated labor forces – closely and often bru- tally supervised. Fieldhouse and Fredrickson saw theseplantation colonies as pioneered by the Portuguese. Given a labor surplus, the natives might be callously worked to death. If labor was scarce, the colonists might show
more restraint. Despite its brutality, this type of settlement did not usually lead to deliberate murderous cleansing, though it sometimes brought eth- nocide, unintended deaths resulting from callous labor practices, requiring further importation of slave labor from elsewhere. I touch upon this type but do not focus upon it.
5. Settlement not requiring native labor. The settlers used the land, but with their own or some other labor, not the natives’. This is Fieldhouse’s and Fredrickson’spure settlement colony, pioneered, they believe, by the English. Max Weber observed that throughout history “conquering peas- ant communities” have sought to “wipe out” native populations (1958:
165). The Europeans wanted fertile land, which was usually already in- habited. If natives were thinly spread out hunter-gatherers, they needed large spaces for their subsistence. Despite the natural abundance of regions like North America, large settler populations put pressure on the habi- tat, causing great hardship among natives. Since most colonial economies were much more productive than the natives’ one, they generated large eco- nomic surpluses capable of provisioning further conquest and cleansings.
Such colonies are the main focus of this chapter. They perpetrated mass murder.
Even here, however, two lesser forms of cleansing were still possible. A division of the land might occur, so that the two communities could live segregated from each other. The Europeans would likely take most good land, but survival might remain possible for both. This was what settlers termed protectionor reservations. Alternatively, natives could assimilate, some as small property owners, most as laborers. If native, society was stratified, lateral aristocratic assimilation might result, assimilating elites but not the masses. These were the main economic variations.
Political Power
Political power also brought variations in the treatment of natives. Small settler and trading groups sometimes made no formal political claims on the land. But their desire for monopolies encouraged political claims, and most settlers arrived in the name of states. On landing, Europeans would plant a flag, round up some natives, and make a long speech to them in an utterly unintelligible language, claiming the land and its people for the Crown (or the republic). This political claim to a monopoly over the land and people was nonnegotiable, likely to bring determined resistance. But often Europeans could not enforce the claim. Three types of political enforcement brought ascending levels of violence.
1. Extraterritoriality. Europeans could not conquer the most powerful ri- val states of the world, like the Chinese or Japanese or Ottoman Empires.
But they could achieve extraterritorial powers, whereby their merchants would not be subject to local law and would enjoy privileges or monopolies.
Sometimes this brought much violence, as in the Chinese Opium Wars. But it did not bring cleansing, since the locals were regarded as useful trading partners and consumers. I touch upon extraterritoriality when dealing with the Ottoman Empire in Chapter5.
2. Indirect rule. Europeans might conquer – usually with the help of native allies – but not be strong enough to rule on their own. They had to be con- tent with indirect rule orprotectorates, permitting native rulers to continue while paying obeisance and tribute to the colonial authority. Indirect rule involved compromise and only limited violence and cleansing. Yet further settler waves generally put pressure on the colonial administration to go for more direct rule.
3. Direct rule. Where they dominated, the Europeans insisted on direct rule, involving the complete submission of native rulers and masses to their powers and laws. This invariably happened where large numbers of settlers arrived and stayed, claiming their state – “rule by the people” – but not including natives. There now resulted a clash of rival sovereignties over the same territory (my theses3and4).
Whatever the enforcement powers, however, colonial governments almost never wanted to kill the natives beyond what was necessary for conquest.
They wanted live natives to tax and conscript. So where settlers wanted to eliminate the native population, governments had a dilemma. They tended to be wavering actors, caught in the middle between more extreme settlers and more moderate churches (see later). But on the ground, the settlers, not themselves, often controlled the territory, especially in newly settled frontier areas. This was often a de facto settler democracy long before it also became de jure. Either might be bad news for the natives.
Europeans could generally wield superior political resources than native polities could. Aztecs and Incas could mobilize, but only through loose and fragile federations of peoples and city-states. Europeans could divide and rule, offering allied elites indirect rule and lateral aristocratic assimilation, culturally assimilating elites but not masses into a civilized identity. Yet in North America natives were usually fragmented into many tribes, clans, or nations, each rather fissiparous. Chiefs had great autonomy but little power, and few could make deals involving lateral aristocratic assimilation since they could not provide stable indirect rule. In the 19th century, U.S. gov- ernment agencies further exploited this political weakness. They claimed to have made treaties with an Indian nation on the basis of a deal made with a small, unrepresentative group of desperate, starving chiefs prepared to sign away extensive tribal lands in exchange for paltry rewards. Con- versely, native survival was helped where Europeans fought against each other, as they did in most early stages of colonization. But when one colonial power was ceded full sovereignty over a territory by its European rivals, this was bad news for the natives, since their powers of maneuver were gone.
Military Power
The clash was solved by war. The Europeans came armed, seeking conquest.
The balance of military power varied according to numbers and technical and organizational capacities. Where Europeans were few, they could not easily conquer, but they increasingly made up for numerical weakness by more powerful military organization and technology. Some wars were costly, since natives might long remain dangerous, but the outcome of battles if colonial resources could be focused on them was not generally in doubt, especially in19th-century colonies after the development of quick-firing guns. If the Europeans wished to cleanse murderously, they could increasingly do so with little risk to themselves – perhaps more easily than any other group of conquerors in history (my thesis 4b). But military power also involves tactical matters. As noted in Chapter1, certain types of warfare are more likely to tactically lure soldiers into more campaigns aimed against civilians.
Ideological Power
We saw that barbarians invading the Roman Empire had actually been its neighbors. But the Europeans now arrived from afar by means of a nav- igational revolution, and at first they seemed like aliens. Aztecs debated whether the firstconquistadoreswere gods and fatally delayed their initial response; Hawaiians supposedly debated whether Captain Cook might be the god Lono – though if they really did think this, it proved fatal for him, not them. These were examples of native ideological explanations of the great difference and the superiority of European economic, military, political, and biological power – the main thrust ofideological power. Little social con- struction of ethnicity was needed. No European doubted who was native and who was European, though natives had to modify their sense of iden- tity. They had not previously regarded themselves collectively as natives – they were of diverse clans, lineages, nations, and states. They were now forced to construct themselves as collectively distinct from white Europeans.
Nonetheless, colonial ethnic conflicts had a degree of facticity to which the constructivist theories discussed in Chapter1are less appropriate.
Superiority was not entirely objective, since colonists behaved savagely and treacherously. As Trigger (1994) says, their behavior ensured that they were not regarded as gods for long. But in terms of economic, military, and polit- ical resources, colonists were superior. The colonists explained this in terms of models drawn from their own history: “higher” civilizations overcoming
“lower” ones and “civilization” overcoming “barbarity” or “savagery.” This was the very meaning of history and progress. It was inevitable, what God intended. Being civilized also involved notions of personal hygiene, clothing, and manner that could make repugnant interpersonal contact with “dirty,”
unclothed, and “unrestrained” natives. Natives were often dying of disease in front of them, seemingly physically unfit to live amid a higher civilization.
Civilizational models of history and progress meant that it was easy for set- tlers to develop ideologies of superiority to justify whatever treatment they meted out to the natives, insulating themselves from moral risk (as thesis4b suggested). We should not wonder at their contempt for natives. It seemed self-evident.
Of course, Europeans, like natives, were careful observers and noted dif- ferences. If they found complex cities, monuments, irrigation agriculture, or even peoples of proud bearing, they modified their judgment. Pragmatic needs also influenced their ideology. If they needed to rule indirectly through native elites, or if they needed natives as stable sexual partners, they moder- ated their views.
Christianity complicated their models. It reinforced the savage–civilized dichotomy, since Christians alone had truth. The Christian church also said that Christians had the right to dispossess non-Christians of their land by right of discovery. Yet even savages were believed to have souls. Natives were literally in a “state of nature,”naturales, but they should be led to the true faith – and thence to civilization. Conversion involves assimilation, cleans- ing culture, not lives. Christianity strengthened dispossession but weakened murderous cleansing. Later, the Enlightenment, liberalism, and socialism brought secular moderating ideologies. So the stronger the power of reli- gious/humanitarian groups, the less the murderous cleansing. This gives us a third colonial actor, professional ideologists – churches, religious orders, mis- sionaries, humanitarian movements. After initial conquest and land seizure, they were usually more restrained in their treatment of natives, though they were not immune to ethnic stereotypes or to their own material interests in dispossessing the natives.
Biology/Ecology
One further form of power lies outside my four-part model. The Europeans hadbiological powersuperiority in the temperate zones of settlement, where they unwittingly carried lethal disease microbes. Natives in first contact with Europeans (and especially with their animals) succumbed to everyday Eu- ropean diseases, for which they had built up no immunity. Diseases were easily the biggest killers of most native populations, though they worked in conjunction with food shortages and fertility declines that were more deliber- ately induced by the Europeans (Thornton,1997). Disease epidemics accom- panied European penetration, making conquest much easier. New England colonists found expansion easy amid sick and dying natives unable to work or fight, pleading, arms outstretched for help. This was the main component of ethnocide in the temperate zones – reinforcing Europeans’ sense of their power superiority.
Ecology mattered. Cleansing was much greater in the temperate zones of the new continents, which were hospitable to European settlement. This primarily meant the Americas, Australasia, and small zones across Africa.
This is where Europeans imposed what Crosby (1986) callsecological im- perialism, domination by European humans, weeds, animals, and disease microbes. The result was cataclysmic, the greatest eliminations of popula- tions ever recorded.
In Australia the aboriginal population before the arrival of the First Fleet in1788was probably just above 300,000. By1901only about93,000re- mained. The low point was reached in1921, when about72,000survived.
Over little more than a century the attrition had been almost80percent.
Then the aboriginal population stabilized. After1961it even began to grow (Smith,1980:12,69–70).
In the Americas, regions with large settler populations lost about90per- cent of their natives. Across the whole continent the total pre-Columbian population may have been60–100million. Over half died (Stannard,1992:
74–5,81–7,118,146,266–8). In the area now occupied by the United States, estimates of the pre-Columbian Indian population are generally4–9million.
In the U.S. Census of 1900there were only 237,000 Indians, a loss of at least95percent. Extermination happened last, and so is most visible to us, in California. The Spanish missionaries estimated that there were310,000 natives on their arrival in1769. By 1849, when the gold rush began, the population had been halved. Thereafter it fell even faster as settlement ex- panded. By1860, after10years of statehood, Californian Indians numbered only31,000– an80percent loss rate over only12years! The Third Reich also lasted12years and killed70percent of European Jews. Finally, things began to ease. By1880there were still over20,000Californian Indians. In the20th century their number grew slightly (Almaguer,1994:107,000–130,000, but all figures are crude estimates; Thornton,1997). How did this cataclysm happen, how intentional was it, and who perpetrated it? I explore variations between those wielding political power (colonial and postcolonial political elites), ideological power (mainly churches), and economic power (settlers).
Military power might be wielded by either states or settlers. Biological power was wielded, usually unintentionally, by all of them.
mexico
The Spanish first entered Caribbean islands where they did not face orga- nized states, usually through privateering ventures. They killed native elites and coerced and overworked natives on their estates and mines. They forced native women into sexual relations so that fewer Indians reproduced Indi- ans. Their pigs and sheep destroyed the vegetation that nourished the natives.
But above all, European animals carried diseases that ravaged native popu- lations, including those who never even saw theconquistadores. In terrible ethnocides the native populations were wiped out – unintentionally, though with great callousness.
On the mainland, the Spanish confronted an advanced civilization. Cortes noted that these Indians were “of much greater intelligence than those of the
other islands. Indeed, they appeared to us to possess such understanding as is sufficient for an ordinary citizen to conduct himself in a civilised country.”
Though daunted by the size of the armies that the Aztecs could bring into the field, he recognized their divisions, quoting St. Mark: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be brought to destruction” (Thomas,1993: 576, 245). Cortes recruited as allies city-states that were restive under Aztec rule.
His initial Plan A was to impose sovereignty, while allowing allies some po- litical autonomy, and to plunder gold and silver, settle the land, and convert souls. His chronicler, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, cheerfully admitted, “To bring light to those in darkness, and also to get rich, which is what all of us men commonly seek” (quoted by Farris,1984:29).
During the conquest the worst Spanish atrocities amounted to exemplary repression. About20Mexican towns suspected of betrayal had their men killed, their women and children enslaved, their buildings burned. Dogs were occasionally used to tear victims apart. More commonly, the Spaniards would turn aside while their native allies tore apart their former rulers and ate them. Such were the accusations made by Bartolome de las Casas, bishop of San Cristobal, Chiapas, and theconquistadoresonly denied the details.
One defended the destruction of Tepeaca (in retaliation for the murder of 12Spanish captains): “It was convenient to impose the said punishment for the pacification of the land. . .and in order to put fear into the naturales so that they did no hurt to the Spaniards.” But the Spaniards often lost self-control when they believed someone was concealing gold. Rich Aztecs were tortured to reveal hiding places; a few were ripped apart in search of swallowed jewels. These were emotional outbursts marring what was gener- ally an instrumentally rational campaign. After the fall of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, many of its captains were executed. Yet the other inhabitants were allowed to leave the destroyed city in peace (Thomas, 1995: 243–5, 262,434–9,459,527,544).
There was a tactical lure away from murderous cleansing toward making distinctions between friendly, neutral, and hostile natives. Allies were desper- ately needed. This campaign requirement was decisive in luring theconquis- tadoresaway from undifferentiated murder. In their exemplary repression, the conquistadores were traditional imperial conquerors, so their Plan A did not aim at ethnic cleansing. Settlement involved lording it over na- tives who would do all the work, if necessary by coercion. But they had learned from the Caribbean experience, and in Mexico they developed the encomienda system. The Crown granted to Spanish settlers the land and the people on it as virtual serfs. They were not allowed to drive the natives away and they had to protect them, though labor conditions could be very harsh.
Since the settlers were overwhelmingly male, they needed women. Span- ish tolerance of ethnic diversity ensured that many native partners became wives, begetting children in stable mixed marriages. Relative numbers – far more natives than Europeans – meant that native marriages and procreation