HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The Settlers

The controlling power of the state was noticeable both in the establishment of bridgeheads, from which further settlement proceeded and in the subsequent arrival of further settlers. In many cases, the first settlements on an overseas territory were organized and controlled by the military and civilian elites, while the actual settlers themselves were either prisoners or paupers. For example, North America, which subsequently became synonymous with liberty, was primarily settled by indentured laborers during the early modern period.¹⁹

These laborers sold their labor to a plantation owner or some other entrepreneur for a number of years in return for their passage to America. They were unfree workers, as they were subject to the Masters and Servants Laws, and the employers enjoyed extensive patriarchal authority over them. New South Wales, as the first settlement in Australia, consisted of convicts under military supervision.²⁰ 

Siberia was shaped by banished convicts, perhaps to a greater extent than any other settler colony, though there were also escaped serfs looking for a new, freer existence.²¹ Similarly, forcibly dispossessed Highland Scots migrated to Canada, for example, Nova Scotia and Ontario, from the mid-18th century as impoverished migrants, where they were initially settled in communal groups.²²

Thus, the Red River Settlement  (present-day Manitoba) in North America was a private settlement initiative undertaken by the Scottish Lord Thomas Douglas Selkirk (1771–1820), who wished to strengthen the territorial position of the Hudson's Bay Company, of which he was a leading member.²³ 

During the American War of Independence, loyalists also migrated northward. They predominantly settled in Upper Canada (Ontario) and New Brunswick, bringing large numbers of people with conservative social values to Canada. However, the dominance of the conservative elites around the Anglican bishop John Strachan (1778–1867)  was not to last due to the arrival of further new migrants. Two rebellions that coincidentally broke out at the same time – in 1837 – in French Lower Canada and in British Upper Canada resulted in a comprehensive reform of the institutions, which was recommended by John George Lambton, Lord Durham (1792–1840) after his detailed investigation and famous report.²⁴ In 1820, British settlers migrated to the Cape Colony as socially stratified groups, which soon dissolved and gave way to individualization.²⁵

Social conflicts emerged in almost all of the settler colonies, initially between settlers and the indigenous population but also within the settler communities themselves. In spite of the egalitarian image that settler communities had of themselves, class tensions emerged with the commercialization of agriculture – in the form of sheep rearing in Australia, for example – and industrialization. In the late 19th century, these class tensions gave rise to conflicts, which were, in some cases, severe and resulted in the emergence of unions and workers' parties in the early 20th century.²⁶ Newfoundland was a special case.

A divide emerged between the English, Protestant commercial elite in the capital, St. John's, and the predominantly Irish Catholic fishermen who lived in numerous small isolated villages along the coast and who were kept in a state of dependency by means of contracts of adhesion and credit. It was not until William Coaker (1871–1938)  organized the Fishermen's Protective Union in the early 20th century that reforms were initiated in the form of legislation.²⁷ 

Conflict situations also emerged in Algeria and New Caledonia,²⁸ the preferred destinations to which the defeated supporters of the Revolution of 1848²⁹ and the Paris Commune of 1870 were deported.

The settler colonies soon became different from the societies of origin in Europe. In the colonies, land was freely available as private property, and it thus became a commodity in the colonies earlier than in Europe itself. The United States, in particular, became a magnet for immigrants as a result of the Homestead Act passed in 1862, which granted 65 hectares of land to each new settler. For many involved, the ownership of their own land was like obtaining new freedom, as they did not have to pay dues or enter into a relationship of dependency with a landlord, and they could make their own commercial decisions.

Nevertheless, large-scale land ownership emerged over time, for example, in South Africa, where in the small colony of Natal, companies and land speculators accumulated a lot of land, which they leased to farmers. Due to the easy access to and the commodification of land, dynamic agricultural economies emerged in the late 19th century in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, and South Africa,³⁰ whose economic development was made possible by new technologies, such as the exportation of Argentinian beef on refrigerator ships.

In the medium term, the settlers were not satisfied with remaining the suppliers of raw materials for the European economies. Instead, they followed the example of European urbanization, industrialization, and commercial forms of agriculture, though the concrete manifestations of these in the colonies often differed considerably from the European models.

Due to their greater influence, which on the one hand was due to familial and social networks reaching back to Europe and on the other hand to their privileged status as members of the "higher European race," settler colonies found it much easier to do this than the indigenous inhabitants of other colonies.

Settlers and Political Power

In the African settler colonies, the settlers established a system of privileges that treated the indigenous population very unequally, even though equality among the settlers was considered a given. This was also the case in the United States and Australia, where the settlers soon constituted an overwhelming majority of the population. How settler power was structured depended to a large degree on the situation at the time the colony was established.

Where settlement did not occur until after conquest, it was more difficult for the settlers to instrumentalize the administrative regime for their own purposes than in cases where settlement and colonial administration began at the same time. In Algeria, it took the settlers nearly 40 years to gain the upper hand in their relationship with the French military administration,³¹ and even in Rhodesia, where the British South African Company acted in a fairly settler-friendly way, it took the settlers years to get the already established power structures working in their favor.

Where seizure and settlement proceeded simultaneously, as they did in North America and South Africa, the colonial administration saw itself from the beginning as an advocate for the settlers. In Australia, it took some time before the administration represented the settlers in this way, which was due in part to the convict status of the initial settlers. In Siberia, conditions were considerably more complicated since the first settlers were Cossacks. At the same time, during the course of the 19th century, convicts and banished people, who had lost most of their rights, constituted an increasing proportion of the settler population.³² 

The settlers devoted much energy to obtaining and expanding their institutions of self-administration in order to increase their own freedom of action in relation to the colonial power. As new possibilities and requirements emerged, they created new institutions, such as the town meeting in New England.³³ The Canadian Confederation³⁴ founded in 1867, employed a model of a federal state which was unfamiliar in Great Britain itself, and it served as an example for the subsequent formation of similar confederations within the British Empire, for example, in Australia in 1901.³⁵

Many of these constitutions were also more democratic than those of the European "mother countries," which often made the settler colonies more eager to experiment and more open to innovations than the European states. Of course, this was also due to the fact that the majority of the settlers had not come from the traditional elite classes of the European states.

However, the "color-blind" electoral franchise, which was introduced in the Cape Colony in 1853 with the establishment of a colonial parliament and which granted a minority of the indigenous population the right to vote, was decreed by London.³⁶ 

In 1923, power was transferred to a settler parliament in Southern Rhodesia, when the colony had already been in existence for 25 years. This parliament elected a prime minister and his government from among its members.³⁷ While the British government ignored the grotesque demographic imbalance between the approximately 34,000 white settlers and the approximately 900,000 Africans in establishing "responsible government," in the subsequent decades, the British prevented the further development of settler autonomy and prevented Rhodesia from obtaining full dominion status.³⁸

Difficulties arose when a colony changed owners, and the new rulers could not be sure of the loyalty of the settler communities. After the British had taken Canada from the French in 1763 and the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806, they endeavored to appease their new subjects and to win their loyalty with concessions. The enforced resettlement of the French Acadiens in the early years of the Seven Years' War was an exception in this regard.

The French settlers in Acadia (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) on the Canadian east coast were not prepared as Catholics to swear allegiance to the British king, who was also head of the Church of England after they became British subjects through the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. After decades of friction and distrust, the British deported the Acadians to other colonies during the Seven Years' War, and only a portion of them managed to return.³⁹

While in most colonies, the settlers were able to obtain a legally guaranteed position of power, in Kenya, they only held informal influence. Though the settlers, who had come from the British elite, had considerable informal power, the British government denied them their own parliament.⁴⁰ In the Dutch and French colonies in North America, settlers had to push hard to get a say in their own governance. In German South-West Africa, a comparatively powerless Landesrat was introduced relatively late.

The expansion of settler participation in governance in the settler colonies of the British Empire followed a particular pattern. First of all, representatives elected by the settlers replaced members who had previously been appointed by the governor in the legislative and executive committees. 

The next step was "representative government," a settler parliament that controlled the budget but which had to deal with a powerful governor appointed by London. It was only with the introduction of "responsible government" that the parliament was able to elect a prime minister, which also led to the formation of the first political parties. In most colonies, jurisdiction was held by courts which were controlled by the metropole and were thus independent of the colonial administration.

In many cases, the law continued to be developed because, in addition to European law, the supposed customary laws of the indigenous population were codified, particularly in Africa.⁴¹ In almost all settler colonies, there was an indigénat,⁴² a separate set of laws for the native population, which enshrined their inferior legal status in relation to the white settlers. Western-educated African intellectuals were exempted from this, but they were not given full legal equality. Instead, they found themselves in an uncertain status between the natives and the settlers. They, in particular, had their hopes dashed by the broken promises of the Europeans regarding their civilizing mission.

They attributed the fact that they were not accepted as equals to racism. There was no clear correlation between the intensity of this racism and demographic conditions. While one might expect settler populations that were in the minority to have been more racist in their dealings with native populations, the United States and Australia demonstrate that some white majority populations were characterized by strong racism. This was directed both against the Native Americans and the Aborigines as well as against the supposed threat posed by Asian immigration.⁴³