Mahmood Mamdani - Neither Settler Nor Native: The making and unmaking of permanent minorities

I came across Mahmood Mamdani's work while researching for an article on settler colonialism. Mamdani is a key thinker of decolonialism and this book is a study of both the processes of colonialism and decolonialism - or the aftermath of colonial rule. It is a dense and intense work, wide ranging in its scope and sharp politically. In setting out his view, Mamdani contrasts the Ancient Roman method of colonialisation with the British Empire:

The Romans were content to rule peoples as they found them, but the British were not. In this sense nineteenth-century indirect rule turned out to be a far more ambitious project than direct rule had been: whereas direct rule aimed at civilising elites, indirect rule looked to impose a native subjectivity on the entire local population.

Mamdani explores this through a study of several different colonial experiences - the dispossesion and destruction of the Native Americans, the experience of Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism and independence in Sudan. Regarding the later he writes:

Colonial authorities did not have to tell Sudan's various peoples that they were different from each other - the people already knew that. They pracrtices different religions, spoke different languages, tended different crops and animls, and had different ideas about how to structure communities. They dressed, ate, amrried and died differently. Rather, what the British did was to invest these differences with political meaning. The British turned differences of culture into boundaries of authority and decided what power that authority would possess.

This classic form of divide and rule was enormously successful. The problem was that the divisions were cemented to such an extent that the post-colonial experience was shaped by them. In Sudan this was devastating. As Mamdani says, "colonialism made ethnic violence thinable because colonialism made ethnicity an important contour of public life". In Sudan, post-colonial violence, civil war and the eventual separation of South Sudan saw tens of thousands of lives lost, ruined or displaced.

In contrast, notes Mamdani, South Africa was able to transition away from Apartheid in a peaceful process. Why the difference? In Sudan, "everyone in control was committed to perpetating the colonial nightmare", but in South Africa "various groups learned to reject the political identities they had been given under colonialism." Through political mobilisation, "Afrikaners... came to relaise that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority".

The problem is that this doesn't really hold. Apartheid was dismantled by the Black majority. The white minorty did not abandon racism. They just understood that they could not longer hold on to their systems of power and in this they were helped by concessions from the ANC to maintain the South African capitalist state. Civil war was a real possbility.

Mamdani continues:

In South Africa today there is little angst about the results of the Truth Reconcilation Commission. The focus is on the deficits... specifically [the] failure to achieve a more socially just country.... If the demand is that the end of apartheid should have delivered socila justice, then it ignores the political contxt of the transition. The political prerequisite for attaining social justice would have been a revolution, but this was not attainable given the balance of forces. There was instead a stalemate between forces supporting and opposing apartheid, which was broken through a compromise agreement.

But this outcome was not inevitable. What was underminded the possibility of revolution of the Black majorty working class was not the balance of forces, but political leadership. Revolution, like Civil War was a possibility. But by abandoning the struggle for the former, to avoid the latter, social inequality was baked in. There's a similar absence in Mamdani's treatment of Sudan. While its an exemplary discussion of the crises caused by colonial divisions, the story stops short of discussing the Sudanese Revolution. This is, in part, because of when the book was published. But that Revolution demonstrated a real possibility for uniting disparate groups. A different future was possible there too - as I wrote in my own book Socialism or Extinction.

These weaknesses undermine Mamdani's chapter on Israel/Palestine which ends up looking to a politically rejuvenated Israeli middle ground who can decolonise the Israeli state. Indeed Mamdani is critical of BDS as seeing this movement as undermining potential allies within the Israeli population. The problem is that these groups have demonstrated no desire to overthrow Israeli Apartheid. Indeed, mass protests and criticism of Netanyahu during the most recent genocide have failed to raise Palestinian solidarity in anyway. Israel, as Mamdani says, is a racist settler colonial power - liberation for the people of Palestine will come from the wider working class of region dismantling Israel and building a new state where Jews, Arabs and others can live together. This requires revolution. Mamdani says that "in place of the nation... we might imagine a new political community". But its not enough to imagine, one has to strategise how to get there. The process of "stripping away the nation" as Mamdani wants requires struggle and the way that the Israeli working class have become tied to the interests of the Israeli state (and by extenstion Western Imperialism) makes this process impossible. That state will need to be defeated, and wishing or imaging isn't enough.

These are harsh criticisms. Mamdani's book contains, however, much of interest to socialists. There's a lot of detail about the processes of colonialisation in the US, Sudan, Palestine and South Africa that shows how settler colonialism created and expanded differences to maintain colonial power. There's also some fascinating accounts of struggles against that. A chapter on the failure of de-Nazification in Germany post-WW2 is also particularly good at exposing the methods and hypocrisy of the United States. That said, I was left wanting, because Mamdani wasn't able to articulate a strategy for liberation or clearly identify the agency for that change.

Related Reviews

Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Daniel Oberhaus - Extraterrestrial Languages

In some ways this book's title is a misnomer. There are no extraterrestrial languages. Or at least none that we yet know of. But Daniel Oberhaus has not written a scientific text teaching us to speak another language, rather this is a fascinating study of how we could communicate and, indeed, what communication might mean to aliens. Oberhaus begins with a useful historical introduction to the science of communicating with aliens. There are some early proposals that set the scene - plans to use mirrors in the Sahara or burn messages into forests to communicate with Mars - but these are background to show the evolution of the idea.

More important are the beginnings of serious attempts to communicate combined with the development of the science of understanding language and communication. Here Oberhaus takes the reader on a series of discussions about how we might communicate with intelligences that do not share our culture, biology or indeed references points. Many readers will be familiar with SF films or novels that show communication where the two alien species attempt to communicate around common knowledge. Maths is the normal starting point, and indeed this forms the basis for much of how such communications might happen. Oberhaus shows how messages can be used to use simple maths to build up communications teaching, for instance, counting, then logic and so on. But there is always a problem. What knowledge is common across the universe? Will aliens understand our maths? Is maths even a thing likely to be held in common? Oberhaus writes, while discussing the possible use of set theory and logic to establish common ground:

Axiomatic set theory and symbolic logic have come to dominate mathematics over the past century to the point htat it feels entirely natural to conceive of the order of the world in terms of sets and cognition in terms of symbolic logic. Yet this misses the cirtical transition from grounding metaphors, which can reasonably be assumed to be shared with extraterrestrial intelligences since they arise from direct experiences... to linking metaphors, which are the creative productions of human minds meant to deal with human experience. In other words, a very useful mathematical invention that meets the idiosyncratic needs of embodied human intellifence has been naturalised to the point that it is taken to be a trait of the universe itself.

There's a good example in the book. We might think physical understanding is a common ground. But what if we had communicated with aliens when our only understanding of the atom was Bohr's model and not the quantum models now favoured. Might a more advanced alien race have ignored us?

Oberhaus grapples mostly with the sciences of communication and languages. But there are some interesting moral points. He notes, for instance, criticism of the Pioneer plaques that only depicted humans who looked caucasian. The Voyager records were better, mixing languages and music from many cultures, but still displaying cultural limitations. Indeed none of these languages offered enough information to allow real communication or understanding to develop. Perhaps their greatest success would have been in terms of inspiring future scientists here on Earth.

Oberhaus also makes a further interesting point. When we communicate, "do we want to tell extraterrestrials the truth?" Indeed do we share the limitations of our civilisation or, as we have done so far, share "messages into space [that] hve been filtrered through rose-tinted glasses".

Realistically there is little chance that any historic messages to space, or indeed any ones in the near future will be received or answered. While I was not convinced by Oberhaus' arguments that other aliens may well share biological traits with us, and indeed DNA might not be unique, the bigger problem is that aliens are likely to be extremely rare. I suspect that most life in the universe will be some form of slime or bacteria. That said the scale of the universe is such that statistically there ought to be intelligences out there, that we might converse with. That is unlikely to happen. But the science of how we communicate, and this fascinating little book, are part of developing our own knowledge of ourselves and our universe. As Oberhaus says, "each message... is like a mirror that reflects the spirit of the age that crafted it".

Related Reviews

Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Bell - The Interstellar Age

Anthony Trollope - Doctor Wortle's School

Dr Wortle’s School is a later one of the prolific novelist Anthony Trollope's books. It is also one of the shorter. This era, and type, of novel is not one that I often read and I picked it up because I came across a discussion of its plotline which piqued my interest. The novel is a surprisingly interesting discussion of Victorian morals. Or rather the pious and pompous attitudes of a particular class to those morals.

Doctor Wortle is a clergyman and headmaster of a small, private, rural boarding school. His staff includes Mr Peacocke, a teacher and an occasional preacher in the church. His wife, Mrs Peacock, is American and while they are nice people, there is a reticience to engage in the social life of the village, or that of the wider (and wealthier) parents of the students they look after. Early on in the book Trollope tells the reader that he will explain the reason and the reader can continue if they like. 

It turns out that the Peacockes were married, but that Mrs Peacocke was already married in the United States, to an uncouth, abusive and alcoholic Colonel Lefroy. Mr Peacock feel in love with her while Lefroy and his brother, also a Colonel, are in the Confederate army. Nothing improper occurs, though it is clear the two fall for each other. On hearing that a Colonel Lefroy has been killed during the Civil War, Mr Peacocke travels to the South to learn which brother has died. On hearing from her brother that it is Mrs Lefory's husband he returns and marries her, making her Mrs Peacocke.

On discovering that her former husband was not actually killed, and finding themselves not actually married, the pair flee to England and Dr Wortle's school where they live as husband and wife. Guilt eats at the two of them. Living in sin like this is considered a major social, moral and personal failing, particularly for those who would teach children and preach in Church. But it is clear they love each other very much, and Mr Peacocke decides to tell Dr Wortle. Before this can happen, Lefroy arrives and breaks the news, scandalising the local population, shocking the gossips and leading to many students to be withdrawn from school.

The plot then follows Mr Peacocke as he returns to the US to find the truth. 

The novel is of greatest interest because of the moral questions. Dr Wortle is the lynch pin of the story, and the reader now (and then) explores the ambiguity of the Peacocke's position through him. Wortle understands that the Peacockes love each other greatly, and feels that they are effectively married. He looks after them, offering Mrs Peacocke somewhere to live while her husband goes to the US. This scandalises people still further but Wortle, a brave, principled, if inflexible, soul stands firm.

Readers today will find it singularly unshocking. Had Mrs Peacocke had the right to divorce, nothing would have mattered. I suspect that the scandal that is depicted is true to life. Trollope offers his readership a slice of gossip, a slice of amusement and a slice of morals. What is love? What is marriage? What should these things matter? 

But matter they did. Trollope has to offer his married, but not married, characters a way out - and of course the first husband is found to be dead so the Peacockes can marry again. There's not defying of Victorian morals, but there is a challenge to those who would dismiss people so easily. Trollope knows his readers and he knows he has to give the steam an escape valve.

As such this is a novel very much of its time. Nonetheless, Wortle does speak to a more modern audience. Do you stand by your friends and colleagues when the world is flinging mud? Do you make snap judgements? Do you care for society's morals? 

The book is shorter than the more well known Trollope novels. On the other hand, it does feel padded out in places. There is a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving the Wortle's daughter and her betrothed. Perhaps Trollope was being paid by the page.

Nonetheless there is a lot here, dated though the moral questions are, its an insight to how a certain class of people in the 1880s thought about each other.

Linda Pentz Gunter - No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress & provokes war

Proponents of nuclear power, whether politicians or representatives of the nuclear industry, have a long history of claiming that their technology will fix the latest of humanity's problems. Today they like to claim nuclear energy as the ultimate safe technology that can reduce carbon emissions and solve the climate crisis. It is a devious lie that must be challenged by those who want a just and equitable future for the planet and its people.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a long standing anti-nuclear campaigner. Her book, No to Nuclear: Why nuclear power destroys lives, derails climate progress and provokes war, is an excellent primer for those who want arguments against nuclear power. I suspect it will be widely read among those who oppose nuclear energy and that is a good thing, for reasons I will come on to. But it also should be read by the growing number of activists who are unsure how we are going to stop climate change or are seduced by the lies of the nuclear industry.

I was priviledged to interview Linda about her book during a recent book launch in Manchester for CND. Linda explained that the book came out of a growing need to tell the stories of those people, and animals, affected by nuclear power already. One of the great strengths of the book is how it explores the impact of nuclear power already. In particular, and probably of great interest to activists in Europe, Linda talks about the impact of nuclear power on indigenous people. She recounts how some of the poorest communities in countries like Australia and North America have been used as testing grounds for nuclear power, or sites for resource extraction. As she says, they get all of the danger and problems and none of the benefits.

But indigenous people are not just victims. They are also activists who have successfully mobilised against the nuclear industry. In telling the stories of how they have suffered and how they have resisted Linda gives us a new approach to nuclear power. One that sees communities as being sites that can demand a different approach to the environment and energy, free of corporate control. But these accounts also show a significant fact. Just like disasters and environmental crises impact worst along the fissures of capitalist society, nuclear power impacts the oppressed and exploited first and worst. Take the question of waste. It is black, indigenous and poor commuities that become the places where they want to dump it. As Linda writes:

Where does it go in the meantime? We must return to the lands of Indigenous peoples and communities of color. Yucca Mountain ripples acorss Western Shoshone land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtim with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain "Serpent Swimming Westward." It is a sacred place. It was also never ceded to the US government. But, for a time, it was the chosen destination for America's high-level radioactive waste repository.

Two other arguments run through Linda's book. The first might seem counter-factual. Linda argues that nuclear power itself has been a distraction from action on climate change. Despite being portrayed as the solution to disaster, it's made it worse. Linda says:

Studies also clearly show that the political choice being made today to continue with or build nuclear power plants, rather than ceoncentrate on renewable energy, only further impedes progrss on carbon reductions, takes longer and of course costs far more. But because nuclear power got in the way of what could have been a global renewable energy revolution decades ago, there is a case to be made that it is far more a contributor to climat echange than it could ever be a solution to it.

I think this is an important argument against nuclear power. There has been a tendency to oppose nuclear power by highlighting its costs, or the amount of dangerous waste, or the technical problems associated with building reactors. What we must do is to look at the whole of nuclear energy within wider contexts. This flows then, into Linda's key argument, the one that opens the book and frames wider politics - the question of nuclear power, war and weapons proliferation.

Because nuclear energy plants always have the potential to be used to manufacture materials for nuclear bombs, building them in ever increasing numbers threatens the potential for more bombs. Indeed that has been the stated reason behind many a country's nuclear plans, the "pathway to the bomb" as Linda calls it. She writes:

Any country with a "civil" nuclear power program is in possession of the necessary technology, skills and materials to develop nuclear weapons. This was already demonstrated by India's transition to nuclear weapons and is responsible for the concerns today surrounding Iran's nuclear intensions, which led in part to the decision by Israel and the US to bomb Iran's nuclear faciltiies in the summer of 2025.

It was also the excuse that the US and Israel used to attack Iran the month that I write this, opening up an appalling moment of imperialist war. But the existence of nuclear weapon potential also encourages others. As Linda points out Saudi Arabia, a country with masses of fossil fuels and enormous potential for solar power, is looking at starting a nuclear energy programme. That's clearly to put it on the path, or potential path, for nuclear weapons. The existence of nuclear energy esclating the possibilities of nuclear weapons elsewhere.

This is a short, readable and polemical book. It places nuclear power in the context of a wider economic system geared to profit and the need to protect markets and resources. It is, in that sense, a frightening book that makes it clear that the threat of nuclear war is getting worse. At the same time it reminds us that in places were there have been accidents, or where uranium is mined, or bombs tested, ordinary people, particularly those from minorities, are already suffering horribly. But Linda also makes it clear that we can resist. Who knew that in Orkney mass movements in the 1970s stopped uranium mining? Linda gives us good numbers of other examples.

Nuclear power can be stopped and in doing so we can strengthen the struggle for more just society and a more rational energy policy. Linda Pentz Gunter's No to Nuclear is an important weapon in that battle.

Related Reviews

Ramana - Nuclear is Not the Solution: The folly of atomic power in the age of climate change
Walker - Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
Lochbaum, Lyman, Stranahan & UCS - Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Commoner - The Poverty of Power: Energy & the economic crisis

Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Alfred W. Crosby - Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900

In his infamous book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond tried to answer the question of why it was that European settlers arrived in the Americas, and not the other way around. His geographical determinism left many wanting in their quest for answers to these important historical questions. Before Diamond however Alfred W. Crosby asked similar questions, and while his book Ecological Imperialism is much better than Guns, Germs and Steel, it still is flawed in providing answers.

Crosby is, however, good at exploring what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas. He begins with the brief arrival of the Norse and that will not detain us here. He then looks at various aspects of the arrival of Europeans after 1492. The impacts he discusses are primarily biological - disease, weeds, crops and animals. What was driven extinct? What survived well? What caused the decimation of the indigenous people?

The first thing that Crosby notes is the "striking paradox" that

The parts of the world that today in terms of population and culture are most like Europe are far away from Europe - indeed, they are across major oceans - and although they are similar in climate to Europe, they have indigenous floras and faunas different from those of Europe. The regions that today export more foodstuffs of European provenance - grains and meats - than any other lands on earth had no wheat, barly, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsover five hundred years ago.

While Crosby is very detailed in what happened and always sympathetic to the human cost of colonialism, his answers to the questions such as "why did so few of the natives of the Neo-Europes survive?" are often rooted in quite crude biological determinism. Take this point:

A very specific advantage of the Norse over the Skraelings, Eskimo or Amerindian, was the ability of their adults to gain nourishment from fresh milk. 

On the question of disease, and it's impact, he writes:

The Amerindians, Aborigines, and Australiasians were true isolates. They had been different from Europeans, Asians and Africans for thousands of years, and so, perhaps, were the capabilities of their immune systems. 

Essentially what Crosby argues is that for a number of reasons European biology was able to supplement and destroy indigenous people, flora and fauna. But while this is true in a general sense, it fails to explain why it happened. Here, for instance is Crosby's key argument around the queston of pathogens:

We must examine the colonial histories of Old World pathogens, because they success provides the most spectacular example of the power of the biogepgraphical realities that underlay the sucess of European imperialists overseas. It wa stheir germs, not these imperialists themselves, for all their brutality and callousness, that were chiefly responsible for sweeping aside the indigenes and opening the Neo-Europes to demographic takeover.

But here Crosby plays a neat trick. He starts by saying we must examine colonial histories of pathogens. But then he doesn't and simply says that it is the biological realities that did the horrifc deads that saw enormous numbers of indigneous people in the Americas and Australisia die. What Crosby misses is that the diseases cannot be separated from colonialism. There are, for instance, multiple examples of settlers using disease to infect and kill (the infamous smallpox blankets for instance). But Crosby also misses something else - if the Europeans had not had smallpox and other diseases, they would have used the musket and gatling gun to murder their way to supremacy. In fact they did exactly this in many places were disease hadn't killed vast numbers. The Europeans did nothing to try and stop the spread of disease, and they did nothing to help its victims. They simply took the vacant land.

But there's a deeper problem. Crosby doesn't articulate any real understanding of what it was about (say) European culture that was different to that in the colonies. Part of this is that he doesn't really get how the economic dynamics of societies in Europe meant that they were much more productive - particular;ly after the 17th century. They could produce more to overwhelm indigenous people. Secondly the reshaping of the environment of the colonies was part of developing capitalism. The slave trade, the introduction of industrial agriculture and so on all strengthened Europe's ability to subsume the colonies.

Crosby does make some interesting points about the biological processes themselves. He argues, for instance, that European biology thrived in conditions of disturbance, and it was disturbance that was introduced by the Europeans. By this he means, "condition[s] of continual disruption: of plowed fields, rzed forests, overgrazed pastures, and burned prairies, of deserted villages and expanding cities, of humans, animals, plants and microlife that hav eevolved separately suddenly coming into intimate contact."

But really these conditions are not about "Europe". They are more about the particular mode of production of capitalism, and how capitalism treats the natural world and the humans it encounters. Those people were subsumed into the process of accumulation and either died, or were distorted by it. Crosby is not entirely ignorant of this. He notes, when discussing the horrific impact of sexual diseases on Native Americans, hat their economic world was turned upsidedown:

A physician serving the Sioux at Fort Peck toward the end of the last century assessed the tragedy of veneral infections among their women not simply as a result of immorality but as the result of a more general change: "They were chaste till the disappearance of the buffalo". 

What Crosby doesn't say here is that this is partly because Native American women, to survive, had to turn to sex work. Another example of biology following economic change, not the other way around.

In conclusion there is a tendency here for Crosby to end up blaming the victim's circumstance/biology for their misfortune, rather than the nature of the settler states that arrived in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand. Crosby has a tendency to associate more advanced societies with those in Europe which means there is an inevitability to his analysis of what happens. Crosby doesn't in any way celebrate the destruction of indigenous societies or people. But his conclusions are inadequate to explain what happened and why, and while there is much of interest here, the book is flawed.

Related Reviews

Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Cushman - Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Maja Lunde - The History of Bees

Climate fiction is in the vogue these days. It usually depicts a horrific, post-apocalytic world where extinction and global warming have decimated humanity and destroyed society. The few survivors grub about in the ruins and try to live their lives. When Maja Lunde's The History of Bees was first published in 2015 the genre was less advanced, and to be fair, Lunde's take on it errs on the side of hope, rather than inevitable disaster.

Bees are a key, though not the only, part of the ecological system due to their role in pollination. Without bees, we are told, the world come close to starvation very quickly. In the last few decades the decline of bees, and the collapse of bee colonies, through the little understood "Colony Collapse" has become an issue of mainstream concern. Lunde puts it at the heart of her story which uses three different, and obliquely connected stories to tell a wider tale about how bees have been transformed by humans.

The earliest story is set in the 1850s with a scientist whose efforts to advance understanding of bees and improve their domestication are constantly undermined by his failure to remain at the forefront of scientific knowledge. Wracked by depression and self-doubt, William designs a new beehive, but is distraught to learn it isn't unique or the first. His design however becomes a family heirloom and his descendents become bee keepers in the United States. Interestingly William's depression overcomes his ability to innovate, but Lunde's development of his daughter, Charlotte, as the person who takes things forward and breaks free of England's stiffling atmosphere is one of the high points of the book. William, characteristically dismisses Charlotte's insights. Rather like one of his descendents George.

George is a bee farmer (I use the words deliberately) in the 2000s. He's farming colonies that can make honey, but more importantly because they are part of a wider and utterly irrational part of capitalist agriculture. I've written on this elsewhere, but the monoculture of industrial farming makes it impossible for bees to survive. So capitalism has made it profitable for bee farmers to move thousands of hives across country to artifically pollinate crops. You couldn't make up a better metaphor for the limitations of farming for profit. Unfortunately George is too pigheaded to see this. He also is too pigheaded to understand that his son is the only person who can truly innovate things, but doesn't want anything to do with the bees (or his father). 

Finally we have Tao and her family. In China in a future where bees have disappeared she works in near slave conditions to artifically pollinate trees by hand. Its the most dystopian part of the story, and Tao dreams that her son will escape through education. His sudden illness and disappearance sets her on a journey that leads to the "hope" of the novel. 

While bees, farming, and colony collapse are the central themes of The History of Bees, the substance of the book comes from the family relationships. Lunde is adept at portrayal of parents who don't understand their children, and whose obsessions blind them to wider issues of family and society. That said, Lunde is also shownig how our attempts to domesticate the undomesticable (is that a word?) drive ecosystems into crisis. The desire to manipulate for profit is what is dooming us - and along the way fathers will fail to understand their children just as they have always done. But the politics and the conclusions aren't developed enough, and the ending is too much of a liberal cop out (with a leader who "also has kids"). Relying on family won't save us. What will save us is the rejection - exemplified by George's son Tom - of capitalist farming and its profit motive.

Nonetheless I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite the appalling insensitivity and blinkered nature of George and William.

Related Reads

Goulson - A Sting in the Tale
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

Ivan Doig - Mountain Time

In my head I associate Ivan Doig closely with the old West, settlers and immigration. His autobiography This House of Sky is mostly set in his time as a boy and young man on a ranch near the Rockies in Montana. The period traverses the 20th century in many ways, finishing with Doig heading to a new life as a writer in Seattle, but is rooted in the characters and family of the late 19th and early 20th century and their experiences living, farming and loving in Montana's rural areas.

So it is strange to read a Doig novel that has laptops and email, and seems to focus more on the Seattle side of this life. While Mountain Time is part of the lose Two Medicine Country series, it shares only a few names with the early books in that series and a few characters with the later books. Indeed one of the realistic things about these books is how the past, while present for all the characters, matters less and less to them the further generations it is away. There is clearly a lot of Doig's life here. His main characters are centred on Seattle having made the break from Montana and rural life. Mitch, the main character is a talented environmental journalist, whose regular columns document the depletion of the natural world on the West and NW coast of the United States. Mitch's connection to Montana is his father, a grumpy old grifter back home, whose get rich projects never, well, get him rich.

Mitch's wife Lexa is the sister of Mariah McCaskill the central figure in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. This allows Doig to tie up a few story lose ends from previous books in passing. But the main story centres on Mitch's return home to see a dying Dad and the weeks that follow his death. 

Life most of Doig's novels there is little plot. Montana itself, the countryside, the mountains and the people are the real story. Here however the real story is an individuals relationship with their parents, and how that is challenged and transformed by death. It is inevitably, poignant and sad. But also a celebration of life and labour.

Related Reviews

Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana
Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Jonathan Sumption - Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V

The final volume of Jonathan Sumpton's epic history of The Hundred Years War brings the story to a violent close. This is a period marked by the revival of France's fortunes and the defeat of England as a continental power in any meaningful sense. English Kings continued to use the title "King of France" but for some of them at least it was more of an embarrasement than an aspiration.

Three decades previously it had all been so different. Henry V had died, but only after masterful victories at Agincourt had meant he could win the Treaty of Troyes. Even with Henry V's death, the near complete victory over France left much of northern France in either England's hands or in the hands of those who were completely loyal to the new monarch. But despite this, England's collapse when it came at the end of the 1440s was rapid and inglorious.

But despite the claims of the English monarchy at the time, and popular belief now, England in the 1400s was not a particularly powerful nation. Henry V's victory had been, essentially, a technological one. His longbowmen were able to decimate the French Army at Agincourt and simultaneously the French ruling class. The latter was more devastating, weakening the French government and undermining their ability to challenge England. But England's position was a castle built on sand. As Sumption says:

Fifteenth-century England was a middling power with a population of about two and a half million... less industrialised tahn the Low Countries and less populaous than France of even than that part of France which regocnised the authority of the Dauphin. The country had suffered, like the rest of Europe, from sevrere depopulation during the pidmics of the previous century. Its population was still declinigng... In 1422 England was in the grip of a prolonged agricultural recession that had lasted with brief intermissions since the 1370s. The previous years had been diffcult and the following ones would be worse: abandoned fields, declinging agricultural prices, shrinking rent-rolls, falling land values, scarce and expensive labour. These changes were gradual but disruptive. They brought about a significant transfer of wealth from landowners to wage-earners.

For a mode of production were land, or those who worked the land, was the principle source of wealth, this was devastating. The ability of England to fight wars was badly hit. Sumption points out that it was the "nobility and the richer gentry" who were hardest hit. The problem was that despite the Treaty of Troyes seemingly offering peace, the war had to continue. England's rulers could pretend this wasn't the case because they felt they were in a position of strength. Normandy formed a buffer (together with the lands of allies like the Duke of Burgundy and neutral powers) that meant there was no enemy directly on the other side of the Channel. The French were arguing amongst themselves about who was to rule, and "the frontier of Valois France was more than 200 miles away". 

The problem was that France, whoever eventually came to dominate politically, could not let this stand. If land was the source of wealth and power, then the loss of land to the English could not be tolerated. When French fortunes revived England was crucially hampered by its inability to pay for the war, or to raise money in time. The final decades of the Hundred Years War feel like the gradual and inevitable loss of land (despite occasional reverses) by England to a resurgent France. 

France, as ever, benefiting from its larger size, the proximity of its lands (no need to hire ships) and an ability to fight a war to reclaim what it had loss. That's not to say that France was always ascendent, or free of economic concern. Both sides suffered reverses and both sides lacked cash. On one occasion in early 1423 the French commander Tanneguy du Châtel simply disbanded his army ahead of a crucial battle because he had run out of money.

But other factors were coming to the fore. While English castles and walled towns crumbled for lack of cash, the tensions created by the occupying power were causing discontent at the bottom of society. At the end of 1434 and the beginning of 1435 a peasant rising led to a peasant army uniting with French forces and challenging the English in several locations. In particular the English gave up their eighteen year long attempt to capture Mont-Saint-Michel. This "loss of nerve marked a profound change in the political mentality of the English in Normandy" writes Sumption, "Soldiers and administrators became more suspicious of their Norman subjects". Crucially:

Summonses of the indigenous nobility for field service became rarer and the response weaker. In the new forms of indenture issued to garrison commanders six weeks after the outbreak, the rules about recruiting local men to royal garrisons were tightened up... A government dedicated to the defence of the population against external enemies, gradually became an army of occupation whose priorities were internal control and counterinsurgency.

Nonetheless in this period, "neither part was strong enough to overcome the other". Indeed at times reading Sumption one is inclined to believe that the war could never end. Neither country could break out, however good their leadership or their weaponry. So why was France triumphant? Partly that has to do with the ineptitude of leadership in England, and the growing tensions within feudal England that would lead to the Wars of the Roses. Henry V was dead, and with him died the idea of a single strong military and political leader. Henry VI was inept at best and at worst a pawn in the hands of which ever court faction was stronger. Another key factor was economic - England could not draw on its rural hinterlands for manpower and money over and over again. The last few years of the War saw this financial crisis play out over and again.

Other factors are important too. While Sumption's analysis of Joan of Arc emphasises her lack of military prowess and instead her role as a useful figurehead, he uses it to demonstrate the way that a revitalised French monarchy was growing in confidence and power. While her military role was limited, her role as a harbinger of the ideal of nationhood was enough to begin a process that saw English allies and neutral lords swing behind the French monarchy. These would end up being crucial to undermining the position of England in Normandy in particular. Other things mattered too. French military prowess and technology was improving - though these are perhaps less important than purely military historians would like readers to believe.

But there remains a final factor - the ordinary folk at the bottom of society in both France and England. Sumption makes an important point about the Congress of Arras in 1435. These peace talks were unlikely to ever bring lasting peace. But their failured was understood to mean "the continuance of the war" and for the peasants of Normandy in particular, it "fundamentally affected their attitude to the English occupation". Sumption explains that the local ruling class were loyal to the English throne, but this was

not widely shared in the Norman countryside or the smaller townsm where the new taxes served only to remind men of the burdens of the war. Conditions were particularly difficult in the north of the duchy where there was frequent contact between the inhabitants of the towsn and the French garrisons of Picardy and the Beauvaisis. In the following year, Poton de Saintrailles briefly occupied Gisors after the townsmen went over to the French in a body. The English sensed the change. "There was so much treason walking that men wist not what to do," a London chronicler wrote.

Similar tensions existed in England. Military failures (and it should be added local economic issues which Sumption downplays) and discontent at the lords around the King led to Jack Cade's rebellion in 1450. Wider discontent in England's rural regions and the tensions that led to the Wars of the Roses, were making themselves felt. While in the 1430s it seemed that the war could never be won, as the 1440s progressed things were much less certain for the English.

The end of the war was as brutal and violent as any other period. The details matter little here. What should, however, concern us in passing is the dislocation and horror of the process. One contemporary French account estimated that two million lives had been lost in the course of the war. The figures don't seem impossible. Whole swathes of the French countryside were abandoned for decades as a result. The War may have brought temporary glory for some commanders, and battles like Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt are supposed to remind us all of "English glory" today. But they were won through the systematic destruction of thousands of lives. The flowers of English and French chivalry were rarely chivalrous to those whose villages they burnt. The Black Prince and his ilk were war criminals fighting for land for their power and glory. 

Sumption finishes with some musings on the meaning of the war, and its historical legacy. France came out of the War a nation in the modern sense. While it was still a patchwork of territories, the centrality of the French government in Paris was obvious. England too, though impoverished and entering a prolonged period of Civil War, was also differently positioned, though this was far from obvious at the time. England became a nation off the continent, rather than one partially embedded in it. As Sumption concludes:

As Henry VIII eventually discovered, the growing disparity of wealth and power between the English and continental monarchies after 1453 made a revival of the dynsasty's old European ambitions unrealistic. The historic rivalry of England and France which had dominated European politics in the late middle ages gave way to a world in which Italy, central Europe and the Low Countries, and the European empires in Asia and the Americas were the focus of international tensions.

But this was a world that was changing fundamentally. The rise of the Low Countries, central Europe and Italy reflected a world were emerging social relations were displacing older ones. The feudal societies that had dominated, and had fought over every inch of Norman land, would soon be pulled apart by revolutionary change. If the Hundred Years War was not quite the final conflict of Medieval Europe, it was one that demonstrated the irrational nature of the feudal society better than any. 

On the Five Volumes

Having finished all five volumes of Jonathan Sumption's epic history (a grand total of 4231) pages. I am moved to make a few concluding remarks about the work as a whole. It is, of course, a detailed and readable history, worthy of much of the superlative quotes from other reviewers.

Surprisingly my tweet announcing that I had finished the five volumes went viral. This was an interesting experience in and of itself. In one of the replies to that tweet I was asked "what was the war about?". Slightly facetiously I replied simply "Land". In doing so though I did hint at something frustrating about Sumption's work. While the detail is impeccable and at times overwhelming, I was often left frustrated that there was no theoretical depth to the analysis. 

All of the volumes discuss broader aspects to the war beyond military history. Questions like economics, rebellion, the peasantry, technological development and even military architecture are discussed, sometimes at length. But what is lacking is any attempt to root the war in society itself. Sumption is no Marxist. But understanding the question of land, and its importance as a potential source of wealth for feudal lords, offers crucial insights into why the war happened and why it continued for so long. The political factions on both sides of the Channel that Sumption expertly describes, owe their existence to much more than personal allegiances and political ideas. They also represented the tensions within a ruling class whose figures were constantly at war with each other because they needed more land to pay the bills. As the war continued and money became short, this only exarcerbated the pressures for the feudal lords in England and France. In England the war ended in Civil conflict. In France a similar crisis led to England's greatest successes. But in coming out of that crisis and solving, temporarily, some of those tensions by making Charles VII King, the newly united French were able to drive England back in the midst of their own economic and political crisis. Sumption's work is monumental, and will probably be definitive for a long while in the English speaking world. But it doesn't quite get to the bottom of why the war happened. 

That said these books are an astounding read and very accessible to the non-specialist. In telling the history Jonathan Sumption never neglects the horror and barbarity; the murder, pillage, rape and dislocation exprienced by thousands of people. While this is no peoples' history, these books are far more than a military history of the Hundred Years War.

Related Reviews

Sumption - Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War I
Sumption - Trial by Fire: The Hundred Years War II
Sumption - Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III
Sumption - Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

When I reviewed  Peter Cozzens' The Earth is Weeping which tells the story of the "Indian Wars for the American West" in 2024 I complained that it was wekaned because the author "did not have the framework to tell it properly. His desire at "historical balance" means that he sees no difference between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor." This is not a complaint that can be leveleed at Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz's superb history of the United States through the eyes of indigenous people.

Since its first publication in 2014 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States has become somewhat of a touchstone for histories of the Americas that seek to look at the history through the lens of settler colonialism. That said, this is not a dry academic text. It is a polemical work that seeks to link the ongoing settler colonial destruction of indigenous people with their resistance historically and today. The link to today is important. Dunbar-Ortiz makes it clear that the settler colonial origins of the United States, which are themselves rooted in the original and early settler project dating from European arrival in the Americas, continue to shape the US imperialist project today. As she says:

Why then does the popular US historical narrative of a "natural" westward movement persist? The answer is that those who still hold to the narrative remain captives of the ideology of 'manifest destonu,' according to which the United States expanded across the continent to assume its preordained size and shape. This ideology normalises the successive invasions and occupations of Indigenous nations and Mexico as not being colonialist or imperialist, rather simply ordained progress. In this view, Mexico was just another Indian nation to be crushed.

She continues that while the US invasion of Mexico is called the first foreign war by the US, it was not. "By 1846, the US had invaded, occupied and ethnically cleansed dozens of foreign nations east of the Mississippi".

One of the great strengths of the book is that Dunbar-Ortiz links the destruction of indigenous societies with wider, global questions, such as slavery and the development of global capitalism. Take the question of land. This is, she argues, central to the project of settler colonialism. But the structures of settler colonialism incorporate those at the bottom of society into the logic of land. Thus, writing about slavery, she says:

Every settler in the Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own more land and more lsaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the extent of property owned. Even small and landless farmers relied on slavery-based rule: the local slave planatation was the market for what small farmers produced, and planters hired landless settlers as overseers and sharecroppers.

Lincoln, as an opponent of slavery (though not genocide) had to offer "free land" to those that supported him and those that fought the South. But this free land was in the hands of indigenous nations.  As such, "the dispersal of landless settler populations from east of the Mississippi served as an 'escape valve' lessening the liklihood of class conflict as the industrial revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labour."

Resistance to the settler colonial project has shaped US policy. "Between the alternatives of extermination and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace policy) were interim periods chraacterised by benign neglect and assimilation." The delay in states like Montana getting recognition was because of native resistance. Opposition by indigenous people and their allies has helped protect and defend communities. 

Why does this matter? Dunbar-Ortiz says that the structures built by settler colonialism remain today, both ideologically and in terms of politics and economics. The tactics learnt by the US military in exterminating Native Americans are still studied and used today. In some depressing quotes she shows how this even influenced how the US military and politicians thought about the enemy in the Middle East during the various Gulf Wars - reflecting policies and racism at the same time. 

Even those whose ancestors were not part of the destruction of indigenous people come to be part of the structures because of the nature of the system itself. She writes:

In a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behaviour of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

Restitution cannot come from compensation, though given the poverty of some many indigenous communities today, that would be helpful. It requires more thorough going change. Treaties need to be acknowledged. Sacred lands need to be returned, as do "stolen sacred items and body parts". But more importantly there needs to be a "radical reconfiguration" of the continent, "physically and psychologically". As Dunbar-Ortiz hints in her final lines, a quote from the poet Simon Ortiz, this will have to be revolutionary change.

The question of agency for that change matters though. Settler colonialism in some of its interpretations can lead to the idea that all descendents of Settlers are complicit in the ongoing destruction of indigenous communities. In this book Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't take up that issue explicitly. The question of land ownership or the aspiration to own property remains one way that the US system does try to buy off its population, and this land is always originally that stolen from the indigenous people. But it is also true that sections of the working class can be won to a strategy that sees indigenous people as allies, and is prepared to fight for their interests. These struggles (and perhaps the most obvious is the Standing Rock anti-pipeline protests) have demonstrated that it is possible to create unity against the Settler state. Those struggles together with wider anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements are what point towards a strategy for shattering the Settler Colonial structure that is the United States.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is perhaps one of the most impressive of the many books I've read on Native American history. Together with Nick Estes' book Our History is the Future I recommend it as required reading for those trying to understand the United States today. It is a remarkable book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Related Reviews

Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Alyssa Battistoni - Free Gifts: Capitalism and the politics of nature

In 1875 Karl Marx wrote a devastating critique of the programme of the United Workers’ Party of Germany. In its opening paragraph he dismissed their summary that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture” commentating instead:

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.

This was such a basic tenet of revolutionary ideas that Marx claimed that it was written in “in all children's primers”. We can forgive Marx’s hyperbole here, but his central point is a crucial starting point for understanding how capitalism functions today, and how capitalists themselves behave. 

Nature, as a source of value, has long been understood as a “free gift” to the capitalist production process. Alyssa Battistoni’s book is a detailed study of the phenomena of “free gifts” and how they are used. She begins from the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say who saw nature’s free gift in almost every part of the economy, developing the concept in part from the view that nature was a “gift from God”. She says however that “free gift” is an “odd” term. Gifts are, by definition, given freely with no expectation of reward. Indeed it is telling that the word processor I am writing these sentences is telling me to drop the word “free” as superfluous.  The addition of the word “free” by the classical economists is, Battistoni says, telling, because “it provides a clue that the free gift is not timeless or universal, but rather a category defined in relation to the market”. 

Marx had a different starting point. Nature’s “free” gift is a gift only to capital. Once the means of production are held in private hands then the only beneficiaries of nature’s gifts are the capitalists. Consider a river whose flow can drive a water wheel, the private ownership of the banks of the river, or the right to access the waterway, mean that the endless power of the river is accessible only to the capitalist who has bought access to it. Battistoni concludes:

The problem with capitalism… is not just that it destroys nature or unjustly distributes the material harms and benefits of production. Rather, these problems stem from another, second—order problem: that capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free git. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions. Put simply: capitalism limits our freedom.

While this might not seem to great an insight, and Battistoni doesn’t claim any originality, it’s importance lies in the fact that it locates the concept of the “free gift” central to the structure of capitalist production itself, rather than as a superficial outgrowing of particular functions of the system. There are plenty of writings that critique one aspect of neoliberal environmental policy of the other – the absurdity of assigning prices to particular aspects of non-human nature, or the creation of markets and trading in carbon and other forms of pollution. What is less common is the understanding that the possibility for these neoliberal expressions of capitalism arise out of the structure of capitalism itself. 

One further point on this theme by Battistoni is insightful. Discussing the famous comment by Marx that what distinguishes an architect from a bee is that an architect “raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”. A more rewarding insight she says, comes from Harry Braverman, who notes that the significance of human consciousness is not just that humans can make the reality from their imagination, it is that they can communicate this to others making possible “capitalism’s particular organisation of production”.  In turn, she notes, this “makes possible the separation of control over the means of production from the producers”. 

Thus while human labour is very much, as Marx noted, a “manifestation of a force of nature”, it is different to the other gifts of nature. When purchasing labour power, the capitalists are able to deploy it in a myriad of different ways. A river, on the other hand, flows with gravity. Class rule is the ability of the capitalists to direct human labour in order to utilise nature in order to accumulate wealth. The capitalists are not however entirely free to make their own decisions. As Marx memorably pointed out, the capitalists are “compelled” to behave in a particular way by the competition at the heart of capitalism. “The market”, Battistoni points out, “is capitalism’s government body, the institution that structure action on a daily basis”. It is this that makes capitalism so destructive to humanity and nature. Because it means that the capitalists cannot escape the logic of production – a logic that places profit before everything else.

Nature, however, can form a barrier to capitalist accumulation. There are obvious physical limitations – for instance it might not be profitable to mine a particular resource. But there is a secondary form for this. Some aspects of production are not profitable enough. For instance, Battistoni notes that the persistence of peasant and small scale production, despite expectations to the contrary, is a result of capitalism’s inability to make enough profits from day to day agriculture. It is more profitable to invest upstream and downstream from farming through producing fertilisers, or distributing foodstuffs than to take over all aspects of production. 

This is, she notes, a point of critique of those such as the radical Republican movement in the 19th century, or anarchists today, who argue that production like this represents a bastion against capitalism. In reality, it not “the absence of capitalism” but “the result of a particular set of strategies adopted by capital in the face of intransigent natural obstacles to the total subordination of production”. She makes a similar point about fishing, which she says is one of the last remaining areas of “formally subsumed production” as opposed to areas of the economy which have experienced “real production”. While there is no doubt that small fishing fleets and individually owned boats do persist. I’m unsure its quite as stark as Battistoni suggests – the domination of massive trawlers and big corporations in the marine economy cannot be ignored.

Two other aspects of Battistoni’s discussion of “free gifts” are worth noting. One of these arises out of her discussion of pollution. The production of waste products and the dumping of them in the wider environment is a central part of capitalist production. Pollution in this sense, is “matter out of place” that has no use or exchange value. The inability of capitalism to monetarise this is what makes it pollution. Again Battistoni argues, it’s not enough to critique the individual factory or capitalist for this pollution. We have to see pollution as arising from the structure of the system itself. But one further “free gift” exists in this context. The ability of the human body to tolerate pollution or absorb it. Our ability to survive in polluted factories, or live in areas polluted by industry or cope with certain levels of poison in our water, is a gift to the capitalist. Pollution in this sense is another aspect of our lack from freedom within capitalism.

The labour that is central to the reproduction of labour – the bringing up of children and the feeding, clothing, providing for the family is another “free gift” to the system. Here Battistoni rejects the idea that “reproductive labour is devalued “because it has been ideologically ‘naturalised’.” Similarly, it is not enough to say, like Jason W Moore, that capitalism “defines nature as ‘cheap’ in order to better appropriate it”. Instead

Attending to the interaction of bodily and labour processes, and to their organisation within capitalist societies, is vital for understanding how and why certain kinds of human labour are perpetually devalued. 

She continues:

The relationship between human reproductive labour and the ‘free gifts of nature’, then is not merely analogical or isomorphic, but continuous: both reflect a similar collision of recalcitrant biophysical processes with capitalist social forms and relations. Instead of treating reproductive labour as an inherently distinctive type of activity of sphere of life, one always-already informed by gender, I understand it as a formal category naming a diverse array of concreate activities unified by their structural position as a remnant of capitalist abstraction.

For Battistoni nature’s gifts to humanity can only be understood in the context of the dominant economic system. The free gift concept is the “default form” in which nature appears to the capitalist system of production. It is this central insight, and the wider politics that Battistoni engages with, that make the book valuable at a time when concepts like “Natural Capital” are the dominant ones by which environmental movements approach nature. It is an analysis that points us towards the revolutionary strategy that the workers’ and environmental movement needs.

Related Reviews

Burkett - Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Smith - Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
Foster - The Dialectics of Ecology
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler colonialism, white supremacy & a history of erasure & exclusion

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a leading historian of settler colonialism in the Americas and the history of indigenous people and their struggles. Not a Nation of Immigrants is a response to one of the most enduring myths of the history of the United States - the idea that the US is made up of immigrants, and immigrants alone, whose struggles and labour has transformed the barren, inhospitable and virgin landscape into a country emblematic of freedom and hope. That myth has taken some battering in recent years from the second Trump Presidency. Nonetheless, the liberal idea (beloved of the Democrats) of a liberal nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures and societies is one held on to by many - perhaps increasingly so as ICE agents arrest and kill on the streets of US cities.

But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it is a myth that needs to be demolished for there to be true equality, freedom and liberation. Rather than a nation of immigrants, we should understand the US as a Settler Colonial power, whose origins were shaped by colonialism and imperialism from the start, and whose legacy of injustice, dispossession and genocide cannot be ignored. As she writes, the US constitution "created a people empwered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired."

She continues:

The history of the US is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide.

She quotes the indigenous historian Michale Witgen who concludes:

The US was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

The scale of the extermination almost defies comprehension. In hte mid 19th century, around 100,000 Native people in California were "exterminated". Not just murered, but the entire ecological system that they had created was destroyed in a few years by people hunting for gold. Though, as Dunbar-Ortiz points out, if it had not been for their resistance "there would be no indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California", because the settler's "objective" was "to eradicate them".

The argument for a "nation of immigrants" is predicated on the idea that Native Americans no longer exist, no longer have any claim to land and that their history is essentially finished. In her book Dunbar-Ortiz shows however that that this is not true. The treaties and laws that dispossed indigenous people of their lands and livelihoods were ones that continue to be used, and must be challenged. A process of decolonisation is required, but this is one that would require the destruction of the settler colonial state itself. The process of immigration to the US has been a process whereby settlers and immigrants have been incorporated into the structures of settler colonialism itself. She says:

The migrant forced into migration to the US or other states structured on settler colonialism - Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel - is susceptible... to the ideology of settler colonialism, which in the US is imprinted in the content of patriotism, Americanism. Without consciousness of and resistance to this pull, the migrant can passively contribute to the settler-colonial order.

She continues:

This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It's a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers... It's a call for those who work tirelessly for workers' rights and working class solidarity to recognise that it's not nly racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers' identification as even being working class and work solidarity in the US and with other workers of the world.

Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to reject the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US... state". She says instead "a revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism".

At the core of this argument is one that says the structures of US imperialism and settler colonialism needed the dispossession of indigneous lands. Settlers were able to acquire this land and could reconsitute themselves as the original Americans. The structures, ideology and racism of this setup then shapes the attitudes of millions of people - and unless this is shattered, historic injustices and contemporary ones will continue.

Racism and settler colonialism are at the heart of US ideology - Dunbar-Ortiz shows the horrors of racism towards Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese people, among others. She also demonstrates how ideas of White Supremacy became central for many trade unionists and white workers, against Black and Asian people in particular. 

But it is also true that the realities of life in the US constantly create a tension with these ideological realities. Growing numbers of people understand that the US is a society built upon systemic racism and white supremacy. Indeed the very success of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's earlier work, including her brilliant Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, demonstrates this (and shapes it, dialectically). Indeed, the recent retreat of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from Minneapolis following major protests by local people, demonstrates this. On ICE, Dunbar-Ortiz has written (quoting Mexican immigration historian Alexandra Délano Alonso):

The project of dismantling ICE can't be left to the will of the government; rather it will require reimagining society's vision of justice and "a reckoning with the racial and economic injustice built inot the 'nation of immigrants' from its very origins."

It is clear that tens of thousands of people have come to this conclusion as a result of Trump's recent actions in Minneapolis. The task for the US left is to ensure this mood is not diverted by the Democrats into another tiresome electoral strategy that embraces the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric and destroys the potential for generalisation of radical ideas.

But agency too matters. When Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses what she calls the "eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution" I felt obliged to ask what other alternative there was. What agency exists for the root and branch transformation of US society and the destruction, from the bottom up, of settler colonialism? Here, I think we have to note, that few workers actually gain a stake in the system from settler colonialism. Racism does, of course, divide. But it also disempowers White workers as well as Black workers. 

The taking of indigenous land, which is central to the settler colonial project, produces "free land". But not everyone gets that, and when it "presented possibilities for white workers to own property", it also in doing so transformed them from their working class position into that of small producers and smallholders. In turn many of those workers were dispossed by big business and large landowners. Thus few workers have a material stake in the settler colonial society of today. This opens up a contradiction to be exploited. Settler colonialism offers something, but that is out of reach of most workers.

But, I want to emphasis, in concluding this review while these are important debates they do not undermine systematically the importance of Dunbar-Ortiz's central thesis. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project and it must be destroyed. The structures of settler colonialism in the US were emulated everywhere - from Nazi Germany to the racist South African apartheid state and Zionist Israel. Learning the lessons of its history and the resistance to it, are crucial to the liberation project for humanity. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book is a crucially imformative tool in developing our own revolutionary struggles.

Related Reviews

Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Brian W. Dippie - Custer's Last Stand: The anatomy of an American myth

In 1876 George Armstrong Custer's forces attacked a Native American village. In the battle that followed around half of his troops, including every single man that was with him, was killed. It was a major victory for the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho who had temporarily united and a significant blow to the US Army, and the American state which was in the middle of celebrating its centennial year.

There are a plethora of books about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which is known to White people as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I've reviewed some of them on this blog. There is a modern tendency to understand Custer as a spoilt, over-confident, inadequate military leader whose lust for glory led him and hundreds of troops to an early grave. This was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the Battle. Indeed as Brian W. Dippie's brilliant book points out it was not until the death of Custer's widow Elizabeth Custer in 1933 that more critical accounts began to circulate.

What did circulate in the aftermath of June 1876 was the myth of Custer's "Last Stand" and his heroic battle against "savage" hordes. Dippie's book is a study of the process by which this myth was constructed and the role it has played in how the US sees itself. The book was first published in 1976, and the edition I have was republished with a new introduction in 1994. In that introduction Dippie points out that some critics were frustrated by the repeated descriptions of the "last stand". These, Dippie shows, took places in multiple formats - reenactments, paintings, poetry (such terrible poetry), novels, comics and most recently films. 

The problem of the Last Stand is it is a myth. As Dippie points out it was constructed immediately after the Battle with a press dispatch "from the field" reporting "Custer, surrounded bya chose band... all lying in a circle of a few yeard, their horses beside them". It made, according to Dippie, "a deep impression on the minds of contemporary Americans... they became the basis of a heroic national myth". 

There is no need in this review to repeat the various accounts that Dippie has collected. Some of them are dire, and bear little resemblance to what happened at the Battle. Custer has, by turn, been ambushed by devious enemies, killed by a rush, killed escaping, died by his own hand, died by betrayal and died as literarily the last man, fighting with a cavalry sword (which neither he, nor any other cavalryman, were carrying on the day). There was a strong tradition of poetry being written, usually heroic, and almost always laughably bad. But poetry was widely read at the time and perhaps more than anything else it helped recast the defeat as a victory - even as Custer was lying in his grave. 

But other formats have also played their role - some also influential on me. A very large number of paintings depicted the battle and continue to shape perceptions of how the fighting took place. Dippie notes that one of the most important was that distributed by brewer Anheuser-Busch in 1896. They began promoting Budweiser a million prints of "Custer's Last Fight" sent out to bars and pubs across America. Generations of drinkers looked at that painting as they sipped their beer. Similar paintings graced the covers of childrens books that impressionable kids like me read, marvelling at heroism in the face of American Indian savagery. Looking at the Anheuser-Busch print today one is struck by how laughable it all is. Custer standing tall in the middle of dead and dying soldiers brandishing a sword (he didn't have) as troopers are violently scalped and clubbed around him. Its an awful image that only surfices to portray Custer and his men as the brave, civilised people, in the midst of savagery.

Custer’s Last Fight (1888) by Cassilly Adams

There is a certain irony in this. Dippie points out that for Indians, "Custer is the core of a complex of white racist beliefes. For guilt-ridden whites in turn, he is a convenient cultural scapehoat: 'Custer died for our sins.' " But, he says, ironically, "Custer was no hardline racial bigot". However it's hard to agree completely with where Dippie takes this. "To cast him in the form of a zealous racial exerminator is simply to substitute rhetoric for fact". But in June 1876 Custer had every intention of exterminating a village of Native Americans, just as he had in 1868 when at the Battle of the Washita River Custer's troopers killed men, women and children in a Cheyenne camp.

Nonetheless Custer's death and the myth of the "last stand" became both a justification for further assaults and extermination of Native Americans and a myth of white supremacy. As Dippie concludes, of the Battle, "precisely because it was a deviation from the relentless pace of Western conquest, because it was a temporary imperiment in the path of that 'resistless restless race' of pioneers, Custer's Last Stand was elevated into a realm apart". 

Dippie's systematic cataloguing and recounting of pictures, films, poetry and literature, demonstrates both the centrality of the myth to the US's self image and the construction of a particular vision of America. It is a fascinating account.

Related Reviews

Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat
Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn