The Settler Frontier Legacy of Racial Capitalism
At the time of Dewey’s military triumph in Manila Bay, no grand American strategy had developed for annexation of the Philippines. President William McKinley barely knew where to locate the Philippines on a map, so as the popular legend had it, he appealed on bended knees to God for guidance about how to handle the situation. McKinley quickly determined that the United States should take control of the Philippines in order to make its denizens into Christians and introduce the rule of law, if by largely barbarous and lawless means. The moralistic justifications for the policy of “benevolent assimilation” barely masked the interests of sugar importers and other corporate interests who long had urged expansion (Lynch 2009). Robust debate among American elites was fully displayed as the US Senate considered approving the treaty in February of 1899, and divisions quickly escalated about what to do with the archipelago. Understanding these exchanges of divergent views requires some attention to the larger historical context of American national expansion.
Over nearly three previous centuries, American colonists had developed and enacted their own version of the imperial commitment to race-based territorial expansion and control inherited from Great Britain (Robinson 1983). The settler experience from early on was animated by an ideology that fused values of economic independence, republican freedom as self-rule, and white entitlement (Rana 2010). The project of expanding control of land required both settlers, who would turn land into commodified property, and laborers, whose work would turn propertied capital into profit. On the one hand, white northern Europeans were viewed as coparticipants in American expansion; open immigration and naturalization laws invited them to participate as property-owning settlers in the colony and then young nation (Frymer 2017).
On the other hand, laborers from early on included indentured servants (Irish, Slavs, Jews, and others) from Europe but increasingly featured nonnorthern Europeans who were conscripted and entitled neither to own land nor to naturalization. Continuing many centuries of European-initiated Atlantic slave trade, as many as twelve million slaves were imported from Africa to the new world in the eighteenth century; many tens of thousands died in route, and three-quarters of a million slaves landed in what became the United States during this period. The distinction between settler and laborer established divisions of class and citizenship grounded in constructions of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender difference, thus continuing European traditions in the preindependence era (Rana 2010; Robinson 1983). These unfree, dependent laboring classes, and especially dark-skinned slaves, became explicitly identified by whites as inherently distinct, inferior, and incapable of self-governance in line with the emerging “settler supremacy” principle.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as African slaves gradually replaced indentured English servants on plantations, Europeans newly freed from indenture gained access to land or privileged employment, social standing, and opportunities for prosperity along with landed elites (Rana 2010, 47). Routine hereditary succession of blacks born to slave parents of African lineage similarly solidified the racialization of chattel slavery, especially but not exclusively in the South. New hybrid forms of repressive, punitive legal control were developed specifically to sustain white governance over slaves (Tushnet 1981). After the British acquisition of Canada in 1763, the privileged status of white settlers who remained British subjects became threatened, providing additional impetus to equate property ownership and citizen freedom with white European lineage and the laboring classes as religiously, ethnically, and especially racially different, undisciplined, and inferior Others. European immigrants in urban areas, fearing loss of their artisan status and modes of work, increasingly found reason to invest in constructed racial distinctions to insulate themselves from servitude as the lowest of wage laborers, indentured status, and of course as owned slaves. “Free labor” came to connote white-male contractual independence of workers while “free soil” conferred status as owners as opposed to “unfree” dependent labor that was both racialized in absolute terms of difference as “nonwhite” and gendered as female in patriarchal domestic confines (Foner [1970] 1995; Fraser 2016; Nakano Glenn 2002). Hence emerged the development in early colonial North America of a “two-track” legal logic of property rights and political citizenship. “Anglo settlers enjoyed core liberties and common law protection, while indigenous (and imported dark skinned laboring) subjects were governed by whatever means the Crown viewed as necessary to maintaining authority” (Rana 2010, 47). In other words, white citizens could claim rights to what was later heralded as liberal law, and racialized and gendered Others were largely rightsless, restricted to slave or low-wage labor, and subject to more arbitrary, violent, repressive control authorized by state law. Racial hierarchy and violent oppression were constitutive of the American capitalist polity from the very start (Goldberg 2002; Charles W. Mills 2008; Robinson 1983; Smith 1997; Winant 2001).
These developments built on British class and racial traditions, but institutionalized slavery throughout the South deepened the racialization of class distinctions that denied legal status to nonwhites in the young American republic. This development can be traced in no small part to the fact that the United States constitutional government was constructed on a compromise providing protection for the institution of slavery and a substantial electoral advantage to slaveholding states (Davis 2006). The result was that the country was dominated by Southern interests from the American Revolution until the Civil War, and white supremacy was normalized as a premise of American civil religion and routine institutional practice for many. At the same time, slave labor and the great profits it generated, especially through cotton production, was the fuel for industrial capitalist development along the eastern corridor. The Atlantic slave trade long before had catalyzed Western capitalism; banks capitalized the slave trade, insurance companies underwrote it, and profits were channeled into northern businesses, including shipbuilding (Williams 1994). The slave trade had created world trade, Karl Marx argued, “and world trade is the necessary condition for large scale machine industry” ([1846] 1982, 101–2). Westward expansion opened opportunities for growth of slave-based economic development for many in and beyond the South. Hence the observation by Du Bois that “Black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry, and . . . became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire” ([1935] 1998, 5). In this regard, the material interests of whites and ideological construction of those interests in westward movement developed in tandem. Westward expansion thus was central to the continued growth of settler ideology inextricably connecting republican freedom, property ownership, and deeply entrenched racial, class, and gender hierarchies.
Rather than “conquering” local subjects for labor and resource extraction, in ways typical of European colonial projects, the Anglo-American settler project of westward movement across the mainland generally aimed to avoid interaction with rival populations until white landowners amassed majorities or land became scarce and hence more valuable (Frymer 2017). Settler-based empire building thus proceeded initially by claiming territories on empty land or on land emptied by removing and/or killing indigenous peoples, who were viewed as uncivilized nonsettlers and incapable of property ownership or self-governance (Frymer 2017; Rana 2010). Replacing those on the land with those whites who would own the land required sustained, systematic violence. Settlers in the American West who were allocated land were largely charged with providing their own security and urged to eschew conflicts with other peoples, but settler expansion always entailed a state-building project that required organized military force to take and then defend new territories from indigenous peoples and other nations viewed as threats (Frymer 2017). Following the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, it was assumed that annexed territories in the West were subject to the Constitution and eventually would be incorporated as official states. The expansionist impulse materialized by the 1840s into the ideology of “manifest destiny,” which underlined the exceptional character of American white people and their institutions, their redemptive mission of remaking the West in their image, and the fated destiny of completing this project (Merk 1995).
The promise of westward expansion thus facilitated capitalist economic development, promised bountiful opportunities for white northern Europeans, and morally justified continued violent subjugation of nonwhites (Rogin [1975] 1991). The imperial logic propelled murderous removal of Natives, the war against the “mongrel race” of Mexicans, and similar projects validating what the young Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as “The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race” (Rana 2010, 165–66). To be sure, there was disagreement among white elites about various meanings and implications of manifest destiny as well as the racial boundaries of qualification for citizenship rights status (Frymer 2017). Many whites opposed territorial expansion largely out of fear about incorporating nonwhite populations and compromising racial purity. But the premise that western expansion was to be carried out by self-governing, property-owning settlers of Protestant northern European lineage was a widely shared, bipartisan premise in the emergent dominant culture. As such, the idea of appropriating and governing large swaths of land heavily populated by (nonslave) non-Anglos was relatively unnecessary and unappealing to Americans before the late nineteenth century (Frymer 2017).