#12 Understanding Colonialism: Invasion, Settlement, Slaves and Colonisation

Irish and American Colonisation

Many historians have detailed the long history of colonisation by the Irish in the Americas and later in India. In this blog, I summarise some of the key themes of the process of the colonisation of Ireland. If we are to understand colonisation in the Americas we must understand Britain’s first colony, that is, Ireland.

Ireland has been unique in British history. Ireland has always been deeply foreign to the British despite her geographical closeness to the mainland of Britain. Historically, Ireland has been Gaelic: her language, culture religion and economy could not have been more different when compared to the English. As a result, the British invasions were brutal; the settlement by the British aristocracy was alien; and though not enslaved, Irish colonisation took place over centuries that left the Irish people impoverished throughout the island.

Ireland was England’s first colony. Most European colonies, from the 16th century onwards, were new lands invaded to enrich the invading classes of the coloniser, but Ireland had been colonised by the English in the 11th century as a defence against invasion from the French and Spanish. English Catholic landlords arrived from around 1200 onwards. The ancient clan-based Gaelic peoples first clashed with the English who were Norman Catholic settlers.

These early English lords were imposed on a people who had their clans, language (Gaelic), and land tenures systems. But over the centuries the Catholic landlord system had become integrated into Gaelic culture through intermarriage, and the Catholic religion became rooted in the psyche of the Irish people.

In 1536, during the reign of Henry VIII and the religious turmoil of the Reformation, Ireland became significant again in British politics. Following the invasion and the establishment of English supremacy, Henry decided that if he was to rule Ireland, he needed Protestant settlers as landlords. Ireland then became fully subordinate to the English government in London. Sectarian animosity from then on characterised their relations, yet the old Catholic landlords remained the main power base for another 100 years. Non-resident landlords, largely from the English aristocracy, were given land ownership, with rents collected by third parties who oppressed the Irish peasantry. Scarce resources from the land were exported to England. This was a similar system that was imposed on Indians in very different circumstances.

In 1641, the Irish, led largely by Catholic landlords, rebelled against English rule. They were defeated brutally by Cromwell, who then forcibly removed these landlords, replacing them with Protestants from Scotland and elsewhere.

I have condensed a long, complex and bloody period of Irish history. England had considerable experience of exporting their people as settlers to other people’s land. By 1641 it was said that 80,000 settler Protestants, mainly from Scotland had taken up the land rights in Ireland that had been confiscated from indigenous Catholic landlords. Penal laws were then established, and the people left destitute.

England also exported settlers from Ireland to the Americas from the 1640s as indentured labourers, or as white slaves. It is useful to differentiate indentured labour from chattel slavery. Indentured labour was, in principle, labourers under contract. The idea was that they would work with wages for some time, and then be freed and given a piece of land or they could return to the country they came from. Chattel slavery was when a person’s body and soul was owned as if it was the property of the slaveowner.  Even the children of slaves were treated as property.  Chattel slavery was a more severe form of indentured labour.  Both were a system used by colonial plantation owners throughout the European colonies as grossly exploited labour.

From the 1640s onwards, the impoverished Irish appear in American history. Later, huge numbers made the passage across the Atlantic during and after the famine in the 1840s, and Irish religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant reappear in the Americas in many forms, for example, Protestant Irish settlers in the south became particularly brutal slave owners.

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North American Colonisation

“National atlas. Indian tribes, cultures & languages : [United States]” Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. View original file.

The European settlers to the East Coast states of North America, many of whom were from England, declared themselves independent in the War of Independence of 1776.  Almost immediately, other wars to clear the land of indigenous peoples began. Independence meant not just independence from British, French or Dutch rule, it was also a war of conquest for the entire landmass we know today as the USA. There was sustained resistance from the Indigenous tribes, and genocide followed.

American 19th-century expansion might be compared with Russian expansion, as both were colonising landmasses. The outcomes were similar in the sense that both ended with central control over huge populations and tens of thousands of square miles of territory.

In North America, vast areas were taken by violent conquest and annexation, and equally large areas were obtained by treaties with Mexico and France. As in all colonial conquests of the 18th and 19th centuries, the invading power had superior military hardware and guns, against which men fighting from horseback had little chance.

The European settlers ideologically justified the settlement and destruction of the indigenous peoples. They did this through their racist assumptions of perceived innate superiority, alongside which the settlers created the concept of 'manifest destiny', which was a particularly lethal mix of ideas. This later ideology is the concept that the settlers were blessed by God to justify the killing, rape and plunder of the ‘heathen’.  This frame of reference remains in place for some to this day.

The other key concept was that the settlers had also arrived with the notion of ‘private land ownership’ which was completely absent in the ideological framework of the North American Indigenous peoples.

Finally, the development of the newly conquered land required a ready supply of compliant labourers. Chattel Slavery on an industrial scale followed.

The pre-industrial American Empires in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries consisted of the North American plantation slave colonies, including the West Indies and most of the southern Americas. The invading armies and the settlers included  French, Spanish the Dutch and the British.  

All were serviced by the slave ships built in major eastern European ports. The slaves transported across the Atlantic, were used as free labour in the West Indian plantations. Sugar, cotton and tobacco were then shipped back across the Atlantic. This so-called ‘triangular trade’ hugely enriched a small number of traders, bankers, and plantation owners.

Stages of Colonisation

This video presents the colonial history of North America from the first Spanish conquests in 1493 to the independence of Belize in 1981.

Colonisation across the North American continent occurred in stages.

The first stage was the colonisation of the East Coast States – 13 in all – which included New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia North and South, Carolina and Georgia. This was all land colonised by the British between 1607 and 1732.

The Puritans arrived in 1620.

It was the settlers from these 13 states that came together between 1763 and 1775 to declare their independence in 1776.

The British had been offloading their own 'surplus' populations to North America throughout the 18th century. Landowners had been throwing people off the land where they had previously had ‘right’ under feudal tenure to utilise this land.  Sheep became a more valuable crop over the century. Landlords used a legal procedure to evict tenants through what was called “enclosures” (land that was enclosed against the peasant farmers who previously had feudal rights). Many poor peasants were left without a livelihood, leaving magistrates to export destitute peoples to the 13 Atlantic East Coast American counties.

It is worth noting that the enclosures acts by the British Parliament were a key part of the long processes in the privatising of land so that it could be bought and sold. This process is important because it was the first land privatisation anywhere in the world.

In 1778 the French had joined the struggle on the side of East Coast settlers against the British, then the Spanish in 1779 and finally the Dutch in 1782. In a powerful sense, the wars for independence in North America were part of the continuing struggles of the Seven Year War (1756-63) where all the major colonising powers of Europe were all fighting each other.

I discussed with competitive colonialism in an earlier blog. Here we see all the European colonising powers fighting each other, almost in a prelude to the  1914 wars over 100 years later.

This is a period of intense interconnected warfare:

·        The 13 States take power against the British in 1776

·        The French and Spaniards come in the side of settlers in 1778 and 1779

·        10 years later France itself explodes with the French revolution 1789

·        Three years later, Haitian slaves rise and defeat the French

·        This revolution is followed by the Napoleonic wars which continue until 1815

40 years of wars and struggles to obtain and hold colonies were the essential character of these years. Of course, this simplifies a complex period of European global war, but what is important to note is that at the heart of this period of conflict was colonial ambitions.

The Dutch, French and Spanish had obtained other parts of North America over these same years. There had been a struggle between the four colonising European states to control the entire North American continent. As we know, the East Coast settlers won the day, and then went on to colonise the rest of the continent and to make the USA we know today.

Growth of the USA 1783 to 1853

During the following 70 years after 1776, the rest of this huge landmass was obtained by the settlers from the East Coast States to make the USA:

a.       1803 - during the chaos of the Napoleonic-led French wars, France under Napoleon sold off French North American colonies known as the Louisiana Purchase.

b.      1819 - Spain ceded Florida.

c.       1845 - Texas was annexed.

d.      1846 and 1848 - Spain released approximately one-third of the territory along the western coastline.

The USA was founded as a capitalist state, i.e. private property was taken for granted as it was on conquered land with chattel slaves. There was no ancient feudal society to overcome, no ancient axioms to limit the accumulation of land and property. The predominant religion was Protestant; America was, therefore, able to adapt and develop an industrial base from the beginning of the 19th century thanks to its cotton production. Any threat posed by Europe was easily overcome. The industrialisation of the USA occurred rapidly, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century the nation had become the richest country in the world. First, the settlers won their independence, next they expanded the geographic area to the entirety of the North American continent.

In the process, they killed off and destroyed the indigenous population.

Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, the author of An Indigenous History of the United States, argues that precondition for American expansion was the:

… annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee and Miami (peoples)... they slaughtered families without distinction of age or gender and expanded the boundaries of the of the thirteen colonies into unceded Native territory...1776 symbolised the beginning of the "Indian Wars" and westward movement that continued for another century of unrelenting US wars of conquest....white settler /militias using extreme violence against indigenous no- combatants... they met resistance movements everywhere... Without sustained resistance movement, the intended genocide would have been complete; the eastern half of the continent was ethnically cleansed by 1850

Similarly, Phillip Wearne, the author of Return of the Indian conquest and revival in the Americas, emphasises the grave impact colonisation had on the indigenous population in the Americas:

There is an estimated 40 million indigenous people in the Americas today, about 6% of the population. They are the surviving descendants of what can only be described as a holocaust; the events that followed the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas at the end of the 15th century. The greatest killing followed by the greatest plunder... estimates of the number of people living in the Americas in 1492 range as a high as 112 million... Their number fell as a result of disease, starvation, slave labour and post conflict to as low as 2 million.

The USA inherited a country rich in human and natural resources. They created and believed in an ideology that their inheritance was blessed by God. Their belief in 'manifest destiny’ provided them with the means to expand westwards without a flicker of conscience. At the time they understood themselves as extraordinary human beings. They imported a vast slave population. Rapid expansion was assured. From the end of the 19th century, the USA began a policy of global expansion, first through the Monroe Doctrine intended to deny free trade in the South American nations; then, fifty years later, as future blogs will illustrate, by attempting to control the entire world.

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