Settler Colonialism In The Island Kingdom

As always in this season, when we wake to a field shrouded in fog, and ice crackles on the grass and pine needles underfoot, my soul hears the ancient horn call of the mythic North.

A couple of nights ago, I fired up the electronic campfire for a tale of Beowulf*:

…And it gave shape to a post I have been wrestling with for almost two months. I feel compelled to address the concept of “settler colonialism,” which is the term currently in vogue to describe the phenomenon at the center of Frontier Partisan history. The working definition of settler colonialism is:

“…a type of colonialism in which the indigenous peoples of a colonized region are displaced by settlers who permanently form a society there.”

This is a useful term of analysis that distinguishes between different types of colonialism. Britain’s rule over India was not the same thing as the settling of North America. Our own quasi-colonial relationship with the Philippines, say, was a different form of colonialism than that which was promulgated across the continental U.S.

It gets complicated, of course, as human enterprises do. When the Boers were displaced — or displaced themselves — in the Great Trek in the 1830s, they ran into the powerful militaries of the Zulu and the breakaway Ndebele (Matabele). These Bantu peoples had themselves been busy displacing indigenous peoples, in the case of the Ndebele in particular, often subsuming tribes into their own national structure.

When the Boers defeated the Matabele in the Transvaal, the warrior people migrated north en masse into what would become Zimbabwe, where they settled — and held the Mashona peoples as tributaries and occasional targets of slaughter for sport. A generation on, they would be displaced in their new country by the British South Africa Company in a settler-colonial enterprise that would last until 1980.

Not all settler-colonial endeavors succeed long term.

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What is a useful tool for analysis has inevitably been weaponized in the culture war — and in a real-deal shooting war.

The Israel-Hamas War has foregrounded the term, in reference to Zionism and the creation of the modern state of Israel from the 1880s through 1948. In this kind of context, settler colonialism is used as a term of opprobrium — in history-reduced-to-morality-play, the settler-colonialists are the “bad guys” and the indigenous peoples are the victims and thus, in the moral calculus of the current zeitgeist, ipso facto the “good guys.”

This brings up a couple of salient issues for those of us steeped in Frontier Partisan history.

Condemnation of settler colonialism is a “luxury opinion” indulged in largely by people who have benefitted from it. Moralizing backwards into history from the materially wealthy, medically advanced and physically secure vantage point of the 21st century risks (or invites) distortions that render the endeavor absurd.

This is not to say that we cannot or should not reckon with the price that was paid by previous generations — all of them — in gifting us our relative well-being and security. I stand by what I wrote at the very beginning of the Frontier Partisans project:

It is right to acknowledge the cost of conquest, both in human terms and in terms of environmental degradation. The cost was high.Whole peoples disappeared, ravaged by war and even more by disease. And these bold men with rifles shot whole species to the brink — and past the brink — of extinction. Yet to regret this world historic burst of exploration and conquest and condemn the men who pushed it forward is the rankest kind of hypocrisy. Might as well condemn the tectonic plates for shifting.

Settler colonialism is perceived mostly as a European-generated phenomenon because a variety of world-historical forces made Europeans especially good at it. But it has always existed.

Several years ago, when the term first began to be pushed out of academia to colonize mainstream discourse, Craig Rullman and I mused over this question: How far back into history does one go before settler colonialism is a phenomenon that we observe, rather than a “problematic” moral stain on a particular civilization?

I thought of that conversation as I took in some of the commentary on Beowulf. The Saxons from among whom the poem emerged had colonized the island that would become England — after the Romans (who had created a Romano-British civilization there over a period of 400 years) departed. The Saxon colonization created the theater in which the mythic tales of King Arthur played out. If he was historical, Arthur is believed to have been a Romano-Celt warlord who managed to stem the tide of Saxon westward expansion for a period of decades, leaving Wales as a “Celtic” land.

Archaeology has raised questions as to just how strife-riven the Saxon (and Jute and Angle and…) colonization really was. Certainly there was conflict, but there was also trade and an intermingling of peoples and cultures. it may not have been an “invasion” in the sense of a military operation, but it certainly was a folk migration that left Germanic language and culture dominant in England.

The Saxons, in turn, faced invasion from the Danes, who came first as raiders, but then as settlers, and, indeed, settled the eastern kingdoms of the island in what was known as the Danelaw. King Alfred and his Western Saxon heirs successfully held off the Danes and avoided complete displacement — but it was a near-run thing. (This is the history that makes up the meat of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories and The Last Kingdom TV series).

In the north, you might question who colonized who as Norse raiders/invaders settled down, intermingled and to some degree were absorbed by the people of Ireland and Scotland, creating a mixed Norse-Gael identity.

There is a new tome, which I have ordered through the library, that recounts the final struggle for supremacy among three cultures and power players in the Saxon story. Battle For The Island Kingdom: England’s Destiny, 1000-1066.

The six decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars and intrigues, in which three peoples vied for supremacy over the island kingdom. In this epic retelling, Don Hollway (The Last Viking) recounts the clashes of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, their warlords and their conniving queens.

It begins with the Viking Cnut the Great, forging three nations into his North Sea Empire while his Saxon wife Aelfgifu rules in his stead and schemes for England’s throne. Her archenemy is Emma of Normandy, widow of Saxon king Aethelred, claiming Cnut’s realm in exchange for her hand in marriage. Their sons become rivals, pawns in their mothers’ wars until they can secure their own destinies. And always in the shadows is Godwin of Wessex, playing all sides to become the power behind the throne until his son Harold emerges as king of all of England.

But Harold’s brother Tostig turns traitor, abandons the Anglo-Saxons and joins the army of the last great Viking, Harald Hardrada, where together they meet their fate at the battle of Stamford Bridge. And all this time watching from across the water is William, the Bastard, fighting to secure his own Norman dukedom, but with an eye on the English crown.

Saxon England was washed away in the Norman Conquest — and most brutally at that. The Normans’ Harrying of the North is also sometimes called The Northumbrian Genocide. It is estimated that 100,000 people died in the Harrying of the North, out of a total island population of around 2 million.

The Normans were exceptionally successful at the settler colonial business — and they didn’t just rule by the sword. They also had a real flare for building governmental and social systems and law. They built an enclave in Sicily, and in the Crusader states of Outremer, too.

The battle for England is obviously fertile ground for endless compelling stories — invasion and resistance are fonts of dramatic tension, and stories can be told from a wide range of points of view. I particularly love Cornwell’s protagonist, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, precisely because he is a man caught between two cultures, a man of the middle ground, the kind of figure that I find most compelling across Frontier Partisan history.

But today it really is all just song and story; someone is undoubtedly still pissed off about the Norman Conquest, or sad that Guthrum converted to Christianity and failed to take Wessex — but you’d be hard pressed to rally up a demonstration.  The settler colonialism of 1,000 years ago can be seen strictly as a historical phenomenon.

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The same can’t be said about more modern settler-colonial endeavors, especially the one that so profoundly roils what is called the Holy Land. The conflict in Israel and Gaza has triggered intense and highly personal reactions across the globe. The past is acutely present, and emotional responses are driven by whose trauma one identifies with.

The term “settler colonialism” is often deployed in this context as game-set-match evidence of who holds the moral high ground. Settler colonialism is seen as a Very Bad Thing, so the settler colonialist state is necessarily illegitimate, with all the implications that carries.

The irony here is that you could make a case that of all settler-colonial states in history, Israel has the greatest legitimacy, having been given the imprimatur of the United Nations — although they went on to win the land the old fashioned way, by fighting for it.

There is a more fraught game afoot here than a straightforward effort to understand how our world came to be. It is impossible — and it would be fatally naive — to fail to recognize that recent decades of railing against settler colonialism are part of a larger effort of the cultural far left to delegitimize the West. It is a shaming exercise, and shaming exercises are always politically loaded and poisonous.

There is a difference between muting the triumphalism of Manifest Destiny history, and portraying the  entire civilizational edifice as fundamentally rotten. I am glad to contribute to an honest reckoning with history, but I refuse to pander to demands for civilizational self-loathing.

My people, in various times and places, have been both hammer and nail — and were most times just very small bits of wood swept along in a tide. I cannot condemn my Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic ancestors for migrating to these shores — and thence across the continent — nor will I apologize for being a product of the world they created.

“A Country Is Its History, The Sum Of All Its Stories. We Are What Our Fathers Made Us.”

— King Alfred, The Last Kingdom

 

 

* Just found out that Tom Shippey, whom I admire greatly, has produced a new translation of Beowulf.