Frontier rabble violence was colonialism’s principal means of expansion

Evidence

There is certainly nothing lawless about the rabble, for lawlessness presupposes a fixed, stable, normative, and steady rule of law. As both a phenomenon and a category of analysis, sovereignty was intrinsic to the four units of the colonialist project. It ran through the entire project and defined its evolutionary form and substance in every way. Rather than being a separate force operating in any way contrary to the colonialist vision of the metropolis, the “murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion.” As the political historian Lorenzo Veracini persuasively argues, settlers, individual, collective, or official, systematically saw themselves as independent agents and thus as founders of political orders: they “interpret their collective efforts in terms of an inherent sovereign claim that travels with them and is ultimately, if not immediately, autonomous from the colonising metropole.” But it is significant that the quest for sovereignty was driven by the mother country’s sovereign domination of its own deployed colonizers. The constitutional historian Aziz Rana effectively argues that at least in the North American case, the settlers enjoyed legal and political rights not much different from the conquered populations and African slaves. The Crown arrogated to itself as much right to exercise against them discretionary and coercive power as it had against the conquered and slave populations. If violence breeds violence in the world of Europe, then sovereign domination breeds its own offspring. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to settler-colonial studies and to the colonial-settler sovereignty debates that run through this book’s broader argument.
• SEED: The claim that ‘lawless’ rabble violence was the principal motor of colonial expansion rather than the metropole’s official policy is a sharp essay angle on how sovereignty migrates down to unofficial agents.