Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority

Evidence

Locke claims that “wild Indians” and “Negroes” have not in fact expended the labor that would give them “the Conveniences” Europeans enjoy (2nd Treatise, #41), not that they are naturally incapable of such rational design and so perennially condemned to such natural state. An American colonist, the Reverend John Bulkley, for instance, invoked Locke to legitimate expropriation of Indian land. He did so on the basis not of “first occupancy” but of the ascendancy of the “God-fearing” and so “morally dignified” productive labor of “the people of New England” over the presumed laziness of the indigenous inhabitants (Huyler 1995: 176). — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing interest in how abstract philosophical justifications (labor theory, contractarianism) get deployed as material instruments of dispossession — parallels work on who gets to count as a productive actor. — connects to: Locke naturalized market creation as inevitable to defend his class’s property project — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 281; Locke’s improvement doctrine undergirded neoliberal justifications of colonial appropriation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 399; Locke’s labour-mixing argument licenses annexation by assuming nature has no own value — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 420 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes two strains of racial thinking: historicizing developmentalism (Locke, Mill, Marx) vs. naturalizing essentialism (Hobbes, Kant, polygenism).

Related

• Locke’s improvement doctrine undergirded neoliberal justifications of colonial appropriation. (similarity 0.85)
• Locke justified private land ownership by divinely commanded labor and dominion. (similarity 0.83)
• Locke’s labour-mixing argument licenses annexation by assuming nature has no own value (similarity 0.82)