Totalizing explanations of colonial violence fail when reduced to single causes

Evidence

Third, as Wolfe persuasively argued, using an empirical comparison between the treatment of “Black blood” and “Red blood” by American settler colonialism, racial theories operate differently in different contexts, often producing opposite results. They operate on their victims by the principle that it is not who you are but where you are. The “primary motive for elimination is not race … but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.” While this is no doubt true, this greed for territory has no more explanatory value than race or a gas chamber, for the deep desire for all such material things can constitute neither a genealogical terminus nor a final cause. The greed in accumulating territory is no different, in principle, than the greed in commanding a massive army and arsenal. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 402

Categorization

• DEFINE: Wolfe’s settler-colonial principle that ‘it is not who you are but where you are’ gets crisply encapsulated here as territoriality being settler colonialism’s irreducible element.
• XREF: connects to: Free trade rhetoric concealed British imperial violence and famine causation — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 260; Violence at home, not colonial violence abroad, discredited belief in commerce’s pacifying virtues — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 33; Colonial war trauma, not current conditions, drives Pieds-Noirs’ right-wing voting — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 88 (+1 more)