Settler colonialism is the process where a country or people creates an offshoot of itself in a new land. Countries like the United States, Australia, Liberia and Israel were created by settler colonialism. Countries like Haiti, Nigeria and Iraq, on the other hand, were created by extractive colonialism.
Settler colonialism, says Andrea Smith, is one of the three pillars of White supremacy in the US, the other two being anti-Black racism and Orientalism.
In extractive colonialism there are two main parts:
- metropole – the country that rules an empire;
- periphery – the countries it has power over.
Metropolitans extract wealth from the native peoples and lands of the periphery. Wealth flows from the periphery to the metropole. Metropolitans may work for a time in the periphery – as soldiers, slave traders, priests or plantation owners, for example – but consider the metropole their homeland.
In settler colonialism a third element is added: settlers. They move from the metropole to the periphery to create a new homeland. The Pilgrims are a good example. In the long run they cause trouble for both natives and the metropole as they gain land, wealth and sovereignty.
Settlers and natives: Settlers are not mainly interested in ruling over natives or joining their society or even in making them slaves. They want their land and therefore want them to disappear by any means necessary, even genocide. To replace natives they bring in:
Cheap labour: Convicts, slaves, refugees, immigrants, contract labourers, etc. These people serve settler society, becoming part of it in time, sometimes a racialized part. Sometimes they are forced out. Unlike settlers, they do not create homelands of their own. Unlike natives, they have no natural claim to the land.
Settlers and the metropole: Settlers at first need the protection of the metropole.
The metropole tries to limit land claims by settlers to keep peace between natives and settlers – like in eastern North America in the late 1700s (pictured), Colorado in the middle 1800s and the West Bank in the 2010s.
In the long run, though, the metropole cannot stop settlers from taking more and more native land.
The metropole either backs settler land claims (turning a blind eye to broken treaties) or in time loses all control (as in the US war of independence).
Ideology: Settlers believe stuff like:
- Our god wants us to have this land (Zionism, Manifest Destiny).
- We are way better than natives (racially, culturally and especially morally).
- Natives are violent (savages, terrorists).
In the US, settlers called themselves “Americans” (land-based) and natives “Indians” (race-based, named after a faraway place).
The term “settler” is itself a bit of whitewash: it sees invaders as peacefully taking over land that was somehow not settled. Contrary to what most Whites in the US seem to believe, for example, nearly all Natives in 1491 were farmers, not hunter-gatherers.
Settler colonialism as a separate field of study only began to take shape in 2008, although Stokely Carmichael, for example, spoke of settler colonies back in 1970. The hope is that by comparing settler states and their history, we can understand how they work.
– Abagond 2014, 2015.
See also:
- The three pillars of American white supremacy
- Manifest Destiny
- The eight stages of genocide
- problematic terms
- Notes towards a Native American history of George Washington
- Vine Deloria, Jr: Conquest Masquerading as Law
- Gaza
- The diseased host model of American society
- The lies you were taught about Native Americans
“Settlers are not mainly interested in ruling over natives or joining their society or even in making them slaves. They want their land and therefore want them to disappear by any means necessary, even genocide. ”
True in case of the US, Australia and some other parts of the Americas, but it depends on the value that is placed on indigeneous labour. The settler colonists in Rhodesia and German South-West Africa were interested in the rule over the natives.
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The Indonesians are settler-colonialists in West Papua. They call the western half of New Guinea “Irian Jaya”. The French are settler-colonialists in Kanaky, which they “New Caledonia”. The British are settler-colonialists in Aotearoa, which they call “New Zealand”. In the southwestern region of the Pacific they it “French Polynesia”.
The Indonesians have performed an ongoing genocide on the West Papuans. Due to decades of French immigration and sterilization (eugenics), the Kanaks (black people) have become a minority (43%) on their native island. Many native people in so-called French Polynesia are gamma ray victims of nuclear bomb testings. The powerful gamma rays destroy the DNA of cells.
Settler-colonialists are the cancer of the Earth.
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” Countries like Haiti, Nigeria and Iraq, on the other hand, were created by extractive colonialism.” This is nonsense in the case of Haiti, the buccaneers and flibustiers(freebooters), the French settlers on the western side of St-Domingue settled permanently and even married Black and Indian women giving rise to the mulatto population, see Before Haiti by John D. Garrigus. Some who became wealthy moved back to France and lived like aristocrats. You seem to forget that the Spanish wiped out the aboriginal population of Haiti. All colonies started out as ‘extractive’ so this new academic division strikes me as arbitrary.
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Is it safe to assume that the areas which were later used for agriculture by whites was generally used for agriculture by Natives before that?
The areas not suitable for agriculture probably led a more hunter / gatherer lifestyle (eg, the Rocky Mountains and western great Plains, and the Far North (Alaska).
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@ Jefe
Right. Maize was grown pretty much everywhere it could. Even many Plains Indians, like Sioux and Osages (but not Comanches) grew it before the Spanish brought the horse and they were pushed west.
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@gro jo
By the 1700s Haiti was super extractive, brutally so. Most people were slaves who were worked to death. France made a fortune off of it – sugar, indigo and so on. Getting rich in the colonies and living in the metropole (France in the case of Haiti) is how extractive colonialism works.
The Pilgrims and Puritans, on the other hand, came to New England to live, not to make their fortune and return to Old England. Instead of mining or growing a cash crop, they became a shipping and trading rival of the Dutch and British.
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The US, Israel and Australia are classic settler states. French Algeria and South Africa are disputed cases.
I think Afrikaners count as settlers since they see South Africa as their homeland and do not see themselves as Dutch. The Bantustans are a classic settler colonialist move. So is their argument that Zulus are not natives but newcomers, which reads history in a way that supports their own land claims. On the other hand, instead of being genocidal like Anglo Americans and Australians, they and other Whites have remained a small minority using natives as a work force. Settlers try to avoid that in the long run – partly because it leads to just what happened in South Africa: the overthrow of White rule.
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This is an informative post i need to read up on this subject.
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First you confuse St-Domingue with Haiti, its antipode. Haiti was never a colony and did not exist until January 1, 1804. The refusal of France to accept blacks as citizens after being forced to do so since 1793 necessitated the creation of that nation. The fact that slavery was brutal is besides the point. The buccaneers and freebooters who started out as pirates and smugglers SETTLED DOWN and became planters who created the sugar, indigo and coffee plantations that made them super rich. They were no different then the forebears of Thomas Jefferson or Washington, etc. are you seriously trying to argue that Washington was just interested in getting rich and moving to England? The planters of St-Domingue were just as much at odds with French mercantilist policies as the 13 colonies were with Britain’s. They even contemplated either becoming independent like the USA or becoming a British colony. The whole extractive vs settler bit is weak. Where would you place Jamaica in this scheme?
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@ gro jo
I regard Jamaica as extractive, even if the faces at the top are darker. Unfortunately, revolution and independence are not cures for extractive colonialism, as Castro found out. If only it were that simple. Much of Latin America and Africa is still extractive. The big money, in other words, is mainly made by outsiders, even if there is a rich elite of insiders (who are often, but not always, corrupt sell-outs to outside interests). From what I understand, that was true of the sugar-growing islands of the Caribbean and the cotton-growing region of the US south till at least the 1960s, if not afterwords. It is certainly STILL true of Blacks in the US.
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It doesn’t even have to be outsiders who extract the money. Though one can’t call it colonialism anymore, the extractive nature is the same, when people make their money in Land A and then move to Land B and spend it there.
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(By the same token), I guess places like Singapore or Mauritius and the Seychelles are also “extractive”.
In the Philippines, I suppose the “settlers” intermarried with “locals” or Chinese. The elite classes tend to be part European and Chinese.
Are there any countries like Malaysia, which started out extractive, imported millions of coolies, only to have one or the pre-colonial peoples seize power again.
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So you are saying that Black Americans are an internal colony of the USA and not true citizens. I believe the Black Panthers and other radicals (cpusa, and others) pushed that idea in the 1930’s and 1960’s. I think it was called the “Black Belt” because southern territories where Blacks were concentrated looked like a belt. The problem I see with such view is that Black Americans don’t see themselves as other than American. The problem with the settler vs extractive colony question seems to be predicated on the fact that a White capitalist class must be identified capable of running the economy. Argentina, Chili and Uruguay meet these criteria and yet your scheme would relegate them to the extractive side of the ledger, being Latin American, while exempting Australia and New Zealand who resemble them. Is Australia presently an extractive colony of China? If not why not?
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My only problem is with this, “In the US, settlers called themselves “Americans” (land-based) and natives “Indians” (race-based).”
India is a landmass as much as America is. So, the U.S. settlers calling themselves, eventually, Americans and calling the natives “Indians” isn’t race based, but land-based. A ignorant claim because of the land that Christopher Columbus thought he was on/going to. If would be race based if they called them something like “red people” or something like that.
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You already gave the answer. Even when the Europeans managed to stay alive long enough to colonize Inner Africa, they weren’t able to attract many settlers. they could order soldiers and officials there, whose careers depended on it, and a few people tried to make a fortune.
But the pull factors of tropical colonies were to weak for the people, who wanted to take up the small-scale agricultural life they knew from their homelands.
South Africa doesn’t really fit in the same category. As far as I know it never saw large-scale european immigration. The Boers are descendants from a small number of settlers in the 17th centruy (supposed I remember correctly, less than 3,000).
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I am not an economist, but I would say:
In an extractive colony, you have a few rich people at the top who are
heavily dependent on mining, oil, tourism or a cash crop, a layer of
government workers, possibly bloated, and high levels of poverty.
At the other end are countries with a large middle-class that comes from a
large, diversifed internal economy.
In the US:
Black America, by world standards, has a large middle class but it does not have a large, diversified, internal economy. Its middle class mostly works for the government or White businesses. Its own business class is small. It has high rates of unemployment and poverty – a bad sign. It has long provided the US with cheap labour and still does, even if it is now better educated and better paid.
Asians might have enough of a business class, but it too has high rates of poverty, so maybe not.
Natives and Latinos are in an extractive relationship with the US.
Hawaii certainly was extractive. It does not seem like it still is.
Elsewhere:
Australia and New Zealand depend heavily on mining and agriculture,
but have large middle classes that seem to be more than just
government workers. Australia could sink into an extractive colony of
China, as could other countries in that region (and Africa).
South Africa, I would say, started out as a settler colony but, after
the discovery of its mines, has sunk into an extractive colony.
China and Japan are not extractive colonies.
Iran and Venezuela are trying to break free of that.
South Korea seems to have broken free and maybe southern Brazil too.
Argentina has long been trying to break free, not sure if they have made it yet.
Iraq and Saudi Arabia are extractive.
India: much of it is still poor, but does not seem to be an extractive colony.
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@ Kiwi @ Kartoffel
Good point. European agriculture does not work in the tropics, so the colonies there are necessarily extractive.
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@ beesams
For Columbus the term “Indian” was land-based, naively so. Anglo Americans from the 1700s onwards used it in a race-based way. They knew full well that Indians were not from India. In a way, that was the beauty of it since they were taking their land, a kind of cruel joke: “Oh, you’re not American, you’re Indian.” In the 1600s they still called them Americans.
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@ Kiwi
Contrafactual questions like this are of course immensly difficult to answer, especially if one changes not only one fact, but the whole setting. But I think the major reason for the difference in America’s and Australia’s colonial history on one side and Asia’s and Africa’s on the other, are caused by the fact that the Europeans established themself centuries earlier in the former. The American east coast for example by the middle of the 18th century already was firmly under european control and had a “native” white population, while it was completly unthinkable that Europeans could conquer China or the Middle East at that point. India is a special case, its conquest was on a razor’s edge and could easily have panned out differently.
So when Europe’s population growth took off, they could migrate to already esablished states that were simlilarily organized, rather then the only loosely governed new colonies.
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Stokley Charmichael was right about a lot of things.
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@ Kiwi
“Europeans certainly did militarily occupy and economically exploit China.”
I said that the Europeans couldn’t conquer China and the Middle East in the 18th century. In the 19th century they certainly could and that they didn’t in the case of the Ottoman Empire (its Asian part) was more due to disagreement of the European powers than the strength of the Ottomans.
I brought that up as an explanation why there were no settler colonies in Asia. Although there is the exception Indonesia. I know very little about the Indonesian history, but could it be classified as a settler colony?
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@ Kartoffel
Regarding Kiwi’s reply to your
of
I will have to disagree also.
Portuguese established themselves in Malacca, Goa, Taiwan, Macau, East Timor, Nagasaki, etc. and Spain established itself in the Philippines, parts of Taiwan, Guam and other islands in the Pacific back to the 16th century (1500s). Dutch colonized Mauritius, Taiwan, parts of Indonesia, Capetown, etc. in the 17th century. French did so in Reunion.
Whether or not they formed European settler colonies was not because of the timing of the colonization. It was probably more due to diseases and to climate / agriculture. It was also due to certain cultural attitudes. For example, the Spanish and Portuguese often mixed with the local population to form a mixed ruling class. The Dutch did this to some extent in Indonesia. In certain areas, a successor colonial power (eg, Britain) came in and did not mix so much with the local population, which disconnected some of the ones descendant from the prior colonial power.
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“But how could this happen as long as ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand) and Southeast Asia’s Tiger Cub Economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand) all remain close military allies of the US?” Why do you assume that they will remain allies of the US?
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“Australia, New Zealand, and the US share a common Anglo cultural heritage due to their legacy as products of British colonialism. For example, they were all founded by white settlers who committed genocide on the native populations in order to take their land. In addition, all three countries have a long history of hostility towards ethnic Chinese.” Kiwi, interesting take on how the world works, but I wouldn’t be as confident as you are in such things. In 1753 George Washington was an officer of the British in the French-Indian War and yet in the 1770’s he was fighting the British with the help of the French. That kind of reversal would be impossible if the world worked based mostly on kinship as your comment implies.
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I think the small countries near China will remain US allies for the foreseeable future simply because they fear the giant on their doorstep more than the one across the ocean.
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Which means for the foreseeable future, there will be no end to the allegations that the US is meddling / interfering in China’s domestic and international affairs.
BTW, I do agree that most of the countries of East Asia, SE Asia and Australasia will remain allies (and Taiwan a de facto ally) of the USA for a while. Maybe 1-2 exceptions (eg, Cambodia). esp. those countries that do not have a direct land or maritime border with China.
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@ Kiwi
I regard Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are parts of the US empire, but it is hard for me to imagine them as extractive colonies since they seem to be industrialized with large middle classes.
Extractive colonies are generally debtor nations, not creditors. It is like what in ancient times was called tribute. I could see the US maybe strong-arming Japan and the Gulf States for credit – rich places that it could get “protection money” from, so to speak – but not China. I could be wrong, though.
The Asian brain drain in the US, though, is extractive. It is cheap labour in relation to what the US would have to pay Whites and, even more so, in relation to what the US would have to pay to properly educate its own people. The same applies to the African and West Indian brain drain.
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@ Kiwi
If Asian Americans have enough of a business class then, like Jews, they would no longer find themselves so dependent on Whites. On the other hand, Whites could find an excuse to destroy it or take it over, as they did with the Japanese American internment. The Jews, not the internment, is the exception. Whites in the US have a long history of destroying or taking over independent power centres – Trail of Tears, Indian Wars, Tulsa, the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing, regime change, etc. Even lynching and police brutality are about keeping Blacks in an abject state (one that Blacks can never achieve, not even with their hands up, due to White racist fears).
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The more comments on this subject the less sense the settler/extractive colony argument makes. I see that Kiwi ignored my example of George Washington’s military career, from “Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and Commander in Chief of all forces now raised in the defense of His Majesty’s Colony” in 1755 to general of the rebels against the British in 1775. There’s no guarantee that the nations now deemed hostile to China won’t gravitate to her due to their economic interests, including Australia, dragging in racial and cultural issues to explain things fails to do the trick. Kiwi claims that Russia is China’s only ally but leaves out why he believes it is so. This ‘alliance’ needs explaining since these countries have a contentious history which as recently as 1969 resulted in armed clashes and the threat of nuclear war! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict. One of the reasons Mao opened talks with the USA was to use it as a counterweight against the Soviet Union, hence Nixon’s opening to China. Claiming that sovereign nations are extractive colonies because they depend on one or two cash crops or other commodities for their entree to the world market is simply ridiculous. Chili depends on copper and yet it had a sizable middle class same goes for Australia, New Zealand and a number of other nations. Returning to the life of G. Washington, we see that he started out as a planter of tobacco who depended on the British market until he switched to wheat farming, spinning, whiskey production, etc. that could be sold in the colonies. The great divide between settler and extractive didn’t exist for him since he dabbled in extractive as well as settler money making. Cuba is not a colony because Cubans determine their political fate despite the fact that their economy relied too much on sugar production, and now on exporting doctors. Abagond, since you seem to claim that Cuba is a colony, would you care to say whose colony it is? Haiti stopped being a colony in 1804 since Haitians determined their political fate until 1915 when it was invaded by the USA and reduced to a financial slave of that nation. You seem to want to argue that politics doesn’t matter with that settler/ extractive colony concept.
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Is it possible that we can look at something as “selectively extractive”? For example, these countries / regions (together with the Philippines) have been used as resources for the US military.
Guam seems to be used almost entirely for military and tourist extraction by the USA with a labour force primarily consisting of native Chamarros and Filipinos.
Saipan had also been used as an offshore manufacturing centre allowing the importation of foreign labour (who have no rights to travel to the US mainland), but since terminated.
(From Wikipedia):
“dozens of garment factories also opened; clothing manufacture became the island’s chief economic force, employing thousands of foreign contract laborers while labeling their goods “made in the U.S.A.” and supplying the U.S. market with low cost garments exempt from U.S. tariffs.”
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@ gro jo
When Castro overthrew Batista, he found out that that was the easy part. The economy was overly dependent on sugar, which made it overly dependent on the US. He was able to get the Soviet Union to buy most of its sugar instead, but he merely traded one colonial master for another. Cuba was still overly dependent on the Soviet Union when it fell.
The trouble was, it had no internal engine of growth. Everything depended too much on foreigners buying its sugar. It needed to diversify its economy. Just like what Iran is trying to do, knowing full well that some day its oil wells will run dry.
Compare that to the US, which is not overly dependent on any one thing or on foreigners buying its stuff.
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“He was able to get the Soviet Union to buy most of its sugar instead, but he merely traded one colonial master for another. Cuba was still overly dependent on the Soviet Union when it fell.” In your opinion that made Cuba a colony of the Soviet Union? Was it an “extractive” colony where the Soviet overlords came and underpaid for the sugar, greased the palms of the ruling clique and left the mass of the Cuban people in misery? That’s not how I remember it, so please explain how that colonial relationship worked. In my opinion this settler/extractive colony dichotomy ignores the political relationships and caricatures the economic ones. There’s something Procrustean about a concept that skirts complex relationships and substitutes a classification scheme instead of analysis.
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@gro jo
“Is Australia presently an extractive colony of China?.”
There are huge differences between a) stealing someone’s land by removing the inhabitants b) using the someone’s land and labor and b) legally starting an enterprise with purchased land and/or legally employing people.
Australia was created by Britons who effectively waged war on and stole indigenous land. The plan was not to rely on the labour of indigenous Australians, but to make Australia an extension of Britain, by populating it with British convicts and military, primarily, under British rule.
Iraq is extractive because, although Britain ruled it, the plan was not remove the inhabitants, but to use the resources for Britain’s benefit. Of course Britons did not settle Iraq en masse.
As to your question, China never waged war on Australia or stole Australian land to enlarge its empire. The fact that Chinese enterprises legally do business in Australia with assets they have legally purchased and legally hired employees, so Australia is obviously not an extractive colony of China.
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I think you missed my point, I was trying to show that taking out minerals or whatever from one place for your industries located somewhere else wasn’t necessarily ‘colonial’. In other words, the “is Australia a colony of China” question was rhetorical. My objection to this post is to the whole settler/extractive dichotomy. As my example of Washington’s biography illustrates, you can be both ‘settler’ and ‘extractor’. I failed to see a fundamental difference between the white settlers of the 13 colonies and the white settlers of the Caribbean, in general, but specifically St-Domingue (present day Haiti). All the colonies started out as business ventures to enrich their investors in the Metropole. Any divergence on how they ended up should be explained by their histories, not by some classification scheme.
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@gro jo
No, I think you missed the point of what constitutes colonialism. Using Andrea Smith’s pillars: a country that rules an empire and countries under its control, the China/Australia example does not seem to fit. Although Chinese enterprises are extracting minerals, etc. from Australia for consumption by China, the main two pillars of colonialism are not present because China does not wield “power over” Australia…not to my knowledge, at least.
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^and both extractive and settler colonialism are two forms of colonialism. I don’t see what’s the problem pointing out the distinguishing variable: the settlers from the metropole.
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One could argue that the ante-bellum South was largely extractive, with the North being the primary metropole (together with England). But, it was not purely an extractive colony of the North, as the ones who control the land, labour and capital of the South did not mostly migrate there from the North, but from England and Europe itself.
So, the North emerged as a settler colony early on (from the 17th century), but the South retained a largely extractive status until the 19th century.
By the 1830s – 1840s, that started to change with
– the expulsion of Natives for their land (in the South)
– a growing nativist identity distinctive from the North, seeking less reliance on the metropole of the North.
By then, they saw themselves as settlers in the South. First as Confederates, but after the Civil War, very much so as “Americans”. This was happening in the South when the North was receiving its large numbers of European immigrants. So, even in those counties in the Mississippi Delta that were only 10% white, they were still white settler colonies, albeit retaining some extractive characteristics (ie, supplying raw materials to the factories in the North which were staffed by European immigrants).
After the Great Migrations, they became less extractive.
I don’t think it is the same as Haiti or Jamaica.
As long as whites are seen as “Native Californian” and Latinos and Asian-Americans seen as non-native (perpetual foreigners), then California cannot be still called an extractive colony, whether or not white flight occurs. In order for that to occur, Mexicans and Asians would have to be viewed as the “REAL” Californians and whites as colonists. California is still very much a white settler colony even if non-whites become the technical minority (albeit a plurality). If California is extractive, what is the metropole?
South Africa is at a very different stage than California.
Hawaii is different, at least until the end of the 20th century. A mainland USA Asian-American who moved to Hawaii and settled there would often be treated as a local Hawaiian resident, and their children definitely would be. However, a white person moving there from the mainland would be treated very much like a haole, no matter how many decades he lived there. He might get the “Kama’aina rate” at certain establishments, but not be treated socially as Kama’aina. It may be possible for haoles to be Kama’aina, but they would have to have been born and raised in the islands, be a long term resident married to a Kama’aina or be part Hawaiian themselves.
I am not sure how Hawaii is today. Do they readily accept haole migrants from the mainland as Kama’aina? Regardless, the metropole is still mainland white America.
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