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Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.
-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Neither the English people themselves nor the masses of imperial subjects could be expected to perpetually accede to the imperial myth of civilizing in the face of the overtly selfish and catastrophic preoccupations of white settler colonists.
-Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism
In Patrick Wolfe we lost an intellectual giant. More than any other scholar, he has emerged as the leading figure in the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies and has done so much to advance its generative theoretical paradigm. We also lost another intellectual giant in 2016: Cedric J. Robinson, whose work challenged liberal and Marxist theories of political change, exposed the racial character of capitalism, unearthed a Black Radical Tradition and examined its social, political, cultural, and intellectual bases, and advanced a concept of racial regimes that deepens our understanding of the historically contingent character of racism. I learned a great deal from both men. When I first read Wolfe's Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, I found myself returning to Robinson's work, to places where their ideas converge and, especially, where they diverge. Unfortunately, Robinson's absence in the discourse on settler colonialism has, in my view, impoverished much of the work-including Wolfe's outstanding new book. My essay is a modest attempt to wrestle with specific claims in Traces of History, with Robinson's insights into race, racial capitalism, and colonialism, as well as traces of South African and European history, informing my critique.
Traces of History expands Wolfe's argument that settler colonialism operates through a "logic of elimination." The destruction or expulsion of indigenous peoples is a continuous feature of settler societies, primarily because they want the land. The logic of elimination is also consistent with forced assimilation as well as state policies that define and protect limited rights for indigenous people through the politics of recognition: cultural protections and individual rights in lieu of indigenous sovereignty, land and water rights, and the means of livelihood-a critical point made recently by Glen Coulthard.1
Wolfe sets out to interrogate the operations of race making in specific historical processes, in particular, in the always contingent struggles...