Summary
Patrick Wolfe’s term in Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics for the aggregate historical endowment settlers brought with them to Native country — economic, technological, military, cultural and moral attributes that were the combined outcome of centuries of Eurocolonial history — whose central characteristic is pre-formedness: a plenitude independent of local determinations, arriving ready-made (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.5-7 / printed p.137-139).
Details
- Wolfe introduces the term for the historical preconditions that equipped invaders for settlement before they first set foot in Native country, starting before the frontier, in the Zionist case before the Bilu settlers landed in 1882 (PDF p.5 / printed p.137).
- Its global reach endowed the settler project with an effectively unlimited capacity to reproduce itself, opposed to the relative fixity of the Native stock: demographically, more settlers could always come, augmented by coerced subordinates imported from outside; economically, Native societies were reduced to subsistence from an ever-shrinking repository subject to an advance guard of frontier irregulars, imported livestock and exotic predators (PDF p.5 / printed p.137).
- It is cultural as well as material — an endowment of consciousness, of ideologies of class, race and nation forged through colonial expansion abroad and class struggle within Europe together; Wolfe quotes Barbara Fields on colonial Virginia, that English servants entered the ring in company with preceding generations while Africans and Afro-West Indians entered alone (PDF p.6 / printed p.138).
- It differs from primitive accumulation: when Europe was piecing together its imperial-industrial-capitalist hegemony there was no prior Europe riding on its back, whereas Eurocolonial society arrived in Native country ex nihilo and ready-made, condensing the power and violence of the long run (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.138-139).
- Initially a metropolitan inheritance, it confronts on Native soil Natives endowed with different plenitudes from their own local histories, so outcomes cannot be predicted in advance; settler ascendancy rests in each case on a particular contextual mobilisation of the preaccumulated resources (PDF p.7 / printed p.139).
- In Palestine the decisive mobilisation was capital not conditional on a return of profit: foreign capital was, in Wolfe’s words, Zionism’s principal preaccumulation (PDF p.21 / printed p.153, sentence split by the running head in the text copy).
Related pages
Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, Conquest of Economics, Logic of Elimination