Replenishing the Earth

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the liberal political subject and the settler state

“…The proportion of emigrants settled through systematic colonization was small, some 4% in its heyday of the 1830s and 1840s. 10 Yet to dismiss the discourses it produced as mere rhetoric In the literature on systematic colonization I discuss, the settler appears as a fragile and unreliable representative of the colonizer's ideal of civilization. 13 As Wakefield wrote in a prospectus for the colonization of New Zealand, 'in general, a society transplanted from one of the densely-peopled countries of Europe, to one in which there was a wide extent of unoccupied land, has degenerated after its removal.…”

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

“…97 In nineteenth-century settler locations, such as the Cape Colony discussed by Alan Lester, the "domesticated family" provided the template and focus "for a new, British colonial culture" predicated on the transplantation of middle-class values and moral improvement. 98 There and elsewhere, the idealization of the frontier homestead run by a wife devoted to childrearing, cleaning, and cooking became seared into mythologies of white settlement.…”

After the British World

“…62 James Belich's Replenishing the Earth restores ideas of economic asymmetry but does so by placing the economic dynamics of settler expansion rather than socio-cultural networks at the core of the analysis. 63 On the other hand, the British world at times also risks neglecting settle colonialism and the internal and heavily unequal power dynamics between settlers and indigenous peoples (and the fact that such phenomenon were not limited to a British sphere). As Adele Perry has warned, 'deconstructing colonialism's self-serving success story is not without risks.…”