Extractive Labor: A Lethal Legacy of Racialized Colonial Rule

Abstract

How and why does colonial domination kill off the very labor it depends on? While settler colonial studies provide one of the only theorizations of the systemic elimination of populations, they see it as antithetical to labor exploitation, and thus cannot answer this question. I therefore build on recent critiques of settler colonial studies to develop the concept of racialized extractive labor regimes: race marking labor as disposable, as realizing value through expending workers’ lives. I then articulate these dynamics through a comparison of the highly divergent cases of early colonialism in Peru and what is now the United States, first across initial settlement and then as they shifted to racialization decades later. While settler colonial studies emphasize land acquisition as colonialism’s defining feature, my comparison reveals that elites’ drive for indelible inequality actually shapes colonial projects. And in order to maintain their vaunted positions, elites ultimately construct racialized extractive labor regimes that predicate their domination on the regularized elimination of racialized Others. This analysis therein provides new insights into the elitist nature of colonialism and the logics of elimination and racialization through which it runs.

Introduction

Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal worldwide mark of meanness,—color!

WEB DuBois (2003 [1920]: 52), Souls of White Folk

Negroes were to this country what raw materials were to another country.

US Retired General Charles Pinckney, 1785, quoted in Lewis (2017: 57).

Colonial racial formation in the Americas involved investing in eliminating the labor that colonial regimes depended upon. Forty years into the Peruvian colonial project, just as colonial demands for indigenous labor escalated, the new viceroy institutionalized genocide, reorganizing society such that in 30 years native numbers had plummeted by at least half. A few decades later in fledgling British North America, most members of the main labor force, imported European indentured servants, died before the end of their contracts. Both of these tales beg the question: how does a labor-dependent system survive if it kills off its workers?

While ‘many race scholars [fail] to include genocide of Indigenous peoples as formative in the analysis’, settler colonial studies explicitly theorize eliminatory logics (Fenelon, 2016: 1). Unfortunately, this theory maintains that elimination occurs apart from rather than as a defining aspect of exploitation. This means that it has yet to speak to the formative role of the contempt for life in racialized labor, largely conceiving lethality as either a contingent outcome or even antithetical to racial exploitation.

Joining recent challenges to the stark dichotomy between elimination and exploitation, this article critiques settler colonial studies through a major insight from the literature on racial capitalism as well as colonial racialization: it is not the coveting of land, as settler colonial theory maintains, but the elite drive for ‘the creation of an inequality that could never be breached’ (Huston, 2015: 136) that shapes colonialism—creating what Quijano (2000) terms a seignorial order. More specifically, I maintain that elite colonial rule consolidated through establishing racialized extractive labor regimes, which represent its great legacy: race structures the disposability of labor so as to enable elites to extract wealth.

An extractive labor regime is an organization of production that inherently treats labor as fully expendable. High mortality rates are not simply a consequence, but rather definitive of the system, with systemic perseverance depending on the expendability of labor. Furthermore, the turn toward racialization during the colonial experience salvaged such regimes from crisis. As racism thereby came to characterize extractive labor, these regimes provided racism with a major aspect of its systemic nature.

I unfold my argument and analysis as follows. In section ‘Challenging the Limiting Binaries of Settler Colonial Theory’, I build on recent works to construct a retheorization that places elites seeking enduring inequality at the center of colonialism and therein provide a new lens to understand racialized colonial relations. I then move on to empirically show the historical racialization and centrality of extractive labor regimes. I compare the development of two very different early colonial projects and their transitions to racialization. I analyze the British North American case in light of one of the most paradigmatic of colonial ventures, Peru. That is, I compare one of the most well-funded, deliberate, direct, envied, and emulated colonial projects, Peru, to a much more obscure, poorly funded, and haphazard effort, what is now the United States.

I draw on a large range of secondary sources focused on the history of colonialism in both areas, and as part of an evolving line of inquiry I have pursued for almost two decades (Scarritt, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2022). Like Coulthard (2014: 10), I shift the emphasis from ‘the capital relation to the colonial relation’, but investigate the means of colonial domination rather than his politics of indigenous recognition. I principally chose the cases for the illuminating power of their great differences, following the long tradition of building theory through comparing differences and similarities between highly disparate cases (Bernhard and O’Neill, 2021; Skocpol and Somers, 1980). More specifically, the colonial experiences of Peru heavily influenced the entire European colonial enterprise and its racialization but remain understudied as such.

In contrast, while providing profound insights, the case of the United States has defined the sociology of race and settler colonial studies to such an extent that it worrisomely comes across as an exceptional rather than an informative case. Its insights risk lack of application outside US national boundaries, needlessly truncating the intersection of race and nation, with contributions from the race-making experiences of colonialism largely elided in the major theoretical works (e.g. Bobo et al., 1997; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015; Feagin, 2010; Omi and Winant, 2014; Wilson, 2012). Part of this comparative study, then, aims at de-centering the United States to help make colonial and racial studies more profoundly global as they ultimately must be (cf. Mills, 2000). Such de-centering of the United States will also help other cases of Anglo-indigenous colonial relations, such as Australia and Canada, shed light on these issues.

Section ‘Early Colonization’ thereby compares the first decades of colonial rule in both areas. This reveals, contra the theories of settler colonialism, that elites seeking an indelibly unequal society drives colonialism, and suggests ways to intertwine rather than separate the key binaries of coloniality. Section ‘Racialized Extractive Labor’ compares how these very different and differently resourced colonies both turned to racialized extractive labor regimes to preserve elite domination in the face of crises. This shows the eliminatory logic of colonial labor. And it suggests a new conceptualization of racialization beyond the settler–colonized binary: as a means for elites to further inequality simultaneously within colonial society and between colonials and the colonized. That is, it offers a route to better understand the intersections of race and class in colonial society.

In this way, this paper offers a retheorization of settler colonial studies that expands its applicability and its usefulness for race scholars. Settlers did not principally covet land or labor, but colonial elites administered land as a core means of controlling the labor through which they extracted wealth. Settlers did not subject dominated populations to either an eliminatory or an exploitative logic, or even switch between these, but rather elites dominated through structuring death and violence as a defining aspect of labor within colonialism. Finally, settlers and the colonized are not set in binary racialized opposition, but rather race marks people as disposable while it divides non-elite settlers from non-elite racialized Others so as to enable elite domination.

Finally, space limitations prevent me from directly addressing resistance to colonial domination. As I indicate in the empirical sections, such actions played crucial roles in challenging elitist rule, bringing it to crisis, and forcing it to transform. In theoretically highlighting the core means through which colonial society runs, I suggest potential weaknesses to this form of domination. But directly addressing these issues will have to wait for future and longer publications.

Challenging the Limiting Binaries of Settler Colonial Theory

Why would colonial systems structure themselves to kill off the very labor they depend on? Settler colonial studies are one of the only bodies of works that explicitly theorize the systematic elimination of large populations. Unfortunately, these works follow the general thinking that a logic of preserving rather than eliminating labor is necessary for exploitation, keeping exploitation and elimination apart and failing to answer this question.

To retheorize this work, I join recent literature interrogating the binaries that limit a core thrust of settler colonial theory which holds that settlers covet native land not labor—land–labor binary—so eliminate natives and exploit imported slaves—the elimination–exploitation binary—achieved partially through eliminating colonial class differences such that a colonial–colonized racial binary defines society.

I begin this rethinking by using the racialized labor focus on elites to argue against a core tenet of settler colonialism that, as Wolfe (2006: 388) influentially put it, and as is often positively cited (e.g. Coulthard, 2014), ‘territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element’—settler colonialism is about seizing land. I add greater theoretical specificity: (1) it is not the general colonial population driving this process but the elites, and (2) they are not coveting land but seeking forms of accumulation by dispossession of which land represents one of the longest standing and most accessible means. Accumulation by dispossession means taking rather than making things: in contrast to the economic system of generating profit through capitalist production, it instead relies on the political collection of rents through ‘the monopolisation of particular portions of the globe by a certain class demanding a payment for its use’ (Ward and Aalbers, 2016: 1780) and therein ‘merely extracting value produced by other means’ (Hardt, 2010: 348).

In this distinction, the social impact of land use depends on what is done with the land, and the institutional and cultural practices that surround it (Coulthard, 2014; Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Furthermore, land is not the only means of accumulation by dispossession, and broadening the definition allows the possibility of seeing settler colonial logics reproduced up through today via such means as patents, health care, the financial industry, and higher education (Harvey, 2003; Sassen, 2010). Of course, such a shift begs more questions than it answers and is well beyond the scope of this article. I merely begin an exploration of the shift to elites here.

In contrast to settler colonial studies, the racialized labor literature demonstrates the crucial role of elites in driving racial splintering to achieve class domination. Bonacich et al. (2008), for instance, show capitalists opportunistically employing racial splintering to enhance worker exploitation. In a richer and far-reaching historical account, Robinson (2021: 26) defines the field by narrating how since the Middle Ages the nobility saw themselves as inherently superior to the common people, while the bourgeoisies since the 12th century were ‘seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the purpose of their domination’. That is, the feudalism Europeans imported into the New World presaged the inherence of modern racism and an utter contempt for the lives of non-elites, while mercantilism strove to divide the masses, with both seeking to entrench elitist rule.

But this scholarship lacks a theorization of elimination as systemic, despite Robinson’s narrations of many varieties of mass deaths in these times. Instead, this work ultimately sees capitalists as invested in preserving life and not invested in destroying it—insinuating that these are antithetical, that capitalists cannot be simultaneously invested in preserving and destroying life (Go, 2021; Ralph and Singhal, 2019). Furthermore, as Robinson has been critiqued for elsewhere, he sees racial splintering beginning centuries before colonization and therein misses the particularly race-making processes of colonialism addressed here (Conroy, 2023; Miapyen and Bozkurt, 2022; Walzer, 2020). However, as will help expand settler colonial studies, racial capitalism conceives of racialization not as a white–Other binary, but as a tool of elite domination over non-elites of all stripes.

Shifting the focus to elites, however, requires a rethinking of the underlying binaries. If coveting land does not drive colonialism, what role does land have? If eliminating natives is not the means to clear lands for colonization, what explains genocide—by what logic does elimination run? And, finally, if racialization is not a settler–colonized binary, what role does it play in colonialism?

Foundational to settler colonial studies, different oppressed groups fit differently into settler colonial regimes. Their racialization occurred differently, through divergent means, and for different ends. As Patrick Wolfe (1998, 2006, 2016) spells it out and as is often repeated in the field (inter alia, Castellanos, 2017; Glenn, 2015; Veracini, 2010, 2016, 2021), settler colonialism subjected indigenous people to a logic of elimination while incorporating imported African slaves under a logic of exploitation. Settlers coveted indigenous lands but not their labor, exterminating them to possess their lands, and instead put landless slaves to work for colonial desires.

There has been good work challenging this dichotomy from a variety of angles (e.g. Cordis, 2019; Kelley, 2017; Mays, 2021; Sturm, 2019). Especially in the Latin American context, authors emphasize that colonists both exploited and eliminated natives at different times (O’Brien, 2017; Speed, 2017; Taylor and Lublin, 2021). While these works stress that societies can readily switch between these logics, the critiques still keep the concepts apart, insinuating that a logic of preservation is required for exploitation rather than a logic of elimination (Englert, 2020; Gordillo, 2004). Moreover, these critiques are generally based on the notion that the split is due to employing the Anglo colonial experiences as paradigmatic (Englert, 2020; Taylor, 2021; Taylor and Lublin, 2021). My point is that even in Anglo cases colonial domination required employing these together. As such, the fusion of the two came to define colonization and eventually the racialization that saved elitist colonial society.

This leads into what Speed (2017: 783) calls the ‘largely unexamined premise’ of a land-labor dichotomy in settler colonial studies (Poets, 2021; Taylor, 2021). This holds that colonials want subaltern groups for either their land or their labor—but never both, and therein subject them to either extermination or exploitation, respectively. Finding many empirical cases where land and labor are not neatly divided, works have begun challenging this dichotomy, calling for a rethinking of the theory, though with providing few specifics on how to do so (Baker, 2021; Speed, 2017; Taylor, 2021). Heeding these calls, I employ data from both Anglo and Iberian cases that show that elites relate to land as a means to control the labor from which they extract value.

But understanding this requires enhancing the class analysis of settler colonial studies, particularly addressing the racialized labor point that elite-driven racial division enables elite class domination over all non-elites. Settler colonial studies tends to homogenize colonial populations, providing distorted findings. Specifically, class tends to disappear with settler colonial studies’ emphasis that ‘settlers win by discontinuing unequal relationships’ (Veracini, 2016: 3), such as with Speed (2017: 789), concluding that settler logics are ‘the racial and gendered logics that allow Euro-American men to remain inevitably dominant’, and therein missing crucial distinctions between class and other forms of privileges (Harris, 1993).

In one recent exception, Englert (2020: 1658) emphasizes that ‘The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession’. Englert therein importantly adds that class struggle within colonial society shapes the redistributive outcomes of colonial actions, and also invests non-elites in the colonial venture—to the extent their class power leverages ‘colonial booty’.

But by focusing on the role of the settler working class rather than problematizing elites, Englert follows settler colonial theories in maintaining race as a dichotomous relation between settlers and natives (Jafri, 2013). That is, Englert’s analysis does not incorporate the point made by Allen (1994) and others that the means of colonial domination are a powerful tool for the colonial elite to maintain their vaunted positions above all non-elites, both colonizers and the colonized (cf. Mamdani, 1996; Roediger, 2017; Scarritt, 2015). Or, to put it another way, Englert fails to see that a powerful tool of elite domination entails redirecting anti-elite resentment toward the indigenous and other non-elites, reframing the issue from rapacious elites to threatening Others.

This oversight therein does not recognize the means of colonial domination as a contested if highly unequal terrain through which all non-elites can fight colonialism from within colonialism itself (Faragher, 2014; Poets, 2021; Scarritt, 2022; Slovo, 1997). It rather reifies the boundaries between non-elite groups. Furthermore, in only seeing working-class settlers struggle over the distribution of loot taken through accumulation by dispossession, Englert—and Coulthard (2014) similarly—fails to see that non-elite settlers therein also acquiesce to having accumulation by dispossession exercised on themselves. This is akin to arguing that US whites currently benefit from the accumulation by dispossession processes in health care simply because people of color are hurt more. Herein Englert, like Speed, misunderstands the ‘consolation prize’ nature of white privilege—it is not a resource for upward mobility but just a guarantee of not being the lowest (Harris, 1993: 1758; Olson, 2004).

All told, then, these works enable a rethinking of settler colonial studies with elites at the center. Elites seeking an unbreachable inequality drives the system. Land is a preeminent way of controlling labor. Elimination and exploitation can work together to extract value for elites. And racialization is a means of consolidating elite control through marking a particular population as expendable and dividing non-elite populations. In what follows, I use comparative historical case studies of the racialization process in two highly divergent colonial ventures to first show the elitist nature and drive for accumulation by dispossession of colonialism, and second show how the racialization of these used different means to consolidate elite power through institutionalizing eliminatory logics in race. Ultimately, these two highly divergent cases employed different means to arrive at racialized extractive labor regimes with which to maintain elite domination.

Early Colonialism: Preserving Native Society for Elite Domination

Contrary to the core theories, early colonization in Peru and British North America did not center on seizing native lands, and did not occur through racially splintering or eliminating natives, or through discontinuing unequal relationships between colonists. Rather, while these two efforts had dramatically different resources and faced divergent situations, they both strove to establish and maintain an indelibly unequal society in which the colonial elite secured their vaunted positions through establishing a non-elite population from which they could extract wealth. And, while the specifics differ in important ways, they both largely did so through (1) preserving native society and access to land, and (2) using strategic administrative control over land to control labor for (3) the ultimate purpose of extracting wealth.

The key difference was that the wealthy Spanish venture successfully subordinated existing native society to serve its interests while the more impoverished British efforts failed to do so and thus had to import highly disposable labor from home. In this, to enable elite domination the British quickly established an extractive regime while the Spanish relied on the indigenous productive labor regime. And, for the first decades of colonialism, while there were many racist acts and thoughts, neither of these projects racialized society as racialization proved antithetical to elite domination.

Early Colonial Peru

The Spanish of 16th-century Peru subjected the indigenous populations to many horrible deprivations, including enslavement and hunting humans for sport. Nevertheless, for the first almost half century of colonialism, Spanish well-being largely depended upon maintaining rather than undermining native society. This governance, then, involved racist acts and intents, but was not racialized in the sense of reshaping heterogeneous populations into a degraded homogeneous mass, a ‘mark of meanness’ institutionalized to serve supposedly inherently superior masters. Rather, conquest resembled more of a coup. The Europeans replaced the existing imperial overlords and kept much of the local systems in place (Covey, 2020; Klarén, 2000; Scarritt, 2022; Stern, 1992).

The colonials imposed themselves like parasites on top of indigenous social structures, reaping great windfalls through keeping the social order in place. This meant that the Spanish recognized and reinforced native hierarchy, including its various forms of aristocracy. Furthermore, Spanish domination maintained and even enhanced regionalized ethnic group identities and political organization—an ethnic splintering that helped Spanish rule while enhancing the power of local indigenous leaders presenting themselves as liberators from Incan domination (Scarritt, 2015; Stern, 1992).

Instead of the Incan system, however, the Spanish set up a much more fractured encomienda system. Encomienda granted colonists lordly oversight rather than outright ownership of huge tracts of land. It ‘gave individual Spaniards the right to demand labor and tribute from the Indians assigned to them’ (Keith, 1971: 435). Indeed, at this time, ‘rights to land were of little economic value . . . . Control of land did not necessarily confer control of the labor needed to exploit it’ (Keith, 1971: 434). In other words, the Spanish were not interested in acquiring land to work themselves, but vassals to pay tribute. And the best way to keep this running was to keep native society intact.

The encomienda system thus was based on the largely unconscious assumption that indigenous social, political, and economic organization would survive in more or less the same state in which the Spaniards found it. (Keith, 1971: 435)

While accessing native labor was the cornerstone of colonialism, the bylaws specified that the Spanish could not directly recruit labor but had to go through the local indigenous nobility, or curacas. The most successful encomenderos prospered through lavishing patronage upon the indigenous nobility. This greased the tracks for the upward flow of labor and tribute, but also enhanced curaca power and made encomenderos more dependent upon the viability of the local systems. Rather than a racialized system of degraded masses holding up an exalted European aristocracy, then, the fractured encomienda elite used their positions to shore up pre-existing social relations to best ensure their own standings (Scarritt, 2015, 2022; Stern, 1992).

During these first 40 years, then, no thorough process of racialization occurred, in the sense of an institutionalized mark of meanness. Rather, diverse indigenous societies persevered, distinguished from each other and self-governed through reciprocal hierarchical relations—though with new obligations of providing tribute in labor and treasure to the Spanish overlords. The labor regime consisted of a broad base of highly localized and diversified, integrated labor practices tied to regional production and cross-ecological reciprocal trade under the authorities of family and local ethnic lords (Andrien, 2001). From this base the Spanish extracted tribute to serve their own purposes.

The connection between land and labor under this regime involved Spanish encomenderos having political authority over specific tracts of land so they could control the labor. This form of control was indirect, going through the local indigenous authorities, preserving native labor practices to get a tax of overall production in the form of labor and tribute. Colonials owning land made little sense (Keith, 1971). But colonials controlling the land as much as they could through preserving native society was the way they controlled their prime target: labor. Thus, land and labor were intimately tied together. And, up to this point, extraction was not related to extermination, but rather preservation. This was largely due to the colonists’ limited power, and thus dependence on a preserved native society. Within decades, however, the weakness of the encomienda system began generating crises of colonial rule, with preserved native societies providing capacities to foment outright rebellions and resist tribute obligations just as the European population grew, helping to increase colonial infighting (Covey, 2020; Lockhart, 1994; Scarritt, 2015; Stern, 1992).

In sum, then, early colonial Peru did not work through seizing native lands or racializing indigenous groups as settler colonial and racial capitalism theories hold. Indeed, it worked through the opposite: through preserving native society and access to land. The colonists rather held on to their single-minded goal of establishing and maintaining an aristocratic society in which the upward flow of labor and tribute made them powerful lords. Herein the colonists established the native populations as the subservient non-elite from which they could extract wealth. But this entailed preserving and running through rather than dismantling native hierarchies. Seizing land was not the goal or a way to achieve control over labor. Rather, preserving native access to land and instead imposing themselves as rapacious administrators up to which wealth flowed proved the best method for achieving an aristocratic society they dominated. Similarly, while Spaniards employed some ethnic splintering, they did so through shoring up existing local ethnic relations rather than imposing new and explicitly divisive forms of ethnic relations as occurred in later colonial ventures (Li, 2011; Mamdani, 1996; Scarritt, 2015).

Early British North America

Early North American British colonialism also relied on preserving native society. But lacking the same ability to access indigenous labor, the elites set up an extractive labor regime through importing dependent labor from Europe. The colonial gentry quickly became invested in and shored up the indenture system which established a vast inequality through rendering its labor highly disposable. The elites’ problem for maintaining their domination was not how to preserve labor, but how to maintain the lethality of the system. And, as I will explain here, while native groups controlled most of the lands, the gentry monopolized control over colonial lands in order to keep colonial non-elites in positions of deadly subordination.

Up through the end of the 17th century, the much more impoverished British crown envied and feared their wealthy Iberian counterparts. The Anglo colonial charters mandated the enslavement of indigenous populations and the flow of tribute for the glory of the crown. Yet, these racist aspirations lacked the capital investment to become institutionalized. While sporadic enslaving and killing occurred, the British toeholds in North America proved even more dependent upon viable indigenous societies than did the Spanish. Colonial survival did not depend on conquering the natives but rather relied on indigenous treaties and even charity. In some areas without a strong aristocratic presence, Europeans lived intermingled, equitably, and in relative harmony with local indigenous groups creating ‘a closer association between native and settler than between settler and overlord’ (Faragher, 2014: 188). Early British efforts not only lacked the capacity to conquer and racialize, many officials warned aspirant colonizers against making landfall.

But the rising colonial aristocracy, bent on emulating the homeland and its insurmountable inequality, did not let the intractability of natives get in their way (Huston, 2015). Luckily, one of the major push factors for colonization entailed severe shortages of food and employment in England, driven by aristocracy-led enclosures. Plagued by what they regarded as irredeemable indolent rogues who needed controlling through workhouses, prisons, and even slavery, the failings of feudal Tudor rule provided a huge potential pool for colonial labor. But these shiftless masses needed removal and relocation to the colonies.

Drastically failing to suborn sufficient indigenous labor, the colonial gentry set up a system of indentured servitude. Kidnapping adults, snatching children and selling them as slaves, and the forced transportation of convicts and prisoners all sought to relieve England’s problems by addressing the labor needs of the colonies (Fredrickson, 1982). Heavy workloads, hazardous living conditions, and low life expectancy meant a large portion of indentured servants failed to live out their servitude in order to realize their freedom (Bailyn, 2013; Wareing, 2017).

Losing so much of their labor through excess mortality would seemingly undermine the colonial economy. If servants outlived their indenture, however, the aristocracy would have to accommodate non-gentry through altering the system, something the freedmen continually agitated for but never realized. Instead, the gentry largely did not have to adjust their society because the indentured died. For those who outlived their terms, the gentry invented several terrible options that preserved their seignorial order. Most prominently, they used the newly enfranchised in highly lethal efforts to push the frontier for later elite appropriation. Otherwise, the few freedmen could rent from landlords or directly return to servitude, with debt peonage rife when tobacco prices fell (Morgan, 1975).

In sum, the British desired to emulate the Iberian experiences, but were too poor to realize their initial dreams of controlling the lands to subdue the local population for labor and treasure. British colonialism nevertheless succeeded in establishing and maintaining an extractive labor regime. They did so through the highly costly process of importing unwanted British labor to the colonies, building an infrastructure to incorporate and maintain the imported labor in a deadly subservient position. The twin needs of elite aggrandizement and non-elite subservience required treating labor as expendable, as a raw material needing to be spent rather than preserved. Rather than seeing labor as a long-term investment upon which the elites depended, laborers outliving the terms of their indenture threatened the colonial system. The gentry therein had to create various mechanisms to make the imported labor serve the extractive labor regime.

As with the Peruvian case, land and labor were intimately attached, with control over land forging the main tool to control the most important resource: labor. In Britain, the aristocracy exercised an iron control over lands, with their expansionism generating surplus labor and the conditions to have it exported to the colonies. In the colonies, the natives controlled most of the lands, squashing elite dreams and crown mandates to ensnare native labor into colonial machinations.

But the lands the colonies did control served as a powerful tool for elite domination. The gentry jealously guarded these, refusing the freedmen’s appeals for cultivable fields. By so controlling the lands, the elites effectively weaponized them. This kept freedmen in positions of dependence, having to support the elitist indenture system in some way or another. Elites also institutionalized the landholding system to expand the indenture system, such as through the headright system that awarded the gentry 50 acres for every imported indentured servant (Huston, 2015). This not only enhanced elite control over land, but it also subsidized a continual flow of servants into the lethal indenture system.

Herein control of land and even the expansion of territory are not about enabling the greater inclusion of more colonists, with Europeans arrayed against natives. This was the opposite of providing territory for the inclusion of a relatively homogeneous white population. Land control and expansion were rather about enhancing elite domination. Controlling the land was not about producing from the land, but about controlling the labor necessary to concentrate wealth and enhance the stark divide between commoner and gentry. Controlling the land enabled a lethal control over labor, enabling wealth concentration and aristocratic domination.

Comparison: Elitism, Life, and Death

While they had similar mandates to plunder the New World for the glory of the crown, the Spanish and the British cases unfolded in vastly different ways. The well-financed Spanish subdued an empire and the shoestring British struggled to establish a toehold. The similarities therein speak to key elements spanning the European colonial venture. And these run against the prevailing literature in major ways. First, establishing a vaunted elite primarily drove early colonialism. The Spanish made natives subordinates while the British imported theirs. But the point of colonialism was for an elite to employ whatever means at their disposal to establish a subordinated population from which they could extract wealth. Second, this did not occur through seizing native lands, eliminating natives, through racialized splintering, or through intra-colonial class equality. Instead, elite domination occurred in both cases through preserving native society and access to land—though for very different reasons and in very different ways.

Third, contrary to the land-labor bifurcation of settler colonial studies, elites dominated by controlling labor through controlling land. That is, the land was not the main goal, but rather administering it so as to enable elite rule. The Spanish ensconced themselves as parasitic overseers siphoning off a small part of the productivity of a normally running native society. The British rather had to accept native control over the majority of lands from which they could not extract wealth. But with the nobility in Britain controlling the lands in such a way that created shiftless masses, the colonial gentry could monopolize colonial lands so as to render imported indentured labor totally disposable, granting colonial elites mercenary control over life and death. ‘To start at the top’—the beginning—then, as Wolfe (2006: 390–391) claims to do, colonization is actually about reproducing European aristocratic society, with Wolfe’s ‘irregular, greed crazed invaders’ not going against elite dictates as he says but, compelled by elite land monopolization pitting them against natives, dangerously pushing the frontier created by elites to ultimately extend aristocratic society.

The major difference between the cases was that the British set up an extractive labor regime. That is, the much more impoverished colonial venture had to quickly resort to this lethal system. The Spanish elite acquired their lordly positions through a preservation logic of replacing the upper-tier indigenous nobility. But the British had to rely on eliminatory logic, positioning themselves with godlike powers over life through the lethal indenture system. This was accumulation by dispossession in the sense that elites gain through totally expending workers. Labor is not exploited but extracted, has its value realized through expending it like a raw material. And, as with other forms of accumulation by dispossession, the goal was not economic productivity as this was undermined by killing the producers, but, as David Harvey (2005: 16) characterizes our current iteration, ‘was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of [elite] class power’. In contrast, the basis of Spanish control was not accumulation by dispossession but maintaining the productivity of native society, and extracting rent from this.

Racialized Extractive Labor

After decades of colonial rule, internal contradictions began threatening elite domination in both colonies. For different reasons and in different ways these highly divergent colonies both turned to racialized extractive labor regimes to preserve the seigniorial order. In comparison with the previous decades, this new order employed novel, racialized means to maintain the outcome of elite domination similar to both areas in the earlier era. The Spanish used costly military might and state power to control lands in order to exert a much more direct control over labor and render it extractable. The British colonials, in contrast, had to invent a host of policies and resources over many decades in order to use colonial class differentiation to create racial fracturing and thereby reassert elite power over all non-elite, indigenous, and otherwise.

Contrary to the land–labor divide, both cases used increased control over land to exercise greater control over labor and render it extractable. Contrary to the exploitation–elimination separation, systemically subjecting labor to exterminatory logics enabled elites to extract value from labor. More importantly, racialization was not a settler-colonized dichotomy involving either greater colonial equality or colonial working-class struggles for a greater share of booty. Rather, racialization entailed elites providing particular kinds of—racialized—resources that enhance aristocratic domination over all non-elites, both settler and colonized.

Spanish Racialization

While early colonialism relied on preserving native society and ethnic diversity, colonial contradictions and the pressing needs of the crown inspired a radical remaking of society. In the relatively rapid span of well less than a decade, the king employed vast resources to turn colonial society inside out. This mostly involved racializing the native populations, reducing their diversity to a much more homogeneous Indian race to enable colonial extraction. As I will address here, the violence and crushing of life-sustaining indigenous institutions generated a racialized extractive labor regime in which the genocidal loss of indigenous life actually made more labor extractable by colonials.

To shore up his flagging colony and teetering empire, the king sent a new viceroy, Francisco Álvarez de Toledo. The new viceroy employed military might to put down indigenous rebellions. But more impactfully, through a 5-year tour of the sprawling colony, Toledo adopted the thinking of racist luminaries like Juan de Matienza who argued that bringing Spanish civilization was worth any human cost. Toledo therein abandoned ideas of native sovereignty and put the full power of the crown toward dramatically reshaping the colonial order (Covey, 2020). Instead of relatively coherent indigenous groups serving the splintered demands of a disordered colonial elite, the Toledo Reforms disciplined rebellious colonials into a civil society while breaking the back of the native economy so native labor would directly serve Spanish desires.

As he sought to shore up the native labor upon which the colony depended, Toledo also unleashed genocide. As his centerpiece, Toledo massively scaled up the colonial practice of civilizing through relocating native populations from their ancestral lands into urban concentrations called reducciones. Toledo viewed native landholdings as the basis for what he believed was their natural indolence—and resistance to Spanish rule and religious conversion (Covey, 2020). So, on behalf of the roughly 9000 Spanish in the colony, he systematically moved up to a million and a half native people to where their labor could be best accessed for colonial priorities, particularly in the mining and agricultural sectors (Andrien, 2001; Wightman, 1990). While he believed this would help native labor reproduction, he also knew it would make labor less able to resist and more accessible to colonial needs.

The indigenous society that had sustained early colonialism—and the Incan empire before it—was a complex multiethnic society that wove together the full gamut of systems, ranging from health and sanitation to communication, administration, and trade. This included 30,000 km of roadways, agricultural and animal domestication, and complex vertical trade through the highly variable ecological zones of the 7000-m-high Andes (Andrien, 2001).

Toledo’s reforms racialized by ripping these systems apart, transforming native infrastructure from enabling a vibrant autonomy to forcing a desperate dependence. Toledo deliberately undermined the great complexity of multiethnic native society with its diversity of ranks and specialized jobs with which it sustained large population sizes. He radically simplifying it, ‘treating the indigenous peoples as a common mass of undifferentiated ‘Indians’’ (Andrien, 2001: 57), enabling colonists to treat all natives as degraded sources of labor and tribute—he racialized them. In addition to brutal coercion and war campaigns against rebellions—including the elaborately festive execution of the Incan rebel Tupac Amaru—the new living and working conditions decimated the native populations, dropping by almost half in three decades (Covey, 2020; Gade and Escobar, 1982).

While Toledo may have protected natives from the arbitrary labor demands of abusive colonists, the reducciones made labor exploitation much more systematic. Colonists looked greedily upon the reducciones such that ‘[b]y the end of the sixteenth century, in fact if not in law, native resources in land, labor, and goods were regarded as a reservoir upon which members of Spanish society could draw with relative impunity’ (Spalding, 1973: 589). In addition to mining, the Spanish pressed natives into servitude, agricultural work, and into harsh manufacturing, especially textile workshops. The terrible labor demands maimed and killed with such impunity that entire sections of reducciones disappeared. Despite this genocidal devastation, Spanish labor demand increased (Bakewell, 1984). Colonists continued to blame labor problems on native indolence and called for ever harsher means of extracting it (Wightman, 1990).

In all, while Toledo rapidly accelerated indigenous population decline, his reshaping of colonial society realized the overarching goal of making more labor available to colonial designs. Despite massively undercutting the labor pools, by geographically relocating, concentrating, and isolating—by racializing—the native population, Toledo achieved a net gain in labor available to the growing colonial population. As Moore (2018: 15) puts it, ‘Horrific mortality mattered little, so long as the costs of appropriation . . . were sufficiently low’.

That is, Toledo forged one of the first and most robust racialized extractive labor regimes. In order to fulfill the growing colonial demand for labor, the population of potential workers had to be treated as totally expendable. And herein the great contradiction underlying colonial regimes reveals itself. To render labor amenable to colonial designs, labor must be treated as fully disposable. To achieve this, Toledo forcibly removed people from the geography and social arrangements that sustained them – and their ability to resist. In his establishment of this extractive labor regime, Toledo kept the Spanish colonial tight connection of land and labor, and unleashed extermination as a tool of heightened extraction. This became the model of colonization that others tried to emulate: land control enabling a dehumanized removal and relocation of labor, exploited despotically through extermination. And racialization would prove essential for preserving it.

Especially when compared to the earlier period, this quick racialization process reveals key facets of racialized colonial rule that enhance settler colonial theory. As with early colonialism both North and South, the central goal was maintaining a vaunted elite who could extract wealth from the subordinated. Controlling the land was not the goal but the means to this aristocratic end. Rather than elimination through not providing resources or through directly slaughtering to clear the land, Toledo provided civilization—he provided specific resources that genocidally reshaped native society to directly serve colonial interests. That is, exploitation occurred through an exterminatory logic, forging exploitation into extraction: colonists did not appropriate surplus labor as in exploitation relations, but rather extracted labor well beyond its capacity to reproduce: as a raw material whose worth was realized through expending it, through the dispossession of productive and life-sustaining systems and life itself. While well beyond the scope of this article, racialization may have briefly looked dichotomous between settler and native, it quickly became more complex through the process of mestizaje (cf. Scarritt, 2015, 2022).

British Colonial Racialization

As with the Spanish, the crises of the British system toward the end of the 17th century inspired them to increasingly turn to racialization. Unlike the Spanish, however, the British still lacked the capacity to bring the natives to heel, had already established an extractive labor regime, and had a large population of non-elite colonists to deal with. Indeed, the key difference from early British colonialism that forged racialization into elite colonial domination was the incapacity of the indenture system to contain non-elite colonists while simultaneously dealing with ongoing conflicts with indigenous groups. That is, the means of controlling the land so as to extract labor under an eliminatory logic suffered serious difficulties that the elite chose to deal with not through increasing egalitarianism and humanity, but through upscaling violence and inequality through racialization. Importantly, racialization provided a means for the elite to have their cake and eat it, too: the particular resources they provided enabled them to enhance their control over colonial land and labor while increasing the inequality between elites and non-elites.

The institutionalizing of African slavery emblemizes a steep racialization of the colonies. It largely occurred at the end of a process wherein the elite failed to sufficiently keep non-elites in the indenture system. Much of this had to do with indenture becoming slightly more humane: people began outliving the terms of their servitude. By 1670, colonial society began facing the same feudal crisis that colonialism had rescued the mother country from: shiftless masses with insufficient roles in the prevailing order. Morgan (1975: 221) finds local estimates of freedmen ranging from 25% to 40% of the population.

Another way of looking at it is that the non-elites of American, African, and European origin presented the colonial gentry with many examples and opportunities to create a society less steeped in inequality and lethality. The elite, however, resisted with full force, only offering opportunities that preserved the seigniorial order. They did not, however, offer what the freedmen wanted the most: access to cultivable land. Even as indenture began unraveling, the elite still used their monopoly control over cultivable lands to control labor and stifle non-elite desires to transform the system.

Even without giving them lands, elites denied freedmen the vote, and still made them subject to levees and other taxes, such as the quitright owed the king. That is, the aristocracy continued to try and make these formerly indentured the tools of the seigniorial order, serving elite interests in multiple ways, especially by either rejoining servitude or pushing the frontier. They brooked no compromise, particularly if it eroded aristocratic standing in any way. Rather, they sought only to maintain their extractive labor regime through maintaining their control over the land. Under these conditions, the gentry’s regular problem of frontier wars, such as the Powhatan wars and King Phillip’s War, was joined by growing rebellions among poor Europeans (Lepore, 1998).

The different colonies in British North America took similar two-pronged approaches to employ racialization to preserve aristocratic society. They changed laws and practices to newly reward freedmen—increasingly termed white—for subordinating Indians and black folk, freed and enslaved, on behalf of the seigniorial order. And at the same time, the elite sowed racial fear and hatred among freedmen—resources that seemed cheap and endlessly renewable—to ideologically motivate freedmen to participate in their new roles in the elitist society. That is, through racializing, the elites overcame their problem of keeping their monopoly of land while incorporating the freedmen that the indenture system had made shiftless, providing many new positions and roles for freedmen that maintained the highly unequal status quo within European colonial society. More than a colonial class struggle over loot as Englert (2020) characterizes it, elites mollified non-elite colonists by giving them roles that simultaneously increased colonial class differences and settler-colonized racial differences—racialized resources that consolidated elite power.

The strongest strain of racial hatred developed out of the colonial experience of European fear of extermination at the hands of natives. The Europeans largely brought the concept of the total war to the Americas. As Lewis (2017: 18) describes it,

Native peoples did not generally practice exterminatory warfare. After contact with Europeans, however, Native Americans learned quickly that it was in their best interest to operate in what would become the ‘American way’: applying English techniques of massive slaughter that indigenous people themselves frequently experienced during English attacks.

The British therein created the conditions for their terrible fears of race war and extermination.

Those fears drove a mentality based on an ‘us versus them’ dichotomy that demanded action. Such fears led to the death of thousands of Native people—men, women, and children—who were seen as collateral damage in what English colonialists viewed as ‘just wars’. (Lewis, 2017: 11)

Since the beginning, the British colonials had a conflicted relationship with American natives. Some they regarded as invaluable allies, while others they saw as only worthy of slaughter. Many scholars incorrectly see Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 as a cross-race alliance of the poor threatening the ‘simple survival’ of society (Horne, 2018: 148). But Bacon was another elite fighting for standing in an elitist society, related through marriage to his main foe, Virginia governor Berkeley. Most importantly, the rebellion catalyzed colonial policy to homogenize natives as the true enemy. Such provided a way for the government to greatly enhance its elitist positions through giving in to the rebels’ demands.

Rather than a cross-race class rebellion, Bacon attacked the colony’s native allies, scapegoating these groups as responsible for preventing freedmen from exercising their freedom dues and gaining land ownership. The rebellion recast the gentry’s long-standing efforts to keep freedmen in the indentured system as the fault of natives whom they saw as worthy only of extermination, lest they exterminate Europeans first. Berkeley took the opportunity to sell out his native allies, and keep the ‘colony continually on the brink of rebellion’, so he and his cronies could profiteer, setting up ‘legalized plundering by which the loyal party were accumulating property at the expense of everyone they could label a rebel’ and ‘squeezing the people to the point where the king’s whole revenue from Virginia might be lost’ (Morgan, 1975: 221–295). That is, the elite used the rebellion and its anti-indigenous racism to more deeply entrench the seigniorial order, bringing greater economic and social distinction between the European aristocracy and commoners.

But the rebellion does mark one area where non-elite and gentry came together. The concessions Berkeley granted did not significantly alter land tenure arrangements. Rather, they were part of an accelerating process of racialization. These concessions cost elites very little, but had tremendous rewards: the gentry could maintain their vaunted positions and keep commoners relatively impoverished while working to shore up the seigniorial order. That is, while these racialization processes brought the gentry and commoners closer together along racial lines—both groups increasingly identifying as white—they increased economic and social divides. As Walsh (2010: 5) put it, ‘Growing inequality among whites went hand in hand with increasing degradation and exploitation of enslaved blacks’. The aristocracy got wealthier and more unassailable, and the commoners came to more directly serve the needs of a seigniorial order while still failing to realize their dreams of access to cultivable land.

Racialized resources were many and varied. In direct response to the rebellion, Virginia reversed its policy against enslaving Indians, effectively granting Bacon a ‘slave-hunting license’ (Morgan, 1975: 328), a shift echoed in New England (Warren, 2016). ‘By 1682 any Native person traveling or living in Virginia could be legally enslaved’ (Lewis, 2017: 21). Such changes homogenized the very different native American and African populations ‘marking them as degraded people fit only for enslavement and the brutality required to extract work’ (Scarritt, 2022: 104). As Morgan (1975: 329) puts it, ‘Indians and Negroes were henceforth lumped together in Virginia legislation, and white Virginians treated black, red, and intermediate shades of brown as interchangeable’.

Many other piecemeal changes unfolded over the next 50 years, a racialization process increasing as time passed. This provided a host of political, economic, social, emotional, and psychological rewards for whiteness. The different colonies began granting whites rights and taking rights away from natives and blacks. Christian Indians and Africans were prohibited from owning Christian servants. Indian and Africans could get 30 lashes for lifting a hand against any Christian. Deficiency laws began mandating only menial jobs to people of color while reserving and sometimes creating white quotas for skilled and oversight jobs. Colonies began to seize property owned by slaves for redistribution to poor whites. By 1723, Virginia outlawed the freeing of slaves, soon after stripping any free blacks and Indians of political rights. For decades after, explicitly racialized jobs, such as slave patrol militias, expanded in opportunity and profitability, especially as slave laws became more draconian (Scarritt, 2022).

Theodore Allen’s (1994: 245) canonical work explains that the point of the system was not to protect against slave revolts but to control poor whites. ‘Nothing could have been more apparent than that the small cohort of the ruling elite must have a substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum to stand between it and “great disturbances”, or even another rebellion’ of white freedmen.

But these resources would not work without racial hatred and fear. And these tied extermination and exploitation together. The colonists engaged in exterminatory warfare, but this process rendered native survivors enslavable. For instance, ‘New England codes of law were used as early as 1641 to affirm that bond slavery was lawful if the persons were ‘Captives taken in just warres’’ (Lewis, 2017: 27). Rather than a special case just for native Americans, this logic passed to the governing of Africans.

Such a system, sustained by exhibitions of violence, brute force, and dehumanization, became normalized for its executioners, even as it became symbolic of their own underlying fear of annihilation. (Lewis, 2017: 12)

This racialized labor form required constant symbolic and actual reminders of the lethal violence driving it. Elites increasingly empowered European commoners to perpetrate this violence, both routinely and arbitrarily. This privilege also increasingly shifted poor whites out of the extractive labor category, a privilege in itself. But, as Lewis notes, in such a polarized situation, the lethality created a self-reinforcing spiral, wherein perpetrators created their own fear of violence, inciting them to greater lethality.

North American racialization was a slow process that increasingly wove ideas of settler extinction into the fabric of society. As the years advanced, the preservation of elitist society proved to require ever-increasing amounts of racial rewards and hatreds. And the notion that colonists were locked in a war of extermination grew to increasingly define settler society. This extermination threat took many decades to shift fully to Blacks. But rather than decreasing as colonialists brought in more African slaves to subject them to a logic of exploitation—as settler colonial theory holds—the white idea of a war of extermination only increased as the slave population grew (Lewis, 2017). Indeed, white fear of violence from Blacks became a founding principle of the fledgling United States many decades later, increasing over these years to still define society today (Anderson, 2021).

In sum, the failure of elites to realize their dreams of outright conquest created regular skirmishes and wars with native groups, generating a fear of extermination among the colonial population. The eventual erosion of the indenture system created pools of dissatisfied freedmen, rising up to exercise their freedom dues. Elite agents redirected this anger at feared native groups, pitting their enemies—and some allies—against each other. Natives became increasingly racialized as a homogeneous existential threat to colonial society. But this was institutionalized such that new racial hatreds and rewards for commoners, including some movement out of the extractive labor category, dampened desires for lands while concentrating wealth and power among the elites. Racial fear and hatred became a new resource for elite domination, with the maintenance of the colonial order requiring ever-increasing amounts so white commoners could realize their racial rewards. With this racialization, labor and its mechanisms of control became increasingly lethal, tying exploitation and extermination ever closer together.

Comparison: Racializing to Ensconce Elite Power

Remarkably, these highly divergent cases met their crises of colonial aristocratic rule by employing very different means to arrive at the similar solution of a racialized extractive labor regime: a system in which race determined the disposability of labor that enabled elite domination. Elites built racialization and the disposability of racialized labor into the structure of society. In the Peruvian case, the strong central authority dramatically remade the infrastructure, relocating natives from their distinct ethnically identified areas to new racially associated towns where their labor could be plundered. This case most starkly reveals that a racialized eliminatory logic renders more labor extractable for elite demands. Through tearing down the life-sustaining infrastructure of native society and a radical remaking of the valence of land, the Spanish killed off a large portion of the labor pool, but overall achieved a net gain for colonial labor extraction.

In contrast, the British had been employing this eliminatory logic since the beginning, though in a non-racialized way, with elites continually struggling to preserve the indenture system and thus the lethality in labor. Racialization here, though, enabled elites to preserve the extractive labor regime through pitting non-elites against each other. The impoverished British had to increasingly shape racialization into society such that racialized Others increasingly bore the mark of disposability. This process, however, did not liberate non-elite colonists from expendability. Rather, it gave them new specific tools with which to engage in the continual fight against the disposability of their own labor, tools that simultaneously oppressed the Other while furthering elite domination.

Herein, the comparison provides a deeper understanding of both eliminatory logic and racialization. Rather than clearing the land for settler occupation, elimination uniquely aggrandizes the elite by giving them total control over life and death, consolidating the ideology of their inherent superiority. At the same time, it degrades labor as sub-human, as valuable for its expendability, and therein making it systemically impossible and ideologically irrational to negotiate with elites. That is, the eliminatory logic sets apart elites and non-elites as different species. In doing so, it structurally essentializes elite domination, as human over beast or god over human.

In contrast to the productive logic of class struggle wherein workers have some leverage because capitalists depend on their labor, the arbitrariness of death in eliminatory logics further enhances elite power as it undermines workers. In Peru, death largely struck indiscriminately and unrelated to productivity, with workers unable to negotiate with elites based on some shared dependence on the means of labor procurement. In North America, elite rule depended upon non-elite settlers’ employment of random vigilante violence. Indeed, these were major terms in the racial contract (Mills, 1997), non-elite settlers unleashing violence as a way to stay in elites’ good graces and not slip back into the disposable labor category. That is, the whimsical nature of violence and death further set the elite apart as operating according to an esoteric logic rendered incomprehensible in the everyday lives of the racialized—while keeping racialized labor in a constant state of fear.

Herein, understanding racialization as a settler versus native dichotomy makes little sense, as it cannot conceive of settler inequality growing in relation to racial inequality. In this, conceiving of settler class relations as about ‘discontinuing unequal relationships’ or as the working-class fighting for a greater redistribution of booty are equally misleading. Rather, it is a much more complex process wherein elites strategically provide specific racialized resources with the aim of making non-elite actions perpetuate elite domination. In late 16th-century Peru, these were the civilizing resources of concentrating native populations in towns. In late 17th-century British North America, these were a host of policies and jobs that crafted racialized Others as the lethal culprit of non-elite colonialists’ lowly status. Particularly as shown in the British case, racialization therein works to further inequality both within colonials and between colonials and the colonized.

Furthermore, by creating this mark of meanness that draws boundaries between non-elites, racialization consolidates the terms through which extractive labor regimes can be perpetuated. And this inevitably involves increases in violence and lethality, a continuous upping of the means through which racialized extractive labor regimes enhance elite domination. This helps make racial sense of the observation about today’s society that ‘the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege’ (Žižek, 2012: 9). Racial privileges are not resources for upward mobility but are a ‘consolation prize’ for fighting off slippage back into the disposable labor category (Harris, 1993: 1758; cf. HoSang and Lowndes, 2019). Thus, exploitation and extermination intertwine, even for non-elite members of the dominant racial group.

Conclusion

This article has set out to address the question: Why do colonial regimes structure their systems to eliminate the labor they depend on? The short answer is that it is the extremism of elitism, the severe dehumanizing measures aristocrats are willing to take to safeguard their vaunted positions. But explaining how this is the case—how eliminatory logics enable elite domination—requires revisiting settler colonial studies with elites at the center.

To do so, this paper offers a rethinking of the nature of settler colonialism that results in new insights on eliminatory logic and racialization. First, I find that elitism, particularly the drive to maintain an indelibly unequal society through extracting wealth, motivated the colonial project. Emphasizing the settling activities of a relatively homogeneous European population, as settler colonial theory tends to do, not only fails to capture the vast differences between colonizing Europeans, but it also fails to fully explain the lethality and avarice inbuilt to the colonial projects. The elite extraction of vast fortunes straddles all colonial experiences, with elite engagement with all non-elites, settler and colonized alike, constantly working toward this end even under highly divergent circumstances across time and space.

Eliminatory logic, then, is not about clearing the land to establish a new native European population. Rather, eliminatory logic employs a twofold process that simultaneously elevates elites as untouchable while debasing labor as expendable. The elite set themselves up as inherently superior—aristocracy as rule by the best—and non-elites as innately inferior. While most works associate this essentialist thinking with racism, the colonial experience shows it existed long before racialization and worked specifically to forge an unassailable elite. Herein joining other literature about the commensurability of exploitation and elimination, this article suggests that elimination is actually a powerful tool for exploitation, readily transforming it into extraction to the degree that it is within elites’ power and serves their needs.

Racialization, then, did not pit a relatively homogeneous European population against African or American natives, nor is it fully accurate to see colonial class divisions as a struggle over the redistribution of colonial loot. Rather, racialization consolidated elimination-based elite rule, with elites using race to craft new means for their domination. Where racialization pitted non-elite groups against each other, system maintenance required ever-increasing amounts of fear and violence—an ever-increasing exterminatory logic—for non-elite members of the dominant group to realize their racial rewards. This means the elite can simultaneously provide resources—of the racialized variety—to non-elite colonists without having to relinquish any of their power. In the most straightforward manifestation, elite colonists provided their non-elite counterparts with racial jobs and rights with the result that elites amassed more wealth and power. This provides particulars to the notion that racial privileges are not for upward mobility but are a consolation prize: non-elite colonists merely have tools to try and stave off their disposability, tools which have non-elites do the elites’ bidding and furthering aristocratic domination.

This form of rule has its own contradictions that the dominated can potentially exploit. Clearly the imperative to kill off the labor that the system depends on is the major one. In this, elites must struggle to sufficiently coordinate recruitment into the system, the lethality that undermines labor while elevating elites, and the subordination that keeps workers in the deadly system. Preservationist logics potentially challenge this system. This can be seen in some colonial situations without elites, wherein Europeans and Americans lived well together. It also suggests that Marx’s peans about the progressive quality of the bourgeois revolution can apply to countering the eliminatory nature of aristocratic rule. But factories clearly eliminated many of their workers, so this is not axiomatically the case. Yet many other examples of ‘make live’ organizations of society exist to counter the eliminatory logics of colonialism (cf. Li, 2010). These elitist dynamics, however, also suggest that innovations in the means of appropriation, such as less labor-dependent forms of accumulation by dispossession, can make the aristocratic balancing act easier, as elites can amass wealth with less worry about undermining themselves by killing off their labor (cf. Sassen, 2010; Scarritt, 2022). Going forward, more research needs to specify the factors accounting for variations in the mix of elimination and exploitation, and the actions and resources that can overcome this elitist inhumanity.