isaacsapphire:

tanadrin:

I want to expand briefly on something in the tags in that last ask, because I think this point informs how I think about the whole question in a way that be different from anon.

The whole idea of an empty, natural, trackless wilderness suitable for building an autarkic community is a fiction. By the time humans finished spreading out into the Americas, most of the surface of the Earth was inhabited to some extent by human beings who developed a suite of technologies appropriate to the climate, and further innovation took place within that framework. In short, the whole world was peopled in 1492, except for some remote islands and Antarctica. The density of that population varied a lot, and the kinds of social organization, and the cultural institutions around law and territory and property, but there was really very little wilderness that was also suitable to human habitation. And much land not at all suitable to human habitation that humans stubbornly decided to live in anyway.

Part of the self-mythologizing of North American (and later Australian) settlers, because of the lower population density of many of the areas they settled (though at least in the Eastern Woodlands in the US, this may have been a very recent change caused by smallpox), and because conflict with expanding settler states drove the natives out so that their own farmers could move in. Since “we tamed a virgin wilderness” is more appealing as a national mythology than “we drove out and exterminated the savages” (although there was plenty of romanticizing of that part, too, back in the 19th century!), that view of American history is the culturally preferred version. It’s the sort of thing I would point out as settler-colonial ideology, if the phrase settler-colonial hadn’t been driven into the ground by overuse. The natives are treated as a footnote, which is easy because they’ve been demographically swamped by higher settler population densities and by centuries of immigration. I’m sure apartheid South Africa would have tried to take the same tack with regard to its own history, if the native population hadn’t stubbornly insisted on being much more numerous and sticking around.

This national mythology was developing while at the same time new theories of government were being articulated; the American revolution (anger at the British crown was motivated in part by settlers being forbidden from crossing the Appalachians, remember!) not only occasioned but may have been necessary to the great push west, and so a lot of thinking and writing on liberty, on the origins and purpose of government, and the ideal nature of government was being done in a period of time when, it just so happened, a lot of people found themselves in a position to set up big family farms in frontier “wilderness,” and had occasion to justify and celebrate as ideal a form of economic organization that is actually historically very anomalous. Patterns of land use and property distribution in the colonial Americas looked nothing like patterns of land use and property distribution in Europe, and though they used approximately the same principles of land tenure, the actual situation on the ground was a lot different. Small family land holdings for a European peasant would have been distributed among other small family land holdings of neighbors within the same community. Tenant farming by small farmers working the land of a local bigshot were still common. This system worked given the conditions on the frontier at the time, but it was never going to be stable long-term. It’s not very efficient, and it’s not always environmentally sustainable either.

But the fallout of all this is that a really unusual episode of history has provided an abstract template for thinking about economics and politics for generations! When we imagine building a utopian community ex nihilo, we imagine doing it in some nonexistent but fecund wilderness that really hasn’t existed anywhere on Earth since humans made it to Tierra del Fuego. I think this hampers our understanding a lot of the time. It blinds us to how dependent current institutions are on the shape of past institutions (we can build institutions from nothing!), it emphasizes an unrealistically individualist and autonomous approach to society (we can live far enough away from our neighbors we never have to interact!), and it handwaves away a central problem of land and wealth distribution, which is how often acquiring those things necessarily comes at someone else’s expense. It seems to me that a lot of people of anarcho-capitalist inclinations live in a world where that frontier-possibility exists as a self-evident, perennial feature of the world. Whereas to me, it feels like a mirage: something that has never existed in recorded history, and which has no actual relevance (at least until we colonize other planets, I guess).

The scale of resources necessary to allow someone to set up a family farm on another planet are literally astronomical, so it’s not going to be much of a frontier by the time it’s ready for the plow, considering that a superpower or John Company is going to have poured massive resources into it before its ready for colonists and expect something back.

Mostly endorsed but re: South Africa, seeing it as a black/white thing on colonial lines is a long-distance oversimplification/misunderstanding of some substantial cleavages on both sides of that.

“White” was split between Boers, descended from Dutch settlers, and English. The Cape Colony was largely settled by Dutch colonists, surplus population seeking an outlet, but came under British control. A lot of Boers retreated overland in wagon trains to the east and north and set up in the rural interior, in the late 19th century the British would secure these areas in some of the most total white-on-white warfare of the period.

These travails gave the Boers a strong sense of identity as the tested, proven redneck frontier people of the land, indeed ones that had been displaced and occupied by the English. By contrast the English identified themselves with an Empire (also containing Jamaica, Hong Kong and the Raj) in which they administered others’ lands but were not fundamentally “gone native” of them.

Apartheid began in 1948 following the surprise electoral victory of a Boer party over the reigning British one (South Africa had become a sovereign state in 1931). Compare the fate of nearby white supremacist state Rhodesia, a British colony which rebelled against native sovereignty and declared independence but eventually became Zimbabwe in 1980.

On the black side, tensions arose from the way the white settlers intended to use black natives as a sort of peasantry, performing agricultural labor on rural landholdings, but they tended to slip away to labor in the cities, as peasants have always done. But more than that many of the blacks pouring into the city were not “natives” at all but economic migrants streaming from other colonial lands to the only industrial economy in sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, decades after the fall of apartheid, the disruptions of such economic migration still erupt in severe, violent “black on black” tensions.