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

Abstract

Modern citizenship, with its exclusions and disaggregated freedoms, has a distinct genealogy in the state-formation of settler societies. Ethnic tensions and indigenous rights-claiming in many Anglophone states are frequently traced to their beginnings as settler societies. This is not only a legacy of the rights-claiming discourses of settlers, traced in individual national histories. It owes much to the formal body of literature that justified settler states not primarily as the embodiment of a nation but for the government of transnational populations. Using the writings of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his contemporaries, this article examines the settler as a problem in British liberal thought. Wakefield’s unease about the settler as a political subject drew together three contemporary discourses, the critique of American society, post-Malthus thinking on poverty and the systematic colonization movement. For Wakefield, settler societies could only prosper through central planning, surveillance and land price fixing, leading to class formation.