How Settler Colonies Fail

Review of Lachlan McNamee's Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop

Richard Solomon

July 22, 2025

Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop.

by McNamee, Lachlan

Princeton University Press

2023

There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers….It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Colonial-era town of Samarai, New Guinea (1906). Courtesy of Pat Shea.

Who comes to mind when we use the word “colonizer”? In Colonizer and Colonized, the Tunisian-born intellectual Albert Memmi caricatured a masculine portrait: the bronzed white man in his Wellington boots, leaning on a shovel, gazing into the North African sun. For other settler states, the image of the settler is similarly romantic. National monuments of an earlier century celebrated pioneers trekking across the Oregon Trail, Southern Cape, or Argentine Pampas. Vintage 1930s postcards promote the industriousness of Japanese colonizers in occupied Manchuria. A 1970 Rhodesian advertisement in Newsweek entreats Americans to “Move now, before the rush.”¹ Today, perhaps the most recognizable descendant of that genre is the bearded Zionist in occupied Palestine, draping sidelocks and an M16 slung at his side.

Advertisement for Colonial Zimbabwe (1920). Courtesy of Mitch Stirling.

For the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in his searing essay Discourses on Colonialism, this whole ensemble of characters, “the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant” were propelled according to a unifying logic, what Césaire called the “baleful projected shadow” of a civilization “obliged for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.” In the conventional Marxist formulation, land-hungry Europeans colonized the earth to secure new resources for trade and commercial agriculture. The ever-expanding market “chases the bourgeoisie across the whole surface of the globe,” as the Communist Manifesto declared. Lenin, in his book Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, envisioned this process would culminate in the synthesis between banks and industry and the division of the world among a few capitalist states, which would plunder the colonial peripheries of resources.

But under what conditions are natives exploited for their labor or eradicated for their land? The field of settler colonial studies is premised on this analytic typology. For the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, whose work also emphasizes the capitalist state, the key feature of settler colonial enterprises is the elimination of indigenous society. In his oft-cited dictum, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”² Whether by frontier genocide and expulsions or softer forms of incorporation like intermarriage, elimination is not incidental to settler colonial society. For Wolfe, it is the “organizing principle.”³ Wolfe’s scholarship in the 1990s and the critical responses to it from Lorenzo Veracini and others anchored the fledgling subfield, which was buoyed by a peer-reviewed journal Settler Colonial Studies established in 2011.

This research program has attracted a certain degree of moral panic. Over the past year, British and American outlets have published “explainers” and polemical attacks on settler colonial studies, particularly with reference to Israel and Palestine. Although the field has yet to summon the degree of rightwing legislation reserved for fields like critical race theory, American pundits like Adam Kirsch and Christopher Rufo are doing their best to make it happen. Under the editorial tenure of a former Israeli prison guard, the Atlantic has been particularly vociferous in its criticism of what it dismisses as a “trendy” academic fad obsessed with Israel and the Jews. Recent titles include “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism,” “The Curious Rise of Settler Colonialism and Turtle Island,” “Against Guilty History,” and “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False.”⁴

Given the hubbub, Lachlan McNamee’s recent monograph Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop is a useful text to critically appraise the field. Written originally as a dissertation at UCLA, it bears all the signs of graduate training in quantitative political science: novel empirical data and practiced counterfactual reasoning. He poses a big question—why do states colonize and why do they stop?—and constructs a bold, positivist theory to challenge the prevailing wisdom of Wolfe, Lenin, Césaire and others. In this wisdom, colonization is a teleological process driven by capital, a structure that “persistently pursues a specific end point.”⁵ For McNamee, settler colonies can and do fail, and to explain variation in the outcomes we should look beyond theories that conflate the state and settlers or that present the settler-colonial process as a mechanical quest for genocide or capitalist exploitation. Rather, state-led settler colonialism is a contingent tool for states to consolidate authority in contested territory. It unfolds as a strategic encounter within a triangle of actors: settlers, their states (which have security and fiscal interests distinct from the settlers), and indigenous people.

In McNamee’s theory, states tend to only take the lead colonizing contested territory with coethnics when they face geopolitical threat or rebellious subjects, typically in nonnatural borderlands. Most strikingly, he predicts that urban industrialization makes it costly to colonize frontiers, “obliging states—whether America in the Philippines, Australia in New Guinea, or Israel in the Gaza Strip—to settle for less land” (54). This happens because as the urban cores industrialize and median incomes rise, the relative value of frontier land from the settlers’ perspective falls compared to opportunities in the cities. Wouldbe settlers require increasingly lavish subsidies and quality-of-life guarantees to relocate. The kids no longer want a farm. Rising subsidy requirements hit up against budget constraints of the colonizing state, forcing it to compromise or pursue other tactics of state violence to deal with native rebels.

For McNamee, settler colonies can and do fail, and to explain variation in the outcomes we should look beyond theories that conflate the state and settlers or that present the settler-colonial process as a mechanical quest for genocide or capitalist exploitation. Rather, state-led settler colonialism is a contingent tool for states to consolidate authority in contested territory. It unfolds as a strategic encounter within a triangle of actors: settlers, their states—which have security and fiscal interests distinct from the settlers—and indigenous people.

In order to test the theory, he presents new data surveyed from paired cases of Indonesian and Australian colonization attempts in New Guinea, as well as two periods of Chinese Han settlement in Xinjiang. McNamee also marshals global data that track countries over time as well as impressive case knowledge about Greece, the Philippines, and Angola to show how the theory applies to a range of cases beyond the “classic” Anglo-settler projects. As Lorenzo Veracini once pointed out, it is in the “failed” or “imperfect” cases of settler colonialism such as 1950s Kenya or 1970s Zimbabwe where the settler logic is “most recognizable” and the distinction between the colony and metropole most stark.⁶ McNamee similarly invites us to consider the failed cases: they reveal where the interests of the state and those of the settlers diverge and where the state is forced to abandon colonization plans in the face of rising costs.

Colonization: Antique and Modern

“Youth volunteer for the cultivation of Manchuria”. From a series of postcards promoting Japanese colonization of Manchuria. Courtesy the Manchukuo Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library.

That states settle colonies for strategic reasons is an old idea. In sixteenth century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli advised prudent rulers to pacify a “province differing in language, laws, and customs” by “planting colonies” and displacing indigenes. The costly alternative is to “maintain a large force of armed men.”⁷ Since Machiavelli, European colonization efforts have been conceptualized as a bedrock of historic statemaking, integral to the resource requirements of capitalism, or driven by the nation-state project and ethnoracial ideologies.⁸ Both geographic determinists like Jared Diamond and historical institutionalists like recent Nobel Prize winners Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson ascribe the patterns of European colonial settlement to tropical disease burdens and climate.⁹

These literatures offer divergent predictions on the relationship between modernity and settler colonial forms. McNamee situates his theory within two of these. On one hand, James Scott argued that modern “distance-destroying technologies” such as the train, all-weather road, and telegraph enable state powers based in land-hungry lowlands to conquer thinly-populated, self-governing highlands. Here modernization accelerates the settler colonial enterprise. For the state, infrastructure outlays advance its coercive powers over territory—in Scott’s case, the “Zomia” highlands of southeast Asia. For the settler, innovations like air-conditioning and vaccines erode the barriers that once prevented them from penetrating rugged, tropical, or otherwise unappealing terrain. Scott calls this modernizing process the “world’s last great enclosure” and the end point of capitalism. The extent to which colonization varies reflects what is logistically feasible: it is not ultimately a strategic question.

Wolfe takes it further. For Wolfe, settler colonialism is “foundational to modernity.” In modern form, the capitalist state must kill, deport, and forcibly assimilate indigenous peoples in order to secure land for commercial agriculture. In a conceptualization that McNamee critiques, Wolfe says settler colonialism is therefore “impervious to regime change” like democratization because it is tied to capitalism. It is not a “one-off (and superseded) occurrence” like the Holocaust he says; rather, its eliminationist structure “pursues a specific end point” and once started is inexorable.¹⁰

For Veracini, settler colonialism “is designed to produce a fundamental discontinuity as its “logic of elimination” runs its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation.”¹¹ At this end point, the settler colony transfigures from colony to metropole. New England becomes its own England.

On the other hand, some see colonization as a dying form of state activity in the modern period thanks to the spread of norms and democracy. Rights to national self-determination articulated by both Vladimir Lenin (1910) and Woodrow Wilson (1918) inscribed anticolonial norms into international law and the structure of bodies such as the League of Nations and the UN. The formation of the Bandung Conference in 1955 gave voice to a growing nonaligned movement’s “common detestation of racialism” while European possessions in Algeria, the Levant, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Indonesia won independence from the European empires in the two decades following the second world war. The Organization of African States took further measures to freeze existing borders, despite their arbitrary, colonial origins, while Samantha Power hoped that installing a Responsibility to Protect principle in international law would curb population displacement and genocide.¹² In empirical terms, Ted Gurr and Philipp Ther separately contended that state violence against minorities has declined due to rising accommodation of minority rights. The Israeli occupation in Palestine may be horrifically violent, but its reputation as the “last colony” underscores what some critics portray as a vestigial remnant of nineteenth century ideology.¹³

McNamee does not consider what indigenes actually do knowing their actions affect the calculus of the settlers and state. Under what conditions do they resist with force of arms, flee to less desirable areas, or engage in more quotidian acts of sabotage?

What Settler Colonial Studies Gets Wrong

Welsh settler and his Tehuelche wife and child in Chubut, Argentina (1890). Courtesy of Museo Regional Trevelin.

For McNamee, abstract concepts like Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” or Scott’s “last enclosure” are too vague to be useful in explaining when and where states actually colonize. Constants like a world-historic system of capitalism cannot explain variation, and explaining population changes in terms of the purpose they serve instead of the cause by which they arise, amount to teleology, not social science. The story of progress based on the diffusion of liberal norms and democracy is also wishful thinking, he says. According to the author, the cardinal sin of these theories is their inability to recognize the costs of colonization to the metropole or when such efforts fail. In fact, colonization can actually be undesirable for states. This is because states prefer to extract resources from native lands at the lowest possible cost. In some cases, states actively attempt to curb settler activities to prevent conflicts with indigenous communities because such conflicts raise the costs of rule.

Examples of such attempts abound. In 1763, the British Crown restricted American settlement on Indian land west of Appalachia in order to conserve military expenditure, clashing with land-hungry planters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Upon independence, the US Confederate Congress in 1783 again prohibited settlement on native lands west of the Appalachians “without the express authority and direction of Congress.” Squatters ignored the law and moved into the Ohio Valley anyway, precipitating a long, costly war with the Northwest Indian nations. The Qing dynasty redrew the frontier line in Taiwan four times, in 1750, 1760, 1788, and 1790 to separate Han settlers and island natives. By examining only cases where state and settler interests coincide, the older scholarship misses this blind-spot, overpredicting settler colonialism’s occurrence and rendering the variation in settler colonial outcomes inexplicable. In McNamee’s words, “the central error in the ‘logic of elimination’ is the conflation of state and settler” (98).

What then is colonization and who does it? Building from the Latin root colonus, or “farmer,” McNamee defines colonization as the process by which farmers physically occupy a frontier or overseas territory on behalf of a distant state or as founders of a new state. Aside from rare, debatable cases where settlers encounter a true terra nullius—Vikings in ninth century Iceland, Polynesians in fourteenth century New Zealand—colonization generally requires territorial conquest over an existing human population, generating a colonial encounter between settler and indigene.¹⁴ It is not necessary that those individuals would be perceived today as white or that they share the ancestry of a single demographic core. Japanese settlers in Manchuria and Americo-Liberians in West Africa were not white. The French in Algeria had to be made French through citizenship and race laws: Arab Jews for instance were classified among the European population while most of the pieds-noirs were of Italian or Spanish (not French) origin. Refugees can also become settlers when they seize land backed by a state, even if the migrants also fled state violence. McNamee cites for instance Edward Said’s ironic observation that Palestinians since 1948 have been “turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the Jews.”¹⁵

When states are concerned about securing a peripheral area coveted by a competitor or under threat by secessionist rebels, “state-led colonization” is likely. Unable to distinguish between friend or foe within the indigenous population, coethnicity of settlers with the state’s elites becomes a reliable heuristic for political loyalty, and their presence in a contested territory ties the state to the region. In such cases, such as Greece’s colonization of Macedonia in the 1920s and Indonesia’s colonization of West Papua in the 1980s, the metropole determines the targeted area. Australia’s parliament for instance designed incentives for white migration to its northern territories following Japanese occupation. Given tradeoffs between the security benefits of colonization and its economic cost, McNamee theorizes that colonizing a frontier is only an appealing choice when the metropole faces a pressing threat. This is particularly true along nonnatural borderlands populated by indigenes who are coethnic with elites of a rival state.

Settlers, in McNamee’s account, do not always want to coercively settle frontier regions. Instead, they respond to push factors, like population pressure in the demographic core, or pull factors, like the presence of gold or easily alienated farmland. Where these incentives are strong, the settler-led logic of “strategic fatalism” takes hold, as states passively license the eliminationist faits accomplis of their colonists. Strategic fatalism is guided by state concerns that the colonists, left to their own devices, will draw the state into a costly war or go on to establish independent states. This was for instance the rationale for the American annexation of Hawaii where white settlers overthrew the indigenous monarchy of Queen Lili’uokalani and declared a republic on July 4, 1894. Similarly, Cecil Rhodes in 1890 used the pretext of a mining concession to mount an armed gold rush of Mashonaland (later Zimbabwe) called the Pioneer Column. The army of the native king Lobengula proved no match to company forces, who destroyed the Ndebele kingdom and herded the survivors into “native reserves.” London’s initial consternation over Rhodes’ unilateralism soon faded. Company rule was soon established, followed by selfrule in 1923.

Modernization changes this calculus, as potential settlers instead seek opportunities in the urban, industrializing cores. Persistent rural-to-urban migration patterns emerge, displacing the older spatial pattern by which farmers move to colonial frontiers. As economies develop, it becomes difficult to entice settler youth to actually stay physically on the frontier or convince new settlers to join, and states must provide further incentives for settlers to relocate into the periphery. Low fertility demographic patterns also reduce population pressure that imperial metropoles historically shunted to their colonies.¹⁶ Therefore, as economies modernize and median incomes rise, the costs of attracting settlers become steep. This is the basis of McNamee’s boldest claim. Unlike Lenin’s classic thesis, capitalism is not the midwife of settler colonial expansion. It is the coroner. Settler-led colonialism thrived in the early twentieth century, but as capitalist economies modernized, the appeal of relocating to peripheral areas diminished. The demographic transition made possible by modernity breaks the classic alignment of incentives between states and settlers.

Archipelagos and Antipodes

Chapters three to seven present two case studies presented as hard tests of the theory. The first compares two states (Australia, Indonesia) which attempted to settle the same island of New Guinea inhabited by Papuan natives. Indonesia, a putatively anti-imperialist state successfully claimed and settled the western half of New Guinea with Javanese and Balinese Muslims in the 1980s. Australia administered the eastern half but its repeated attempts to encourage colonization with tax breaks, subsidies, and infrastructure investment failed. In a twist of irony, White Australia, the classic settler dominion, ultimately abandoned the territory and backed Papua New Guinea’s independence.

Why did Indonesia succeed where Australia did not? Drawing on census and migration data, McNamee shows that in Australia, earlier economic development and urbanization drained the core of willing white settlers. A 1953 study commissioned by the government estimated that the state would have to spend about 50,000 pounds, or one million US dollars today, in infrastructure and amenities per settler to be successful.¹⁷ Similar to the end of US occupation in the Philippines, decolonization was guided by burdensome administrative costs and fears that millions of poor nonwhites would eventually demand the metropole’s citizenship; Australia’s migration policies at a time were explicitly dedicated to white supremacy. In Indonesia, Javanese settlers faced fewer opportunities. Facing Papuan sovereignty claims, Jakarta successfully encouraged three hundred thousand Javanese to take up plots of land in West Papua via the state’s transmigration program, which the Indonesian state inherited from the Dutch. Areas targeted for settlement included border regions with Papua New Guinea, especially after a failed 1984 Papuan uprising, as well as the Grasberg gold mine, the largest in the world. The resettlement program cost about $5,000 per family, half a percent of the estimate for Australian whites.¹⁸

Here McNamee deftly questions the field’s canonical paradigm, Wolfe’s logic of elimination, in the field’s canonical case: Australia. Much of settler colonial studies was developed by Australian scholars to explain Australia: Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, Lynette Russell, Penelope Edmonds, and McNamee himself are all Australian. But one potential problem with Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” thesis in the Australian context is that the continent’s colonial regime evolved differently in the north and south. In fact colonial policies toward Aboriginal life in such important areas as miscegenation, welfare entitlements, criminal justice, land tenure, wage labor incorporation varied—revealing the possibility of what Tim Rowse proposes as “contending structures” of Indigeneity.¹⁹ Can one “logic” such as elimination capture all of this? Or does it perfunctorily assume everything is eliminatory, for instance both denial of native land title in the south and recognition of native land title in the north? In response, Veracini as defender of the field argued that Australia’s colonial project relied on exploiting indigenous pastoral labor in the North, so settlers did not take root: “the categories of settler colonial studies do not apply there.”²⁰

For McNamee, this explanatory strategy rationalizes history backwards: “The Australian state spent enormous sums of money trying to colonize its northern reaches with whites in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, colonization failed. Only when faced with a stubborn absence of white settlers did the Australian state belatedly turn to employing indigenous labor” (98). In a counterfactual world where critical masses of white settlers had reached the north and begun commercial agriculture before urbanization, northern aboriginals would have been eliminated as well. Exploitation of indigenous labor was the effect, not the cause of the settlers’ relative absence.

McNamee’s second case examines Chinese attempts to settle ethnic Han people in the northwest territories of Xinjiang over two periods of economic development. He and his coauthor Anna Zhang recover rare census data showing that China was successful at colonizing its nonnatural, oil-rich, and ethnically Russian and Uyghur frontiers during midcentury conflicts with the Soviet Union. However, as China marketized and eastern cities became magnets for labor in the 1980s, Beijing progressively lost the power to colonize its restive northwest.

Unable to flood Xinjiang with Han settlers and facing Uyghur insurgency, the state turned to mass incarceration and birth suppression. “Like Australia, China failed to colonize its periphery not for lack of effort or a lack of fertile agricultural land. Rather, colonization in both China and Australia ceased when economic development in the core drained the state of willing settlers” (98). The proposed mechanism thus operates across a range of cases: White Australia’s settler democracy, communist-ruled China, and an Indonesian postcolonial state.

McNamee confirms these findings in the seventh chapter with a cross-national study using proxy measures of minority displacement. When national income per capita rises above approximately $6,000 USD, largescale settler migration becomes rare (138). The chapter also provides strong evidence against norms based arguments that position liberal states or those with competitive party elections as more respectful of human rights in wartime. Faced with rebellious subjects, states can move to mass violence swiftly, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza shows.

Zionist Exception?

Map of “Jewish Colonies in Palestine” in Harry Sacher, *Zionism and the Jewish Future* (London: John Murray, Albermarle St W., 1917).

This observation dovetails with a major objection: what about Israel? It is difficult to avoid seeing Israel as the glaring anomaly to McNamee’s theory. A long line of Palestinian and Jewish scholars have characterized Zionist expansion as a settler colonial project: Fayez Sayegh, Gershon Shafir, Maxime Rodinson, Elia Zureik, and more recently Ilan Pappé and Rashid Khalidi.²¹ Today Israel is relatively wealthy and postindustrial, boasting per-capita GDP above the United Kingdom. Yet it remains home to an aggressive settler colonial movement in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is seemingly no shortage of settlers willing to seize remote West Bank hilltops, while the eliminationist intent on display by the Israeli military and Zionist policymakers toward Gaza has shocked the world. Whither the supposed obsolescence of settler colonialism in rich countries?

Here McNamee acknowledges the anomaly but does not consider Israel’s use of settlers to secure control over contested territory exceptional. Greece, Morocco, India, and Turkey have also colonized land with coethnics on the basis of dubious ancestral claims. What is exceptional for his theory is the contracted geography of land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean. About two thirds of Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem, and the majority of the rest within the city’s commuter belt, connected with Israeli-only access roads like Route 398 south of Bethlehem. The Ariel settlement bloc in central West Bank is about a thirty-five minute drive from downtown Tel Aviv. “Commuter colonization” as McNamee calls it, allows the state to create affordable suburbs for Israeli urbanites while controlling Palestinians through an apartheidlike system of work permits, walls, checkpoints, and Bantustans. The West Bank is thus not really a distant frontier so economic development does not unravel the incentive alignment between the settlers and state.

In Gaza by contrast, the former Israeli settlement of Gush Katif was too far (two hour drive to Tel Aviv by highway) for the state to successfully lure Jewish settlers with subsidized mortgages and tax breaks. The number of settlers never exceeded ten thousand. When the second intifada raised the security costs of defending these isolated colonies above levels sustainable for Ariel Sharon’s government, he turned on them in 2005, swapping the colonization of Gaza for a siege. In Sharon’s words, the move was a pragmatic response to “the demographic reality on the ground” where Palestinians outnumbered the colonists one hundred to one. The remoteness of Israeli settlements also guided Israel’s decision to abandon them in the Sinai at the end of the 1970s. One could infer Israeli state planners would veto any attempts to colonize southern Lebanon for analogous reasons, especially given the security costs of defending settlers against Hezbollah.

Native Resistance

Fighters from the West Papuan National Liberation Army (2014).

On the topic of Hezbollah, the most dissatisfying and undertheorized part of the book is the third actor in the triangle: the indigenous population. How do they resist? Does the form of that resistance matter, other than increasing the costs to the state of colonization or ethnic cleansing? Natives appear formally as an actor in the second chapter and are mentioned occasionally in the case studies (that is, the West Papuan liberation movement). However their agency is generally absent, and the costs that their resistance imposes on the occupier are left unexplored to tease apart the tradeoffs between the settlers and colonizing state. McNamee does not consider what indigenes actually do knowing their actions affect the calculus of the settlers and state. Under what conditions do they resist with force of arms, flee to less desirable areas, or engage in more quotidian acts of sabotage?

Even in “mature” settler colonies, struggles over land persist. The field of indigenous studies is full of examples of how activists have deployed legal, cultural, and political tactics for decolonization.²² Violence against colonizers also varies; the African National Congress for instance had an armed wing but its leadership avoided targeting white civilians. As Nelson Mandela laid out in his speech at the 1964 Rivonia trial, “outbreaks of terrorism…would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of the country which is not produced even by war.” What effect did this forbearance have, and what caused it?

For Marxists, one useful answer to this question is the “labor incorporation thesis” explored separately by Mona Younis and Ran Greenstein, but which goes back further to Palestinian Trotskyists like Jabra Nicola.²³ Natives’ uneven leverage over the colonial economy led them to adopt different strategy sets. For instance, black labor was incorporated into South African apartheid while Palestinians were mostly excluded from the Zionist labor market. This gave the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups a form of class leverage such as labor strikes. It also encouraged them to form a historic, crossracial alliance with the leadership of the old South African Communist Party. The PLO leadership in contrast emerged outside the state and derived its base of support in the refugee camps; ties with Jewish anti-Zionist groups like the Matzpen were weaker, and the Palestinians could not debilitate the Zionist state as easily through mass strikes. Consequently, PLO parties and Hamas evolved a repertoire of contention that emphasized armed struggle. Such counterviolence mirrored the arguably more rapid and eliminationist character of Zionist expansion compared to that in South Africa.

Here is also a place to return to identity. McNamee presented a definition of settler agnostic to particular demographic origins or the ability to return to a constructed homeland. Refugees can also become settlers when they participate in a political project of demographic displacement. But this definition obscures the fact that the existence of a constructed, “national” homeland affects settlers’ willingness to remain. For example, the pieds-noirs in Algeria saw themselves and were French citizens, and Algeria was a formally annexed part of France. By contrast, white South Africans did not have such a backup in Europe. Trump’s symbolic overtures to the Afrikaners notwithstanding, there was no English or Dutch state eager to take them en masse, and a separate South African national identity emerged before the rise of the National Party in 1947 and formal apartheid legislation in the 1950s. As US-Israeli efforts to quell native aspirations in Palestine reach new heights of violence, these outside options may help explain how the Zionist settler colony will end and if so, what comes the day after. But to discern which way that pattern is unfolding requires us to look beyond McNamee’s book.

Despite these lingering questions, Settling for Less delivers a solid analytic punch. Among its strengths is the moves beyond dominant interpretive paradigms in settler colonial studies, particularly the logic of elimination. By defining settler colonialism broadly, McNamee looks beyond the “classic” Anglo-European cases to contexts where the field’s interpretive power can continue to make sense of the world: Chittagong Hill Tracts, West Papua, Kashmir, Ukraine, and Rwanda-East Congo.²⁴ His emphasis on the strategic dimension of colonization offers a more nuanced view of state versus settler-led colonization and the conditions under which states opt to populate colonial territories with coethnics.

What he shows is that colonization schemes can fail or never get off the ground. By taking these negative cases seriously, we expose the demographic and fiscal constraints on colonizing power. This emphasis on the promises of modernity has a surprisingly optimistic hue. For without a base of willing settlers, the state cannot colonize with large population transfers. What Césaire called his “only consolation” might hold true: nations sleep only for a time, and peoples remain.²⁵

How Settler Colonies Fail

Review of Lachlan McNamee's Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop