Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash ed. by Mohamed Adhikari (review)

In his 1983 classic, Settler Capitalism, Donald Denoon explored the colonial encounter between settler pastoralists and Indigenous hunter-gatherers. Could the settler capitalist and hunter-gatherer modes of production be articulated into a functioning colonial formation? While settler communities absorbed some Indigenous people as labourers, Indigenous communities themselves, he argued, were not exploitable. No articulation between settler capitalism and Indigenous hunting and gathering could be fabricated: the emergent social formation did "not permit the survival of an earlier mode of production."¹ Does a study of the articulations of modes of production, then, provide us with a link between settler colonialism and genocide?

Some three decades on, Genocide on Settler Frontiers engages with similar questions. In his work on the Cape San in the nineteenth century, Mohamed Adhikari discerned that clashes between livestock famers linked to the global capitalist market and hunter-gatherers were particularly catastrophic, resulting in the "near complete destruction of forager societies." Why, he asked, has this particular subset of settler colonial conflict "been overwhelmingly predisposed to eradicatory violence?"² (2). Is there something in the articulation of these two modes of production, or in the impossibility of any articulation, that rendered genocide a likely outcome of their encounter? Does the clash establish what Tony Barta refers to as "relations of genocide"? (250) The book tests this proposition, bringing together scholars working on the experiences of the San in southern Africa, Aboriginal people in southeastern and Western Australia, and North American First Nations in "Indian Territory" north of Texas and on the Canadian prairies. Covering an impressive geographical breadth, Genocide on Settler Frontiers effectively examines relationships between settler colonialism and genocide, land and labour, pushing us to reconsider the social specificities of different modes of production and their effective relationships.

For Adhikari, the clash between commercial stock farming and hunter-gatherer societies was so stark as to generate genocide. The former, when bolstered by access to capitalist markets, was characterised by rapid expansion and exclusive occupation of land and resources on frontiers beyond the full reach of the colonial state. With extraordinary wealth available to be generated, the vulnerable hunter-gatherer societies settlers could not stand in the way of invading settlers. Whenever Indigenous peoples resisted, settlers responded with genocidal violence. We see this dynamic play out in longue durée histories that culminate in detailed descriptions of the annihilation of the Cape San by Griqua and Dutch-speaking farmers in chapters by Adhikar, Edward Cavanagh and Nigel Penn, as well as in Robert Gordon's account of the extermination of the Bushmen in German South West Africa. Turning away from southern Africa, Lyndall Ryan presents an account of genocides in Tasmania and Victoria as sheep farming spread across the colonies in the early nineteenth century. But Ryan argues that genocide was far from an inevitable outcome when commercial stock farmers invaded hunter-gatherer territories. Instead, she suggests a return to Charles Rowley's argument that it was less the encroaching pastoral industry than the provision of convicts as bonded workers in that industry that rendered superfluous Indigenous labour, other than the often forced sexual labour of Aboriginal women.³ The manufactured dispensability of their labour, she argues, was the key factor in determining hunter-gatherer survival of the encounter with commercial stock farmers (190, 209).

For Mathias Guenther, in his study of the survival of the Ghanzi Bushmen, it was this capacity to serve as labourers in relationships of reciprocity and interdependence with trekboer pastoralists that saved the Indigenous people of Bechuanaland. Theirs was a fundamentally paternalistic modus vivendi which, as one district commissioner wrote, "was stable, and both sides recognized their duties and obligations" (134). Perhaps the remoteness of the Ghanzi veld prevented an influx of settlers who could push the Bushmen out of their labouring roles, perhaps it was the bond between workers and masters. This was not a genocidal invasion. But, as the collection makes clear, this was exceptional.

Elsewhere, as Jared...