Lachlan McNamee’s short book on settler colonialism, Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, is nothing short of excellent. In just 163 pages, excluding appendices, notes, and such, it gives us the theoretical tools to make sense of one of the macro-political processes that has shaped the contours of the modern world: settler colonialism. Although it is naturally associated with European colonization overseas, the Tibetans in China, the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Kashmiris of India, the Darfuris of Sudan, the Palestinians in Israel, and the Kurds in Iraq can testify that the practice of settler colonialism persists to this day. McNamee, however, is “cautiously optimistic” that the coercive redistribution of land from Indigenes to settlers, which is settler colonialism, will become obsolete in a not-too-distant future. How so?

The overall argument is as simple as it is compelling. In developing countries, where land is valuable, it is easy enough for governments to convince their citizens to migrate to a contested frontier by offering free land there to settlers. In more developed countries, however, citizens are naturally attracted to the economic activity in urban centers. This reverses the flows of migration from the periphery to the metropole. “The only necessary and sufficient condition for [settler colonialism] is the existence of willing settlers,” McNamee tells us (p. 24). Developed countries lose the ability to attract settlement into frontier regions, because economic modernization eventually dries up the well of willing settlers. Tax breaks and infrastructure investments will likely prove ineffective given the countervailing force of urban opportunity. Developed countries have to “pay more for settlers and end up settling for less land” (p. 21). Turning Lenin on his head, McNamee argues that the highest stage of capitalism is not, in fact, colonization: it is decolonization.

Other prominent interpretations of colonialism have emphasized populist nationalism; strategic considerations to defend existing colonies and important trade routes; a social atavism of Europe’s precapitalist aristocracy that sought “expansion for the sake of expanding,” as Schumpeter would have it; and the erosion of home markets caused by rising inequality in a newly industrialized Europe. Like Hobson and Lenin, proponents of the last view, McNamee focuses on the economic drivers of colonialism, although, of course, his conclusion is almost diametrically opposed to theirs.

Colonizing states are not as unitary as the title might suggests. On the contrary, McNamee argues that the interests of settlers and of the government in the metropole are often opposed. The theoretical argument is structured around a triangular game between governments, settlers, and the Indigenes. Settlers have an almost unavoidable zero-sum conflict of interest with the Indigenous population over land. For the metropolitan government, the Indigenous relation is murkier. A priori, settler colonization is “uneconomical” for governments: there are direct costs of conquest, displacement, or elimination. Later there are also the opportunity costs of foregone production and tax revenue. The metropolitan government would prefer to rule the territory through Indigenous elites in a system of indirect rule or to assimilate the Indigenes into the common national identity through the educational system.

Why, when, and where do governments then opt for the uneconomical strategy of settlement colonization? The timing of state-led colonization is shaped by territorial conflict. When conflict is limited, governments can afford to wait a generation or so for assimilation to work. When territorial conflict has escalated, governments might opt for simply eliminating the Indigenous population. Settlement colonization occurs in between these extremes, in a middle ground of uncertain peace where governments lack the time to assimilate but are in no hurry to eliminate. The geography of state-led colonization is shaped by the location of disloyal ethnic groups, natural resources, and non-natural borders. In politically contested border regions, the settlement of conationals constitutes a credible commitment to defense and potentially deters rivals from staking claims to the territory. The last leg in the theoretical triad is the relationship between governments and settlers. This, as argued, changes with development, modernization, and urbanization.

Lachlan McNamee builds his theory using all kinds of qualitative sources to illustrate and exemplify. Newspaper clippings, parliamentary speeches, official reports, and personal observations from fieldwork are skillfully woven into the overall argument so that even the theory chapter reads like a novel.

The empirical chapters largely follow the trend in modern comparative politics and historical political economy of using original data to provide deep, quantitative explorations of specific cases. Panel data analyses across countries show the general validity of the argument.

Half the quantitative case studies illustrate successful colonization schemes; half show failures. As an example of the former, we learn how Indonesia’s colonization of its borderland with Papua New Guinea in the 1960s is consistent with the theory’s proposed dual logic of mid-level conflict and resource extraction. As an example of the latter, modernization processes in the early twentieth century drew Australians to the economic activity around urban centers and hampered the government’s attempts to colonize Papua New Guinea and the Northern Territory. Australia, obviously, is a crucial case: it is the canonical settler state. As Australia grew richer, it lost the power of colonization.

The same is currently happening in Xianjiang, where the Chinese government is now largely unable to encourage large-scale Han migration to the region. This contrasts with Beijing’s relative success in altering the ethnic demography along the Soviet border during the Sino–Soviet split (1959–82). It contrasts also with the mass settlement of ethnic Russians and the expulsion of Chinese, which the Soviet Union successfully orchestrated from the other side of the same border. Needless to say, notable differences between China today and China (and the USSR) in the 1960s are economic development and the resultant pull from urban centers. The well of willing settlers ran dry.

Even if the etymological origins of the word “colonization” might be similar to farmer (presumably making “settler colonialism” a pleonasm, and McNamee uses “colonization” and “settler “colonialism” interchangeably), this is not a book about colonization tout court. It is a book about a specific form of colonization: the displacement of Indigenous people by settlers and the coercive redistribution of land from the one to the other.

Most of the recent quantitative literature on colonialism in the social sciences has explored the consequences of colonialism, treating it as the cause of contemporary political institutions or economic outcomes. These consequences have been found to vary systematically with the form of colonization: direct rule and settlement colonization are generally associated with a transplantation of institutions, ideas, human capital, and more. McNamee’s book is mandatory reading for scholars interested in both the causes and consequences of colonization. Colonial settlement is not randomly distributed, and before we attribute causal significance to specific forms of colonization we need to understand why, when, and where governments and settlers chose the strategy of settler colonization. To that end, Settling for Less is indispensable.

Charles Tilly once warned us not to crow too loudly about the death of empires. But Lachlan McNamee’s excellent, accessible, and well-written book has given us reason to crow. Slowly but surely, the structural force of modernization works against the strategic goals of empire builders.