Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

My own interest in this question arises from my study of the genealogy of German colonialism—specifically, the practice and understanding of “inner colonization.” In the late nineteenth century, there was a “program of inner colonization” in the heavily Polish eastern provinces of the German Empire, whereby Germans from the West were brought in as “colonists” to shift the demographic balance against the local Poles. What I find fascinating is that for the thinkers behind inner colonization, most prominently the agrarian economist Max Sering, “colonization” meant bringing under plough any “unused,” or “wasted,” property by importing Germans from the overcrowded, disease-ridden cities onto the healthy land. They would ultimately strengthen the nation through food security and raise tall, strong farmer-soldiers, free from the socialism of the urban haunts. Significantly, “colonization” began in the fields right outside German cities, extended to rural spaces in the borderland regions of the German Empire, such as Prussian Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, and then continued overseas to “proper” colonies, such as German East Africa. My belief that labor, property, and the concept of colonization were inextricably intertwined for these German thinkers was only further entrenched when I read of Max Sering in the Canadian Prairies in 1883 looking approvingly upon Métis (“half breeds”) being taught “European” farming methods. For Sering, how you farmed was much more important than the color of your skin.Footnote ¹

This nexus of labor, property, and nature in colonialism was crucial to what has come to be called the “colonial gaze.” With history now fully in the “spatial turn,”Footnote ² and with it the concomitant turn to geography, we are better able to understand how the colonizer saw and understood colonial space and the subjects within it. Along these lines, I have long been struck by the way in which the colonizer was able to see fully populated space as “empty.” Indeed, it was in pursuit of an explanation as to how Natives seemed invisible to the colonizers that led me to the books under review. Although written by a highly interdisciplinary set of authors, from geographers to literature and law professors, all five works wrestle with the fundamental question of invisibility: How do those with power render land that is full, empty?

We will begin with the oldest, yet now newest, work: the seminal monograph of Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. First published in 1992 and reprinted a dozen times, and now in a modified second edition, this study, with its evocative title, is regarded by many as signaling a shift away from analyzing what “happened” in the colony to studying what the colonizers “believed” they saw. In other words, colonial studies turned away from the question of how the colonized were changed to how the colonizer was altered through the practice of colonialism. Indeed, a criticism of this shift, which Pratt acknowledges, is that it marked a radical turning inward of colonial studies, where the colony and the colonized largely (and rather ironically) disappeared from view as historians focused on the colonizer and, ultimately, the metropole and how it was shaped by the empire and the periphery. Over the course of ten roughly chronological chapters, Pratt analyzes the travel accounts of European voyages to South America and Africa. Early on, in chapter two, she explains what she calls “planetary consciousness”: the rise of science and rational classification in Europe, which endowed European travelers with the sense that theirs was a universal ordering system that would conquer and bring under the high modern lens all the flora, fauna, and land of the world “out there.” Here we have our first introduction to those “imperial eyes,” the tendency to order (and thus make controllable) the chaos of the periphery, to become the “monarch of all I survey.” This controlling, modernizing technique is a crucial aspect of the colonial gaze, and it is also closely connected to the bourgeois gaze at home that sees chaos when apartment dwellers hang their laundry on the balcony, that recoils at lawns unmown. While Pratt is willing to bring her colonial gaze inside Europe, it is only to acknowledge that it exists between Northern and Southern Europe, the Germans looking down upon Italian chaos, with forms of travel writing that “legitimate bourgeois authority and delegitimate peasant and subsistence lifeways.”Footnote ³ She would likely find the same discourse in British or German travel accounts of their own backward rural corners. Nonetheless, her main point, the rationalizing gaze of the colonizer/traveler, is central throughout all the books under review.

In chapter three, she analyzes travel accounts of eighteenth-century southern Africa and introduces us to another concept that will run through the other books as well: the “anti-conquest.” Like virtually all colonizers (and indeed, most historical subjects), Pratt's travelers like to feel good about themselves and what they are doing. Thus, in contrast to certain virile accounts of manly conquest often encountered in travel literature based on climbing Kilimanjaro, etc., scientist-travelers attempted a meeker, more “innocent” description of the places they were exploring by simply describing the natural history and failing to mention people at all (especially where slavery was involved). Southern Africa in these accounts is a land ripe for British improvement, and fittingly, in the moments where humans do appear, the poor, dirty, backward Boers are often mistaken for Africans, the modernizing gaze being one that, as mentioned above, has only an instrumental need for racial categories. You are either modern or you are not. The all-seeing traveler/narrator as blind to human presence reaches its apotheosis in chapter six, when Pratt analyzes the writings of one of the most famous travelers of all, Alexander von Humboldt. Amazingly, in his descriptions of South America, Humboldt's lush, exotic natural landscapes, open and beckoning for colonization, sometimes possess domesticated animals, yet their domesticators are nowhere to be seen.

Ultimately, as humans begin to be noticed in the travel narratives from the 1820s, they are judged solely in terms of their capitalist potential. The Euroamericans of South America, if seen resting instead of ploughing, are immediately rendered as being as dirty and lazy as any other colonized people. Pratt claims:

Pratt brings this point forcefully home in the second edition with her newly minted chapter ten: “In the neocolony: modernity, mobility, globality.” Here, she points out that the formerly directly colonized areas of the world, earlier deemed “uncivilized,” are now described as “less developed.” Capitalist understandings of “proper” labor and land use were earlier “hidden” under the umbrella of colonialism. Today, we are surprisingly more honest.

Yet perhaps the link between the colonial gaze and economic potential was never more obvious than at the very beginning of the story of modern imperialism. In John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, Barbara Arneil makes the devastating argument that a key underpinning of our Western liberal understanding of property can be traced to John Locke's sophisticated apologia for the “theft” of land from the aboriginal population of the American colonies. Not being a political theorist, I cannot say what effect (if any) Arneil's work has had on the intellectual history of liberalism. What I can say is that her work, published in 1996, has helped put Lockean notions of labor and property front and center in discussions of the “colonial gaze.” In Locke, as in the “anti-conquest” narratives in Pratt, we see the continuous working out of guilty consciences among the colonizers. Here, finding that the simple, and ugly, “right of conquest” invoked by Grotius and the Spanish to claim land in the Americas as insufficient to assuage his own (and the English public's) sense of injustice in this massive theft, Locke sets out to philosophically and legally explain when and why it is all right to take what is not yours. It must be noted that in doing so, Locke established a rationale that would be used to the present day to justify everything from colonial invasion to legal expropriation of land in modern democratic societies.Footnote ⁵

Locke described a Native population in the Carolinas that wandered through the land, over rich soil, picking fruit from the trees and hunting animals. These were people much closer to Locke's “state of nature,” who, unlike the English, had not yet learned to improve the value of the land through farming. (We know that Locke owned and read several books detailing extensive farming among North American Natives. This was information he ignored, or did not “see.”) Further, and crucially in the wake of the English enclosure of common lands, the Natives did not set up fences indicating who owned what. Thus, argued Locke, the Natives did not own the land. Through the lens of progress and improvement, Locke was able to lay out a theory and justification for taking the land from the Natives, improving it, and thus increasing the overall wealth for English and Native alike. With regard to “emptiness,” Locke invoked the term vacuum domicilem to describe land empty of cultivation and yearning for the plough. Thus, in a pattern to be repeated throughout the history of colonialism, Natives who failed to practice modern modes of production disappeared into the empty backdrop of nature. In Arneil's words:

Further, and key to the history of modern genocide, Locke and others seemed to indicate that only in the domesticated space, the ius gentium, did law exist. Beyond this, in the frontier, law did not apply.Footnote ⁷ In her final chapter, “Locke, Jefferson, and the Amerindian,” Arneil demonstrates the heavy effect of Locke on Jefferson and how the latter argued that the British no longer owned the colonies because newly arrived immigrants had now worked the land and thus removed the Crown's claim! Further, it was one of Jefferson's great wishes to teach Amerindians how to farm in the European style in order to raise their level of civilization.Footnote ⁸

The influence of labor, property, and the utility of law on nineteenth-century colonialism comes to the fore in the breathtaking reach of Stuart Banner's Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska. In this study, Banner, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, compares and contrasts the various British and American approaches to colonization in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, Tonga, Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Here, as in Locke, the cold, hard political reality of every colonial encounter is weighed, and then a justification is provided for whatever form of colonialism that is then chosen. And at the very heart of each of these decisions is whether or not the Natives work the land. In Australia, Aborigines did not farm, the British arrived in military force, and the land was declared terra nullius, owned by no one, and thus ready to be claimed by the British flag. A very different encounter occurred in New Zealand, where the Maori farmed the land, had an understanding of “private property,” and were able to obstruct any easy gaze of emptiness. There is a link here, however, not pushed too hard by Banner, to modernization theory. It is not simply the case that the British happily recognized farmers and exploited hunters and gatherers. The fact that the Maori farmed, according to modernization theory, meant that they were more advanced in their political formations, and were thus better able to unite and present a formidable military alliance. This is in effect why the British were unable to push around farmers in New Zealand. Only later, once the white settlers were well in place and in positions of power, did they then steal the land through “land tenure reform,” creating a maze of impossible legal bureaucracy in the 1880s that largely accomplished what was earlier inopportune.

In a fascinating twist, which again highlights modes of production and the colonial gaze, Banner details the pre-emptive strike undertaken by the landowning Native elite in Hawaii in the 1890s. As these landowners became fearful that the United States would soon annex them, and that upon annexation would declare terra nullius rights, with great prescience the Hawaiians implemented their own land tenure reform and created a system of land use and private property that succeeded in eventually forcing American annexationists to buy the land instead of simply stealing it. In other words, the link between modes of production and how colonizers saw and stole land was so clearly demarcated by the end of the nineteenth century that the colonized were able to take part in a grand game of illusion and the very deliberate social deconstruction and reconstruction of space. While in this case the Hawaiians’ preemptive bureaucratic organization was understandable, valid, knowing, and cynical, what is so striking on the part of the colonizers is their own need to justify their actions with retroactive laws and philosophical understandings of labor and property. The “guilt” of the colonizer is never more obvious than in the constant desire to frame and reframe the various legitimate reasons for what was always, in the end, the use of power against the powerless, naked conquest wherever possible. Like the British in Australia, in California the Americans encountered non-farming, unallied Native groups, powerless to stop the encroaching Whites. And so, for the only time in all of the United States, terra nullius was invoked. By the end of westward expansion, the Americans were so strong as to see no need to treat with Native populations. Likewise, north of the border, the arrival of the British in the future British Columbia would signal the end of writing treaties. In closing, Banner highlights the legacy of these various methods of colonial land acquisition for the present-day legal battles of indigenous peoples. As he points out, no matter how one's land was stolen, by 1900 the social and political situation of aborigines in all of these places was very poor. However, today the manner in which the land was taken matters a great deal. In New Zealand, because of earlier written treaties, effective legal arguments have been made and substantial settlements have been won by the Maori. No such victories have been achieved by the Aborigines of Australia, people whose land was taken without any negotiation whatsoever.

Whereas Banner's study is far reaching and comparative, Cole Harris's Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia, provides the concomitant razor-sharp focus of a regional study of one of the areas covered by Banner. A key finding of Harris, backed up by Banner, is the degree to which the periphery, and not the metropole, called many of the shots when it came to worldwide colonial negotiations. In Banner, while Pacific-wide policies may have come out of London, in every case the British colonizers encountered Natives, judged their strength or level of civilization, then adjusted policy accordingly. Sure enough, in the case of British Columbia studied by the historical geographer Harris, a constant refrain is that of how little attention the British on the West Coast paid to orders and policies emanating from the East. The same can be said with regard to the “anti-conquest” narrative I have referenced throughout, the desire by the colonizers to justify their actions. In a nice mirroring of the metropole/periphery tension over law and dispossession, Harris marks the same occurring at the philosophical level. While those at the very top of the colonial empire (including the elite in British Columbia) may well have invoked Locke's understanding of natural man and the vacuum domicilem to rationalize the removal of “wandering” Natives from the fertile valleys to reserves, the typical settler, having escaped generations of poverty in Britain, simply associated owning and farming land with everything they desired. It meant social standing, the right to vote, security, and power, all things they lacked in the homeland. Thus, believing that Natives did not value (or see) land in an identical fashion, they had few qualms about taking it from them.Footnote ⁹

What is fascinating here is how the recently powerless oppress the newly powerless, using the same logic that had just been used against them. Stealing from Natives because Natives do not have fences mimics what had happened to the poor in Great Britain: enclosure. In fact, enclosure in the Western Highlands and the resulting removal of poor Scots had led directly to many of the very same Scots emigrating to North America (with many eventually arriving in British Columbia). Indeed, when a historical geographer of colonialism based at the University of British Columbia invokes a Marxist historian of the working class in Britain—no less a figure than E. P. Thompson with his Whigs and Hunters—one is definitely moving beyond typical understandings of colonial dispossession as something based in race. In the same discussion, Harris invokes Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that capitalism has a spatial energy that works to first deterritorialize people and then reterritorialize them in relation to capital.

Harris does not want to dismiss race entirely, however, as it was used to justify even harsher treatment of Natives than that visited upon the other “colonized people” of Canada, the French of Quebec. Harris nicely compares the language of the 1870s requiring the quick civilizing of the Natives to that of the Durham Report on French Canada some thirty-five years earlier. The “civilizing” of the Natives, however, would proceed along much more brutal lines, beginning first with the cynical application of Lockean notions of farming. Whereas the average White farmer in British Columbia scraped by with 320 acres, a Native family was provided with twenty acres to till while transforming themselves into good Christian members of the West. In a similar move to the aboriginal population of Hawaii, in British Columbia the colonized recognized the power of Lockean language and began to petition the government of British Columbia, pointing out that they were no longer “lazy and roaming-about people,” and instead now farmed and thus had “a bright hope to enter into the path of civilization.”Footnote ¹⁰ I would argue, however, that here again race is only instrumental. The French on the Plains of Abraham put up a strong fight, had been farmers, and thus resembled the Maori as a people that would have to be negotiated with. Along the lines of Banner, the Natives of British Columbia were in a much weaker position, and thus race (and a lack of Christianity) was merely used as a further justification for a theft that would have taken place regardless of skin color. Indeed, in the twentieth century, the “white-skinned Natives” of Eastern Europe were to be treated as the lowest of the low when empire arrived in its German and Russian forms.Footnote ¹¹

Before turning to the last book under review, the work with the most abstract understanding of colonial space, it would be useful to turn briefly to some of the seminal works on space and modernity referenced, or at least alluded to, in much of the recent work on colonialism. Key to the current vogue of seeing both emptiness and capitalism at the heart of it all is the often impenetrable work of the French neo-Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre and his seminal monograph The Production of Space, originally published in 1974 and appearing in English in 1991. Lefebvre essentially argues that the world “out there,” or “nature,” only exists for us in the way we experience it; that is, it is absurd to talk about nature beyond human contact (a notion beautifully illustrated in the work of Braun, to be reviewed presently). Thus, all space for us is “social space,” and we can only understand and experience that space through our own highly subjective cultural lenses. Hence we have the fundamental manner in which the modes of production of any particular society frame the way in which those operating within that mode of production see the world, or space, or indeed individuals within that space. It has been argued that Lefebvre is merely an incredibly difficult-to-read Platonist and that this is all a variant on the “Simile of the Sun” and the “Dividing Line.” We see what we desire to see and what makes sense to us at the time. As one scholar told me, this problem is at the center of geographical debates and can best be summed up by the question: “Am I in a church or a sports hall?”Footnote ¹² Indeed, as a twelve-year-old member of a Thursday-night boys’ youth Christian club, I often had my head bowed as the youth pastor prayed, all the while seeing out of the corner of my (surreptitiously open) eye the workbench of the suburban garage we were sitting in. This was, to say the least, incongruous. Amazingly, until that moment, the “garage-ness” of the space was invisible to me. Only when I was bored (i.e., praying) did I “see.”

Another more recent work of crucial importance is James Scott's Seeing Like a State. Most of the themes I have mentioned, whether in relation to colonialism or capitalism, are virtually all subsumed under what Scott calls

Scott invokes the “high modern gaze” wherever the Western elite look, from the colonial situation abroad all the way “back” to the forests of Germany. Indeed, he directly compares the “scientific” management of the Prussian forests in the late eighteenth century to the management of people in modern societies. The “modern” (Lefebvre would say capitalist) viewer desires to measure and order all that it sees, and insists upon taxonomies that create a “planetary consciousness” (to use Pratt's language). Crucially, all of the “imperialism” that is invoked upon colonized populations is first and foremost implemented in the metropole. Scott is able to invoke the work of Eugen Weber in his defense: The history of France is the conquest and colonization of various “peoples” on the periphery, followed by the assimilation of those Völker, through modernizing techniques such as a universal language and a universal school curriculum teaching the glory of the colonizer. Scott quotes Weber: “There can be no clearer expression of imperialist sentiment, a white man's burden of Francophony, whose first conquests were to be right at home.”Footnote ¹⁴ Scott sums up this overall modernization = colonization argument thus:

Again, in these key works as well as the books under review, it is the modern/scientific/capitalist gaze that produces empty space in the eyes of the colonizer, space ripe for forced population transfer and/or assimilation, followed by new, proper settlers and correct modes of production. In this new colonial turn, race is (perhaps unintentionally) under relentless attack. Surprisingly, the cultural and spatial turn has led to the return of class!

Labor, land, and emptiness once more come together in the final book under review, and it is here that we find some of the most invidious, subconscious, and for the typical progressive academic reader, most disturbing legacies of Western colonialism. With Bruce Braun's The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada's West Coast, we once more return to British Columbia, this time, though, in the 1990s and with a rather surprising target: white, middle-class environmentalists who believe they are the friends of the oppressed Natives. The setting for Braun's analysis is the confrontation between environmentalists chaining themselves to trees in Clayoquot Sound and the logging companies who would like to cut down the trees. In a wonderful upsetting of readers’ expectations, it is not the “evil loggers” that Braun has in his sights, but the “do-gooder” green guerrillas. In 1993 the environmentalists produced a map of the sound for the media that depicted and contrasted two areas: (a) the space being ravaged by the loggers, and (b) pristine, empty wilderness. What was erased from the map was the majority population of the sound: the Natives.

“Epistemic erasures are not innocent; they justify political and territorial erasures,”Footnote ¹⁶ claims geographer Derek Gregory, Braun's rather famous doctoral supervisor. And Braun is able to show that the environmentalists' erasure of Natives is not accidental, though it would surely break the heart of any of his targets to admit this. In perhaps the most fascinating section of the book, chapter three (“Saving Clayoquot”), Braun deconstructs a coffee table tome of images, On the Wild Side, published by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. At the heart of the environmentalists' argument was a perceived need to describe this landscape as “pristine,” that it was nature untouched by man, because man spoiled nature. Thus a binary had to be produced: If people were in this land, it would no longer be “nature.” Right here we see the error Lefebvre warned against: “Nature” does not exist for humans. Only “social nature,” nature as perceived through human interaction, exists for humans. It is always wrong (and somewhat absurd, as Braun illustrates in the next chapter) for “nature lovers” to believe that the nature they experience is somehow “primordial” and “more real” than a forest with a logger standing in it. There is a section in the middle of On the Wild Side that gives an incredibly colonial “nod” to the humans living in Clayoquot Sound: Amid a series of pictures of empty longhouses and rotting totem poles (aborigines as a dying or dead autochthonous people), there is one shot of Natives paddling a canoe in the distance. Braun correctly points out that an image of Natives operating an outboard motor would have been verboten. “Modern” Natives disrupt the political message of the environmentalists, and what is more, it confuses and annoys them.

In the following chapter, “Landscapes of Loss and Mourning,” Braun skewers the adventure, eco-tourism business in a wonderful anecdote in which he accompanies a group of seakayakers into the sound. After gearing up, spending the lion's share of their resources in the White town of Tofino, and kayaking for an afternoon, the paddlers cruise along a shoreline, passing two good campsites before alighting on a third, rather poor beach. The earlier sites had the following problems: From the first site you could still see the lights of Tofino (electricity = inauthentic), and the second site was so good that often another set of adventure kayakers might show up; as Braun explains, there is nothing eco-tourism hates more than other eco-tourists. The nadir of the journey, however, occurs the following morning, when the kayakers land at the village of Marktosis, inhabited completely by members of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation. The adventure tourist company wants to spend at least a tiny fraction of its funds in Native communities, and thus they pay for an organized lunch there. Yet the visit does not produce the fantasized indigeneity the adventurers expected to see:

Here, Braun argues that a fundamental paradox of modernity is taking place in such moments: Modernity is prefaced upon history, and a backward past that is always disappearing and being triumphed over. As such, the modern adventure traveler (who did, after all, fly in from New York on a Friday evening, will return a week Sunday, and just loves that his or her high-modern capitalist occupation provides enough money to go on such an eco-tour) looks upon Clayoquot Sound as a past to be mourned, a past that had ultimately to be destroyed.Footnote ¹⁸ This strange element of antimodernity in the heart of the liberal and progressive modern world can be seen in the paradox at the heart of the organic food movement: Only those who have benefited most from modern capitalism have the money to buy the expensive, free-range organic eggs.Footnote ¹⁹ There is much to say here, but let us turn back to the concepts of land, labor, and emptiness.

Of course, it is not only the environmentalists who are gazing upon this space and seeing what they want to see: The logging companies are also drawing upon incredibly robust colonial legacies in order to push their agenda of an empty forest, ripe for exploitation. Just as nineteenth-century surveyors created empty maps of British Columbia for the crown, “eliminating” Natives and simply listing resources, so the giant forestry companies of the 1990s wanted to indicate that the trees they desired were “unused” and full of potential. In their legal challenges to cutting rights, the Native groups of Clayoquot Sound had to indeed play the Lockean game (as the Hawaiians had in Banner's book) and prove “continual use” of the trees over decades and centuries, in order to hold on to the land. Thus, a battery of high-modern scientists was brought in to “prove” (to a Western court) that Natives had been using the trees for various purposes (boats, baskets) since “time immemorial.” In a surprising sentence that seems to justify a Lockean approach, Braun claims: “First Nations in Clayoquot Sound did not simply wander aimlessly across the surface of the land living off its bounty; they actively used and transformed their environments in a purposeful manner” (102). Why does Braun need to tell us that? In any case, what Braun has brilliantly shown is the level to which the main elements of the colonial gaze of the modern period continue to operate in our supposedly postcolonial moment. The way in which we see space today is run through with our imperially shaped understandings of what labor is and who qualifies as properly working, as well as whether or not land is enclosed, that is, properly owned.

Seeing is a social function. It is not “pure” or “natural,” and it always takes place in a cultural context. The overriding ideological constructions of our post-Enlightenment episteme, Capitalism and Science, modulate our modes of seeing today and fundamentally controlled the way in which the European/White colonizer saw the colonized, as well as the space inhabited by the colonized. Having just invoked race in that last sentence, a final word on that subject is due. The five books under review make the case (perhaps inadvertently) that race is often little more than an incredibly useful tool to help demarcate those whose land is to be stolen and/or those who are to be enslaved.Footnote ²⁰ As referenced earlier, the desire for an “anti-conquest” narrative is almost always very powerful among the strong, and thus any easily identifiable category that can be invoked to assuage the conscience of the colonizers and their home populations will be seized upon. And few categories have been more thoroughly exploited than that of race, that is, the justification for subjection due to the lesser “scientific” status of those you colonize. As mentioned earlier, after making his comparison between Scots and Natives as both being victims of enclosure, Cole Harris claims that race is nonetheless a factor, as the latter were treated far more harshly than the former. Yet, as any Irish historian of the Cromwellian period will tell you, how the English treated you had far more to do with power differentials than skin color.Footnote ²¹

To put it most provocatively, in the colonial context, class trumped race. The former was “real” and had to be confronted, while the latter seems to have been vastly more elastic and invoked after the former was established, to justify the former. If the colonized farmed the land and had a “Western” understanding of property, the colonizer was forced to deal with these circumstances. Skin color, however, in no way determined how you would be colonized. In other words, labor practices, and not skin shade, explain why Maori were colonized differently from the indigenous people of British Columbia. While I am sure that critics of this approach will invoke Africa as perhaps an example of race trumping class in the colonial encounter, it is important to remember that in Pratt's book, poor (and very White, but dirty) Boers are indistinct from poor Africans. They are equally looked down upon. Yet, because the Boers would come to have a preeminent place in the later, racially classified South Africa, it is, of course, absurd to claim that race is unimportant. Race is of colossal significance in modern history and the history of colonialism. My argument (as opposed to what I had long believed) is that in the colonial encounter, the socioeconomic conditions of those to be colonized, that is, issues of class, labor and land use, were ultimately more determinant than race when it came time for the colonizer to decide how to colonize the subjects.

The modern gaze renders invisible all that it cannot understand, as do, to be fair, perhaps all understandings of the world by all peoples in a position to make the world more to their liking.Footnote ²² In the period covered by the books under review, highly rationalist understandings of science, geography, history, biology, and law were joined with dominant (though always evolving) modes of production, and together these elements provided the rather thick lenses worn by the colonizers, spectacles that allowed the viewer to see emptiness.