Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, and Limits of Liberal Anti-imperialism

Abstract

Recent scholarship has claimed Adam Smith's frontal attack on the mercantile system as a precocious expression of liberal anti-imperialism. This paper argues that settler colonialism in North America represented an important exception and limit to Smith's anti-imperial commitments. Smith spared agrarian settler colonies from his invective against other imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies because of the colonies' evidentiary significance for his "system of natural liberty." Smith's embrace of settler colonies involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity of these settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from the indigenous peoples. Smith navigated this problem by, first, predicating colonial "injustice" on conquest, slavery, and destruction, and second, describing American land as res nullius. Together, these conceptual definitions made it possible to imagine settler colonies as originating in nonviolent acts of "occupation without conquest" and embodying "commerce without empire."

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

“…Much less commonly does it consider how non-western and anticolonial thinkers themselves conceptualized progress-what it looked like and how it was theorized from the other side of the colonial divide. This remains the case in more recent works on liberalism, race, empire, and developmentalism centering philosophers such as Mill (Beaumont and Li 2022;Lederman 2022), Hobhouse (Williams 2021;Tan 2022), Smith (Ince 2021), and Kant (Williams 2021;Church 2022).…”

The Export of Capital to Colonies and the Falling Rate of Profit in Economic Thought: 1776–1917

“…The argument that colonies can bolster the general rate of profit would later be taken up by Wakefield and Mill. Smith's opinions on colonization were complicated by its historical association with mercantilism. Although he viewed the colonization of land-abundant regions of North America in a generally favorable light (Ince 2021), he strongly criticized colonial trade restrictions and monopolistic chartered trading companies like the British East India Company (Muthu 2008;Collins 2019). He distinguished between the advantages that might be derived from colony trade "in its natural and free state" versus the disadvantages associated with the monopolization of that trade (Smith [1776(Smith [ ] 1952.…”