Settler Economies and Indigenous Encounters: The dialectics of conquest, hybridisation and production regimes

Abstract

The socioeconomic histories of settler societies with their conquests, impacts, articulations, fusions and hybridisations are a fraught field for research, with a wide range of conceptualisations and debates, and one with significant material effects in the present. Few areas of contemporary social science history have more direct social significance. History wars, governmental Indigenous policies, socio-anthropological research and political debates are all directly affected by conceptual/scientific and ideological debates. Furthermore, the literature on settler economic history, in contrast with that of social and cultural history, has been somewhat lagging in this conceptual debate. This chapter is a discussion of the development, meaning, use and usefulness of the central but controversial concepts of 'conquest', 'hybridity' and 'production regimes' to the field of settler-Indigenous economic relations and their consequences. I argue we need all these concepts and several more and that the concept of 'hybridity' must be part of this bigger set of concepts - depending on how it is specified and used - if it is to carry the weight placed on it. In particular, it is argued here that the concept of 'hybridity' - now extensively used in cultural studies and especially post-colonial studies - is useful for this field but also potentially over-generalising and misleading in its application. The danger is, I argue, that the use of 'hybridity' could obscure as much as it illuminates if it is too generalised. Surely not all socioeconomic articulations, blendings, mergers or fusions are hybridisations. If they are then the concept loses specificity and power because of over-generalisation.