Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
7-2021
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.”
Keywords
capitalism, colonialism, empire, political economy, Enlightenment, liberalism, Adam Smith, British Empire
Discipline
Political Economy
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Journal of Politics
Volume
83
Issue
3
First Page
1080
Last Page
1096
ISSN
0022-3816
Identifier
10.1086/711321
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
INCE, Onur Ulas.(2021). Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, and Limits of Liberal Anti-Imperialism. Journal of Politics, 83(3), 1080-1096.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3233
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1086/711321