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Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race
Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arabs in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal.
Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.
Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.
306 pages, Hardcover
First published August 18, 2015
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About the author
Patrick Wolfe
12 books33 followersPatrick Wolfe (1949 – 2017) was an Australian historian and scholar who made significant contributions to several academic fields, including anthropology, genocide studies, indigenous studies, and the historiography of race, colonialism, and imperialism. He is often credited with establishing the field of settler colonial studies.
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March 24, 2018
It has been a long time since writers, analysts, other academics and a whole host of us whose work regularly connects with the question of ‘race’ have been using sneer marks to indicate that despite its powerful impact and signficance in everyday life ‘race’ is not an actual thing, but a social construct – a characteristic constructed to maintain a set of social relations, hierarchies and power. We’ve had the analyses that link the invention of ‘race’ to the global worldview that emerged in the Early Modern period linked to the colonisation of the Americas, we’ve had the geneticists who have shown convincingly that there is no genetic basis to the social, cultural or intellectual attributes granted ‘race’ and should have convincingly won the argument that ‘race’ is socially constructed. Yet, the myth of the ‘race’ gene (in sport), the notion that there is some social, cultural or intellectual aspects of individuals that as caused by their skin colour (the most common marker of ‘race’) and a host of other socio-cultural attributes are deep rooted and resilient.
Part of the problem, from my point of view, and part of the persistence of the myth of ‘race’ is that although we’ve repeatedly insisted that it is only a social construct, we’ve not been very good at showing what that means in that we’ve not demonstrated how this social construct comes about, what it means in practice or how it varies – and it must vary: if there is no ‘objective’ cause of ‘race’ and it is constructed in specific social settings, it must vary according to those settings. For instance, and this is a rudimentary one, a person of mixed race descent may well be identified as Black in the UK, but White in the home of their parent of colour: we see this often – what ‘race’ an individual is varies according to where in the world they are. Through another lens, ‘race’ in a colony of settlement plays itself out differently than ‘race’ in the imperial metropolis that was the source of that colonisation.
Patrick Wolfe’s Traces of History sets out to explore exactly this issue and grapple with the meaning of the social construction of ‘race’. He does so through a series of illustrative case studies where four of the eight chapters are country specific examples that fulfil a role of typical forms. He then shifts his frame to explore two colonies of settlement producing two profoundly different discourses and frames of ‘race’. The first four chapters focus on very different settings where ‘race’ is a powerful organising tool of everyday life: Australia where the politics of indigeneity has a deep influence on the form of a predominantly mono-cultural Anglo-Celtic national concept; the USA where he argues that although ‘race’ was fundamental to the era of mass enslavement, the language and social practice of ‘race’ became more significant once enslavement and unfreedom no longer distinguished people of African descent from other Americans; Central European anti-Semitism as a social force in a world where the adherents of one religious faith were not phenotypically or in any of physical manner distinctive; and Brazil where there is such a mix of ‘races’ that the construction of ‘race’ turns to a large degree on the complex and subtle language of skin colour. In each case, Wolfe comprehensively unpacks the historical construction of the notion of ‘race’ as a social force. We might, and in many points of detail could, challenge Wolfe – but his underlying case is sound as is his wider conceptual point, clearly stated on pp18-9:
One of the key points to emerge from these four chapters for me is that Whiteness is just as much a locally specific social construct as is any other trope of ‘race’.
The final four chapters shift direction and focus to address two cases, in each case noting the historical transformation of notion of ‘race’. The first instance is the USA where Wolfe explores two narratives of racialisation of indigenous peoples; the first is a narrative of dispossession where indigenousness/‘Indianness’ is a marker of foreignness of a people who must be dispossessed to allow the United States to be made. The second is a narrative of marginalisation where indigenousness is a marker of a group within the United States who must be managed and (culturally) destroyed to allow them to become of the USA: here he explores things as diverse as the Indian School system, land tenure and reservation and treaty policy and practice.
The second instance is Israel with its dual narrative of the dispossession and redefinition. In the first part this is the dispossession of Non-Jewish occupants of Palestine leading to the formation of the modern state and here Wolfe explores issues such as land purchasing and tenure as well as acts of violence. In the second he explores the racialisation of the Jewish state, making two key points: first that unlike other settlement colonies the settler nation existed before colonisation, constructed in part by the discourse of a ‘Jewish national home’ but also more broadly within the Central European anti-Semitism explored in Chapter 3. The second key point, marking this settler colony and its construction of ‘race’ as distinct is that assimilation is not about blending into an existing settler nation but about being in the space of the nation and thereby denying Palestinian indigeneity. Woven through this discussion is an analysis of the paradoxical position of Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Christian family members accompanying Russian Jewish settlers.
This is neither an easy read nor one that we would expect to agree with, although I am convinced by the overall argument and impressed at Wolfe’s ability to construct a comparative historicisation of the social construction of ‘race’ in a way that focusses on a set of cases but also does so in such an open way that it prompts thinking and analysis of other settings: I found myself continually reflecting on the two other colonies of settlement I know well – New Zealand and South Africa – throughout.
He makes one more powerful case that might in part explain my sympathy for his position and approach. He argues that as historians we need to be more attentive to models and structures because it “is in the nature of structures that, often as not, the deep-seated regularities subtending individual events can be traced forwards as well as backwards in time” (p236). That is, structures help us make better sense of what it is we’re exploring: the challenge for many in my profession is to get beyond the notion of ‘their’ events as distinctive – but that’s an ontological and historiographical question for another time….
In short, this is an impressive global comparative history of ‘race’ that makes a significant contribution to this field and to our understanding, both academically and in our daily lives of the meaning of the statement that ‘race’ is a social construct. Very highly recommended!
Part of the problem, from my point of view, and part of the persistence of the myth of ‘race’ is that although we’ve repeatedly insisted that it is only a social construct, we’ve not been very good at showing what that means in that we’ve not demonstrated how this social construct comes about, what it means in practice or how it varies – and it must vary: if there is no ‘objective’ cause of ‘race’ and it is constructed in specific social settings, it must vary according to those settings. For instance, and this is a rudimentary one, a person of mixed race descent may well be identified as Black in the UK, but White in the home of their parent of colour: we see this often – what ‘race’ an individual is varies according to where in the world they are. Through another lens, ‘race’ in a colony of settlement plays itself out differently than ‘race’ in the imperial metropolis that was the source of that colonisation.
Patrick Wolfe’s Traces of History sets out to explore exactly this issue and grapple with the meaning of the social construction of ‘race’. He does so through a series of illustrative case studies where four of the eight chapters are country specific examples that fulfil a role of typical forms. He then shifts his frame to explore two colonies of settlement producing two profoundly different discourses and frames of ‘race’. The first four chapters focus on very different settings where ‘race’ is a powerful organising tool of everyday life: Australia where the politics of indigeneity has a deep influence on the form of a predominantly mono-cultural Anglo-Celtic national concept; the USA where he argues that although ‘race’ was fundamental to the era of mass enslavement, the language and social practice of ‘race’ became more significant once enslavement and unfreedom no longer distinguished people of African descent from other Americans; Central European anti-Semitism as a social force in a world where the adherents of one religious faith were not phenotypically or in any of physical manner distinctive; and Brazil where there is such a mix of ‘races’ that the construction of ‘race’ turns to a large degree on the complex and subtle language of skin colour. In each case, Wolfe comprehensively unpacks the historical construction of the notion of ‘race’ as a social force. We might, and in many points of detail could, challenge Wolfe – but his underlying case is sound as is his wider conceptual point, clearly stated on pp18-9:
regimes of race do not figure as faits accompli, as transcending history, but as ever-incomplete projects whereby colonisers repetitively seek to impose and maintain White supremacy.
One of the key points to emerge from these four chapters for me is that Whiteness is just as much a locally specific social construct as is any other trope of ‘race’.
The final four chapters shift direction and focus to address two cases, in each case noting the historical transformation of notion of ‘race’. The first instance is the USA where Wolfe explores two narratives of racialisation of indigenous peoples; the first is a narrative of dispossession where indigenousness/‘Indianness’ is a marker of foreignness of a people who must be dispossessed to allow the United States to be made. The second is a narrative of marginalisation where indigenousness is a marker of a group within the United States who must be managed and (culturally) destroyed to allow them to become of the USA: here he explores things as diverse as the Indian School system, land tenure and reservation and treaty policy and practice.
The second instance is Israel with its dual narrative of the dispossession and redefinition. In the first part this is the dispossession of Non-Jewish occupants of Palestine leading to the formation of the modern state and here Wolfe explores issues such as land purchasing and tenure as well as acts of violence. In the second he explores the racialisation of the Jewish state, making two key points: first that unlike other settlement colonies the settler nation existed before colonisation, constructed in part by the discourse of a ‘Jewish national home’ but also more broadly within the Central European anti-Semitism explored in Chapter 3. The second key point, marking this settler colony and its construction of ‘race’ as distinct is that assimilation is not about blending into an existing settler nation but about being in the space of the nation and thereby denying Palestinian indigeneity. Woven through this discussion is an analysis of the paradoxical position of Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Christian family members accompanying Russian Jewish settlers.
This is neither an easy read nor one that we would expect to agree with, although I am convinced by the overall argument and impressed at Wolfe’s ability to construct a comparative historicisation of the social construction of ‘race’ in a way that focusses on a set of cases but also does so in such an open way that it prompts thinking and analysis of other settings: I found myself continually reflecting on the two other colonies of settlement I know well – New Zealand and South Africa – throughout.
He makes one more powerful case that might in part explain my sympathy for his position and approach. He argues that as historians we need to be more attentive to models and structures because it “is in the nature of structures that, often as not, the deep-seated regularities subtending individual events can be traced forwards as well as backwards in time” (p236). That is, structures help us make better sense of what it is we’re exploring: the challenge for many in my profession is to get beyond the notion of ‘their’ events as distinctive – but that’s an ontological and historiographical question for another time….
In short, this is an impressive global comparative history of ‘race’ that makes a significant contribution to this field and to our understanding, both academically and in our daily lives of the meaning of the statement that ‘race’ is a social construct. Very highly recommended!
March 6, 2022
A truly gripping read in its beginning - in the middle it loses its strength becoming bogged down in history of particular laws without necessary theoretical focus, its analysis of Israel I think re-centers the theoretical elements sufficiently. The central argument is that settlerism is predicated upon a logic of extermination, i.e. seeking to eradicate the particularity of the category of indigenity - which can be achieved by a variety of strategies: assimilation, expulsion and eradication. However, this logic of extermination means that indigenity still structures settlerism fundamentally and allows the continuation of native counter-claims.
This is an eye-opening argument - and despite all the issues, extremely useful in analysing present settlerism. Furthermore, it analyzes the multiplicity of settlerism - in how not always race is the basis of social control per se, but a variety forms can serve as basis for social control.
This is an eye-opening argument - and despite all the issues, extremely useful in analysing present settlerism. Furthermore, it analyzes the multiplicity of settlerism - in how not always race is the basis of social control per se, but a variety forms can serve as basis for social control.
February 3, 2016
Race is a social construct. [please note that I use the author's original British spellings of certain words in quotes]
”…racialisation represents a response to the crisis occasioned when colonizers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonised.”
”…race denotes certain peoples as being out of place, rendering the subordinate populations concerned inherently dirty, as we see in the ubiquitous linkage of race and hygiene.”
”Race […] is a trace of history: colonised populations continue to be racialised in specific ways that mark out and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted these populations.”
While it's obvious that nationality is a product of where you grew up or where you or your ancestors are from, race was invented in order to oppress - whether by enslavement, ostracization, assimilation, or elimination.
This screams a lot of truth:
”As it emerges in the late eighteenth century, race is a classification concept with two general characteristics. First, it is hierarchical. Difference is not neutral: to vary is to be defective, in concert with the degree of variation alleged to obtain. Second, it links physical characteristics to cognitive, cultural, and moral ones…”
Wow.
One purpose of racialization is colonialization.
In Australia, the point of racialization was to be able to define a group of people (who originally lived on the land), so that colonizers could confine that group to missions and reservations and keep the land for themselves. It also allowed for the systematic erasure of a group of people by such means as kidnapping their children and assimilating them in to non-native families.
Of course, in the US, we racialized the indigenous peoples for our own gain.
Preaccumulation is ”…the historical endowment that colonizers bring with them and [the] Natives’ countervailing historical plenitudes…” Or, colonists bring with them a plenitude of resources and experience, which continues to grow - while they use, take, and shrink resources available to the Natives whose land they are occupying.
That’s probably way overly simplistic, but maybe it conveys the idea.
In fact, our history turns Native peoples into Nature and part of the very resources of the land, denying them humanity and allowing us to live guilt-free on stolen ground.
“The distinction between dominion and possession presupposed a long-held asymmetry whereby Native entitlements were held to be axiomatically inferior to those enjoyed by Europeans (or Christians).”
I.e., by nature of who we were, we were more entitled to this land than they were. The only things we left open to the American Indian were removal and assimilation.
“Time and time again, on the Plains, the US cavalry was sent into Indian country to protect encroaching Whites from attack by its Indian owners.”
In other words, the US government went into Indian territory to help Whites fight Indians who were merely defending their homes.
Like the author says, this was conquest.
One Georgia volunteer stated, of the Trail of Tears, "I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousand, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."
It's ironic that some of the excuse we used for taking their land was that they weren't tied to the land as farmers, but were hunters and gatherers. Though they were the ones that taught the settlers to grow corn and tobacco. Two of the biggest money-making crops to this very day. There's an interesting appropriation for you. Andrew Jackson even asked if "the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian?"
(I think I got more out of the chapter on the American Indian because I just read so much about the dispossession of the Creeks.)
This is our history:
”We have already noted the tension between African American and Native American orientations to the US civil rights movement. As observed, that tension is reflected, as it continues to reflect, the respective historical experiences of chattel slavery and territorial dispossession. Yet the mutuality between the two is complete. As Ronald Takaki needed no more than a sentence to explain: ‘In order to make way for White settlement and the expansion of both cotton cultivation and the market, some 70,000 Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, and Chickasaws were uprooted and deprived of their lands, and hundreds of thousands of Blacks were moved into the Southwest to work the soil as slaves.’”
Because in early America, one of the purposes of race was to identify people who could be kept as slaves. Anyone, regardless of parentage, was black of they had so much as a drop of black blood in their background. At this time, there was no free Black or mixed blood - there was only Black (slave) and not Black (free). (And of course is still used to determine who to use systems like Jim Crow against. Jim Crow and racism are not dead in the US, in case you didn't know.)
Racialization of the Jews led to the "demonic extreme" of anti-semitism in the Nazi era.
In Brazil, Blacks have been discriminated in similar ways to the US; natives, more like Australia.
The book presents a fascinating thesis and gives some amazing and well-researched support for it.
And gives some hope - since there was a beginning to race, there can be an end.
But one of the problems I had was the extreme academic-ese the book was written in. You get an idea above, but here’s another example sentence:
”The tide of history canonises the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of discovery to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse within a cohesive project that implicates individual and nation-state, official and unofficial alike.”
It was a bit difficult to wade through some of these sentences.
But, ultimately worth it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Verso Books for a copy in return for an honest review.
”…racialisation represents a response to the crisis occasioned when colonizers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonised.”
”…race denotes certain peoples as being out of place, rendering the subordinate populations concerned inherently dirty, as we see in the ubiquitous linkage of race and hygiene.”
”Race […] is a trace of history: colonised populations continue to be racialised in specific ways that mark out and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted these populations.”
While it's obvious that nationality is a product of where you grew up or where you or your ancestors are from, race was invented in order to oppress - whether by enslavement, ostracization, assimilation, or elimination.
This screams a lot of truth:
”As it emerges in the late eighteenth century, race is a classification concept with two general characteristics. First, it is hierarchical. Difference is not neutral: to vary is to be defective, in concert with the degree of variation alleged to obtain. Second, it links physical characteristics to cognitive, cultural, and moral ones…”
Wow.
One purpose of racialization is colonialization.
In Australia, the point of racialization was to be able to define a group of people (who originally lived on the land), so that colonizers could confine that group to missions and reservations and keep the land for themselves. It also allowed for the systematic erasure of a group of people by such means as kidnapping their children and assimilating them in to non-native families.
Of course, in the US, we racialized the indigenous peoples for our own gain.
Preaccumulation is ”…the historical endowment that colonizers bring with them and [the] Natives’ countervailing historical plenitudes…” Or, colonists bring with them a plenitude of resources and experience, which continues to grow - while they use, take, and shrink resources available to the Natives whose land they are occupying.
That’s probably way overly simplistic, but maybe it conveys the idea.
In fact, our history turns Native peoples into Nature and part of the very resources of the land, denying them humanity and allowing us to live guilt-free on stolen ground.
“The distinction between dominion and possession presupposed a long-held asymmetry whereby Native entitlements were held to be axiomatically inferior to those enjoyed by Europeans (or Christians).”
I.e., by nature of who we were, we were more entitled to this land than they were. The only things we left open to the American Indian were removal and assimilation.
“Time and time again, on the Plains, the US cavalry was sent into Indian country to protect encroaching Whites from attack by its Indian owners.”
In other words, the US government went into Indian territory to help Whites fight Indians who were merely defending their homes.
Like the author says, this was conquest.
One Georgia volunteer stated, of the Trail of Tears, "I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousand, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."
It's ironic that some of the excuse we used for taking their land was that they weren't tied to the land as farmers, but were hunters and gatherers. Though they were the ones that taught the settlers to grow corn and tobacco. Two of the biggest money-making crops to this very day. There's an interesting appropriation for you. Andrew Jackson even asked if "the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian?"
(I think I got more out of the chapter on the American Indian because I just read so much about the dispossession of the Creeks.)
This is our history:
”We have already noted the tension between African American and Native American orientations to the US civil rights movement. As observed, that tension is reflected, as it continues to reflect, the respective historical experiences of chattel slavery and territorial dispossession. Yet the mutuality between the two is complete. As Ronald Takaki needed no more than a sentence to explain: ‘In order to make way for White settlement and the expansion of both cotton cultivation and the market, some 70,000 Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, and Chickasaws were uprooted and deprived of their lands, and hundreds of thousands of Blacks were moved into the Southwest to work the soil as slaves.’”
Because in early America, one of the purposes of race was to identify people who could be kept as slaves. Anyone, regardless of parentage, was black of they had so much as a drop of black blood in their background. At this time, there was no free Black or mixed blood - there was only Black (slave) and not Black (free). (And of course is still used to determine who to use systems like Jim Crow against. Jim Crow and racism are not dead in the US, in case you didn't know.)
Racialization of the Jews led to the "demonic extreme" of anti-semitism in the Nazi era.
In Brazil, Blacks have been discriminated in similar ways to the US; natives, more like Australia.
The book presents a fascinating thesis and gives some amazing and well-researched support for it.
And gives some hope - since there was a beginning to race, there can be an end.
But one of the problems I had was the extreme academic-ese the book was written in. You get an idea above, but here’s another example sentence:
”The tide of history canonises the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of discovery to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse within a cohesive project that implicates individual and nation-state, official and unofficial alike.”
It was a bit difficult to wade through some of these sentences.
But, ultimately worth it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Verso Books for a copy in return for an honest review.
February 22, 2024
Detailed and thoughtful, Wolfe manages to present the social construction of race in a variety of different historical and geographical contexts. However, at times the analysis felt quite clinical - focusing overly on legalistic means rather than on the ground struggles over race itself. I also disagree with his conception that settler-colonialism can only be based upon elimination of the native - I think history has shown that there are a variety of means through which settler-colonialism oppresses and dominates the native, exploitation being one as well as elimination.
November 9, 2021
As good a book on race as you're likely to find, and far better than pretty much any other book you're likely to have had recommended. Thoroughly materialist in its refusal of psychological and biological explanations of race, as well as in its rooting of race in processes of colonisation, dispossession, and exploitation, it's more Marxist than many texts that are styled as such. Race is a concept too often studied parochially and in isolation rather than comparatively, but it's a phenomenon that demands a global and comparative framework. Wolfe brings that methodology to the subject with a remarkable command of each subject he addresses: European Jewish, African American, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Black Brazilian, and Arab-Israeli. The book is complex and at times difficult to follow (I will need to revisit it), but it's also beautifully written and argued with a logic that's irresistible. Can scarcely recommend it highly enough for those serious about understanding what race is - and, just as importantly, what it isn't.
If I was to make a criticism, it would be this: Wolfe's argument is (laudably, and too rarely, imo) about race as a modern phenomenon, as contingent, contextual, and mutable. But at times I think the book would benefit from a clearer explanation of how and why prejudices with longer historical trajectories become racial. I felt this especially in the chapter on European Jewry, whose racialisation (antisemitism) he suggests needs to be differentiated quite sharply from previous kinds of violent marginalisation (Judaeophobia). I don't find that distinction as common-sense as Wolfe seems to assume, even if I'm very attracted to it. This, though, is a relatively minor problem with a genuinely brilliant book.
If I was to make a criticism, it would be this: Wolfe's argument is (laudably, and too rarely, imo) about race as a modern phenomenon, as contingent, contextual, and mutable. But at times I think the book would benefit from a clearer explanation of how and why prejudices with longer historical trajectories become racial. I felt this especially in the chapter on European Jewry, whose racialisation (antisemitism) he suggests needs to be differentiated quite sharply from previous kinds of violent marginalisation (Judaeophobia). I don't find that distinction as common-sense as Wolfe seems to assume, even if I'm very attracted to it. This, though, is a relatively minor problem with a genuinely brilliant book.
April 23, 2018
An incredibly comprehensive historical account that traces the contours of racialization in white settler societies and really distills the importance of this racialization in upholding social hierarchies in these societies. I was recommended this book to read as part of an academic paper review process and was not disappointed by the richness of analysis that Wolfe brings in this book. Very important read for those that are interested in the topic of race and want to delve more into how it has come to define non-White individuals.
March 7, 2021
This is a brilliant and important book. It would warrant 5 stars, but, at times, the writing is so jargon-laden as to be almost unreadable. I struggled to finish this, but am profoundly glad that I did.
Wolfe examines the construction of race in Australia, the USA, Brazil, Europe and Israel/Palestine. The breadth of the case studies is what gives this book its strength. The last two chapters on Israel/Palestine are stand-outs.
Highly recommended.
Wolfe examines the construction of race in Australia, the USA, Brazil, Europe and Israel/Palestine. The breadth of the case studies is what gives this book its strength. The last two chapters on Israel/Palestine are stand-outs.
Highly recommended.
December 9, 2024
Fascinating book on providing a materialist explanation of how race was constructed, arguing mainly that the construct of race depends on that race’s function within colonialism. His examples look at Australia, Brazil, America, and Israel.
December 10, 2016
As a piece of academic history, this is incredibly accessible and compelling to read. Indeed, I ploughed through it compulsively in 2 days. Wolfe looks at how settler colonial societies create race, and once the racial binaries have been produced, he charts their evolution within social structures and systems.
Wolfe take the subject matter of his analysis to be the settler colonialism of the US, Australia, Brazil and Israel. The first half of the book looks at how race is created and the tensions that this creates in settled societies. Of the greatest interest to me was the settler colonial system deployed across Brazil. Wolfe analyses the displacement of natives by cheap slave labour from the Portuguese slavers. He looks at how manumission and the miscegenation of black women (it's own particularly depressing form of degradation) helped to displace the natives with colonised people of their own. Indeed, he even analyses how using slaves as colonists was useful to the Portuguese; allowing the accretion of population and accumulation of land simultaneously.
This system was inverted by Israel. A product of European liberal ideology in the twentieth century, Israel functioned on importing unproductive and uneconomic labour through using systems of race to ensure that only Jews could provide labour in Jewish territory.
Either way, this book looks at how social structures create race, but also continue to form it. Wolfe demonstrates how the aim of settler colonialism is ultimately the de-racination of native populations. Either through complete assimilation or through radical displacement and isolation. Indeed, often both are brutally deployed, as in the stolen generation of aboriginal children abducted by Australian governmental diktat.
Read this book, as it is incredibly important. In a time when the reactionary right wing scoffs at "cultural appropriation" and pumps a 'you've never had it so good' message on a global scale, it is important to see how race has been created and deployed to systemically crush all but the dominant culture. And this for those who will argue that newly independent states are incorrigible, this book is needed tonic. A demonstration of how the legacy of brutality and imperialism means that indigenous and alternative cultures must continue to resist their brutal silencing.
Wolfe take the subject matter of his analysis to be the settler colonialism of the US, Australia, Brazil and Israel. The first half of the book looks at how race is created and the tensions that this creates in settled societies. Of the greatest interest to me was the settler colonial system deployed across Brazil. Wolfe analyses the displacement of natives by cheap slave labour from the Portuguese slavers. He looks at how manumission and the miscegenation of black women (it's own particularly depressing form of degradation) helped to displace the natives with colonised people of their own. Indeed, he even analyses how using slaves as colonists was useful to the Portuguese; allowing the accretion of population and accumulation of land simultaneously.
This system was inverted by Israel. A product of European liberal ideology in the twentieth century, Israel functioned on importing unproductive and uneconomic labour through using systems of race to ensure that only Jews could provide labour in Jewish territory.
Either way, this book looks at how social structures create race, but also continue to form it. Wolfe demonstrates how the aim of settler colonialism is ultimately the de-racination of native populations. Either through complete assimilation or through radical displacement and isolation. Indeed, often both are brutally deployed, as in the stolen generation of aboriginal children abducted by Australian governmental diktat.
Read this book, as it is incredibly important. In a time when the reactionary right wing scoffs at "cultural appropriation" and pumps a 'you've never had it so good' message on a global scale, it is important to see how race has been created and deployed to systemically crush all but the dominant culture. And this for those who will argue that newly independent states are incorrigible, this book is needed tonic. A demonstration of how the legacy of brutality and imperialism means that indigenous and alternative cultures must continue to resist their brutal silencing.
May 7, 2020
In Traces of History, Wolfe discusses the history of the racialization of different groups of people, including Aborigines in Australia, Black people in the United States, Indians in the Americas, Jews in Europe, and Arabs and Jews in Israel. Wolfe argues that "race," at its fundamental core, is a product of colonial relationships, and that different colonial relationships (such as enslaver-slave and settler-dispossessed) engenders different racial regimes and accompanying ideologies. As Wolfe states, "race is colonialism speaking." It is a colonial construct that reflects the unequal society and social relations designed to empower European colonizers to the detriment of non-European colonial subjects.
Wolfe posits that the Eurocolonial construct of race, while it draws from older forms of xenophobic and cultural oppression, is distinct in that it manifests itself in an inherent hiearchy that links physical characteristics (such as skin tone, "blood", or biological classifications) to social outcomes, cognitive abilities, and morality. Wolfe argue that "race" cannot be understood outside of its inherent violence and depravity.
As such, racialization occurs when colonizers must share social space with the colonized in one form or another. According to Wolfe, both racialization and race is a process. Its different iterations (i.e. "racial regimes") can be attributed to the varying struggles between specific colonizers' will to dominate, and specific colonial subjects' will to be free. Thus, racialization and race are products of resistance to colonial domination. Wolfe makes clear that while the colonial structure gave birth to the modern construction of "race," the colonizers (whether enslavers, settlers, or both) did not set out to create racial discrimination or doctrine. Rather, they set out to create wealth, and were forced to create racial ideology by the resistance of the dominated colonial subjects.
Wolfe spends a lot of time describing the mechanisms of settler colonialism. He defines settler colonialism's relationship to "race" as a structure that racializes native subjects for the purpose of eliminating them and dispossessing them from their land. This elimination (i.e. genocide) can take on many different forms, including assimilation, rigid exclusion, and outright ethnic cleansing. Wolfe notes that over the course of various racial regimes, racial categories tended to harden when existing systems of oppression melted away. In this way, Wolfe argues that "race" and enslavement / segregation is somewhat redundant, as the both are inherently oppressive systems and processes.
In short, Wolfe describes how and why skin color isn't the actual dividing line for race across the board. Rather, racial regimes are based on the whims of the white ruling class. Subjugated populations are racialized in different but complementary ways that work to jointly sustain the dominance of white supremacy. We can begin to deconstruct these racial regimes only once we learn how they operate in their specific colonial / neo-colonial locales. This is an extremely important book and a must read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the development of racialization.
Wolfe posits that the Eurocolonial construct of race, while it draws from older forms of xenophobic and cultural oppression, is distinct in that it manifests itself in an inherent hiearchy that links physical characteristics (such as skin tone, "blood", or biological classifications) to social outcomes, cognitive abilities, and morality. Wolfe argue that "race" cannot be understood outside of its inherent violence and depravity.
As such, racialization occurs when colonizers must share social space with the colonized in one form or another. According to Wolfe, both racialization and race is a process. Its different iterations (i.e. "racial regimes") can be attributed to the varying struggles between specific colonizers' will to dominate, and specific colonial subjects' will to be free. Thus, racialization and race are products of resistance to colonial domination. Wolfe makes clear that while the colonial structure gave birth to the modern construction of "race," the colonizers (whether enslavers, settlers, or both) did not set out to create racial discrimination or doctrine. Rather, they set out to create wealth, and were forced to create racial ideology by the resistance of the dominated colonial subjects.
Wolfe spends a lot of time describing the mechanisms of settler colonialism. He defines settler colonialism's relationship to "race" as a structure that racializes native subjects for the purpose of eliminating them and dispossessing them from their land. This elimination (i.e. genocide) can take on many different forms, including assimilation, rigid exclusion, and outright ethnic cleansing. Wolfe notes that over the course of various racial regimes, racial categories tended to harden when existing systems of oppression melted away. In this way, Wolfe argues that "race" and enslavement / segregation is somewhat redundant, as the both are inherently oppressive systems and processes.
In short, Wolfe describes how and why skin color isn't the actual dividing line for race across the board. Rather, racial regimes are based on the whims of the white ruling class. Subjugated populations are racialized in different but complementary ways that work to jointly sustain the dominance of white supremacy. We can begin to deconstruct these racial regimes only once we learn how they operate in their specific colonial / neo-colonial locales. This is an extremely important book and a must read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the development of racialization.
October 31, 2025
Reading Traces of History by Patrick Wolfe felt like cruising down the proverbial highway of ideas, though at times I find myself easing off towards an exit or at the very least pulling into a pit stop. It’s his Eurocentric construction of race, which at first took me a bit off course.
Rachel Schine in Black Knights makes a salient point when we totalized race as having a “both telos and origin” in the West:
Genesis of race aside, the bridge drawn between America and Brazil felt like an unsteady one and the near-total absence of racialization in the Caribbean…an ideological chasm and geographic archipelago that complicates, and ultimately undermines Wolfe’s binary.
Nevertheless, Wolfe’s exploration of the aspects of racialized mode of thought were insightful and I think ultimately outweighs my critiques. Specifically, the assertion that racialization is an inextricably spatial phenomenon is intriguing. Then when Wolfe reaches Palestine, the text catches a vigorous momentum. It is in that terrain, that terrain where race, land, and empire converge that his argument felt most compelling.
Rachel Schine in Black Knights makes a salient point when we totalized race as having a “both telos and origin” in the West:
As this suturing of modernity, globalization, and Westernness implies, the dominant account of race’s history is itself underwritten by cultural condescension. It assumes that only modern, Western (white) people rigorously positioned themselves as the ontological, intellectual, and moral centers of their universe, and implies that other historical, global subjects are exempt from engaging in what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls an “analytics of raciality” in any of their own efforts to do so.
Genesis of race aside, the bridge drawn between America and Brazil felt like an unsteady one and the near-total absence of racialization in the Caribbean…an ideological chasm and geographic archipelago that complicates, and ultimately undermines Wolfe’s binary.
Nevertheless, Wolfe’s exploration of the aspects of racialized mode of thought were insightful and I think ultimately outweighs my critiques. Specifically, the assertion that racialization is an inextricably spatial phenomenon is intriguing. Then when Wolfe reaches Palestine, the text catches a vigorous momentum. It is in that terrain, that terrain where race, land, and empire converge that his argument felt most compelling.
December 23, 2024
This is a book that interrogates the concept of race and explores how it was historically used as a means to progress imperialistic ends, in particular, to disempower, disposess, and even disembody indigenous populations, so that those in power could assert control over their human and natural resources. The effects of this history still shapes how we perceive and make sense of each other today.
It’s a comparative study of the different techniques employed over the 19th and 20th centuries that used “race” to essentially erase the indigenous or at least make it easier to divide and control them. Although we typically picture that process as just white people burning down villages and stealing land— and this did happen— the actual strategies used were even more insidious because they were developed with moral justifications based on hierarchies of human value and worth, capacities for “improvement” and “civilization”. The main case studies in the book are the erasures of Aboriginals in Australia, the differences in techniques used towards black slaves and native Americans in the U.S. and Brazil, the development of the European Jewry, and finally, it culminates in the complexities of race in Israel-Palestine. There’s no single process and every example is unique, but the book shows through these just how flexible the concept of race has been to serve the ends of consolidating power.
One of the most enlightening (and disturbing) books I’ve read all year.
It’s a comparative study of the different techniques employed over the 19th and 20th centuries that used “race” to essentially erase the indigenous or at least make it easier to divide and control them. Although we typically picture that process as just white people burning down villages and stealing land— and this did happen— the actual strategies used were even more insidious because they were developed with moral justifications based on hierarchies of human value and worth, capacities for “improvement” and “civilization”. The main case studies in the book are the erasures of Aboriginals in Australia, the differences in techniques used towards black slaves and native Americans in the U.S. and Brazil, the development of the European Jewry, and finally, it culminates in the complexities of race in Israel-Palestine. There’s no single process and every example is unique, but the book shows through these just how flexible the concept of race has been to serve the ends of consolidating power.
One of the most enlightening (and disturbing) books I’ve read all year.
October 18, 2017
notes are visible
"Indigenous Brazilians were demographically overwhelmed by a majority who were not themselves the conquerors: the millions of enslaved Africans who, by the late sixteenth century, had all but supplanted enslaved Native labour in the Brazilian colonial economy. Thus the racial regime in Brazil presents a distinctive configuration. In addition to the elimination of Indigenous people, it was structured to accommodate a Portuguese minority’s coercion of the African majority who were being imported to replace them."
"Indigenous Brazilians were demographically overwhelmed by a majority who were not themselves the conquerors: the millions of enslaved Africans who, by the late sixteenth century, had all but supplanted enslaved Native labour in the Brazilian colonial economy. Thus the racial regime in Brazil presents a distinctive configuration. In addition to the elimination of Indigenous people, it was structured to accommodate a Portuguese minority’s coercion of the African majority who were being imported to replace them."
December 30, 2019
Wolfe writes with complexity and fervor and as a white settler himself, it’s important that he recognizes his personal history in the beginning of the book. Furthermore in respect to his positionsality, he analyses the historical and modern structures of racialization across various settler-colonies without instructing colonized and marginalized people what action should look like.
A wonderful book that I do not hesitate to recommend (found it to be a bit inaccessible though in terms of verbiage and density at points though).
A wonderful book that I do not hesitate to recommend (found it to be a bit inaccessible though in terms of verbiage and density at points though).
February 20, 2023
Powerful analysis of racialization in different contexts. I was in particular interested in the case of Israel/Palestine. He does a great job there where he shows how Zionism created the new Jew and buried the diaspora, Jew. Wolfe shows how the emancipation of Jews was incidental thanks to the emergence of liberal ideology and industrial capitalism, but he also argues that this emancipation is no different than antisemitism that predated that. He frames Israel as a racial state that capitalizes on race to execute and perpetuate its colonial enterprise.
February 21, 2024
Very theoretical but I read it in detail so I feel like I really understood it? That's why it's a slightly higher rating. But I can see why this book was assigned, my professor def agrees with this highly.
March 27, 2018
This is a wonderful, clear and readable analysis of the extraordinary durability of the practices of domination that are grouped together under the heading of 'race'.
May 13, 2018
Brilliant and important, although the language can be difficult, the information explains systems and structures well
February 21, 2019
Such a brilliant exploration of race with some fresh and interesting arguments about how race operates across different spaces and times to serve colonial ends.
May 14, 2020
may need to reread eventually. very insightful
July 25, 2020
Highly fucking recommend. 5 stars because I learnt so much, but there is some critique that I want to think about more.
Read
February 3, 2021too much good stuff to quote. u should read it all !
August 24, 2025
An absolute masterclass. Thoroughly researched and expertly argued, Patrick Wolfe we owe you much, may you rest in peace ❤️
October 16, 2021
Wolfe is able to cover a staggering amount of ground in relatively concise chapters, covering colonial influence in racialization throughout time and space. His work helps build out an understanding of the world today like few other academics can.
February 24, 2016
Traces of History by Patrick Wolfe tackles racism and colonialism by comparing Jews, Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, and the descendants of African slaves. This book is pretty darned amazing and engaging. Wolfe posits that the experiences of the two indigenous groups were quite a bit different from the experiences of the Jews and Blacks, even if they all experienced discrimination and racism. He makes his case well. He even brings up the differing experiences of the two major areas in the Americas that Blacks have faced incredible discrimination: the United States, and Brazil. Again, my highest praise for a history book, I'll be looking further into this.
I had read of some of the history he went into about the Australian Aboriginal struggles, and knew a lot of them mirrored things the Native Americans experienced, such as the kids being taken from their families so they could have the Native taught out of them. It boggles the mind that this was still happening up until the 1960s, though.
One thing he mentions in a footnote has my inner genealogist going "Hmm". On page 115 he states that there were only 400,000 Africans brought to the United States, but by 1860 there were over 4,000,000 slaves. Even with enforced breeding by slave owners, not every one could have given birth or sired children, so I have to wonder how closely related the Black population is to each other. How many distant cousins are out there that don't even know it? Obviously, that wasn't the point of the book.
I had read of some of the history he went into about the Australian Aboriginal struggles, and knew a lot of them mirrored things the Native Americans experienced, such as the kids being taken from their families so they could have the Native taught out of them. It boggles the mind that this was still happening up until the 1960s, though.
One thing he mentions in a footnote has my inner genealogist going "Hmm". On page 115 he states that there were only 400,000 Africans brought to the United States, but by 1860 there were over 4,000,000 slaves. Even with enforced breeding by slave owners, not every one could have given birth or sired children, so I have to wonder how closely related the Black population is to each other. How many distant cousins are out there that don't even know it? Obviously, that wasn't the point of the book.
December 3, 2016
Great book.
Read
March 6, 2017The colonial usefulness of the structure of race. Fascinating and powerful.
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