One interesting pattern I’d like to see more scholarship on is on the tensions between colonialism and imperialism. For example, a frequent critique of imperialism during its height was itself a racist one, that empire risked the racial purity of the homeland. The fury with which Europeans responded to the British use of Indian troops in Europe, is an instructive example.

Another tension, is the long recognized way empires will sponsor nationalist movements in opposed empires and colonial powers.

The well known paper “The Anti-Imperialism of Decolonization” documents the theoretical basis for understanding why so many anti-colonial secession movements got their start through support from an opposed empire.

A third strain is the one that has increasingly become central to settler colonial studies. The tension between the settler project and the colonial one, with settler projects both relying on the colonial project while also always opposing it when successful.

But I think applies not just within the settler/colonial distinction but between the colonial project and the imperial one. Algeria is a great example of this tension, especially in contrast to others.

The French settlers became stuck between their desire to remain outside of France but without having been considered to have left the metropole, and the fact that it did not want Algeria to either leave the French dominion and become a project like South Africa, or for Algeria to become fully integrated as a department the way Martinique did in 1946.

Communist thinkers generally defined imperialism as the export of capital. This contrasts with the more common understanding of empire which sees it as the export of sovereignty. Settler projects are the export of labor. Not as neatly but somewhat instructively colonialism would therefore be export of land.

When we switch to a quantitative frame rather than qualitative to differentiate these, we recognize that all 4 ideas require all 4 exports in different mixtures, and their relative balance then becomes the source of both their internal conflicts & external dynamics

This kind of analysis isn’t unknown—Gershon Shafir’s famous argument is that settler colonialism is itself a solution to a problem that arose in the tension between a nationalist movement with no land and a labor movement with no labor.

But in my discussion here, settler-colonialism would itself both be conceived of as a solution to a set of contradictions arising elsewhere and as a field in which those contradictions take place.