In an attempt to contribute to the broadening of the field and challenging some of its limiting assumptions, this paper proposes to move away from the stark counter-posing of elimination and exploitation in the study of settler societies. These privileged case studies have further reinforced Wolfe-an assumptions given these settler states’ primary focus on eliminatory practices. By assuming that exploitation, by definition, lays outside the realm of its field of study, SCS has privileged the analysis of the Anglo-settler world-primarily North America and Oceania. Numerous settler societies were built on the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and therefore on their social reproduction, particularly in the South American and African continents. Yet this approach, as a number of authors have discussed (see for example Kelley 2017 Speed 2017), in its efforts to analyse the specificities of settler colonialism, has ended up limiting its scope unduly. Wolfe and others after him, primarily Lorenzo Veracini, his self-styled intellectual successor, analysed settler colonialism as structural, eliminatory, and land based, which-they argued-distinguish it from franchise colonialism, which is based on the exploitation of the native population instead.
It has become customary to start discussions of settler colonialism-those colonial processes organised around the “presence of a settler population intent on making a territory their permanent home while continuing to enjoy metropolitan living standards and political privileges” (Elkins and Pedersen 2005:2)-by engaging with Patrick Wolfe, whose work has defined much of the emergence of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS) as a separate academic field.