Global Racial Violence

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century history of American settler colonialism, what it reveals about the transformation of global politics in terms of racial violence, and, as a consequence, how it comes to structure ideas about global peace and order. It examines more specifically the case of American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century and the very ideas of the vanishing Indian. The nineteenth-century American Indian Wars were a critical dimension of the relationship between savage or racial warfare and global order. The discussion turns to Theodore Roosevelt’s idea that global politics is not (or not primarily) the realm of power politics; rather, the cleavages remain those of civilized races perpetually dominating or fearing racial violence from uncivilized barbarians. As a consequence, savage wars or racial wars become part and parcel of American imperial expansion, and their legacy is derived from the history of American settler colonialism.