Beyond the Anglo-World: Settler Colonialism and Democracy in the Americas

This essay argues that delimiting the settler colonial analytic to colonial legacies in the “Anglo-world” risks disavowing its congruent relationship with other colonial ideologies such as those of the Spanish imperial world. In examining Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparisons of Anglo- and Spanish American colonization alongside Latin American writers like Lorenzo de Zavala and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, it shows how they occupied a common discursive terrain in grappling with the prospects for democracy in the new world. For Tocqueville, the failure of Spanish American democracy compared to the United States stems from the different systems of land colonization at work in each context. Sarmiento and Zavala provide different accounts of American colonization that exhibit both intersections with and departures from Tocqueville. Bringing these writers together shows how settler colonial ideologies and imaginaries in the Americas circulated in a shared hemispheric space and reciprocally shaped one another in contingent ways.