Absurd as they might seem, early-day colonial claims were not irrational. Inside the phantom territories staked by such claims, real interests were protected. This was the trader’s colonialism that made its big profits not by covering areas but by connecting points: a plantation, a mine, a market, a port. The spatial commodity exploited is distance. Sumatra is very distant from Italy, Peru is very distant from China, Jamaica is very distant from France. Pepper, silver, and sugar, crossing such distances, multiply enormously in value. By gaining control over this network of shipping from procurement to consumption, one obtains a tremendous source of profit and power.4 In this type of colonialism, then, perimeters of influence were meant to enclose not a space but a series of points, and details of border and control over space were irrelevant.
Distance would always remain valuable, and it still is: the value of the sweatshop is a function of its distance from its clientele. The geographic distance allows a vast separation between the extremes of poverty and affluence. Connecting these two extremes is crucial to the contemporary world, as it has always been to colonialism. However, in the nineteenth century, a new kind of colonialism emerged: not the trader’s but the investor’s colonialism. The investor does more than connect: he invests and develops, turning as much as possible of a land into usable resources. This new colonialism, then, would be the investor’s colonialism—based on the profits to be made out of intensive production on a vast scale. The spatial commodity for this colonialism is not distance alone but also area itself. Thus borders would now be defined, and their interiors thoroughly controlled. And this was to happen now, following America’s acquisition of the West. In the nineteenth century, America led the way to the world in making the transition from the trader’s to the investor’s colonialism. In taking up the Louisiana claim, America entered, without knowing it, not only a new space but, more important, a new way of handling space. This would ensue in ever-widening cycles of violence.
It started with Texas. A Spanish territory in 1803, Texas came to be part of the newly independent Mexican state in 1822. Its many colonists from the United States took a dim view of the antislavery position of the Mexican government. They fought for their freedom to own slaves—gradually drawing the United States itself into their protection, which, in the brief war of 1847, finally led to the United States being in possession of the West.
At this point, the countdown began for the American Civil War. The issue is this: Land, alone, does nothing for humans. It has to be used in some definite way: cultivated; grazed by animals; mined; built. Each land use determines a different ecology and thus a different society. To reach for land is to try to extend a certain social order into it to the exclusion of others. Decisions are painful, especially when different social orders coexist already. To open new lands is therefore to open old wounds; America’s wound, of course, was slavery. This land use was based on extensive agriculture in large fields, poor in technology, rich in the unskilled, coerced labor of draft animals and enslaved humans. It was most profitable in the global products of classical trader’s colonialism: sugar, tobacco, cotton. It assumed little investment and much transportation. Contrast this to the land use of the farmstead, where a paterfamilias would govern a large family and its livestock to make a living from a land intensively cultivated, partly for internal consumption, partly for the sale, to nearby urban centers, of high-quality produce. This is based on cheaper transportation, but more intensive investment. From the census of 1860, we can take the following two questions: (A) the numbers of acres of improved land (irrigated, fenced, etc.) on the farms; and (B) the number of acres of unimproved land on the farms. A vote for Lincoln was directly correlated to the ratio of A to B. Connecticut had nearly three improved acres of land for each unimproved acre; South Carolina had nearly three unimproved acres of land for each improved acre. This was the divide defining the Civil War.
We can mark the big divide as follows: between a northern country, where fields were controlled by the intensive use of the fence, and a southern country, where fields were controlled by the intensive use of the whip. At issue, in other words, was not just the moral sentiment of abolitionism—which, it is only fair to say, did greatly move many Americans—but the realities of control. The North wanted to see an America with acre after acre of improved land supporting both families and urban centers, all inspired by the intensive economy of the northern American town. The plantation owners of the South wanted to prevent just this outcome of an America governed by the cities of the North. The South needed to grow, demographically, just as the North was growing, and the South needed new slave states, if only to have new slave state senators.
Now the settling of the plains themselves gained a new urgency. It was progressing apace; the bison were retreating, and the railroad was beginning to send its branches west of Chicago. The continental rail project—to connect California with the East, gathering all the West along the way—exacerbated the sectional strife and got stymied by it. The decision about a route for this train would be, symbolically as well as practically, a decision about which part of the nation had first claim to the West. Hence no decision could be made. Nor could any explicit political decision be made for the settlement of the plains. Yet throughout this all, American agricultural practices were brought into Kansas and the entire Plains, changing the land and driving away the bison and the Indians. In Kansas, Southern and Northern farmers faced one another in what became throughout the 1850s a bloody skirmish, a prelude to the Civil War. Simultaneously, the West was being integrated into the East, and the South was breaking away from the North—and the two processes were one.
To repeat: there was a fundamental asymmetry between North and South. Northern farms were outposts of agricultural production sent out by an urban, industrial economy; this is ultimately why intensive farming made sense for them. Southern farms were all the South really had. Like the entire Caribbean area, the South was all, essentially, no more than an outpost of Europe. The sectional divide was thus a relic of the trader’s colonialism, of a time when America was made up of discrete entities serving