Fwd: Capitalism and Colonialism in the Canadian context

[Hugh Williams]

Subject:	Capitalism and Colonialism in the Canadian context
Date:	Tue, 2 Dec 2025 10:48:09 -0400
From:	Hugh Williams <hwil...@nbnet.nb.ca>
To:	Hugh & Stephanie Williams <hwil...@nbnet.nb.ca>

An Important Analysis from the Left that Links Capitalism and Colonialism

I’ve taken the time to extract a brief but relevant portion from a recent Adam King interview with Bryan Palmer in ‘The Maple ( October20, 2025) about his recent scholarly work published as - Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960. This interview gives us a good summary of capitalism’s interconnection with colonialism which often is not inquired into or talked about. This happens often in accounts of settler colonial treatment of indigenous populations both in Palestine and in North America. Thinkers like Marx and Lonergan would have us dig much deeper. Even with the immensity and intensity of ‘our’ discourse on Palestine and the Gaza genocide, this dimension is often placed so far in the background that it is missed, forgotten, or completely overlooked. For example, in history, as Abdaljawad Omar put it very recently in his Monthly Review interview (October 2025), the Eastern Mediterranean is viewed by many as the cradle of anti-imperial dreaming and yet it remains violently fractured and administered. Settler colonial Zionism in this context is not an historical anomaly for serious thinkers on the Left but a necessary instrument essential to a geopolitical trinity that has governed the region since the colonial partitioning: the circulation of oil, the logic of capital accumulation, and the strategic dismemberment of Arab political possibility. It is in this sense that Israel is not just protected, it is viewed as structurally indispensable.

So if you should be interested, the Canadian historian Bryan Palmer’s brief summary analysis attached takes on a very high relevance for the Canadian context in my view –

Hugh