One of Wakefield’s big complaints was that the colonial project in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand was failing because settler homesteaders did not have a division of labour: they did all their own chores. A settler must “build and repair his [sic] house, make and mend his [sic] furniture, and follow an infinite number of occupations unconnected with tillage” (1830: 17-18). He argued that without a division of labour, there can be no true primitive accumulation (i.e. the stealing of land and resources so you have more than other people, and now you have capital and can make them do wage labour for you, which lets you accumulate even more wealth!). Without primitive accumulation, there is no generation of wealth, and this is a failure of both capitalism and colonialism. Wakefield goes as far to characterize a lack of division of labour–chores–as “savagery,” the racial slur being the closest he comes to acknowledging the presence of Indigenous Peoples in any way in any of his work that I’ve read so far. So, a well-rounded jerk.

What I find fascinating about Wakefield’s work is that it’s a reverse anti-colonial text. He systematically outlines all the things that successful colonialism requires, then details all its obstacles and why and how they must be overcome. Chores is one of those obstacles.

This doesn’t mean that if you read his books backwards and upside down, colonialism will unzip, or that chores are inherently anticolonial. But Wakefield does strongly recommend the elimination of chores, and specifically chores on the land, and their replacement with accumulation-oriented wage labour for the colonial project to succeed.

That is a pretty cool nugget all on its own. But this morning I was reading Steve Jackson’s (excellent, beautiful) piece, “Working relations” (2026), which is about the unique relationalities that come from maintaining, fixing, and caring for things in a very chore-like way. One of this unique characteristics is that such “working relations require and build working knowledge” (2026: 5). They:

frequently [take] skill and expertise to execute well and thoughtfully (as well as a great deal of sometimes brute force labor). This working knowledge (Harper 1987; Crawford 2009) is both input and output of the activity: more accurately, it grows within and alongside the practices inscribed. This makes learning a – perhaps the? – central act of working relations, and the sharing of knowledge its most powerful mode of extension in the world. Conversely, efforts to limit or attenuate working knowledge – whether by design, strategy, or simple neglect and disregard – may undermine or destroy working relations. (8)

Chores make knowledge, which is a relationship with land. Passing on that knowledge forms a relation. Eliminating those things breaks multiple relations.

Sometimes, when academics talk about colonialism, they focus on settler land relations. But for settler land relations to take root, there needs to be genocide of Indigenous People first (King 2019). Canada has this odd term, “cultural genocide,” which means Indigenous bodies are left intact, but culture and knowledge is eradicated. It’s still genocide: the elimination of lifeworlds (Canada has this term because of residential schools as a primary tool of genocide here).

So I see Wakefield’s recommendation to reduce or eliminate chores and create wage labour instead as a dual tactic of colonialism: not only does it allow primitive accumulation for settlers, but if brought to bear on Indigenous Peoples by taking us off our lands, putting us in residential schools, forcing urbanization (looking at you, United States, 1948), and other “efforts to limit or attenuate working knowledge” via chores, does indeed “undermine or destroy working relations” (2026: 8) with the land and through the elimination of intergenerational knowledge. That is, it is a tool for cultural genocide.

What’s interesting is that both settler and Indigenous chores are bad for colonialism.

This afternoon after work, I am going to cut a tree that fell in a windstorm last year that’s at a diagonal in the forest. The top is caught on some branches. Cutting a leaning tree requires a different technique than cutting an upright tree, since as you cut through, the weight of the leaning tree pinches the saw and now your saw is stuck in the tree forever.

I have some ideas of how I can cut it to avoid that, but I’ll going to call my dad.

Works cited

• Jackson, Steven. J. 2026. ‘Working Relations’. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 20 (1). https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/JEF/article/view/26606.
• King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals. Duke University Press.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. 1830. A Statement of the Principles and Objects of a Proposed National Society, for the Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by Means of Systematic Colonization. National Colonization Society Provisional Committee.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. 1849. A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire: In Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist. J. W. Parker.

The feature photo for this post has its own intense politics. I always thought it was weird that Wakefield ignored the gender divisions of labour in his complaints, but I supposed he assumed wage labours were men. The photo is called, “Man wanted”, woman chopping wood by Agnes Deans Cameron, 190?-1911.