'The First Thanksgiving' by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (c. 1912). Wikimedia Commons.
We are all ‘mobile individuals’ living in a world that has been structured by mobility. As political theorist Thomas Hobbes argued in the seventeenth century, we are matter in motion. That motion, the restlessness that ceases only in death, tells us that we are alive and human. Mobility itself is understood as a human good, a positive value and a general principle of modernity. The liberal possibility that we are free to pursue our own good involves choosing our own path. It suggests we can change the story of our lives by moving its location, altering the supporting cast of characters and giving ourselves new opportunities, opening up new horizons. In this context, mobility is understood as increasing personal freedom and widening opportunities, and it is inextricably linked to the idea of modernity as progress. Mobility allows us to break away from tradition, to accelerate social change and to become civilised. In its connection with civilisation, mobility emerges from this historical context as a relational concept. The mobility of some relies on the immobility of others.
This relation between mobility and immobility helped structure colonialism. Settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour, but to displace indigenous people from the land. This meant that settler colonies were premised on the elimination of native societies—the colonisers came to stay. Early liberal theorists like John Locke held that this was justifiable in the Americas. Although the indigenous people lived on fertile land capable of producing food and other resources in abundance, he argued, they had put themselves outside the current of history by failing to realise the potential value of what they had. By clinging to tradition they remained outside market society, with no hope of commerce with the rest of the world. They had made themselves immobile. As a result, Locke said, ‘A King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England’.
