The Independence That Wasn't

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:35:00 +0000

July 4, 1776 as a succession of colonial sovereignty, not decolonization

Abstract

This essay argues that the word independence, applied to July 4, 1776, describes only the rupture between the settler population of the thirteen colonies and the British crown. Under the criterion the term requires in the context of colonization, the restitution of territorial sovereignty to the original people, the event constitutes a succession of power between colonizers. The thesis rests on the theoretical corpus of settler colonial studies, on the documentary record of the revolutionary period and on quantified demographic and territorial data, verifiable in the sources cited.

The argument in brief

On July 4 the United States celebrates Independence Day, the date on which the Second Continental Congress adopted, in 1776, in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen British colonies. This essay argues that the word independence, applied to that event, strictly describes only the relationship between the settler population and the British crown, and that, when one adopts the criterion the word requires in the context of colonization, the restitution of territorial sovereignty to the original people of the territory, July 4 marks not independence but a succession of power between colonizers.

The peoples who occupied the territory before 1607 did not recover sovereignty in 1776, did not recover it in the two hundred and fifty years that followed, and hold today, according to data published in the journal Science in 2021, about one percent of their historical land base. The thesis is not a rhetorical provocation. It rests on an established body of theory, that of settler colonial studies, and on a verifiable documentary and quantitative record, which this essay works through on three fronts, the conceptual, the chronological and the statistical.

1 · What the word conceals

Independence, from the Latin in dependentia, designates the cessation of a relation of political subordination. Applying the term therefore requires identifying the subordinate subject. In the case of the thirteen colonies, the subject legally subordinated to the British crown was the settler population, organized in colonial governments with assemblies, courts and royal charters of their own since the seventeenth century. The native peoples related to the crown and to the colonies through treaties, a regime that presupposed distinct sovereignties, however unequal in practice. The rupture of 1776 dissolved the first relationship and left the second intact, with one decisive difference in who held the power exercised over it, which passed from London to the new American state.

Ordinary political-science usage applies the term independence to any transfer of sovereignty from a metropole to the entity that administered the territory. That usage is formally defensible and it is what sustains the official designation of the commemoration. The problem arises when the same term is used for the decolonization processes of the twentieth century, India in 1947, Ghana in 1957, Algeria in 1962, Angola and Mozambique in 1975, cases in which sovereignty reverted to the previously subordinated majority population. Applying the same word to 1776 and to 1947 suggests an equivalence that does not exist. In India, the colonizer left and the colonized governed. In North America, the colonizer stayed, expanded and inherited the apparatus of state. The word is the same, the phenomenon is the opposite.

2 · The theoretical framework

The distinction this essay defends is neither original nor marginal. It corresponds to the core of the academic field of settler colonial studies, whose canonical formulation belongs to the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe. In the book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, published in 1999, and in the article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”, published in 2006 in the Journal of Genocide Research, Wolfe distinguishes exploitation colonialism, in which the metropole extracts resources and labor from the local population without replacing it, from settler colonialism, in which the settler population comes to stay and the structural objective is the elimination of the native as a political entity, in order to free up the land. The formula that condenses the theory, invasion is a structure and not an event, means that the process does not end at a datable initial moment; it lives on in the institutions that settler society builds upon the expropriated land. The 2006 article has thousands of academic citations and is today foundational reading in the field.

The Italian sociologist Lorenzo Veracini developed the typology in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010, where he argues that settler colonialism is structurally resistant to decolonization, because the departure of the colonizer, which defines classical decolonization, is impossible when the colonizer has become the demographic majority and the state itself. In the American and Australian cases, so-called independence decolonized nothing at all; it merely made the settler society sovereign.

The Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, professor at Columbia University, gave the argument its most direct formulation in Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, published by Harvard University Press in 2020. Mamdani holds that the United States is not a postcolonial society, because the colonial process never ended, it merely changed managers in 1776, and he identifies the American model of dispossession and confinement of the natives as the template that other settler states later adopted. American independence appears, in that reading, as the moment when colonialism emancipated itself from the metropole, not the moment when the territory emancipated itself from colonialism.

Two complementary references complete the picture. The jurist Aziz Rana, in The Two Faces of American Freedom, published by Harvard University Press in 2010, demonstrates that the freedom claimed by the settlers in 1776 was constitutively a settler freedom, defined by access to land and by expansion westward, and therefore dependent on the subordination of the peoples who occupied that land. And the researchers Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in the article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”, published in 2012 in the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, establish that decolonization, in a settler context, has a precise material meaning, the return of land, and that any use of the term that dispenses with that content hollows it out.

3 · The documentary evidence of 1776

The documentary record of the revolutionary period itself confirms that the native question was not the object of independence; it was an obstacle to be removed.

First, the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, issued by King George III after the Seven Years’ War, reserved to the native peoples the territories west of the Appalachian range and prohibited settlement and the private purchase of land in that zone. The measure was received by the colonial elites, with landed and speculative interests in the western lands, as an intolerable restriction, and it stands among the grievances that fed the drive toward rupture. Independence removed precisely the barrier the crown had interposed between the settlers and native land.

Second, the text of the Declaration of Independence itself. Among the complaints addressed to George III, the document accuses the king of inciting against the colonial frontiers the “merciless Indian Savages”, an expression that appears in the 1776 original and reveals unambiguously the place native peoples occupied in the signers’ vision, that of external enemy, not that of a people whose liberty was at stake.

Third, the Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783, by which Great Britain recognized American independence and ceded to the United States the territories up to the Mississippi River. The native nations that inhabited and effectively controlled much of that space were neither party to the treaty nor consulted, which illustrates the nature of the act, a transfer of title between colonial powers over someone else’s land.

Fourth, the subsequent legal consolidation. In the decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, of 1823, the Supreme Court of the United States, through Chief Justice John Marshall, incorporated into American law the doctrine of discovery, according to which full sovereignty over the territory belonged to the discovering power and native peoples held a mere right of occupancy, extinguishable by the state. In the decision Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, of 1831, the same court classified the native nations as “domestic dependent nations”, a formula that fixed subordination in law. The state born of independence defined itself, in its own courts, as successor to the British colonial title.

4 · Annotated chronology

1584 · Elizabeth I grants Walter Raleigh a royal charter to colonize North America.

1585 to 1590 · First English attempt at settlement, on Roanoke Island, in the territory of the coastal Algonquian peoples, with the disappearance of the settlers and no documentary record of their fate.

1607 · Founding of Jamestown by the Virginia Company of London, in the territory of the Powhatan confederacy, then under the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh.

1620 · Founding of Plymouth in Wampanoag territory, under the sachem Ousamequin.

1636 to 1638 · Pequot War, in present-day New England, with the near-complete destruction of the Pequot people by the English colonies and their allies.

1675 to 1678 · King Philip’s War, led by the Wampanoag Metacom, with native defeat and the consolidation of colonial rule in New England.

1763 · Royal Proclamation of George III reserves to the natives the lands west of the Appalachians and provokes strong colonial opposition.

1776 · Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4 in Philadelphia, with the reference to the “merciless Indian Savages” among the grievances against the king.

1783 · Treaty of Paris transfers to the United States title over the territories up to the Mississippi, without the participation of the native nations.

1823 · Johnson v. M’Intosh incorporates the doctrine of discovery into American law.

1830 · Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, orders the forced relocation of the peoples of the Southeast to west of the Mississippi.

1831 and 1832 · Cherokee Nation v. Georgia defines the native nations as domestic dependent nations; Worcester v. Georgia recognizes Cherokee autonomy from the laws of Georgia, without practical enforcement capable of preventing removal.

1838 to 1839 · Trail of Tears, forced relocation of the Cherokee people, with mortality estimated between four thousand and eight thousand people out of a total of approximately sixteen thousand deported.

1851 and 1868 · Treaties of Fort Laramie fix and later reduce the territories of the Plains nations, with subsequent violations by the signatory government itself, notably after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874.

1864 · Sand Creek Massacre, in Colorado, with hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho killed by territorial troops.

1879 · Founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, by the army officer Richard Henry Pratt, the first of hundreds of residential schools of forced assimilation, under the principle, formulated by Pratt himself, of killing the Indian to save the man.

1887 · Dawes Act fragments collective tribal lands into individual parcels, with the surplus sold to non-natives; between 1887 and 1934, tribal lands fell from about 138 million acres to about 48 million, a loss of roughly two thirds, according to the federal data that grounded the 1934 reform.

1890 · Wounded Knee Massacre, in South Dakota, on December 29, with about two hundred and fifty to three hundred Lakota killed by the American army; the 1890s mark, according to the demographer Russell Thornton, the native demographic low point, about two hundred and fifty thousand people in the territory of the United States.

1924 · Indian Citizenship Act grants American citizenship to natives born in the territory, nearly a century and a half after independence.

1934 · Indian Reorganization Act halts the allotment policy and returns to the tribes limited instruments of self-government.

1953 to 1956 · Termination policy, initiated by House Concurrent Resolution 108, extinguishes federal recognition of more than a hundred tribes; the Relocation Act of 1956 encourages migration from the reservations to the cities.

1969 to 1973 · Cycle of native mobilization, with the occupation of Alcatraz between November 1969 and June 1971 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 by the American Indian Movement.

1975 · Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, signed by President Gerald Ford on January 4, reverses the termination orientation and returns management powers to recognized tribes.

2007 and 2010 · The United Nations General Assembly adopts, on September 13, 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with one hundred and forty-three votes in favor and four against, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, precisely the four settler-colonial states of British origin; the United States announced support for the text, without binding force, in December 2010.

2021 · A team led by Justin Farrell, of Yale University, publishes in the journal Science the first systematic survey of native territorial dispossession in the contiguous United States, with the results described in the following section.

5 · The quantitative record

Two data sets give the thesis a verifiable numerical basis.

On the demographic front, the sociologist Russell Thornton, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1987, estimates the native population of the territory of the present-day United States at more than five million people in 1492, with a decline to about six hundred thousand by 1800 and to a minimum of about two hundred and fifty thousand in the 1890s, through the combined effect of disease, war, removal and the destruction of ways of life. Estimates of the initial population vary among authors, from about one million in the calculations of Alfred Kroeber, in 1939, to much higher values in those of Henry Dobyns, in 1966, but the order of magnitude of the collapse, above ninety percent between contact and the end of the nineteenth century, is the consensus in the literature.

On the territorial front, the study by Justin Farrell and colleagues, “Effects of Land Dispossession and Forced Migration on Indigenous Peoples in North America”, published in Science, volume 374, in October 2021, quantified for the first time, on the basis of a seven-year survey of tribal, colonial and governmental records, the extent of dispossession in the contiguous United States. The results indicate that Indigenous peoples lost 98.9 percent of their historical land base, that more than forty percent of historically documented tribes hold today no federally recognized land, that tribes with land hold on average 2.6 percent of their historical area, and that forced displacements averaged 241 kilometers, toward lands more exposed to climate risks and poorer in resources.

These numbers answer the central question. If independence, in the colonial context, is measured by the restitution of territorial sovereignty to the original people, then the balance sheet of 1776, two and a half centuries later, is 1.1 percent of remaining land and five hundred and seventy-four tribes with limited sovereignty, ultimately subordinate to the authority of Congress, inside the state the settlers themselves founded. No twentieth-century decolonization produced an outcome even remotely comparable.

6 · Objections and replies

The thesis faces three main objections, which must be stated fairly.

The first holds that the term independence has a legal meaning of its own, the dissolution of a bond of subordination between constituted political entities, and that such a bond did in fact exist between the colonies and the crown. The objection is correct on its own terms. The reply does not deny it; it displaces it. The essay does not claim that 1776 was not independence from anything; it claims that it was independence from the wrong entity to sustain the reading the commemoration projects, that of a people freeing itself from colonialism. What freed itself in 1776 was the colonial project itself, from the metropolitan tutelage that constrained it.

The second objection notes that the settlers of 1776 were, for the most part, no longer newly arrived Britons but descendants of generations born in the territory, with an identity of their own. That is true, and it is irrelevant to the criterion at issue. Settler colonialism is defined precisely by multigenerational permanence, the settler who stays and whose descendants claim the land as natural. The age of the settler presence does not convert expropriation into title, it merely sediments it, and it is that sedimentation that Wolfe calls structure.

The third objection invokes anachronism, the risk of judging the eighteenth century with categories of the twenty-first. The reply is twofold. On the one hand, the categories are not of the twenty-first century, the critique of the Fourth of July’s partiality is at least as old as Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, delivered on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, in the state of New York, in which the former enslaved man demonstrated that the celebration presupposed a subject, the free white American, and excluded the rest. On the other hand, the argument of this essay is not a retrospective moral judgment, it is a question of terminological rigor in the present. The question is not whether the signers of 1776 should have acted otherwise, it is whether the word independence, as we use it today to describe decolonization, correctly describes what occurred there. The documented answer is that it does not.

7 · Conclusion

July 4, 1776 marks a real and datable historical fact, the rupture between the settler population of the thirteen colonies and the British crown, internationally recognized in 1783. That fact deserves to be called independence only under a narrow criterion, that of the relation between settler and metropole. Under the criterion the word requires in the context of colonization, that of the return of sovereignty to the original people of the territory, the event constitutes the opposite of a decolonization, the emancipation of the colonizer from the only power that still moderated its expansion. The academic literature that sustains this reading, from Wolfe to Veracini, from Rana to Mamdani, is not marginal, it defines an established field of study, and Thornton’s demographic data and Farrell’s territorial data give it quantitative expression. Two hundred and fifty years on, the peoples who inhabited the territory before 1607 retain little more than one percent of their land. As long as that number stands, the exact word for what is celebrated on the Fourth of July is not independence. It is succession.

Verification note · How to confirm each claim

All substantive claims in this essay refer to identified primary or academic sources. The documents of the revolutionary period, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Treaty of Paris of 1783, are published in the national archives of the United States and of the United Kingdom and are in the public domain. The judicial decisions cited appear in the official record of the Supreme Court of the United States, Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831). The study by Farrell and colleagues carries the DOI 10.1126/science.abe4943 and makes its data available in open access. Wolfe’s article carries the DOI 10.1080/14623520601056240. The remaining works appear in the final references, with publisher and year, and are catalogued in university libraries.

References

Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. Speech delivered on July 5, 1852, Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.

Farrell, Justin, et al. “Effects of Land Dispossession and Forced Migration on Indigenous Peoples in North America”. Science, vol. 374, eabe4943, 2021. DOI 10.1126/science.abe4943.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Rana, Aziz. The Two Faces of American Freedom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell, 1999.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”. Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387-409. DOI 10.1080/14623520601056240.

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