A Note On Annexation I
A Historical Look
By Gabriel Haythornthwaite, The DNA Report
With 23 days until Alberta’s pre-annexation referendum, The DNA Report is engaging the fact that, prior to Herr Trump’s deranged threats to annex Canada as the ‘51st state’, the public here was largely unfamiliar with the term “annexation”. With that in mind, this note offers a sample primer on the history of annexation from ancient times until the 19th century so as to provide a basic understanding of this imperial military-political practice. Part two of this note will consider annexation in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Ancient Origins of Annexation
Annexation is the practice of one country forcibly dissolving another as a domestic territory, i.e., a province or state, under central control. If we look at this phenomena historically, annexation is invariably a military and political practice of empires.
The earliest recorded annexations were carried out by a succession of rival empires concentrated in the triangle between Egypt, Asia Minor (today Türkiye) and Mesopotamia (Iraq). A succession of ancient empires absorbed city-states, countries and even rival empires, such as: the Akkadian Empire’s conquest of Sumerian cities in 24th century BCE; the Kingdom of Egypt’s absorption of the Levant (Palestine-Jordan-Lebanon-Syria) as well as Nubian territories in the upper Nile (16th century BCE); and the rise of what was the largest regional empire of its time, the Persians, who took over Egypt and most of West Asia in the 6th century BCE.
Even more famous in its appetite for conquests and annexation was the Hellenic empire of Alexander the Great which overran the entire region from Greece to Egypt, all the former territories of Persia and even the Indus Valley in the space of a decade (335-325 BCE). These annexations were invariably the result of military conquests followed by a political set-up to rule and loot the hapless territories.
The Roman practice of annexation represented an ‘advance’ in the imperial practice in terms of a more formal and deliberative process which included three key elements: military conquest; political designation (by the Senate, or later, the Emperor); and a governing administrative system. Rome’s most important early annexation was that of Greece in 146 BCE. Roman annexations led to the formation of formal provinces under a directing colonial administration.
Colonization and Annexation
Not all imperial conquests necessarily take the form of annexations. Starting in the 16th century, European empires began to accumulate colonial territories, particularly in the ‘New World’ that later became known as the Americas. Even for empires like the British and French, who were willing to engage in treaty relationships with Indigenous tribes, colonial territorial expansion was premised on a terra nulius notion which denied both Indigenous nationhood and land claims. With this self-concept in hand, imperial empires opted to simply absorb native territories into colonial holdings without ‘requiring’ formal annexation.
On the other hand, stealing territories from other colonial powers was carried out through formal annexations, one of the earliest examples in this era being Britain’s annexing of Jamaica in 1655 after its seizure from Spain. Annexation in this case is distinct from imperial war settlements whereby a losing empire ceded territories to the winner as was the case in the surrender of French possessions to Britain in 1763.
Back in the ‘Old World’, the Russian Empire--formally founded in 1721 and only a minor player in the colonization of the Americas--successively annexed adjacent territories for almost two centuries creating the world’s most enormous landmass empire.
In the 19th century, empires which transformed themselves as industrial capitalist powers were well positioned to speed up the tempo of expansion and annexation, most infamously in the multi-power ‘scramble for Africa’ formally sanctioned at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference.
The origins of the American Empire owe a lot to the 1845 annexation of Texas wrested by American settlers from Mexico as an ‘independent’ republic a decade earlier. This move led to a sweeping American invasion the following year and the annexation of the northern half of Mexico in 1848 becoming what are today the states of the entire southwest USA.
Americans also had annexation designs upon British-held Canada at this time, a topic that will be examined later in some detail. These annexation designs were directly expressed in the 1844 election won by Democrat James Polk who campaigned on the slogan “54°40′ or War”. This was a push to annex what is today roughly the province of BC. The strength of the British Empire at this time prevented this land grab by an American imperialism still very much in its infancy.
Part two of this note will consider the annexation experience since the 20th century so as to shed light on the current American Annexation operation in Canada.
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Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a former labour-allied school board trustee in BC and currently advises First Nations around political and intergovernmental relations. He is also a leftwing writer and political organizer.
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