It’s certainly a perspective on things.

I like it as propaganda and spin, but it’s defeatist in scope. The idea that only Europeans in Europe can have class consciousness, and they lose it the moment they’re on a new continent hasn’t born out in theory or practice.

I think this is me showing my ass in lacking understanding of Marxism, but I’ve always had an issue with how “Settlers” argue the the majority of white colonialists weren’t proletarians. It argues that they were mainly middle to lower-middle class, which, as far as I know, isn’t actually a thing. “The middle class” is (like whiteness) a political construct that does not exist. “The middle class” is still a group of proletarians. There’s petite bourgeoise and labour aristocrats and class traitors, but (excepting the petite bourgeois) that’s still proletarians.

For example:

This is typical of the English invasion forces. A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian. Most were youth from the lower-middle classes; Gentlemen & Professionals 1%; Yeomen & Husbandmen 48%; Artisans & Tradesmen 29%.

Later on it’s also written

The Euro-Amerikan class structure at the time of the 1775 War of Independence was revealing:

80% bourgeois & petit-bourgeois:
10% — Capitalists: Great Planters, large merchants, etc.
20% — Large farmers, professionals, tradesmen & other upper-middle elements.
40% — Small land-owning farmers
10% — Artisans: blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, shipwrights, etc.
15% — Temporary workers, usually soon moving upwards into the ranks of the small farmers
5% — Laborers

As far as I understand artisan was a class in itself, but not how it is used here. Apart from that being well-off does not mean one is not a proletarian - The way I understand it anyway. Proletarian/Bourgeois is just a question of relation to ownership of means of production, right?

It also writes:

Although there were Euro-Amerikan craftsmen and workers they never coalesced into a proletariat because they were too privileged and transitory in condition. It is important to grasp firmly that the mere presence of settler craftsmen and workers doesn’t automatically mean that they were a conscious class. With their extra-proletarian living standard and their future in the propertied middle classes, most settler workmen had no reason to develop a proletarian consciousness. Further, the rapid turnover of settlers in these strata left no material basis for the formation of a class.

Where it seems, to me, to conflate “proletarian” as a class with “proletariat” as a political entity. Being a “proletarian” isn’t about wether or not one has political consciousness, but wether one owns capital. Likewise it argues that smallholders weren’t “proletarian” because they owned some amount of land - This might be me really showing my ass - but by that line of reasoning feudal serfs were bourgeois too, since they would often own some small plot of land. Private and public property and all that.

I’d love to be educated on this point, because it has confused me.

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Now, as far as I understand the point of the person you’re responding to and what “Settlers” sets out to argue, the two points are not in conflict.
Settlers describes, the way I understood it, how America was shaped, how it was built on the backs of exploited black labor and how modern America has created a different mythology, one where most white people did not benefit from this exploitation, but only a select few, whereas the reality was one where all colonialists, no matter their class, benefitted from this exploitation of slave labor due to (what I very reductively boil down to a single term, so I don’t have to write a bunch) White Privilege. It is a detailing of how “white proletarian” is a privileged class, which it certainly is. That does not mean it is in the interest of the white proletariat to maintain that privilege. One person might be better off than another, but they can still both be doing absolutely terribly, due to the overarching structure in which they exist.

So first: Settlers does not argue against whiteness being a social construct:

Then, too, many English farmers and artisans couldn’t face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor. Traditionally, hired laborers were considered so low in English society that they ranked far below mere failures, and were considered degraded outcasts. Many English (including the “Levellers”, the anti-capitalist revolutionary outbreak of the 17th Century) thought wage laborers should lose their civil rights and English citizenship. Public opinion was so strong on this that the early English textile factories were filled with Irish and Welsh immigrants, children from the poorhouses and single women. So jumping the ocean in search of land was not some mundane career decision of comparing dollars and cents to these Englishmen — it was a desperate venture for continued status and self-respect.

So here you have a bunch of people afraid they’ll lose their privileged status, so they go to America where they feel they can reconstruct and maintain it.

It also get in on the class being white landowners. Seemingly also not just any type of landowner, but those that hold larger estates than what they themselves can work. This class wishes for a society without proletarians:

The Jeffersonian vision of Amerika as a pastoral European democracy was rooted in the national life of small, independent white landowners. Such a society had no place for a proletariat within its ranks — yet, in the age of capitalism, could not do without the labor of such a class. Amerika imported a proletariat from Afrika, a proletariat permanently chained in an internal colony, laboring for the benefit of all settlers. Afrikan workers might be individually owned, like tools and draft animals, by some settlers and not others, but in their colonial subjugation they were as a whole owned by the entire Euro-Amerikan nation.

So back then the white landowners decide to import slaves - They do this with popular support from white proletarians, even though it is not in their interest in the long run (In the short run it is, since white settler-society cannot exist without the exploitation of African slaves), and, at the time, the exploitation also benefitted the white proletariat, for the time being. But, as things developed, it developed not completely in the farvour of all white people:

It was not that slavery was unprofitable itself. It was, worker for worker, much more profitable than white wage-labor. Afrikan slaves in industry cost the capitalists less than one-third the wages of white workingmen. Even when slaves were rented from another capitalist, the savings in the factory or mine were still considerable

I dunno, I’m going to end up quoting the whole book just to make a minor point, which seems silly. It does seem pretty clear, while it is not at all the books main point, that over time - and in certain conditions even back then (Chapter 2) - “Whiteness” expands and shrinks as needed, and the exploitation of black slaves (and genocide of native americans) benefits or hurts members of the “settler” group.

The books main argument isn’t being argued against: “White”, no matter class, is a privileged entity and the “white proletariat” (which includes landowners shopowners, artisans, and many others) generally benefitted (and benefits) from the exploitation, but the exploitation is still not in the interest of the white proletariat - When feasible, planters would rather make use of slaves due to saved labour costs, and the end goal for the white bourgeoise was to get rid of (white) proletariat alltogether. Their class interests do not align.
But the book makes the lack of political consciousness amongst white proletarians into an argument that they are not proletarians at all, which, in my very limited understanding, seems to be a conclusion that does not really hold water.