WHAT WERE THE BROAD PROCESSES by which settlers of European stock created new forms of tenure and wrested control of lands from indigenous peoples, first in the Americas and later across wide stretches of Africa and Oceania? Anyone interested in this basic question about colonization and dispossession in an Atlantic world setting may be tempted to think in terms of a great "enclosure movement" that took shape first in England and Western Europe and then extended overseas to the New World, bringing survey lines, fences, and legal rules fostering exclusive access and transferability. More than one historian has pointed in the direction of such an extended conception of enclosure, although none has so far made the case in detail. "When the English took possession of lands overseas, they did so by building fences and hedges, the markers of enclosure and private property," write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. 1 In relation to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, E. P. Thompson has also pointed to a connection between enclosure within England and the imposition of private property across the overseas British Empire, notably in India, where the Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793) represented a particularly brutal and doctrinaire attempt to establish unitary proprietorship over land. Thompson's argument about enclosure and colonization appeared in an essay
The settler colonial approach has much to offer historians. However, when we
consider the extended, 500-year history of the invasion of Indigenous North America, we
encounter several sorts of colonialism; the settler variety stands out as a dominant force
in some periods and regions, but it fades to insignificance in others. Two other versions of
colonialism discussed in this article, “Imperial/Commercial Penetration” and “Extractivism,”
seem particularly relevant to the history of the northern half of the continent. Along with
Settler Colonialism, these two modes of colonialism made their appearance according to quite
different timetables in the various regions of Canada. Extractivism, it is argued here, has
become the predominant form of intrusion into Indigenous spaces in recent
decades.
Introduction Property and Colonization To sum up, there everywhere appears to be an intimate link between the way in which nature is used and the way in which human beings themselves are used. However, whilst historians have given much thought to the path leading from ways of treating human beings to those of appropriating nature, researchers who have explored the opposite trajectory are still rare. Maurice Godelier, "Territory and Property in Some Pre-Capitalist Societies" Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. . .
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