Property and Dispossession

Abstract

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. . .

Effects of land dispossession and forced migration on Indigenous peoples in North America

“…Indigenous land tenure systems were varied, so these boundaries create room for multiple modes of occupancy and territorial claiming necessary to construct this dataset and to conservatively—and most reliably—make temporal comparisons about land qualities and climate. And although CCEs proved to be the most methodologically reliable option for large-scale historical study, it is essential to recognize that the restriction of Indigenous peoples to a bounded area is itself a practice and outcome of colonial forced migration ( 36 , 37 ). Further, because some tribes have systematic migratory land tenure practices, it is impossible and analytically unsound to impose overdetermined historical boundaries.…”

The Many Faces of Rural Capitalism

“…On one hand, settlers' interest in conforming to public land policy was secured by their need for clear legal title to freehold land they acquired. 8 On the other, the federal government's interest in making grants from the public lands available to settlers was secured by the prospect of obtaining revenue. In a federal system in which individual states retained considerable autonomy and in which direct federal taxation was difficult to arrange and ideologically suspect, government revenue would come from activities geographically peripheral to established populated regionsfrom import duties on trade goods, and from purchase monies and fees from the sale of public lands.…”

“…The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century United States, historian Allan Greer has written, was a time of "utopian settler ambitions and property delusions." 11 Revolution, independence, the peace settlement with Britain, conflicts with Native Americans, government land policy and need for revenue, population expansion, the substantial dividing up and settlement of land in seaboard regions, and an ideology supportive of freehold agrarian landholding, all drove the expansion of settler colonialism. Rapid expansion of white settler populations into the trans-Appalachian West fulfilled the ambitions both of political leaders for national expansion and of individuals and families for property of their own.…”