Property and Dispossession

Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America

Bibliographic Data

ID2826563
AuthorsJames L Hill (Mississippi State University), James Hill (0000-0003-4653-1416, Mississippi State University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume99
Issue2
Pages351-352
Publication date2019-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7370335
OpenAlexW2943278221
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Property and Dispossession is an ambitious volume that examines interactions between land, property, empire, and European colonization across North America during the postcontact era's first three centuries. In particular, Allan Greer investigates the dynamics of what he calls the “empire effect” and “property formation” (pp. 8, 19). The former refers to how European imperialism's effects “ran far beyond the zones of conquest and settlement,” citing the rapid spread of European diseases, livestock, and trade goods as examples (p. 8). He holds that property, like empire, was contingent and constantly “in movement and flux,” “relational,” and subject to continual negotiation (p. 19). Greer debunks whatever notions remain of a stark divide between European private property and Amerindian communal property in the early modern era, arguing that a wide range of property-holding customs coexisted and overlapped among both Europeans and Amerindians throughout this period. Greer observes not only that European influence spread unevenly over the North American landscape but also that Amerindian notions of property shaped European practices.The author frames his work as a comparative study across a multitude of societies, European and Amerindian. He selects three regions as case studies, with the caveat that he does not consider his comparisons “systematic”: the northern Saint Lawrence Valley, southern New England, and “the central uplands of Mesoamerica” (pp. 21–22). Greer evaluates types of property in both European and Amerindian societies and how colonialism altered land tenure. In particular, Greer emphasizes how colonists and imperial regimes attempted to remake property in an indigenous landscape and to what extent that process involved the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Greer's work is synthetic, crafting broad arguments by surveying some of the most significant literature in the historiographies of colonial North America. The book's value comes from its continental scope and comparisons between French, Spanish, and English colonial systems.Greer divides the book into three parts. The first mostly surveys property regimes and forms of land tenure in the three regions of study and how these changed over time. Here, Greer demonstrates that in New Spain, as well as in New France and New England, both European colonists and Amerindian peoples practiced forms of land tenure that did not fit neatly into categories of private and communal property, with all the societies covered exhibiting elements of each. Drawing heavily on Lauren Benton's, Jane Burbank's, and Frederick Cooper's works in particular, Greer also argues that European empires continued to recognize some types of indigenous land tenure, establishing and legitimizing colonial rule on a legal pluralism that governed Amerindians and Europeans differently.The second part addresses the role of the commons in dispossessing indigenous peoples in all three colonial regimes, the limited role that Greer believes cartographic science and scientific surveys played in property formation and indigenous dispossession, and the efforts of all three imperial (and later national) states to erode the legal pluralism that initially undergirded empire. Throughout the entire work, but particularly in the concluding third part, Greer identifies another major commonality of the colonial regimes and their national descendants: the persistence of different types of territorial sovereignty and property, in the form of enclaves of indigenous land tenure and varying degrees of communal property. Greer argues that despite two centuries of on-again, off-again efforts in all three regions to universalize a regime of “private property and uniform territorial sovereignty,” indigenous communities have successfully resisted the hegemony of the state and colonial society (p. 425). He even extends this comparison into the present day, briefly examining the Chiapas ejidos alongside US Indian reservations and Canadian First Nations reserves, wonderfully connecting the colonial past to the colonial present.As a historian of New France and the British colony of Lower Canada, Greer has had a long and illustrious career but approaches Latin American history as an outsider. By his own admission, Greer is less familiar with the historiography of New Spain, particularly the Spanish-language literature, than he is with that of French and British colonial North America. At times, his choice of language makes this unfamiliarity apparent, as when he refers to Spanish colonists as a “settler elite” or refers to “white racial solidarity” between peninsular officials and the creole elite of colonial society (pp. 99, 102). By and large, however, the author has done an admirable job of delving into the English-language and Spanish-language historiography, conveying a nuanced understanding of how both Spanish and Nahua societies defined property and land tenure and how colonization changed (or did not change) these customs. Indeed, the most remarkable element of Greer's overview of colonial New Spain is how seldom one is reminded that the author is not a specialist in the field.Any scholar interested in taking a long view of colonialism in North America or in comparative studies of empire should read Property and Dispossession. Even scholars who generally confine themselves to the history of a particular nation-state, empire, or region will find much of value in how Greer contextualizes the local and regional within the continental and transatlantic

Archaeology · Colonialism · Economics · Empire · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Private property · Property (philosophy) · Settlement (finance) · American Environmental and Regional History · Canadian Identity and History · Ecology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law

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