Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier by Ian Saxine

Reviewed by: Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier by Ian Saxine Gavin Taylor Saxine, Ian –Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 320. In recent years, the literature on settler colonialism has questioned the underpinnings of what Patrick Wolfe has termed the "logic of elimination": the tendency of settler [End Page 230] societies to erase any traces of Indigenous possession of the land. For historians of the early stages of European colonization in North America, this has entailed a recovery of the diversity and complexity of regimes of land ownership. Rejecting a teleological story of settler conquest and Native dispossession, scholars such as Allan Greer have emphasized the ways in which First Peoples not only resisted colonial incursions but also forced colonists to develop rules for land ownership and use that recognized and incorporated existing Indigenous practice. Ian Saxine has offered a valuable new contribution to this literature, focusing on the relationship between the English colonists of present-day Maine and the Wabanakis, a loosely confederated group of communities whose homeland stretched from today's Atlantic provinces to the St. François River. Unlike the Native people of southern New England, who were stripped of much of their land and confined to small reservations by the end of the seventeenth century, the Wabanakis remained a powerful presence in northern New England well into the eighteenth century, forcing "would-be colonizers to craft a new system of property—however haphazard—to acknowledge that reality" (p. 197). Following Lisa Brooks, Saxine contends that the Wabanakis saw their territory as a "common pot" (wlôgan), a source of sustenance that was shared by interrelated beings who determined land use through consensus and reciprocity. Early English colonists in Maine tacitly recognized this system by entering into written agreements with Wabanaki sagamores to obtain the right to use their lands. Understood as legal deeds by the English and reciprocal exchanges by the Wabanakis, these agreements became the basis for a hybrid form of land tenure that would characterize the region for over a century. Saxine emphasizes two watershed moments in the evolution of this system. The first came at the end of a prolonged period of imperial warfare between 1688 and 1713, which emptied Maine of much of its English population. Embroiled in disputes with royal agent Edmund Andros over the legitimacy of land titles, the government of Massachusetts—which had annexed the communities of Maine in the 1650s—insisted that the purchase of lands from Indigenous people formed the basis of land rights in the colony. The result was "a vague arrangement in which, by law, Indian land purchases were valid only if obtained to corroborate titles from the Crown or colony, but in practice, remained an essential basis of landed property on the Maine frontier" (p. 42). When the Peace of Utrecht put a temporary end to over two decades of warfare, well-connected land speculators used these seventeenthcentury Indian deeds as the basis of ambitious settlement projects in Maine. The legal significance of these deeds led land speculators to recognize the validity of Indigenous title even as they worked assiduously to claim Wabanaki hunting and fishing grounds as their own holdings. Their aggressiveness led to another episode of Anglo-Wabanaki warfare in the 1720s, as heavy-handed efforts to exact territorial concessions from the Wabanakis led to violent reprisals. Eager to protect the colony's reputation for fair dealing with Indigenous people—which was the ultimate basis of its land titles—the government of Massachusetts worked to resolve the conflict by signing a 1727 treaty that recognized the validity of seventeenth-century deeds while reserving unsold lands to the Wabanakis. [End Page 231] This second watershed moment became the basis of an Anglo-Wabanaki entente, which "succeeded because it fused Native traditions of diplomatic reciprocity with the British fixation on written contracts and property law, convincing both Wabanakis and most of the land speculators that the agreement protected their land rights" (p. 100). The English concessions were more than rhetorical, as Boston merchant Samuel Waldo found out when he tried to...

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