Land Locked

Land Locked Steven Stoll (bio) Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvii + 450 pp., maps, illustrations, acknowledgments, index. $99.99. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020. xix + 396 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $26.95. In 1689, John Locke published Two Treatises of Government, written during years of political turmoil and revised in exile from persecution. In the Second Treatise, Locke attacks the legitimacy of monarchy and aristocratic power. Lordship rested on wealth derived from control over land, which by the seventeenth century increasingly meant an exclusive right, or ownership. Locke doesn't question the legitimacy of private property; instead, he reconfigures the social process through which property becomes private, eliminating aristocratic inheritance in favor of natural rights. Scholars have parsed "Of Property" for Locke's view of enclosure and the connective tissue between liberalism and capitalism. But in his most crucial pivot, he turns away from England altogether, seeing it as fatally corrupt. Locke projected his experiment in political genesis onto the North American colonies. A new order required the New World. But North America posed a similar problem. A long-established society possessed the land essential to the economic and ecological foundation of liberalism. These inhabitants weren't English or Christian, and they didn't live within a nation-state or government that Locke recognized. (Thomas Hobbes agreed, writing "For the savage people in places in America … have no government at all.")1 All of which emboldened Locke to undermine them as owners with a series of reasons and excuses for why colonizers could enclose land at will. Sounding just like the English aristocracy, he said what lies in common lies in waste. In this view, anyone who removes land from eternal stagnation creates value for all humankind and thereby generates a right to property. Locke didn't invent the English fantasy of an uncultivated continent. Jonathan Winthrop put to parchment the same idea—in nearly in the same words—in 1628. The Puritan attorney and founder of Boston concluded that [End Page 205] Indigenous people "inclose no land neither have [they] any settled habitation … and so have no other but a natural right to those countries."2 Events on the ground looked like nothing Locke described. Winthrop either didn't know or didn't care that Nipmucs and Nausets cultivated domesticated plants in sturdy villages. And rather than float in an imaginary State of Nature, Winthrop established the Bay Colony as a quasi-state, inserting segments of England's legal DNA almost immediately. An administrative structure for creating property, along with the military power to enforce those claims, began to forge what Allan Greer calls "English-owned and English-ruled space" (p. 202). Locke haunts our understanding of European colonization not because anything he wrote had any influence on colonizers, but because the way he naturalized enclosure and blended it with an implicit claim to European supremacy reflected the actions and beliefs of Europeans and white Americans in the ensuing centuries. Two new books broaden and deepen the way we should think about the motives of the colonizers, the Indigenous response, and how the drive to dispossess continued into the nineteenth-century United States, including the exile of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles from their homelands. Allan Greer's Property and Dispossession and Claudio Saunt's Unworthy Republic offer new sources and evidence, synthesize previous scholarship, and render stories we thought we understood with admirable texture and complexity. ________ Greer presents a comprehensive narrative and analysis of the confluence and conflict between Indigenous and European conceptions of property. One of his most important arguments is that even historians tend to overstate the differences between Indigenous and European landholding. Native American systems were not simple or static, writes Greer, nor can they be understood merely as opposed to everything European, calling this "utterly wrong-headed" (p. 29). We never doubt that colonization in Central Mexico, New England, and Quebec followed distinct legal foundations, cultural traditions, and environmental conditions, but we sometimes fail to apply the same assumptions to...

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