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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 1:25 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-AmIndian]: Peach on Greer, 'Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America' To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org> Allan Greer. Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America. New York Cambridge University Press, 2018. 464 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-16064-4; $29.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-316-61369-6. Reviewed by Steven Peach (Tarleton State University) Published on H-AmIndian (February, 2019) Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe Indigenous and Euro-American Land Tenure in Colonial North America When Euro-American colonists began to settle in North America in the sixteenth century, they claimed land in a "Native American property universe" (p. 95). In the Valley of Mexico, the Nahuas surveyed farms and other productive landholdings with arithmetic precision. Further north, across the Canadian Shield, the Innu viewed rivers, streams, and other natural markers as boundaries meant to separate bands of hunter-gatherers during the search for food, furs, and other precious resources. Likewise, south of the St. Lawrence River, semi-sedentary Algonquian peoples organized land tenure around villages, networks of kinship, and individuals. How these rich traditions of indigenous landed property evolved, shaped, and intersected with European colonial property forms from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is the subject of historian Allan Greer's newest book, _Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America._ In the introduction, titled "Property and Colonization," Greer outlines a theoretical framework that challenges an assumption among historians and anthropologists that Indians and colonists in early America either owned or did not own landed property. This is an "on/off binary conception of property," he suggests, one that obscures the complexities of land tenure (p. 2). Land was not a "single thing," land ownership was never absolute, and as late as the nineteenth century, nation-states' "exclusive personal control over land" remained elusive (pp. 2, 18). Rather, North American land has always been "part of a landscape that has natural, social and spiritual dimensions" (p. 12). Inspired by the scholarship on private property, Greer contends that land is deeply contextualized in social relations, and that, therefore, land ownership in early America remained an active and contested process (pp. 11n26, 12n27, 13n29). To track what he calls "property formation" in early America, Greer examines the shifting ways that American Indians and Euro-Americans defined, held, and used land between 1500 and 1800 (p. 2). Part synthesis and part original analysis, his book draws upon the archaeological record, indigenous (especially Nahua) pictographs, colonial-era maps, imperial correspondence, missionary reports, and numerous articles and monographs. Abandoning a nationalist approach to property ownership in early America, he scans New Spain, New France, and New England for "basic patterns in the spatial dynamics of colonialism" (p. 11). Despite important differences among these regions, Greer argues that colonial land practices transformed North America and generated the gradual dispossession of indigenous peoples in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. _Property and Dispossession_ is divided into three sections. Part 1, "Three Zones of Colonization," consists of five chapters that provide a narrative history of property formation in New Spain, New France, and New England. He begins with a synthesis of precontact indigenous property forms and shifts into an examination of Indian-white property encounters in each colony. Part 2, "Aspects of Property Formation," features a comparative analysis of the colonies. Each of the four chapters in this section is devoted to a theme, namely the indigenous and colonial "commons," the Enlightenment-inspired "spatial revolution," surveying, and centralizing empires' influence on colonial property forms (pp. 242, 283). Part 3, "Conclusion and Epilogue," traces the disconnect between the idealism of private property in the Age of Revolution and the messy, on-the-ground realities of land tenure. This review probes four analytical threads that connect parts 1, 2, and 3: 1) private versus communal property ownership; 2) colonists' acknowledgement of indigenous properties; 3) variability in colonial property forms and practices; and 4) indigenous agency in nineteenth-century nation-states' attempts to erase Native people from the land. First, Greer overturns a scholarly tradition that associates private property ownership with Europeans and Euro-Americans, on the one hand, and communal property ownership with American Indians, on the other hand. He examines archaeological reports, indigenous language accounts, and legal records to show that Indians _and_ colonists held land both privately and communally. The main precontact unit of social and political organization in the Valley of Mexico was the _altepetl_, which encompassed several neighborhoods (_calpulli_) and kin-based households that farmed corn. Greer shows that while land "belonged" to individual Nahua _macehuales_ (commoners), who cultivated crops, each calpulli exercised some "control" over farmlands and farmers (p. 35). Furthermore, land ownership among the Native peoples, or "Ninnimissinuok," of New England ran the gamut from individual "control" to the collective use of lands by multiple villages (p. 42). Finally, Greer combines a seventeenth-century Jesuit account with modern anthropology to contend that in New France, "the hunting grounds of mobile and nomadic peoples like the Innu" constituted a "property system" (p. 49). Its dimensions reflected a shared "social universe" and individualized "family territories" (pp. 47, 50). Moreover, Greer demonstrates that indigenous property shaped the direction of colonial property and power. Across North America, colonial administrators, missionaries, farmers, ranchers, and other agents of empire adapted to preexisting indigenous land ownership. In the Valley of Mexico, Hernán Cortés and other conquistadors carved New Spain out of the lands controlled by Nahua _altepeme_ (sing., _altepetl_). Unlike the British and French, however, the Spanish did not conflate _imperium_ (sovereignty) with _dominium_ (ownership). Rather, the Spanish Crown "recognized" indigenous property and deemed "indigenous title ... primordial" in New Spain (p. 73). As a result, colonial officials instituted "two distinct land laws" that separated Spanish lands from Nahua lands. The _republica de indios_ and the _republica de españoles_ of New Spain partially resulted from and reinforced the monarch's guarantee of Nahua land title. In New England and New France, by contrast, the Crown claimed sovereignty and ownership over North America's indigenous people and lands. Even in those two colonies, though, settlers grappled with Native land tenure. Massachusetts Bay Puritan towns obtained deeds to land from Algonquian sachems, suggesting that English immigrants lacked the power to confiscate Algonquian lands in the decades preceding King Philip's War (1675-76). Moreover, many of these transactions "took place outside the bounds of a market economy" and, instead, took the shape of on-the-ground relationships (p. 89). To found Rhode Island, for example, the dissident Roger Williams purchased Narragansett land but later testified that the transaction was not commercial but, rather, a reflection of "personal relations, neighborliness and ... moral obligation" (p. 89). If the English "sought exclusive rights" to Algonquian land, as Greer contends, the French "imposed layers of partial and limited claims" on Innu and other Native lands (p. 178). The messiness of these land claims afforded Native people in New France some autonomy. In the early seventeenth-century St. Lawrence valley, for instance, Jesuit missionaries founded the Sillery mission, granting Innu families continued access to the eel fisheries (_Kâ Mihkwâwahkâšič_) that had sustained these indigenous people since before French colonization. Although colonists overran the fisheries in the 1660s, Greer stresses that Native land title remained contingent on the fluid relations between the Innu and French. Fluidity structured and limited colonial property forms and practices in North America as well. As a feudal colony, New France supported numerous fiefs where the line between proprietor (seigneur) and commoner (vassal) blurred considerably. Both held "different and overlapping stakes in a given piece of land," and commoners themselves occasionally, albeit rarely, purchased their own seigneurie (p. 161). Moreover, the imprecision of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century surveying of riverfront properties along the St. Lawrence meant that "actual possession" of land trumped "geometric rectitude," generating endless disputes between colonists (p. 345). For the Valley of Mexico, too, Greer examines rare property maps to reveal that the outer boundaries of _haciendas_ (commercial ranches) eluded precise measurement and impinged upon and overlapped with neighboring _haciendas_ and with the outer boundaries of Nahua _pueblos _(figures 9.3 and 9.4). Similarly, the resources of the _montes_ (vacant wastelands) straddling the Hispanic and indigenous republics were "equally open" to both (p. 254). Likewise, land tenure in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island resembled a checkerboard of landed properties. Unlike the "territorially open-ended" colonies of New France and New Spain, New England colonies were "spatially limited" (p. 196). As a result, the Puritan town rested on fixed space, exercised autonomous power to grant land to newcomers, and supported a dizzying number of land types. Individual townsmen owned countless land grants that were "fragmented and dispersed" and used land for grazing, logging, haying, farming, and a variety of other purposes (p. 214). While Greer relies heavily on the vast scholarship dedicated to seventeenth-century Puritan town life, he raises the important point that land ownership was "amorphous," "conditional," and subject to variations in terrain and soil quality (pp. 208, 213). The New England town was as much a material reality as an intellectual and political space. In all three regions, empires' and colonists' attempt to remake indigenous spaces into "colonial places" with secure, absolute title was never "entirely finished" (pp. 294, 355). To a degree, indigenous people were responsible for obstructing colonial property-making. Unlike in New England and New France, Indians in New Spain defended their lands by manipulating the Spanish bureaucracy and drawing upon precontact oral and pictographic traditions. Nahuas illustrated precontact land claims in postconquest pictographic records; completed titulus primordiales (primordial titles) meant to prove actual possession; and obtained legal protections to land in the form of an amparo (protective order). Mechanisms designed to preserve Nahua land were more successful in the Nahua heartland around Mexico City than in the north, where hacendados (commercial ranchers) had eroded indigenous land by the early eighteenth century. Similarly, the indigenous peoples of "Lower Canada" used "court actions, petitions and face-to-face meetings" to preserve some of their lands after Britain acquired Canada from France in 1763 (p. 405). _Property and Dispossession_ is a deeply researched and sweeping account of the forms and practices of landed property in early modern North America. Yet the book is less about indigenous dispossession and more about indigenous _persistence_. Over and over, Greer demonstrates that the Nahuas, Innu, and Ninnimissinuok protested land encroachment and opposed private property formation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. His careful work on the multiplicity and messiness of landed property among colonists in all three regions only deepens his central argument that absolute ownership of property eluded colonial control and created opportunities for indigenous people to defend ancestral lands. Still, this book would foster healthy debate among graduate students in reading seminars on colonialism and imperialism, ethnohistory, and law and society. It is an exciting and nuanced contribution to the history of colonial North America. Citation: Steven Peach. Review of Greer, Allan, _Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America_. H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews. February, 2019. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52817 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
