Abstract
In the first six months of 2018, there was a 50 per cent increase in the number of homeless families decanted from London, with one projection suggesting that ‘upwards of a million people’ living in social housing could be displaced from homes, families, friends and communities as part of the ‘London clearances’. As cash-strapped local authorities privatise public assets, including housing and land, the black and multicultural communities which fought valiantly against state racism in the 1980s and 1990s, are being slowly decimated.
The fact that the race and class social cleansing of London faces so little challenge owes much to a discourse that presents poor Londoners on ‘sink estates’ as a racialised underclass. Indulging in everyday acts of anti-social behaviour, governed by gangs and the ghetto mentality of black subcultures, working-class Londoners are deemed unworthy of rights – their very presence seen as an obstacle to estate regeneration and civilised progress. It is in the context of helping develop an IRR research project on these themes 1 that I picked up Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property, a multidisciplinary and highly original historical account of the legal and philosophical justifications for appropriation and private ownership in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appearing at ‘a moment when human life and property’ became so ‘imbricated in relations of exchange that one stands in for another’. Bhandar may not have set out to expose the ways in which colonial-style civilisational racism lives on today in the dehumanisation of those in public housing in the global North, but, as a materialist historian, her work sheds a light on the present. Thus she helps us situate some of the recent Marxist literature on ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (David Harvey) in a long racialised history, confirming, for me at least, that what is happening now in London and other European cities has everything to do with the colonial logic of expropriation.
South Australia, British Colombia and the Naqab, the southern desert region of Israel/Palestine, are the main sites examined in Bhandar’s historical study of settler-colonialism, although there are also digressions. In the early pages, a foray into seventeenth-century Ireland is very welcome as William Petty’s land survey, which was the precursor to the forced transportation of up to a million people and the beginnings of Anglification, is key to understanding developments in other settler-colonial contexts. Indeed, the land survey and other similar mapping exercises are amongst the numerous legal and technical tools – such as pre-emption and homesteading, systems of landholding, title by registration, agricultural settlements – considered by Bhandar. This is not entirely, though, a work of history, for Bhandar (whose original discipline is law) also discusses a number of contemporary land claims, for example, in relation to Aboriginal Title, such as Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014) and McIvor v. Registrar (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) (2009). Justice Sachs’ ruling in the Port Elizabeth Municipality v. Various Occupiers (2004) case, which challenged the apartheid definition of black people as ‘unlawful occupiers’ or ‘trespassers’, is also discussed in a concluding section. That all this is done in 262 pages is a formidable achievement.
The book is divided into chapters which flesh out the central thesis as stated in the introduction, as well as introducing the writings of key colonial administrators such as Joseph Trutch (Chief Commissioner of Land and Works in British Colombia who denied the existence of Aboriginal Title), Robert Richard Torrens (third premier of South Australia and architect of the land registration system), Arthur Ruppin (author of The Agricultural Colonisation of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine) and, most importantly, the political philosopher John Locke, who was also a colonial administrator and who established land policy in the colony of Virginia. Bhandar’s central thesis being that: the settler-colonial state was vital to the development of legal techniques facilitating the transition to modern landed forms of property; property law was a crucial mechanism for the colonial accumulation of capital; and, that the legal drive to categorise and measure brought forth ‘racial regimes of ownership’. (Here she acknowledges her debt to Cedric Robinson, amongst others.) According to Bhandar, we cannot ‘understand modern concepts of race’ apart from issues of ‘ownership’ and ‘property logics’, as ‘blackness and indigeneity came to signify a lesser value not only in relation to white European settlers but with respect to relations of ownership’.
The first chapter, ‘Use’, briefly introduces Locke’s concepts of ‘use’ and ‘self possession’ (a theme Bhandar returns to more fully in the fourth chapter, ‘Status’), placing them at the centre of the discussion of colonial strategies of dispossession and the development of modern property laws. It was Locke who, alongside eighteenth-century legal theorist William Blackstone (author of Commentaries on the Laws of England), constructed the ‘legal architecture for dispossession’. Basically, the argument of these eminent Englishmen boiled down to the fact that it’s OK to dispossess the ‘natives’ of their land, because they are so backward, uncivilised and useless that they do not know how to improve it. Land that was not being cultivated according to European models of agriculture was deemed waste, and therefore legitimately appropriated by Europe’s first settlers, who brought the gift of cultivation. This distinction between ‘cultivated land’ and ‘wasteland’ (inhabited by uncivilised Indians) ultimately laid the basis for the legal doctrine of terra nullius. (Note the echoes through the ages, with former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s post-2011 description of ‘rioters’ as emerging from Britain’s postwar ‘sink estates’ with their ‘decades of neglect’, spawning ‘gangs, ghettos and anti-social behaviour’. These are our modern wastelands.)
In chapter 2 ‘Propertied Abstraction’, Bhandar argues that turning land into a commodity involved structural violence, with the justification for brutal dispossession sharing ‘conceptual similarities’ with the ‘taxonomization and deracination of human life based on racial categorization’. Concepts of race and racial inferiority were smuggled into new forms of value, she believes. In the third chapter, ‘Improvement’, she returns to the theme of the ‘wastelands’, arguing that the ‘appropriation of indigenous lands’ required ‘legal and political narratives that equated English common-law concepts of property with civilised life’. In a settler-colonial context, populations were, by definition, uncivilised and could be easily dispossessed, cast out of the borders of political citizenship. In ‘Status’, Bhandar examines the way official legal status has been used to define and legislate the very nature of personhood in society, determining membership, belonging, rights and entitlements.
It is when Bhandar is talking about ‘improvement’ in the context of the ‘secularized messianism’ of Zionism that she is at her most authoritative. The notion that the land of Palestine was not being cultivated according to European models, and was therefore appropriable, was formative in early Zionist thought. It was of course influenced by ‘the ideology of improvement and progress, informed entirely by a European episteme’, leading to land privatisation based on the notion of ‘population dispersal, a bureaucratically rendered euphemism for the Nakba’. Similarly, Bhandar provides telling descriptions of the emergence in Canada of the juridical category of ‘Indian status’. This can only be properly understood in the context of legislation establishing federal jurisdiction over reserve lands and stipulating in great detail the rules governing life on the reserve, with Indian status encapsulating the ‘fusing together of identity and property ownership’.
A thrilling thesis, then, but not an easy read. On occasion it overwhelms with facts and bewilders with its numerous competing threads. The juggling of so many balls in the air at once doesn’t always come off. And the frequent re-articulation of the themes can be as jarring as the vocabulary can be complicated. I kept having to put the book down to translate it to myself in more basic terms. Perhaps there is a case for a simplified ‘Beginners Guide’ to Bhandar’s account of law, land and racial regimes of ownership. It’s so important that her work becomes accessible to all, not just a theoretical book for other theorists.