Abstract
In Colonial Lives of Property, Brenna Bhandar explores race and property in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and Israel. Bhandar borrows Cedric Robinson’s (2007) concept of “racial regimes” and Cheryl Harris’s (1993) concept of “whiteness as property” and explores the articulation of racialized notions of ownership through settler legal systems. In the colonies, legal regimes of ownership imposed by the settlers were shaped by racialized notions of “use and improvement” of land. These racialized notions were weaponized to dispossess indigenous peoples through the use of legal abstractions and restricted their ability to reclaim certain legal statuses imposed on them.
Bhandar states, “in common law jurisdictions, use that would justify an ownership right was defined by cultivation, and cultivation was understood within the relatively narrow parameters of English agrarian capitalism” (p. 35). This logic was first tested in the English colonization of Ireland. Bhandar explores how William Petty’s labor theory of value was used in justifying the colonization of Ireland. Petty believed that Irish lands were less valuable given that they yielded less output. Petty combined his labor theory of value with race science, specifically his beliefs about the biological inferiority of the Irish. During the English colonization of Ireland, he argued that “economic growth in Ireland depended on the settling and anglicizing of the Irish population” (p. 43). Hence, the Irish had to be dispossessed to give way to improvement in the use of land.
Locke exported Petty’s logic to American colonies and framed it in legal and civilizational terms. For Locke ([1689] 1960), the lands that were communally owned by indigenous peoples were an “uncultivated waste.” Progress from the state of nature to a civilized state necessitated private appropriation of land for its improvement. Land was only to be appropriated and privately owned by industrious men as an extension of their God-given natural right. The private appropriation of land would be justified by the improvement provided by the superior productivity of industrious men. The expression of industriousness would effectively be reflected by the capitalist standards of cultivation. Like the Irish in Petty’s work, in Locke’s work, indigenous people in America were racialized by the same logic of use and improvement, as the ownership of land could be justified only if it was private and used for capitalist cultivation.
In mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia, colonial surveyor Joseph Trutch adopted the same notions: use and improvement, to reduce the sizes of indigenous reservations. Trutch did not believe that indigenous peoples had the capacity for abstract thought, as they did not improve their lands. The English were inherently superior to the indigenous peoples because of their intellectual capacities. Hence, he justified the redrawing of the reservation boundaries through the racial logics of use and improvement of land. Once the boundaries were redrawn, policies of preemption and homesteading were used to settle white farmers on indigenous lands.
Legal abstractions were also used to erase the histories of indigenous ownership and dispossess them. In South Australia, a system of title by registration developed by Robert Richard Torrens legally abstracted land from the possession-based contractual forms previously associated with the English colonies and marked a shift toward registration-based forms. This enabled colonists to gain ownership using surveys and maps that displayed their ownership. The goal of title by registration was to erase prior ownership of land by Aboriginals, as Aboriginal lands were legally deemed terra nullius, or vacant, on the basis of the racialization of Aboriginals as primitive and the denial of their oral histories by the legal system.
In Israeli settlements, Bedouins often had formal proof of their ownership dating back to the Ottoman period. But as Bhandar shows, Israeli courts followed a similar logic of racialized ownership and denied the evidence provided by the Bedouins in every single case throughout the 1970s. At the same time, contracts of sale provided by Israeli settlers from the same period were accepted as proof of ownership, displaying the double standard in Israeli courts.
Bhandar is careful to distinguish the initial racial logic of Israeli settlements from English settlements. She argues that the ideology of the Jewish settlements in Palestine were initially inspired by German idealism more than they were by Locke. The purpose of settlements was to create a homeland for the Jewish people, not capitalist imperatives for economic growth. At the same time, the settlements also represented redemption for Jews who were cast out of Europe. One of the founders of political Zionism, Arthur Ruppin, argued that Jews were not only in Palestine to own land but to show the world that they could thrive under suitable conditions. Palestinians were one of the obstacles to redemption for Jews: they were viewed as biologically inferior and less productive, much in the same way as the English saw indigenous peoples as inferior.
Indigenous legal status, built on Lockean logic, was designed to restrict indigenous ownership of land. The Indian Act in Canada separated the reserves from the settlements and prohibited Indians from appropriating land. As a result, Indian legal identity was tied to access to the reservation, in contradistinction to the white settler, who was free to acquire land from the capitalist market. For Bhandar this makes the Indian a subject without a past, as their relationship to property is defined as static, whereas the settler becomes the actor of civilizational progress as the capitalist farmer who improves land.
In her conclusion, Bhandar aims to provide alternatives to racial regimes of property. The example that receives the most attention in this section is the postapartheid reforms in South Africa.
Colonial Lives of Property is a detailed historical analysis of racial regimes of property. It successfully explores the ideological and legal articulation of such regimes and carefully examines their transformations in a variety of contexts. However, often, theoretical complexity feels overwhelming to the point of undermining the richness of the historical work. The contrast between the English and Israeli settlements in particular is the hardest to digest, given both the theoretical and historical complexities of these cases. Nevertheless, Bhandar’s book is an extremely valuable theoretical and historical contribution to the fields of critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and history.