Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America

tags

LAW 343 Dispossession Enclosure

Notes

there is an intriguing, if rough, coincidence of peak periods of enclosure in England—the Tudor period and the late eighteenth century—with times of imperial expansion and reinvigoration

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colonization was also accompanied by the establishment of commons.

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common property was a central feature of both native and settler forms of land tenure in the early colonial period and that dispossession came about largely through the clash of an indigenous commons and a colonial commons

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little empirical support for Locke’s notion that particular commons somehow require the prior existence of “government,” “law,” and “money” in forms that would be recognizable as such by a European observer

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In erasing the distinction, where American natives were concerned, between particular commons and open- access resources, Locke effectively disqualified them as proprietors

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We can, then, speak of an “indigenous commons,” recognizing the wide variety of arrangements by which terrain and resources belonged to specific human col- lectivities in the real America where Europeans came to establish their colonies. Apart from cultivated areas, America was a quilt of native commons, each governed by the land-use rules of a specific human society. The notion of a universal commons completely open to all—Locke’s “America”—existed mainly in the imperial imagination.

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It is worth taking stock of settler commoning, if only to challenge the Lockean and neo-Lockean tendency to equate colonization, enclosure, and privatization. At the same time, it must be recognized that from the point of view of native dispossession, the balance of fully enclosed versus inner commons may not be of overriding significance. Where land was cleared and bounded for settler use, natives were generally excluded, open- field or no.

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“When Europeans first entered these wide, flat valleys and plains they saw a landscape that had been shaped by centuries of human occupation. It was a fertile, densely populated, and complex agricultural mosaic composed of extensive croplands, woodlands, and native grasslands; of irrigation canals, dams, terraces, and limestone quarries. Oak and pine forests covered the hills, and springs and streams supplied extensive irrigation systems.” Once ganado menor were admitted, the fragile flora was quickly decimated, the ground eroded, and the region was transformed into a semi-desert of cactus and mesquite, barely supporting a handful of destitute natives, “eaters of beetles, bugs, and the fruit of the nopal cactus.”

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everywhere cattle and sheep wandered, the landscape changed and Indian livelihoods were affected.

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Natives complained bitterly of the injuries they suffered through casual settler hus- bandry.

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In the real world of colonial North America, the destruction of indigenous prop- erty forms and the establishment of new, colonial property regimes did not follow the pattern that John Locke and countless other theorists suggest. America (not to mention Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand) did not greet Europeans as an open-access universal commons, and settlers did not initially establish control of the land through procedures resembling enclosure.

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John Locke’s misdescription of colonial property formation as the enclosure of a great universal commons was anything but an innocent mistake. It served both to erase native property in land at the outset and to assimilate colonial appropriation with “improvement,”

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Thus the political thrust of Locke’s essay “Of Property” is inverted as the commons and unenclosed “America” are idealized rather than denigrated, but the basic un- derstanding of colonization is still traceable to Locke. 79 A clearer sense of colonial property formation, purged of colonialist ideology, requires us to jettison the concept of the universal open commons and to explore the ways in which different property systems, each with its particular practices of commoning, confronted one another in an unequal struggle.

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