Commons and enclosure in the colonization of North America

American Historical Review

Volumn 117, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 365-386

  Greer, Allan ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 84859871117     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.117.2.365     Document Type: Article

References (166)

1. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 44.
2. Similar views of enclosure and colonization can be found in the following works.
3. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 82-83
4. Thomas Flanagan, "The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and Political Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Political Science 22 (1989): 589-602
5. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000), 23
6. Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis, 2001), 32-34
7. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York, 2004), 20-22
8. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 37-39, 258-259
9. Ben Maddison, "Radical Commons Discourse and the Challenges of Colonialism," Radical History Review, no. 108 (2010): 29-48.
10. E. P. Thompson, "Custom, Law and Common Right," in Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991), 164-175.
11. See also Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C., 1996).
12. On English enclosure.
13. see R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912)
14. Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4: 1500-1640 (Cambridge, 1967), chap. 4
15. J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (London, 1977)
16. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge, 1993).
17. Admittedly, the language of "enclosure" has a parochially English ring to it, but even though contemporaries rarely spoke of an "enclosure movement in the context of continental Europe, historians find considerable evidence of developments not unlike the changes that transformed the English countryside in the early modern period.
18. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), chap. 6
19. e siècle: Inerties et changements dans les campagnes françaises entre 1715 et 1815 (Paris, 2000), 64-83, 300-302
20. Martina de Moor, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, and Paul Warde, "Comparing the Historical Commons of North West Europe: An Introduction," in de Moor, Shaw-Taylor, and Warde, eds., The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500-1850 (Turnhout, Belgium, 2002), 15-31
21. Jesús García Fernández, "Champs ouverts et champs clô;turés en Vieille-Castille," Annales: É conomies, sociétés, civilisations 20, no. 4 (1965): 692-718
22. Juan Diego Pérez Cebada and Felipa Sánchez Salazar, "Destroying the Commons: The Enclosure of Lands in Spain in the 'Ancien Régime' " (paper presented to the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Brescia, Italy, 2006).
23. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), 133-146.
24. James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980)
25. Tully, "Differences in the Interpretation of Locke on Property," in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 118-136.
26. Tully's argument challenges C. B. Macpherson's view of Locke as the philosopher of capitalist property relations.
27. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), chap. 5
28. Macpherson, "Capitalism and the Changing Concept of Property," in Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale, eds., Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond (London, 1975), 105-124.
29. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 134.
30. "Forests and great Commons make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians," wrote John Bellers in 1714.
31. quoted in Thompson, "Custom, Law and Common Right," 165
32. See also Neeson, Commoners, 30.
33. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 137.
34. Locke's insistence on the right of unilateral appropriation in the state of nature, appropriation requiring no one's consent, is a feature that, according to Barbara Arneil, distinguishes his theory of property from that of Hugo Grotius.
35. Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996), 61-62.
36. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York, 1990), chap. 3
37. David Feeny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie J. McCay, and James M. Acheson, "The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later," Human Ecology 18, no. 1 (1990): 1-19
38. Bonnie J. McCay and Svein Jentoft, "Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research," Human Organization 57, no. 1 (1998): 21-29.
39. James Tully, "Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights," in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 137-176.
40. Joan Thirsk, "The Common Fields," Past & Present, no. 29 (December 1964): 3-25.
41. For an excellent description (in a colonial American context in this case) of the collective management of livestock as an accompaniment to grain-growing.
42. see Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, Conn., 2004).
43. Robert I. Burns, ed., Las Siete Partidas, 5 vols., vol. 3: Medieval Law: Lawyers and Their Work (Philadelphia, 2001), 820-822.
44. Vicki Hsueh, "Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion," Contemporary Political Theory 5, no. 2 (2006): 193-214.
45. Rebecca Horn, personal communication, March 4, 2009.
46. On land tenure and agriculture among the Nahua peoples of central Mexico.
47. see Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), chap. 10
48. H. R. Harvey, "Aspects of Land Tenure in Ancient Mexico," in H. R. Harvey and Hanns J. Prem, eds., Explorations in Ethnohistory: Indians of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque, N.M., 1984), 83-102
49. S. L. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580-1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town (Albuquerque, N.M., 1986), chap. 8
50. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 1992), chap. 5
51. Elizabeth Boone, "Glorious Imperium: Understanding Land and Community in Moctezuma's Mexico," in David Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, eds., Moctezuma's Mexico: Visions of the Aztec World (Niwot, Colo., 1992), 159-173
52. Rebecca Horn, Postconquest Coyoacan: Nahua- Spanish Relations in Central Mexico, 1519-1650 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), chap. 5.
53. On the concept of an indigenous commons in the Arkansas Valley.
54. see Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006), 7-9.
55. On the prevalence of particular claims to resources in the Pacific Northwest.
56. see Wayne Suttles, ed., Northwest Coast (Washington, D.C., 1990)
57. Richard Daly, Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs (Vancouver, B.C., 2005)
58. Douglas C. Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925 (Vancouver, B.C., 2008).
59. Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600-1650 (Toronto, 1971), 168-171
60. Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, 1976), 34-40
61. Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Woman, Land, and Society: Three Aspects of Aboriginal Delaware Life," Pennsylvania Archeologist 17, no. 1-4 (1947): 1-35
62. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman, Okla., 1996)
63. Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (Oxford, 1994).
64. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 60-68.
65. Creek land, says Claudio Saunt, "was not owned as much as used.".
66. Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York, 1999), 40-42.
67. Gabriel Sagard, The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, ed. George M. Wrong, trans. H. H. Langton (Toronto, 1939), 103.
68. Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia, with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians, trans. and ed. William F. Ganong (Toronto, 1910), 237.
69. See Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Manchester, 1986), chap. 6.
70. Patricia Albers and Jeanne Kay, "Sharing the Land: A Study in American Indian Territoriality," in Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore, eds., A Cultural Geography of North American Indians (Boulder, Colo., 1987), 47-91
71. Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman, Okla., 2001)
72. DuVal, The Native Ground, 9, 203.
73. There is a rich literature, most of it the work of anthropologists, on the northern Algonquian hunting territories, both in the distant past and in more recent times.
74. Highlights include Frank G. Speck, "Mistassini Hunting Territories in the Labrador Peninsula," American Anthropologist 25, no. 4 (1923): 452-457
75. Eleanor Burke Leacock, The Montagnais "Hunting Territory" and the Fur Trade (Menasha, Wis., 1954)
76. Toby Morantz, "Historical Perspectives on Family Hunting Territories in Eastern James Bay," Anthropologica, n.s., 28, no. 1-2 (1986): 64-91
77. Adrian Tanner, "The Significance of Hunting Territories Today," in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis (Ottawa, 1987), 60-74
78. Harvey Feit, "Les territoires de chasse algonquiens avant leur 'découverte'? Études et histoires sur la tenure, les incendies de forêt et la sociabilité de la chasse," Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 34, no. 3 (2004): 5-22
79. Colin Scott, "Property, Practice and Aboriginal Rights among Quebec Cree Hunters," in Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, eds., Hunters and Gatherers, vol. 2: Property, Power and Ideology (Oxford, 1988), 35-51.
80. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 48-53.
81. Richard M. Morse, "Some Characteristics of Latin American Urban History," American Historical Review 67, no. 2 (January 1962): 327.
82. Ordenanzas hechas para los descubrimientos, nuevas poblaciones y pacificaciones," July 13, 1573, in Francisco de Solano, ed., Cedulario de tierras: Compilación de legislación agraria colonial, 1497-1820 (Mexico City, 1991), 220-221.
83. See also Gilbert R. Cruz, Let There Be Towns: Spanish Municipal Origins in the American Southwest, 1610-1810 (College Station, Tex., 1988), 112-113
84. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 320.
85. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 81-82.
86. Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963), 92.
87. Ibid., 104
88. Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 42.
89. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981).
90. Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York, 1970), 82.
91. Donahue, The Great Meadow, 117-127.
92. Reglements de police," May 11, 1676, in Pierre Georges Roy, ed., Ordonnances, commissions, etc., etc., des gouverneurs et intendants de la Nouvelle-France, 1639-1706, 2 vols. (Beauceville, Quebec, 1924), 1: 197.
93. Similar arrangements prevailed across much of ancien régime France.
94. Bloch, French Rural History, 46-47.
95. Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal (Montreal, 1992), 175-177.
96. Ordinance of Superior Council," August 13, 1725, in Pierre Georges Roy, ed., Inventaire des jugements et délibérations du conseil supérieur de la Nouvelle-France de 1717 à 1760, 7 vols. (Beauceville, Quebec, 1932), 1: 261.
97. Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal, 177.
98. Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740-1840 (Toronto, 1985), 11-12
99. Colin M. Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal, 2000), 35.
100. See "Ordonnance de Jean Talon," June 20, 1680, in Roy, Ordonnances, commissions, etc., etc., 1: 266-275.
101. Francis Higginson, New-Englands Plantation (1630; repr., New York, 1970), 4.
102. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1681), 2: 103, libro 4, titulo 12, ley v, April 4, 1532.
103. as quoted and translated in William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, Calif., 1972), 67.
104. David E. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge, 1984), 11, 36, 79-83.
105. Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 275-279.
106. Since rocky and swampy land was not counted toward the total, estancias generally covered much larger areas than what the law specified.
107. Herman W. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucia, 1576-1767 (Stanford, Calif., 1980), 28-34.
108. Ibid., 62, 85
109. Jonathan D. Amith, The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 2005), 164.
110. Amith, The Möbius Strip, 186, 188.
111. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca, 117.
112. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 2: 113.
113. See, for example, Solano, Cedulario de tierras, 173, 177, 198.
114. Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora, Mexico, 2006), 309-310.
115. Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 281-285.
116. Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994), 31, 115.
117. Andrew Sluyter, "The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth- Century New Spain," Geographical Review 86, no. 2 (1996): 161-177
118. Miguel Aguilar-Robledo, "Formation of the Miraflores Hacienda: Lands, Indians, and Livestock in Eastern New Spain at the End of the Sixteenth Century," Journal of Latin American Geography 2, no. 1 (2003): 87-110.
119. Melville, A Plague of Sheep, 154.
120. Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820 (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), 332-333
121. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 2: 113v, libro IV, titulo XVII, "Que los indios puedan cortar madera de los montes para su aprovechamiento," October 7, 1559.
122. Amith, The Möbius Strip, 95-98
123. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 2: 104v, law of June 30, 1646.
124. François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, trans. Alvin Eustis (Berkeley, Calif., 1963), 276.
125. Subsequent research in the field suggests that Chevalier simplified this process somewhat, overlooking regions that did not fit the pattern he described.
126. Eric Van Young, "Mexican Rural History since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," Latin American Research Review 18, no. 3 (1983): 5-61.
127. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca, 84-85.
128. In a late borderland variant on the New Spain pattern of dispossession through the instrumentality of the colonial commons, native populations of Alta California were driven, in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, to accept baptism and the Franciscan mission regime after ranging Spanish livestock had undermined their subsistence.
129. Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 67-80.
130. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004), 114
131. Richard Brandon Morris, Studies in the History of American Law, with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1959), 208-210
132. David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629-1692 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), 118.
133. Anderson, Creatures of Empire.
134. Ibid., 185-190
135. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 141-150.
136. The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony (Cambridge, Mass., 1672), 76-77.
137. David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York, 2005), 149.
138. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 139-140, 171.
139. Ibid., 221.
140. See also James D. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter- Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore, 2009), chap. 6.
141. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 179, 224-240
142. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, "King Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 51, no. 4 (October 1994): 601-624.
143. Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant, 40-42.
144. Denys Delâge, "Microbes, animaux et eau en Nouvelle-France," Globe: Revue international d'études québécoises 9, no. 1 (2006): 126
145. Library and Archives Canada, MG8, A6, Ordonnances des intendants de la Nouvelle-France, May 29, 1751.
146. For a good sense of the extent and variety of that process in the United States and the British dominions, one that emphasizes the property-making aspect of colonial expansion much more than the dispossession of natives.
147. see John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (Montreal, 2003), 264-308.
148. Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell, "Landscape of Conquest: Frontier Water Alienation and Khoikhoi Strategies of Survival, 1652-1780," Journal of Southern African Studies 18, no. 4 (1992): 803-824.
149. Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (St. Leonards, N.S.W., 1989), chap. 3
150. Robert Foster, "Coexistence and Colonization on Pastoral Leaseholds in South Australia, 1851-99," in John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, eds., Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver, B.C., 2005), 248-265.
151. On Indians, horses, and bison.
152. see Pekka Hämäläinen, "The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures," Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (December 2003): 833-862.
153. On Euro-American hunting and ranching.
154. see Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York, 2000), 130-143
155. Dodge quotation from 133. For an analysis of the colonization of the Canadian prairies in terms of successive forms of commons.
156. see Irene Spry, "The Great Transformation: The Disappearance of the Commons in Western Canada," in Richard Allen, ed., Man and Nature on the Prairies (Regina, Sask., 1976), 21-45.
157. This point is sometimes overlooked in environmental approaches to history that slight the role of human agency.
158. See, for example, Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986).
159. To cite one example from a recent reference work.
160. see Paul C. Rosier, "Land Tenure," in Shepard Krech, John Robert McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, eds., Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (New York, 2004), 751-752.
161. Robert A. Williams, Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800 (New York, 1997), 146
162. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 112-164.
163. For the modern property rights argument.
164. see Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973)
165. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York, 2000).
166. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley, Calif., 2008).