| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. By Stuart Banner. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005. 344 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01871-0.)

How the Indians Lost Their Land begins with a basic question that students often pose: Did the first people sell their land, or was it taken from them? To find the answer Stuart Banner explored the origins of colonial British land policy and followed the trail into the early twentieth century. In contrast to the historiographical convention stating that the English justified their claim to North America by right of conquest, Banner distinguished between rights of sovereignty to govern the land and rights of property to own it. While early English settlers expected legitimate land use to involve dense permanent habitations, they nonetheless recognized aboriginal horticulture, settlement, and government as proper markers of ownership, but not necessarily of sovereignty.

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