| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska. By Stuart Banner. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xii, 388 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02612-4.)

In this masterful volume, the law professor Stuart Banner compares how white settler societies, all British or Anglo-American in origin, came to define the land rights of Native peoples throughout the Pacific Basin during the nineteenth century. Everywhere except in Tonga, English-speaking colonists and their governments managed to acquire land and organize individual property rights within familiar forms of land tenure, with or without a legalistic show of Native consent. But, as Banner demonstrates, the historical record shows an astonishing diversity from one colony to the next: both in circumstances and in the procedures followed to accomplish a legally secure, government sanctioned dispossession of Native peoples.

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