| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lindsay G. Robertson. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 239. $29.95.
It is hardly news that half a millennium of transoceanic European expansion planted "settlers" of one stripe or another throughout the Americas and, later, Australasia, nor that the indigenous subjects of European attentions consistently suffered catastrophic consequences, including disease, depredation, displacement, and death. In light of all this, why should we accord any particular significance to one early nineteenth-century U.S. court case's post hoc rationalizations of European land grabbing? Was the pattern not already clear? Lindsay G. Robertson's slim but taut account of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) gives us cause to consider the matter anew, although perhaps less for the reasons Robertson offers us than for the brief window he opens upon the rapacious greed, manipulative genius, limitless ambition, and sheer arrogance of the early republic's elites.	1
As a case, Johnson v. M'Intosh is best known as the first of the Marshall Court's Indian law "trilogy," its confederates being Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Together, the cases confirmed the federal government as sovereign (sole and exclusive) successor to the British imperial state in dealing with Indian tribes within the concertina-like boundaries of the United States. Johnson's contribution was to formalize the doctrine that European "discovery" of extra-European territory conveyed title in the territory to the discovering sovereigns not only as against claims of other Europeans (preemption) but also against the claims of the actual inhabitants. Once discovery had conveyed title to the European sovereign, title might be further alienated, subject only to the indigenous population's retained right of actual possession and use, analogous to a lease.	. . .

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