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Book Review
| The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900. By JOHN C. WEAVER. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 488 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
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Historians who engage in comparative history over long periods of time face enormous challenges. Explanations of change for one society often do not carry over to a second society, and the historian is forced to reconcile, discard, and develop new explanations and puzzle over endless inconsistencies and peculiarities of time and place. The challenge magnifies when the historian attempts, as John C. Weaver does in this sweeping volume, to compare similar historical episodes across multiple societies over 250 years. Weaver's comparative history succeeds admirably in bringing together an enormous number of secondary studies for different societies and placing them in comparative context, thereby sharpening "a critical understanding of attitudes and practices about property rights, which have grown to influence the contemporary world" (p. 5). The value of Weaver's study is, however, diminished by his early decision to ignore important studies carried out by economic historians in this area and to eschew quantitative and theoretical frameworks for organizing the materials. |
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Weaver begins with a useful survey of how practices of land acquisition and allocation differed in British colonies from those of other European empires: Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Russia. The main focus of the book is, however, on the land acquisition and distribution practices in British colonies and former British colonies—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—as well as in Argentina. All are settler economies, in which European immigrants found opportunities in farming or grazing on vast tracts of land that were populated by indigenous peoples who offered various degrees of resistance to settler efforts to establish property rights in these lands. |
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