| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 55

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2003)

John Clarke, Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2001)

THE BOOKS by Weaver and Clarke share a central thesis that is captured in one of the titles. It is that a key part of the making of the modern world is the transformation of the world's "commons" and communally held lands and waters into forms of private property. The authors, however, differ in their choice of historical focus. Weaver examines this conversion of property forms in five regions of British settlement colonies and their independent successors — the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the period between 1650 and 1900; and Clarke explores the "struggle over land" in Upper Canada, and more specifically in Essex county in what is present-day southwestern Ontario, from 1788 to 1850. Geographically, the focus of the studies overlap in a small way, but one study is ambitious and sweeping in its scope, while the other is daunting in its detail and concentrates on a small area and a short period in the history of colonial British North America.

The dates that frame these studies are clearly very different — one covers a period of less than 100 years and the other spans 250 years — but they are similar in the seeming arbitrariness of these timeframes. That historical studies demand a chronological beginning and end is obvious, but there is no convincingly argued rationale by either author for their dates. If historical arguments and timeframes imply each other, in these books the reader will not find a clear connection.

The nature of their arguments is not quite so elusive: each rests his thesis on the concept of property. It is unusual to find the writing of historical treatises guided by concepts and even more so to find the concept of property creeping in (the spectre of Marx remains a problem in mainstream academia), but the use of this concept allows both authors to take the writing of history beyond the mere recitation of dates, events, individual actions, and policy initiatives to find a meaning that transcends the recording of the strictly empirical. For this reason alone, these studies are worth the read, and the authors stand out from those who try merely to record data in a chronological sequence.

Although Weaver spends the better part of a chapter defining property, and Clarke spends only a few pages in his Preface, neither quite provides an adequate working definition or discussion of the concept for their lengthy studies. Both have implicitly made the distinction between property as a thing and as a relationship; and both have employed C.B. Macpherson to define property as a relation, that is as "an enforceable claim" or right or entitlement to the use or disposal of some good or service. Property, in this sense, is a generic definition, not a specific one, and as such embraces the entire range of property forms from communal and usufruct claims to exclusive, individual rights, i.e., private property. Both authors, however, frequently use the concept of property solely with the latter meaning. As if to avoid using the term private property, moreover, Weaver even coins the label "absolute property right" to refer to the same; but the notion of absolute does not convey the meaning of exclusive and individual that defines private property, that is, rights possessed by an individual (or the corporation as an "individual"). While Weaver is far more thorough in his discussion of property than Clarke, neither author develops the concept sufficiently well to do justice to the details of their historical knowledge or to the thesis they want to draw from their studies.

All social formations are characterized by a set of property relations — of rights, claims, and entitlements — that define their very nature. Conceived as changing property relations, the whole of history can be traced as the movement from communal or common forms of right, characterizing many pre-capitalist communities, to ever more narrowly defined exclusive rights in a world of private property. Here lies the strength of the concept of property as a tool of analysis. Both authors attempt to trace such changes, but their employment of the concept suggests that they do not see it as the essence of the system itself, and this prevents them from drawing conclusions that are more than statements of the obvious.

Both authors do, however, draw the relation between property forms and forms of political power — a point not always well appreciated. Clarke makes the point in his ninth chapter, entitled "Land and Power"; the existence of the oligarchy of Upper Canada, the "Family Compact," rested on the underdeveloped nature of the land, due largely to the land-granting practices of the Imperial government that placed most of the available arable land in Crown or clergy reserves for the use and disposal by the ruling officers and established churches. Widespread patronage grants, corruption, and speculative use of the land conspired to frustrate development but maximize the returns to the oligarchy and church hierarchies. The unsuccessful rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada merely tried to do what the American Revolution had done about 60 years earlier — to replace one form of government based on an Imperial and appointed monopoly of power and privilege with one that represented indigenous capital and privilege and implied widespread small holdings. Their failure reflected the degree of underdevelopment of indigenous capital in the province. Unfortunately, the Rebellions, long an embarrassment to historians who implicitly side with authority, are barely mentioned in this book.

For his part, Weaver employs the differences in official forms of land tenure as an important basis for a "comparative history." That is, the position of government in relation to land holding provides a valuable tool in making cross-national comparisons and tracing historical movements. Using the concept in this way, we can see the foundations of different national characteristics grounded in different property relations, and in turn — to go beyond the confines of his study — understand the decline of these differences as the property forms become increasingly monolithic as private corporate property the world over.

Throughout history, wherever the state appears, so does religion, often in the form of an established church. In the transformation periods dealt with in these books, not only did institutionalized religion provide the rationalization for the transformation of property forms, however violent it was, but also the churches strove to benefit materially, both in extending their constituencies and in apprehending for themselves a share of the spoils of imperial expansion. In this regard, no church was more rapacious than the Roman Catholic, although the Anglicans did rather well for themselves in Upper Canada, as Clarke points out. There the clergy reserves, established largely for the benefit of the established Anglican church, were not only a significant cause of underdevelopment (through the conscious use of small farmers to enhance the value of these holdings), but also their acquisition was of questionable origin; that is to say, much of the wealth of the Anglican Church, among others, cannot be said to have positive ethical roots.

For Weaver, it is almost as if the church played no role in the "great land rush" that underlay the making of the modern world. He briefly mentions the difference between the Catholic European colonizers and the Protestant British empire in religious attitudes towards land settlement and the indigenous peoples, but the role of religion was much more significant in determining the shape of colonization than his limited discussion suggests. This role included, in part, the very formation of the character of the government, settlers, and their attitude and approach to Natives and their rights.

The property transformations that both authors examine are central to the centuries of colonization by European powers; but any discussion of colonization requires some analysis of the rationale for expansion. In Weaver's book, in particular — with the subtitle, "the Making of the Modern World" — one would expect to find considerable attention paid to this question. Some sort of presentation of the many theories of European and particularly British colonialism and imperialism and the rationale for claiming new territory would seem to be necessary to complement the detailed recording of dates, events, actions, and policies that comprise the book. But Weaver goes no further than to suggest that a "preoccupation," or an "appetite," or an "urge" lay behind the demand for expansion in the mercantile period. And Clarke nowhere takes up the issue of the impetus in capital to expand.

This omission is unfortunate because it leaves the authors unable to explain the rapaciousness of the conquest of new land and the relentless pursuit of new territory in the periods that they cover, or to see the continuation of the object of their studies — the privatization of land holding — to this day. An exploration of the political economy of colonial expansion would have greatly enhanced their focus on the transformation of property forms. Without it, the question of the motive for changes in property forms is left unaddressed and the treatises necessarily become more descriptive than explanatory.

Both authors spend the better part of their work describing the various forms of appropriation of land from the native populations. Both discuss many examples of purchases, treaties, wars, squatting, state assumption of title for speculation or granting, and the use of the market. These discussions are thorough, to say the least, and yet both writers underplay the violence involved in most examples of alienation of indigenous land, not to mention the illegal, extra-legal, and fraudulent measures employed. It is not that these methods are not discussed, but that they are treated summarily, without the due importance that they possess.

It is most unlikely that the treaties signed were understood in the same way by both sides; the purchase of land as private property was almost certainly not fully grasped by indigenous peoples; the question of who possessed the right to sign or speak for whole tribes or bands in these regards would necessarily be unclear; the arbitrary assertion of rights by states or individuals could only be taken as a threat to pre-existing indigenous rights; disease, the use of alcohol and deception, coercion, and the European failure to honour commitments complement the picture; and war and frequent policies of physical annihilation provided the ultimate sanction for the transference of their lands into the form of private property. Where First Nations persisted, they were often subjected to policies of cultural annihilation and/or assimilation. All of this is discussed only in the most circumspect of ways by our authors.

In other words, the transformation of pre-capitalist property forms into forms of private property, the making of the modern world, which is the topic of both books, was everywhere based on violence, deceit, corruption, and the sheer assertion of rights by states and individuals. It would be very difficult to point to any example of appropriation of land in the colonized territories that could be described as completely free of any ethical or legal doubts, that could be defended as completely legitimate, even within the legal framework of the colonizers. There was outright theft from the First Nations, corrupt practices among officials and corporations, and deceit and often violence throughout the whole process. The same legal and ethical reservations persist to this day in the continuing appropriation of commons and communally held lands and in the maintenance of private property. In short, both authors miss the point that everywhere the extinguishment of pre-capitalist rights was and remains questionable. Such an assessment of the "modern world" could have provided interesting conclusions for Clarke and Weaver.

The fact that this transformation of rights was questionable reveals itself in the current demands for Aboriginal rights, now growing the world over. Along with these demands for restoration of rights to land and water, there are also claims for reparations for the wealth generated by the labour power taken by force or fraud from Native, slave, and indentured labour. General consciousness of this point is growing, in particular amongst those whose ancestors were defrauded, coerced, or enslaved. The entire edifice of a world of private property rests on dubious grounds; and while this important point is certainly deducible from these studies, the authors do not venture down this path of inquiry.

Both authors have written lengthy tomes that seem to embody a career's worth of learning and reflection. (Oddly, Clarke's book is the re-working of his doctoral thesis — at the end of his career.) The result of several decades of dedicated scholarship, however, would hopefully be revealed in the manner of the virtuosity of a mature musician — as the presentation of an interpretation that manifests itself as the effortless grasp of the essence, that highlights the themes and subordinates all that merely complements them. There are many historians who have written such pieces at the end of their careers. But with these authors their interesting theme of changing property is incompletely grasped and unfortunately obscured by the accompanying overwhelming detail. Both provide a daunting display of scholarship that continuously threatens to override the themes and cloud what otherwise could have pointed to novel ways of interpreting history. Elements of a good interpretation are all but lost in the excess of detail.


Gary Teeple Simon Fraser University

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