British colonial administrators propagated the fiction of sovereign land ownership.

Evidence

How little Marx knew about India when he started writing those pieces is indicated by the fact that he thought the title for all agricultural land was held by the sovereign; he had picked up this idea from Bernier and others, and the British authorities had done much to propagate it, since they were now the new rulers. Only four years later, when he came to write the second series of his dispatches on India, he had realized that this had been at best a legal fiction, but he still did not even begin quite to grasp the complex land tenure system in pre-British India and began having some sense of the intricacies only much later, after he had read Kovalevsky’s Communal Landholdings (1879), when his main interest had shifted to the Russian mir and India figured in his studies only as a comparative case. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 452

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how colonial power shapes knowledge, parallel to the law-merchant/legal-fictions material and to Said’s Orientalism critique. — connects to: The British Mandate privatized Palestinian common land toward Jewish ownership. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 310; Physiocrats justified taxation by making the sovereign co-owner of the land — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1459; Royal charters expressly conveying soil prove the Crown claimed land rights over Indian territory. — Supreme Court of the United States (Marshall Court, 1823), Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh,…, 197