Mere symbolic plaque-planting sufficed to claim colonized land for empire

Evidence

For Tahiti to be brought into the ambit of the Occident, for it to be quite overwhelmed by this “contact” with the French, it is enough for Bougainville to have touched the island and to have enacted there a ritual of appropriation - the erection of a plaque asserting “this land is ours,” described by Diderot’s everperspicacious Tahitian sage as the title “of our future slavery.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 219

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the plaque,’ examining how tiny physical markers (plaques, flags, stones) carried outsized legal-appropriative weight in colonial claims — and what kinds of symbolic markers perform analogous enclosure today.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the grafting/trees article’s interest in how colonial infrastructure claims territory — the erection of a marker is a minimal act of appropriation that parallels planting a flag or tree as an ownership gesture.