The labor theory of property legitimized dispossession of unenclosed hunter-gatherer land

Evidence

Famously, he remarked that: ‘In the Beginning all the World was America’ (§ 49). Native Americans are mostly transhumant hunter-gatherers. They have property in what they catch, but not in untilled land. (Consider a parallel: I have property in the fish I catch, but the oceans remain a great common.) Hence it is no injustice for European settlers to appropriate unimproved ‘waste’ land and cultivate it. This is Locke’s ‘agriculturist argument’, and it would sustain later European justifications for empire by settlement. — , Second Treatise of Government and A…, 34

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to the colonialism/land-dispossession literature already in the knowledge base — the same logic that turns indigenous territory into ‘waste.’ — connects to: Irish land dispossession paralleled African colonial land theft in scale — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 128; Lockean property rights are conditional trusts bounded by a right to subsistence — , Second Treatise of Government and A…, 33; Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case (+19 more)
• BMF: Evokes Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Okonkwo’s world collapses when land and custom are recoded as ‘waste’ awaiting improvement by the District Commissioner’s law.

Broader Connections

• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy #corroborates (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 246
• Indigenous land-as-gift and settler land-as-property are irreconcilable worldviews #corroborates (0.88) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 70
• Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case #complicates (0.85)
• Settler violation of reciprocal land ethics caused cascading ecological and cultural loss #complicates (0.83) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 763
• The frontier myth of opportunity obscured capitalist capture of land and wealth #complicates (0.80) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 174
• Humanist defenses of native rights legitimized imperial acquisition #complicates (0.80)
• Abuse of land stems from regarding it as owned commodity rather than community #expands (0.78) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 10
• Abject traces of prior owners complicate the impersonality of commodity exchange #complicates (0.78) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 257
• Mixing one’s labor with nature generates private property #complicates (0.77) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 36
• Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource #complicates (0.77) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 1077
• Money’s invention legitimizes unequal land possession without society #complicates (0.76) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 61
• Shared histories of precarious labor united settlers in Brazilian land reform. #complicates (0.76) — Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth, Institutional Bricolage and Commoning…, 44
• Utopian use of nature for community need contrasted with capitalist profit-driven exploitation #complicates (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 403
• Archaeology and renaming manufacture an originary claim to contested land #complicates (0.75)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance #complicates (0.74)