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take from another, and was inherently expansive. Local control and negotiation promoted mostly sustainable extraction, while expansive nationalism tended towards over-extraction. The commons tended to focus inwardly, with outer edges shifting. The nation focused outwardly, defining and then redefining its dominion and its borders. The commons aimed at gaining use-rights, while the nation guaranteed property rights. What had previously been manor insiders and outsiders, became citizens and others. Settler colonialism offered political elites new tools for unifying political constituencies into their service, such as racism, nationalism, and market relations. When mutual validation occurred between borderland dwellers and power centers, a sense of belonging and mandate became the justification for taking (Crump et al. 1867; Martin 1991).
The clearest sign of the growing relationship between settlers and the state in colonial agriculture was squatting. Squatting, of course, was a long-standing aspect of the commons. People appropriated space and natural resources by being present and through physical occupation. By extending the outer commons into an abstract “out there,” settler colonialism detached physical location from corporate political identity. Settlers crossed the boundary dividing actual and potential colonial space. They claimed lands outside of their polity, but they carried their political affiliation with them. Expansion and the acquisition of land was part of the ethic of settler colonialism, so the logical next step was for squatters to petition their political authority for its legal approbation of their taking, which allowed inheritance and sale. There was no published declaration of this agreement. Settlers in the United States appeared to have been the first colonial settlers to initiate such a quid pro quo. The US Congress receive memorials from squatters asking for preemption rights as early as 1785 from the western reaches of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. The practice spread throughout the British Empire, with Lower Canada being the nearest neighbor to the United States seeing widespread squatting with calls for preemption claims by the late 1830s (Whan 1996; Canada did not grant individual preemption rights until the 1870s; Loo 1994; Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell 2008; Neimark and Mott 2017; Girard, Phillips, and Brown 2018).
Empire and colonialism pulled apart the commons’ historic ties between specific places, actual practices, and commoners’ beliefs about the land, their rights, and the presumed and neglected duties of the more powerful toward the less fortunate. It rejiggered these landed social relations into a new formation, where the outer commons carried much of the burden of fulfilling settler hopes and dreams. Colonizers’ visionary propensities created a political bridge between centers of power and peripheral locations. An ideological commons floated above the land, branching out into multiple directions (Dietz et al. 2002; Manzella 2010; Nelson 2016). Both those who went about the daily work of taking, occupying, and possessing land and those who governed, communed with a prosperous and improved future. The western reaches of colonial settlement became an experimental site, where settlers and their state began to work out the terms of white settler expropriation and dominion.
Of course, western lands were far from vacant. They were the homes of thousands of indigenous tribes, families, and traditions. But in another sense, the vacancy was real, in the settler nation’s vision. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1755 that “the Territory of North America” was “so vast that it will require many ages to settle it fully,” after acknowledging only a few lines before that “Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could be by hunters” (Franklin 1918). This blindness produced a fiction called the public domain, which was the actual acres the government planned to offer as grants or for purchase at its land offices, as well as the not-yet-owned spaces of the continent: the area which would eventually be the nation. In a dialog that began even before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Paris, and which echoed from the nation’s edges to its centers of power in the 1780s and 90s, settlers and their state began to establish the terms of how the public domain would expand, and with it the nation. After the American Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase, continentalism and the public domain went together as an expression of the present and future commonwealth of US citizens, still awaiting the overt adoption of Manifest Destiny. Far in advance of land cessions encompassing the continent, this vision encouraged settlers to take land (Hamilton 1790; US Congress, First Congress 1790, 1791; US Congress, Fourth Congress 1795; Dunbar 1804; Jefferson 1804; US Congress, Eighth Congress 1804a, 1804b, 1804c; US Congress, Eleventh Congress 1810; US Congress, Twelfth Congress 1813; Committee on the Public Lands, US Congress, Sixteenth Congress 1819).
It is important to acknowledge that no equivalency existed between indigenous land-use practices and European ones. Whether the numerous different indigenous cultures living in the space of the borderland used intercommoning techniques, shared natural resource commons, or sustained traditions of taking based on possession, labor or justified use, matters little to an understanding of how European agriculture served colonization. Colonizers hailed from a limited area, brought with them a fairly unified set of practices, and shared similar aims. Their history is generalizable. Indigenous cultures adapted their extractive methods over generations to very specific places and with diverse goals. Drawing comparisons between indigenous and settler commons, except at the broadest sociopolitical level, does these cultures an injustice and suggests false equivalencies and “both-sides-ism.” Labeling Indigenous Peoples “commoners all,” and exporting the Anglo-French channel community’s commons culture to a global analysis flies in the face of indigenous sovereignties (Linebaugh 2008). Grasping the historical meaning of the commons is challenging enough without obscuring its significance with false comparisons. What can be stated with assurance is that for Indigenous Peoples experiencing colonization, the outer commons was a place of exchange, learning, conflict, and loss.
Bibliographical Essay
The discussion in this chapter demonstrates how a subaltern agricultural knowledge system transferred to North America transformed in the sociopolitical dynamics of colonialism. Its transformation into the means of indigenous dispossession and land theft, while partly serendipitous and partly intentional, was only possible because of the larger imperialist structures that enabled Europeans to dominate: disease, metropolitan industrialization, global trade networks, and overweening demographics. There was another kind of transfer in colonialism, of indigenous “knowledge systems,” the understanding of which historian Judith Carney argues in the case of rice cultivation, are key to revealing the “agrarian genealogy” of agricultural practices central to the success of colonialism (Carney 2001). This section of this chapter surveys a broad swath of the work exploring these forced knowledge transfers.
Some scholars have missed a significant step in the evolution of colonial agriculture by failing to highlight colonizers’ extractions of this wisdom, know-how, or metis, to identify, cultivate, and produce agricultural commodities. Certainly the many agricultural commodities, whose origins lay in the deep past of indigenous time, mattered to the successes of colonialism. The seductive and coercive regimes instituted to produce them also mattered. The labor of brown people to serve white agendas is also obviously important. Yet, knowledge and know-how are equally significant. In fact, whether transported to colonial North America as in the case of the know-how to cultivate rice, sugar, and marijuana, or expropriated in the colonies such as methods of planting and harvesting tobacco, henequen and sisal fiber, potatoes, and chocolate, forced knowledge transfers were a key part of what made colonial agriculture productive and successful. Marcy Norton persuasively argues that seeing such commodities as “technologies … usefully concretize[s their] analytic utility” (Norton 2017). Colonial agricultural commodities were more than products, they represented ways of knowing and doing, which were almost wholly locked away in indigenous minds.
The sociopolitical dynamics of the commons also applied to the extractions of indigenous technological, geographical, and meteorological knowledge systems, which occurred in the colonial outer commons. Making this distinction is important, for the implicit line dividing inner and outer commons, became a clear color line in knowledge expropriation. Rather than being a passive boundary violation of indigenous space by means of grazing, disease, or the spread of invasive cultivars, forced knowledge transfers required the active discernment and theft of Indigenous knowledge. Colonizers appreciated indigenous agricultural commodities and methods, and understood the potential they represented for wealth creation, if they could take and control them, and plug them into global mercantile trade networks.