The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (review)

This splendid book argues that at the very foundation of modernity lay a particular view of agricultural land on frontiers outside of Europe. The view undergirded 'neo-Europes,' societies shaped by ideas based on Enlightenment culture. In this conceptualization, land grasps were justifiable when it could be demonstrated that newcomers could add value to the land. Justification was facilitated also when land rushes appeared to advance democracy, that is, when 'people of modest means' could acquire land. This view was universally applicable to English frontiers in North America, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, but also to other mid-latitude lands such as the Argentine pampas and the Siberian steppes. This book is thus much more than an economic history, a bid to world systems theory; it is an analysis of the cultural making of agricultural lands. For modernity to take hold, such lands needed to be taken from native dwellers, surveyed and mapped, and turned into legal commodities. Most importantly, land acquisition needed to be couched in a language and philosophy that made the acquisition possible and even seem natural. And land ownership had to be made predictable to enable the grounding of a capitalist economy. The book, concludes Weaver, is a contribution to post-modern discourse that 'has rarely appraised the language of property rights and the connected doctrines of justification, including the powerful idea of improvement' (354).

The book will be especially welcomed by agricultural and rural historians. It breathes life into a field dominated by local histories that plot their subjects on trajectories toward modernity or at cross purposes to it. In this book rurality is a universal construction, but one with variations reflecting contingencies of ecology, legal system, politics, and personality. Here the technologies of land are modernity's very characteristics: law makes acquisition orderly, transits make lines in the ground possible, agricultural improvement makes the possession of land seem natural. The 'great land rush' is much more than greedy people falling over one another in vainglorious pursuit. And it is much more than the creation of a Toquevillesque American man, a Jeffersonian yeoman. The United States and its frontier is no exceptional place, for the grounding philosophy of the land rush was similar throughout the world's capitalist 'neo-Europes.'

Aside from its thesis, this book is valuable for its wealth of information. It is especially good on particularity of subject: South Africa had its circle farms, trekboars, and loan farms; prairie Canada its quarter sections and correction lines; New Zealand its 'right of discovery' and its squatting regions. Land was possessed in different ways: the South Africans laid claim to land by occupying it with many animals; the Texans used barbed wire not to keep cattle in but to lay informal claim to public lands; Canadian prairie farmers seemed especially intent to claim land profits, perverting the very idea of homesteading by giddy dispossession of land in speculative markets. These specific examples underscore the book's argument that despite law's apparent rigidity, fairness, and rationalism, it bent and adapted to local circumstances, to contingencies when land acquisition was thwarted.

This is not an environmental history, but it seems to me that a technology of the land rush that might have been more fully addressed is plant genetics. The text is, after all - despite the subtitle marking it as an account between 1650 and 1900 - mostly a nineteenth-century history when agronomy really took off as a science. The book does toy briefly with the idea that the land rush was enabled by the transplantation of Euro-Asian plants in the New World (4), but does not address the use of the 'New World' cultures of potatoes or tobacco, or discoveries that made farming in northern climes possible. The text, for example, would have one believe that the reason the Canadian prairies were settled late was their image of 'bone chillingly...