In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

77 Chapter 6 The Acquisition of Railway and Harbour Land and Colonial Land Policy General Problems of Land Acquisition in Railway Construction As transport agents, railways operate over very long distances and affect property values on a wide front. This makes the acquisition of land more contentious than for other industrial or agricultural enterprises. The construction of permanent ways, requiring strips of land about 20 yards wide over hundreds of miles, brings in its wake disruption to virgin land, forests, farms, waterways and townships. At principal railway stations and harbour sites, especially those scheduled to be built in residential areas, the space needed for the construction of stations, warehouses, depots, workshops, sidings and marshalling yards involves even more disruption, including to community life. On the other hand, by lowering transportation costs, railways and harbours generally add to the value of land and property. In Britain, where railway projects sometimes experienced long delays, Parliament intervened by granting statutory powers to railway companies to acquire any property that lay on their chosen routes by compulsory purchase. The law, which also provided for the acquisition of a strip of land on either side of the track (the ‘Limits of Deviation’), gave the railway companies more land than they needed. This could later be sold, thereby recouping some of their promotional expenditure.214 In the United States, the government intervened through the Land Grant system, under which railway companies were allocated large tracts of land along their routes. This made the companies not only transport agents, but also significant owners of land, most of which was exempt from taxation.215 In addition to guaranteeing easy access for construction, the land grants provided ready credit to the railway companies during the gestation periods of the projects. ‘Most railroads obtaining grants’, Stover noted, ‘mortgaged their land long before they completed final certification with the government, obtained the patents to their land, or sold it on long term credit to settlers.’216 In colonial Africa, the question of land titles was just as important for railway construction. Land, Edmund Morel observed, ‘was the key problem to European rules in tropical Africa’.217 Morel identified two options facing 78 the British administration: either it could dispossess Africans of their lands in the interest of European capitalism or preserve African land rights, which would increase the Africans’ productive capacity. In East and Central Africa, where the British pursued the first option by declaring Crown rights over the most fertile and arable regions,218 railways, whether state-constructed or privately owned, were simply pushed through so-called public land. This minimised opposition to railway construction from landed interests. Moreover, as they wanted to encourage white settlements, the colonial governments allocated large tracts of land alongside the railways to Europeans for large-scale commercial enterprises, which in turn provided incentives for railway investment. In West Africa, the situation was radically different. Here, the inability of the British authorities to draw up well-defined land laws, especially the failure to distinguish between public and private land, meant that railways on the Gold Coast, and indeed in the whole of British West Africa, could not be built by allocating public land to railways companies. Further, government could not assign large areas of public land alongside railways to new enterprises as was the policy adopted in East and Central Africa. This was the Gold Coast’s land acquisition problem. The Gold Coast Land Act 1876 and the Railways One of the first pieces of legislation passed by the British Parliament after the proclamation of colonial rule over the Gold Coast Colony in the 1870s related to the acquisition of land for public works. Under the Public Lands Act 1876, the Colonial Government was empowered to acquire any land, whether occupied or unoccupied, for public use. Article 6 provided that compensation should be paid only for occupied or developed land (property holdings), while ‘waste’ or unoccupied land was to be appropriated free of charge. It also provided that any land acquired under the Act which remained unutilised for a period of ten years, either because the proposed project for which it was originally acquired had fallen through or because land became superfluous on the completion of the project, should revert to its original owner, subject to the approval of the Governor.219 In the late 1870s, the new administration acquired several plots of land, notably in the immediate vicinity of the coastal castles and forts, for the erection of public buildings to meet the needs...

Share