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

'[T]he essential subject here,' John Weaver writes, is 'the formation of property rights in new-world situations' at the frontier, 'where the colonizer's regime of property rights had not been firmly installed, but where newcomers were already marking out places in anticipation of that condition.' As his title suggests, he sees in the process nothing less than 'the modern world rising.' The case is made in a sophisticated, wide-ranging argument incorporating theoretical perspectives from law, political economy, philosophy, and intellectual history. Of particular importance, the 'powerful cultural ideal of improvement' legitimized European 'ideas about entitlements' in taking land from indigenous peoples and claiming it as property. Weaver contends also that the land rush prefigures new forms of property, such as intellectual property, and modern ideas about development that are just as likely as the land rush to have unfortunate consequences for people in the less developed parts of the world. He seeks not only to understand the process whole but to bring to it a historian's attention to the diversity of individual cases, the latter informed by an extraordinary range of the relevant secondary literature and a representative range of the potentially limitless primary sources.

The new worlds here are the British settlement colonies in North America, the United States after independence, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Comparison is also made with other European empires and with Argentina. The initial establishment of claims to land came from squatting or by acquisition either directly from an issuer or from someone with such a claim. Scrip, warrants, leases, licences, and promises of these were issued under quite different regulations, as policy evolved, and by other authorities than the current government, such as Natives who claimed a right to lease or sell, and prior regimes. Law, by which claims eventually were resolved, is seen as a kind of technology, alongside others that facilitated the conversion of land both to European uses and to a readily transferable component in a market economy.

Anxious to 'let participants in the land rush speak for themselves,' Weaver is attentive to the voices and actions of Native peoples, grazers, farmers, squatters, landhunters, surveyors, speculators, officials, and lawyers. Until very late in the period and almost everywhere (the Canadian prairies being a notable exception), their collective actions and the inherent nature of the processes themselves 'splintered any neatness of design' imagined by those making policy in London, Washington, and other capitals. Writing of the nineteenth-century failure of 'well-meaning London guardians' to protect Native rights, for example, he says 'that frontier avarice throttled principle.' As his tone here indicates, he is profoundly critical of many aspects of processes that he describes as 'shot through with wrong-doing.'

Elements of a narrative are provided in parts 2 and 3, which work from 'uprooting' of Native title, through a 'pre-modern' to a 'market phase' and on to breaking up large holdings that remained late in the period. Even here, however, the book is organized essentially by theme. Given its scope, it is not easy to imagine an alternative, but the approach requires frequent recapitulations of arguments, leads to abrupt geographic and chronological leaps (a few pages and even a paragraph can span places in four or five countries and three centuries), and tends to fragment or abridge specific stories, reducing their power.

What drove the rush, Weaver says, was a sense that first claimants got the best and most strategic properties. Yet there is a paradox, that 'private gains in the great land rush were possibly more often dreamed of than realized.' Value must ultimately have derived from the not unlimited income the land could be expected to generate in actual use; and grazing (in most places the major use) and farming were variations, with a different cost structure, on what producers did in areas appropriated earlier. If later arrivals in the frontier game and those who never...