BOOK: Allan GREER, Property and Dispossession : Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America [Studies in North American Indian History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316613696, £ 22.99

(Source: CUP)

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press published a book on the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Provides a comparative approach to the colonization of North America, including a study of French, English, and Spanish colonies

Considers colonization in an indigenous America, contrary to the prevailing Eurocentrism of the history of early modern imperialism

Focuses on property formation as a central dimension of colonization

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Greer, McGill University, Montréal

Allan Greer is a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University, Montréal. He has published seven books, including Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2005) and La Nouvelle-France et le monde (2009).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: property and colonization

Part I. Three Zones Of Colonization:

2. Indigenous forms of property

3. Early contacts

4. New Spain

5. New France

6. New England

Part II. Aspects of Property Formation:

7. The colonial commons

8. Spaces of property

9. A survey of surveying

10. Empires and colonies

Part III. Conclusion and Epilogue:

11. Property and dispossession in an age of revolution.

More information here