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In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.
In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Property, Law, and Race in the Colony 1
1. Use 33
2. Propertied Abstractions 77
3. Improvement 115
4. Status 149
Conclusion: Life beyond the Boundary 181
Notes 201
Bibliography 239
Index 257
Brenna Bhandar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and coeditor of Plastic Materialities, also published by Duke University Press.
"I am obsessed with the force and eloquence with which [Bhandar]
analyzes the birth of private property and its ongoing devastating
effects. This book is going to be precious to me and many
other people, too."
*Shelf Awareness*
"A multidisciplinary and highly original historical account of
the legal and philosophical justifications for appropriation and
private ownership in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
*Race & Class*
"Bhandar's important and nuanced book is highly recommended to
those with an interest in property theory."
*Journal of Law and Society*
"Through close reading of the work of property philosophers as they
travel between settler colonial spaces, Bhandar sheds light on
where and how the most corrosive ideologies of property reside in
the interstitial spaces of everyday culture."
*Quarterly Journal of Speech*
"Colonial Lives of Property is a deft and nuanced analysis of the
various ways that property—as both a concept and a set of
practices—has been formative to the production and maintenance of
categories of racial governance in late modern and contemporary
settler colonial societies. It makes significant contributions to
social, political, and legal theory, as well as to Indigenous and
settler colonial studies and is a necessary text for those with
active research agendas or pedagogical interests in those fields. .
. . Colonial Lives of Property offers an impressive, sweeping
critical analysis of the property-race nexus in settler colonial
contexts."
*Theory & Event*
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