Description
Book SynopsisBrenna Bhandar examines how the emergence of modern property law contributed to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies, showing how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as legal narratives that equated civilized life with English concepts of property.
Trade Review"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." -- Jordy Rosenberg * 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." -- Liz Fekete * Race & Class *
"Bhandar's important and nuanced book is highly recommended to those with an interest in property theory." -- Ambreena Manji * 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." -- Anjali Vats * Quarterly Journal of Speech *
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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." -- Robert Nichols * Theory & Event *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
