Colonial Land Research Articles

Designing Method of Urban Areas in Hokkaido during the Meiji period in View of the Relationship with Colonial Land Plotting

Designing Method of Urban Areas in Hokkaido during the Meiji period in View of the Relationship with Colonial Land Plotting

Councils, Councillors and Profiteers: Urban Land Speculation and Contestations in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s

Studies of the land question in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) have demonstrated that land was an object of intense speculation. However, they have predominantly considered speculation on rural and agrarian land to the exclusion of urban areas. This article contributes to and expands on this scholarship by considering the largely missing urban dimension. It examines conflict between speculators and municipalities over urban land in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s. While making reference to the situation across the colony, it relies on the specific case of the town of Que Que (now Kwekwe) to argue that excesses of land speculation hamstrung the expansion and development of towns by distorting land prices. When the privately owned Naseby Estate was put on the market in September 1947, speculators, working with some councillors, exploited legislative, administrative and bureaucratic loopholes to steal a march on Que Que municipality, which wanted to purchase the land directly. They subsequently offered the land back to the municipality at a substantially raised price. Largely employing primary data, the article demonstrates that, once government bodies indicated interest in a piece of land, landowners would increase the price sharply, or speculators would buy the land specifically for resale to public institutions. The article also considers the questions raised and strategies imagined by concerned councillors and other interest groups in the wake of Que Que municipality’s loss. It not only contributes to scholarship on colonial land and urban development but also reveals less discussed tensions and contradictions within the settler society.

Japanese Colonial Land Survey Project and Korean Economic Take-off

The mystery of the newly industrialized countries (NICs)s success, including Korea’s take-off, can be addressed by using the concept of a property representation system, as initiated by de Soto (2000). This property representation system, which has been further described as the mystery of capital formation, was supposedly established in Korea during the Japanese colonialization of 1910-1945. The Korean industrialization in this period has been well described by the ‘developmental state’ approach, but the property representation system can reveal the key role of property rights as an institution in the economic take-off, focusing on its incentive function.

Política militar pombalina: Nas áreas de alto e baixo risco de guerra

Diante das crescentes tensões vividas na Europa, resultantes da Guerra dos Sete Anos (1756-1763), fazia-se indispensável aumentar a capacidade defensiva tanto no Reino de Portugal, como, também, no Estado do Brasil, sua principal terra colonial. O primeiro-ministro de D. José, Marques de Pombal, lança um ambicioso programa de reformas militares: reparação de fortificações, melhoria do exército regular e reforma das milícias. Pretendemos nesse artigo, fazer uma analise da estratégia “Povoar para Defender” no contexto da segunda metade do século XVIII, mais especificamente no interior da política militar pombalina na região do Macapá, considerada pela administração central um território de risco. Utilizaremos uma perspectiva comparativa das regiões Norte e Centro-sul da América a fim de obter uma compreensão mais ampla da política militar utilizada pela Coroa Lusitana nas suas possessões ultramarina.

The coloniality of private forest lands: Harvesting levels, land grants, and neoliberalism on Vancouver Island

This paper examines how colonial land grants and the neoliberalization of forestry policy have enabled an aggressive harvesting regime on a massive tract of private land on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We detail the intensity of industrial logging activities of three forestry companies—Island Timberlands, TimberWest, and Western Forest Products—on private land on Vancouver Island. We draw on 11 years of harvesting volume records from the public British Columbia Harvest Billing System to examine the rate of harvest on private land by the aforementioned companies. The paper maps the harvesting volumes we report in relation to forest land ownership and the boundaries of land grants to demonstrate the enduring settler‐colonial character of fee simple forest land and industrial harvesting activities. We argue that neoliberal legislation introduced in 2003 deregulated forestry operations on private lands, facilitating the harvesting regimes we detail. We further suggest that settler‐colonial enclosures set in motion by the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company land grants starting in 1884 have been foundational to the establishment and management of private forest lands on Vancouver Island and continue to represent barriers for Indigenous communities as they assert their rights and title to private forest land.

Land Restitution and the Communities of North-Eastern Botswana, 1889–2012

ABSTRACT This paper argues that land alienation that occurred in the Tati District (North East District) of Botswana can best be returned to its original inhabitants through land restitution. This is because the Tati is unique from other districts in that other districts did not suffer from severe or intense colonial land alienation, whilst the Tati, in many ways, resembled the overcrowded and impoverished African reserves of the settler dominated territories of Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa, which had large prosperous farms for white farmers. It holds that a historical wrong was committed in the Tati and that this justifies land restitution. The paper concurs with the contention that the Market Based Land Reform (MBLR) programme which adopts the ‘Willing Buyer–Willing Seller’ (WBWS) approach adopted by the Botswana government since independence to ease the land shortage in the Tati District has not succeeded. The land restitution process in South Africa is used as a case for adoption in Tati. The paper acknowledges the complexities of the process there, and proposes that the situation in Botswana is somewhat different. It is argued that in Botswana, the economic empowerment measures that are currently in place, particularly the agricultural schemes would to a large extent overcome some of the major challenges of land restitution in the Tati.

Liberty Time in Question: Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia

AbstractThis article examines revolutionary discourses of national historical transformation in Bolivia and tracks the ways those discourses are appropriated, contested, and recast by farmers in the rural agricultural province of Ayopaya. During fieldwork carried out with Quechua-speaking farmers in Ayopaya between 2011 and 2012, I learned about people's enduring concerns with a recent hacienda past. Against governmental declarations that Bolivia's colonial past was dead or had passed, farmers meditated on the duration of earlier histories of colonial land dispossession and violations of indigenous sovereignty. Talk about the region's oppressive history here allowed people to assess deficient state aid and resources but also to oppose unwelcome state interventions pushing a legal model of bounded collectivity. I trace the ways that farmers and villagers mobilized the hacienda past to address inequitable land tenure, violated sovereignty, and women's marginalization from political life, and thereby raise new questions about the critical possibilities opened up by the re-politicization of this colonial history. Rural support for Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism party government eroded nearly a decade ago, and this complicates both triumphalist and defeatist accounts of President Evo Morales’ 2019 resignation, which tend to paint Morales’ rural indigenous supporters as innocent and naïve.

Genealogy of Colonial Land Registration and State Land in Portuguese Timor

ABSTRACT Establishing territorial control was one of the primary activities of colonial presence on Timor from the late nineteenth century. In Portuguese Timor as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the colonial state pursued codification and regulation of land in multiple forms, including serial attempts to enact land registration in tandem with colonial projects including pacification, resource extraction, and generation of state income. Seeking to extend official purview to Timor-specific customary land use and practices, Portugal defined distinct social categorizations linked to land access and ownership. This article traces the policies governing land in Portuguese Timor from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, highlighting state land acquisition, registration processes, laws and procedures asserting state control over land transactions, and international influences on Portuguese practices.

The Identity Issue of the Colonized and the Colonizer in Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill

One of the significant points in post-colonial literature is identity issues. The analysis of these identity issues should be focused not only on the colonized character but also the colonialist. It is obvious why post-colonial scholars are concerned with the colonized as they are the victims of colonialism. However, the colonizer must also face complex issues of identity when arriving in the colonial place. The purpose of this article is to examine the identity issues undergone by Joshua, the colonial subject, and by Clive, the colonizer, with reference to Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill in the colonial period. The concept of hybridity by Homi Bhabha can explain the issue of Joshua’s identity since he has “double” portrays of the identity as legacy of colonialism. Bhabha created the terms the “third space” or the “in-between” to describe the condition of the colonized people. Clive as the colonizer used to be a person without particular authority in his own country before arriving to the colonial land. Suddenly, his identity has shifted into someone who has privileges and authority. The colonizer’s identity is not complete without the colonized. The colonized and the colonizer depend on each other. The colonized and the colonizer’s identities will be fragmented if one of them is missing.

RESOURCE STRUGGLE, RESULTANT REALITIES AND THE FUTURE OF MARAGOLI LAND USE

Land has remained one of the most basic and valuable economic resource right from the pre-colonial to the post independent Kenyan society. The success or failure of every society is always pegged on how prudent the society manages the resources within its reach in the midst of changes, challenges and opportunities that time and space avails every single moment. Being part of the Kenyan society, the Maragoli community has never been left out of the land question that has troubled Kenya over time. The pre-colonial Maragoli society had a land tenure system which was characterized by communal control of land together with its resources and practiced individual land ownership. Though land was communally owned at the general level, it was individually owned and tilled at the family level. The basis of land administration was the customary law executed by the elders who had the overall powers over the production resource. Through colonial policies such as alienation of the Africans’ land, confiscation of livestock, introduction of taxes and the cash economy; all these mechanisms brought about disequilibrium in the Maragoli pre-colonial land use. With this in mind therefore, this paper examined the nature and realities in resource struggle and the future of such struggles especially in regard to land use in the post-independence Kenya, using the case of the Maragoli. Through the articulation theory, this paper demonstrates that the interaction between the pre-colonial Maragoli land use practices and the colonial land policies greatly impacted on the Maragoli socio-economic and political structures. Due to the cash crop economy, the traditional Maragoli communal attitudes towards land as a resource are fading out resulting into individual emphasis on land use. This individual emphasis on land use is the major cause of uneconomical subdivision of land, insecurity and increased poverty. It is from the above perspective that the paper analyses the post-independence Maragoli land situation, some of the key causes of uneconomical subdivision of land and the possible solutions.

Forged in flames: indigeneity, forest fire and geographies of blame in the Philippines

ABSTRACT The forests of Southeast Asia are represented as increasingly ‘at-risk' to fire, constituting a regional fire politics concerned with the management and organisation of environmental blame. State governments often place culpability for this increasing flammability on histories of deforestation that disproportionately blame Indigenous peoples who now face a correspondingly large burden in conservation schemes. By tracing the history of fire management from the colonial period to the 1980s, this paper explores how the management of forests and fire in the Philippines has been shaped over time with imperatives to govern and economically exploit upland spaces. While these histories clearly point to a political economy of knowledge production, they also show how forest governance in the Philippines has worked to construct ethnic difference through policies and practices that naturalise livelihoods, spaces and qualities to essentialised ‘tribal' uplanders. To understand the contemporary geography of blame that surrounds forest fires and deforestation in the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly, we argue for a more nuanced examination of ‘the uplands’ as a post-colonial geography co-constituted with the historical production of indigeneity and environmental knowledge. We conclude by emphasising the historical role of colonial forest and land management institutions in fashioning lasting socio-spatial differences.

Per una storia incrociata tra l’Italia e la Libia: Il percorso dell’etnologa e arabista Ester Panetta (1894-1983)

Abstract This paper is a contribution to the entangled history between Italy and Libya through the trajectory life of Ester Panetta (1894-1983), a leading scholar who devoted her life to develop the knowledge of the language, history and cultures of Libya. After her Arabic and colonial studies at the Oriental Institutes in Naples and in Paris, she lived in Libya until the outbreak of the Second World War when she definitively came back to Italy. Her experience as single woman in colonial lands is not isolated at all, as the stories of single women crossing the territory of the Empire as travellers, teachers and missionaries testify.

Decolonising Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment

The livelihoods of indigenous peoples, custodians of the world’s forests since time immemorial, were eroded as colonial powers claimed de jure control over their ancestral lands. The continuation of European land regimes in Africa and Asia meant that the withdrawal of colonial powers did not bring about a return to customary land tenure. Further, the growth in environmentalism has been interpreted by some as entailing conservation ahead of people. While this may be justifiable in view of devastating anthropocentric breaching of planetary boundaries, continued support for “fortress” style conservation inflicts real harm on indigenous communities and overlooks sustainable solutions to deepening climate crises. In reflecting on this issue from the perspective of colonial land tenure systems, this article highlights how ideas—the importance of individualised land ownership, cultivation, and fortress conservation—are intellectually flawed. Prevailing conservation policies, made possible by global non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory donors, continue to harm indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. Drawing from the authors’ experience representing the Batwa (DRC), the Ogiek and Endorois (Kenya) and Adivasis (India) in international litigation, this paper examines the human and environmental costs associated with modern conservation approaches through this colonial lens. This article concludes by reflecting on approaches that respect environmental and human rights.

Indigenous Income Disparity and Resguardo Land in Colombia

This article examines the association between the resguardo, a colonial land access system similar to the North American reserve and reservation systems, and income inequality among Indigenous people in Colombia. I regressed the variable income unmet basic needs gap (IUBNgap) between Indigenous people and non-minority people in Colombia on a set of regressors that included the mean of resguardo land size per family. I find that more resguardo land per family is associated with a larger IUBNgap, which is likely due to the fact that resguardos tend to be larger where lands are isolated and where most of the land suitable for economic production is owned by non-Indigenous landowners.

Urban as Palimpsest: Neoliberal Environments, Fishing Livelihoods, and Toxic Landscapes in Mumbai, India

This paper illustrates the significance of the palimpsest as a conceptual and representational tool to analyze urban transformations over time. Focusing on urbanization in Mumbai, India, this paper examines the growth of the service sector through the re-shaping of an urban periphery. Based on qualitative field-based research for ten months in 2015–16, I examine how Malad, formerly a periphery dotted with fishing villages became a service sector hub, and an area epitomizing Mumbai’s urban modernization. Through a series of collages, I illustrate changes in Malad’s urban morphology resulting from a long history of colonial and postcolonial land transactions that facilitated infill and land reclamation, and their acceleration since the 1990s. The layers of the palimpsest make visible the environmental and livelihood damage in the form of toxicity, reduced fish availability and loss of other environmental resources, otherwise absent in the dominant narrative surrounding Malad’s transformation. Through the palimpsest, embodied environmental associations of livelihood and loss are uneasily juxtaposed with narrower neoliberal conceptions of sustainability that frame service sector development. I show how the palimpsest as an analytic can represent the power nexus embroiled in transforming urban environments with repercussions on urban ecological systems and erase embodied associations of indigenous communities.

Indigenous African ethics and land distribution

This article focuses on land allocation through invoking African values. It seeks to provide a contrast to other rectifications of skewed colonial land distributions from African values, and it also offers an alternative to the land distributive justice that has tended to be premised on Western entitlement or rights-oriented thought. The article proposes conceptualising land distribution specifically based on indigenous African ethics of Unhu/ubuntu, a quintessential southern African ethic of being humane and living communally. The humaneness and communitarian life are centred on values such as relationality, cooperation, common good and equal distribution of communal goods. Through articulating each value, and indicating its usefulness in land distribution, the article hopes to provide an African account of distributive justice in respect of land redistribution.

Manufacturing Home

AbstractMaking the colonist’s home mobile, disregarding local ecologies and building practices, is foundational to the settler‐colonial project. This article tracks the mobile home from its role as a key architecture of occupation and settlement by the British Empire to being a superlative embodiment of hydrocarbon‐infused commodities and homes after World War II. As the violences of mobile home ownership are coterminous with the violences of settler colonialism, an equitable vision of affordable housing cannot stop at achieving racial parity for toxic/classist loans (for often toxic homes) or greater protections for colonial land tenure.

The Impact of Colonial Land Tenure Policies on the Gusii People in Kenya

Different scholars have looked at the general economic impacts of the land reforms and legal implications at national level. However, a few studies have been done on economic history in Gusiiland. This study aimed at analyzing the impact of the colonial land tenure reforms on the Abagusii customary land tenure practices in Gusii, Kenya. This study used the articulation of modes of production theory to analyze the effects of land reforms on the Abagusii community from 1895 to 1963. Descriptive Survey Design was used to guide the study.Purposive and snowball sampling methods was instrumental in selected the respondents with a sample size of 61 informants. The primary sources of data were obtained from the archives, field interviews, observation and focus group discussions while secondary data was obtained from written sources like books, Journals, magazines, periodicals, Newspaper Articles, unpublished theses, seminar papers, and electronically stored information on the internet. Logical historical method was employed in the actual process of analyzing and interpreting the data gathered.The study established that land consolidation and the issuance of individual land owners with title deeds has increased land conflicts, land titling and issuance of individual titles has increased land speculation, and land tenure reforms have failed to solve land problems or improve the agricultural sector, as well as, failing to change the African mind set or behavior of the smallholder farmers in Gusii, Kenya.

Factor endowments on the ‘frontier’: Algerian settler agriculture at the beginning of the 1900s

AbstractThis article examines rural settlement in Constantine, a département in French Algeria, at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of colonial settlement for almost 100 municipalities, it shows how the changing geographical conditions and the relative quantities of land and labour shaped the colonial land policy and settler modes of production. As fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’, the ability of settlers to participate in the export market was increasingly dependent on the capacity to make use of modern agricultural techniques that required larger fields and intensive labour. Thus, the outcome of rural settlement was determined by the relative abundance of indigenous labour and the adaptation of the land policy to Algeria's agricultural needs. The results demonstrate that—even within a country itself and during the settlement process—the colonial land policy and settler modes of production change significantly, depending on the region being occupied.

The Dialectic of a Descent Dogma Among the Motu-Koita of Papua New Guinea

Abstract Descent dogmas have become visible in recent years among Melanesian societies affected by large-scale natural resource extraction, but it should not be assumed that they are all immediate responses by landowners attempting to restrict access to royalties or other monetary benefits. This article traces the development of a patrilineal descent dogma among the Motu-Koita, whose traditional territory includes Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea, and who were arguably non-unilineal when colonized in the late nineteenth century. I describe the generation of a ‘patrilineal’ descent rule through their experience of early colonial land purchases, early anthropological kinship models, colonial land courts, efforts by State legal agencies to recognise ‘customary law’, and accelerating land loss since the late colonial period. The historical process has been marked by an attenuation of the traditional flexibility and negotiability of Motu-Koita land use and inheritance, a diminution of their ‘moral economy’, and contemporary tensions generated by the rise of individualist interpretations of patrilineal descent.