Property

While the English word property still retains the meaning of a quality or trait belonging to a thing from its Old French derivation, its now more dominant use to signify a thing “owned” or a “possession” appears to have been rare before the seventeenth century. During that century, when the English colonization project came into full bloom, the Anglo adaptation of this term made this second usage common. At the same time, the parameters of things that could be owned under English law expanded dramatically, and what it meant to “own” or “possess” them underwent a sea change in the colonies. More specifically, as the English entered into and became dominant in the Atlantic slave trade, the “things” that could be property within that legal tradition extended to include human beings, and where owning land had long primarily meant one had the rights to its use value, it increasingly meant the right to access monetary value through it, especially by pledging it as security for debts. These evolutions in the Anglo-American understanding of “property” occurred over and against the freedom and dignity of African and Indigenous people and relationships to lands as places and homes (see Goeman 2008). In other words, the production of these qualitatively new forms of “property” depended on dispossession, or extreme violence enacted on the basis of racial hierarchies (see Bhandar 2018; Nichols 2020). By normalizing this violence through the capture and subjugation of African people and the theft of Native Nations’ lands, colonists created a thoroughly racialized and sexually disciplined social order, within which property continues to circulate.