Owning Land

A follow-up to the land ownership thread on Keane's blog: Locke's commonsense account of what justifies title to land is, as our own perspective now allows us to perceive, rather specific to European culture, agriculture, and history. He extends his labor theory of property to land tenure, which relies for its persusasiveness on the way labor can multiply the productivity of land in agricultural contexts. Thus it seems obvious to Locke's contemporaries that the 'savages' in America are squandering natural resources by not building permanent settlements and farming more productively.

Ironically, the claim that one loses title to one's land by neglecting it, which ought to be a populist principle favoring land reform (landless poor willing to work could justly appropriate the land of absentee owners who did nothing with it) was actually used to disenfranchise indigenous people who had rather different patterns of life and ideas of ownership. This process was underway long before Locke. Here's John Winthrop, Jr. writing in 1629 (a text which Locke does not cite, but is obviously familiar to him):

"[the Indians in America] enclose noe Land, neither have any settled habitation, nor any tame Cattell to improve the Land by," so they were only entitled to their cornfields. Thus "the rest of the country lay open to any that could and would improve it. We may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us."

So here the "enough and as good" clause and the labor theory of property applied to land function ethnocentrically as a justification for colonial appropriation.