Properties of Empire

A fascinating history of a contested frontier, where struggles over landownership brought Native Americans and English colonists togetherProperties of Empire shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights.As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

Properties of Empire makes an impressive contribution to this corpus in its attention to the intricacies of colonial land grabbing in northern New England and its appreciation of Wabanaki savviness in weathering and channeling the storm., Documents a general settler colonialist occupation of indigenous space, but again one impeded by complex intercultural and interracial entanglements. In specific, he addresses the transition of the “Dawnland”—the frontier of what is now central Maine— from Wabanaki to British colonial possession from the late seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth., Properties of Empire is a fine-grained cross-cultural study of trying “to bring order to a turbulent world.” The process, as Saxine conceptualizes it, was a multifaceted “conversation frequently marked by misunderstanding, deception, and even violence.” The book’s framework takes Wabanaki actors seriously as coproducers of legal and property regimes, rather than situating them as more passive respondents to colonial forces and ideologies; and it productively complicates what the “colonial” dimension entailed, highlighting dissonances within Anglo-American society and power structures., Saxine is an admirably careful historian, attuned to the complexities and contingencies of historic conditions and human decisions… Properties of Empire is an inventive and important contribution to the dauntingly rich literature on early New England, and a fascinating case study to add to larger discussions of property formation and land ownership across North America., A much needed and long overdue corrective ... greatly adding to our understanding of the complex interplay of forces where Native Americans and Europeans interacted in borderlands ... Properties of Empire should be the standard work on land issues in Maine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ian Saxine is Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University. His writing has previously appeared in the New England Quarterly, winning the 2013 Whitehill Prize in Early American History.