HIS 270 - Empire, Law & Property

Debates over property encapsulated the sphere of the political and the contending meanings of freedom in the modern world. For imperial Britain, the quite diverse overseas contexts of early America, Jamaica, India or Australia often presented new types of claims to property, and thus legitimacy and sovereignty. Company-men, migrants and bureaucratic administrators attempted to sort through preexisting and often overlapping property-based claims as materially grounded issues of land settlement and resource allocation. More abstract thinkers of political economy from Mill to Malthus or Marx, produced fresh perspectives on property with its implications for who was deemed productive, worthy and possessing the capacity toward freedom.

The development of political economy would point towards new theories about the nature of land’s value which transformed understandings of what real property consisted of, while new theories about the nature of value transformed understandings of what economic life consisted of, particularly across the empire. Economic policies to govern these colonial populations were in turn closely bound to arguments about racial, cultural and gender differences, as well as to debates in Britain and its colonial contexts itself about the limits of political participation and the capacity for civic life.

This course will thus focus on the history of conceptions and practices of property in the British Empire, with a special but by no means exclusive emphasis on British India. The aim is to think about how conceptions of property shaped conceptions of freedom, the emergence of international law and the hierarchizations of race, caste and gender that continue to mark contemporary life.

Satisfies History major and minor requirement.
Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement.
Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.