Property and Jurisdiction: The Settler-Colonial Origins of Territorial Sovereignty

• In Event: States and Sovereignty

Abstract

What explains the emergence of linear, territorial boundaries as a core feature of sovereign states? Today we take it for granted that states have geometrically defined borders—lines on a map—but this way of delineating jurisdictions is actually quite modern. Challenging traditional accounts that regarded them as a byproduct of European state formation, an alternative explanation argues that linear, territorial boundaries originated instead in the colonial encounter: Europeans first imposed them, not in Europe itself, but in the “New World” of the Americas as a means to divide up their imperial claims. This paper argues that the colonial origins account is on the right track—but that it is also underspecified. We show that linear borders were not an imperial invention, per se, but a settler-colonial one. Settler colonialism has tended toward the expropriation, exclusion, and elimination of indigenous people. Thus it contrasts with alternative logics of empire that tended toward the forced incorporation of native labor and/or ruled indirectly through indigenous institutions themselves. Comparing colonial charters and other founding legal documents in the English, Spanish, and French empires of the early modern Americas, we show that settler colonialism, and not other imperial logics, facilitated the application of linear boundary-making because only it produced a sense of the New World was an “empty space” devoid of preexisting jurisdiction and property.

Authors

• Jonah Stuart Brundage, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Corinne Lea Rushing, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor