ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Brenna Bhandar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and coeditor of Plastic Materialities, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

"I am obsessed with the force and eloquence with which [Bhandar] analyzes the birth of private property and its ongoing devastating effects. This book is going to be precious to me and many other people, too."

-- Jordy Rosenberg Shelf Awareness

"A multidisciplinary and highly original historical account of the legal and philosophical justifications for appropriation and private ownership in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

-- Liz Fekete Race & Class

"Bhandar's important and nuanced book is highly recommended to those with an interest in property theory."

-- Ambreena Manji Journal of Law and Society

"Through close reading of the work of property philosophers as they travel between settler colonial spaces, Bhandar sheds light on where and how the most corrosive ideologies of property reside in the interstitial spaces of everyday culture."

-- Anjali Vats Quarterly Journal of Speech

"Colonial Lives of Property is a deft and nuanced analysis of the various ways that property—as both a concept and a set of practices—has been formative to the production and maintenance of categories of racial governance in late modern and contemporary settler colonial societies. It makes significant contributions to social, political, and legal theory, as well as to Indigenous and settler colonial studies and is a necessary text for those with active research agendas or pedagogical interests in those fields. . . . Colonial Lives of Property offers an impressive, sweeping critical analysis of the property-race nexus in settler colonial contexts."

-- Robert Nichols Theory & Event

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Property, Law, and Race in the Colony 1
1. Use 33
2. Propertied Abstractions 77
3. Improvement 115
4. Status 149
Conclusion: Life beyond the Boundary 181
Notes 201
Bibliography 239
Index 257

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