This book describes the encounter between the common law legal system and the tribal peoples of North America and Australasia. It is a history of the role of anglophone law in managing relations between the British settlers and indigenous peoples. That history runs from the plantation of Ireland and settlement of the New World to the end of the Twentieth century. The book begins by looking at the nature of British imperialism and the position of non-Christian peoples at large in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. It then focuses on North America and Australasia from their early national periods in the Nineteenth century to the modern era. The historical basis of relations is described through the key, enduring, but constantly shifting questions of sovereignty, status and, more latterly, self-determination. Throughout the history of engagement with common law legalism, questions surrounding the settler-state's recognition - or otherwise - of the integrity of the tribe have recurred. These issues were addressed in many and varied imperial and colonial contexts, but all jurisdictions have shared remarkable historical parallels which have been accentuated by their common legal heritage. The same questioning continues today in the renewed and controversial claims of the tribal societies to a distinct constitutional position and associated rights of self-determination. Mc Hugh examines the political resurgence of aboriginal peoples in the last quarter of the Twentieth century. A period of 'rights-recognition' was transformed into a second-generation jurisprudence of rights-management and rights-integration. From the 1990s onwards, aboriginal affairs have been driven by an increasingly rampant legalism. Throughout this history, the common law's encounter with tribal peoples not only describes its view of the aboriginal, but also reveals a considerable amount about the common law itself as a language of thought. This is a history of the voyaging common law.

What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? In the context of a burgeoning discourse of property, these are vital questions. Rationales of Ownership offers conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual and cultural resources in Papua New Guinea. The volume is a result of a major research project headed by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, and brings together contributions from social anthropology and law. The approaches demonstrated, and conclusions reached, build upon recent understandings developed within Melanesian anthropology, but have far wider significance. The first publication sold out in Papua New Guinea due to the relevance of its approach and contents to lawyers and policy makers in that country. It is here made available to a wider readership, particularly those teaching courses on resource development, cultural and intellectual property, contemporary Pacific societies, environmental degradation, and property itself. ADVANCE PRAISE '...a unique contribution to the discipline's voice in contemporary global debates...this volume represents the best of the comparative, ethnographic tradition providing critical insight into difference and similarity on issues that entangle us all in various degrees of responsibility and care. It will be read by anthropologists, policy makers and all academic and non-academic students of what has come to be seen as the test area of the survival of cultural difference.' Marta Roahtynskyj, University of Guelph Lawrence Kalinoe is Professor and Executive Dean in the School of Law, University of Papua New Guinea. James Leach is Research Fellow, King's College and Associate Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

The complex relationships between ethno-nationality, rights to land, and territorial sovereignty have long fed disputes over territorial control and landed rights between different nations, ethnicities, and religions. These disputes raise a number of interesting issues related to the nature of land regimes and to their economic and political implications. The studies drawn together in this key volume explore these and related issues for a broad variety of countries and times. They illuminate the diverse causes of ethno-national land disputes, and the different forms of adjustment and accommodation to the power differences between the contesting groups. This is done within a framework outlined by the editors in their analytical overview, which offers contours for comparative examinations of such disputes, past and present. Providing conceptual and factual analyses of comparative nature and wealth of empirical material (both historical and contemporary), this book will appeal to economic historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and all scholars interested in issues concerning ethno-nationality and land rights in historical perspective.

This text provides an account of urban land reform in China, which is unique in merging the existing socialist landowner system with market mechanisms. The book starts with a historical account of the land tenure system in China followed by discussions of the reform in the frameworks of law, administration and finance. Contrasting case studies of the Shanghai land system and of Hong Kong after the end of British rule illustrate the impact of land reform in China's transition.

As a young boy, Raja Shehadeh was entranced by a forbidden Israeli postage stamp in his uncle's album, intrigued by tales of a green land beyond the border.He couldn't have known then what Israel would come to mean to him, or to foresee the future occupation of his home in Palestine. Later, as a young lawyer, he worked to halt land seizures and towards peace and justice in the region. During this time, he made close friends with several young Jewish Israelis, including fellow thinker and searcher Henry. But as life became increasingly unbearable under in the Palestinian territories, it was impossible to escape politics or the past, and even the strongest friendships and hopes were put to the test.

Brave, intelligent and deeply controversial, in this book award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the devastating effect of occupation on even the most intimate aspects of life. Looking back over decades of political turmoil, he traces the impact on the fragile bonds of friendship across the Israel-Palestine border, and asks whether those considered bitter enemies can come together to forge a common future.

An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa. Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin draws on new sources to offer an original approach to the study of land in African history. Documenting the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the institution of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River, the book shows how these waves of changes sweeping the region after 1850 altered local political and social arrangements, with important implications for the ability of elites to control land. Author Assan Sarr argues for a nuanced understanding of land and its historic value in Africa. Moving beyond a recognition of the material value of land, Sarr'sanalysis highlights its cultural and social worth, pointing out the spiritual associations the land generated and the ways that certain people gained privileged access to those spiritual powers. By emphasizing that the land aroundthe Gambia River both inspired and gave form to a cosmology of ritual and belief, the book points to what might be considered an indigenous tradition of ecological preservation and protection. Assan Sarr is assistant professor of history at Ohio University.

In this highly original book, Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of the first-century BC Roman Republic and veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war. The study centres on the body of the soldier, the cultural production of images and representations of gender which advance theoretical discussions around war, masculinity and violence. Mlambo employs a transcultural comparative approach based on a persistent factor found in both societies: land expropriation. Often articulated in a framework of patriarchy, land appropriation takes place in the context of war-shaped masculinities. This book fosters a deeper understanding of social processes, adding an important new perspective to the study of military violence, and paying attention to veterans' claims for rewards and compensation. These claims are developed in the context of war and its direct consequences, namely expropriation, confiscation and violence. Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe contributes to current efforts to decolonise knowledge construction by revealing that a non-Western perspective can broaden our understanding of veterans, war, violence, land and gender in classical culture.

This book explores tribal land alienation problems in India and tribal agitation against land encroachment and alienation. It discusses India's tribal land problem and explains how despite legislation to protect tribal lands, the problem has not been resolved since neither the letter nor the spirit of the law has been implemented. Due to continuous land encroachment and alienation by outsiders, the negligence of the revenue administration and the apathy of the central and state government, the situation concerning tribal land in the country have became precarious. In this context, the book highlights the process of land estrangement among the tribes and the related movements, focusing on the Narayanpatna land movement in the Koraput district of Odisha. It argues that land remains a central issue that is extremely important for tribes as it directly affects their life, livelihood, freedom and development, and that the cultural attachment of tribes and their views regarding the idea of 'place' (land) furnishes crucial perspectives in understanding the politics of collective resistance. It also discusses the politicization of group identity and material interest against the outside authority as the basis of the unrest among the tribes, and when the grudges of the people are hardened due to insensitivity and tyranny, the extent of tribal resistance escalates, leading to conflict between the state and its own people. Given its scope, this book is a valuable resource for students and research scholars, as well as for policymakers and anyone interested in Indian democracy and development in general, and tribal problems, issues and politics in particular.

In this book, Martin Bunton focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration - a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. His meticulous research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. He argues that land officials' views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home.
Bunton reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions, is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this however, land policies remained in flux.

Several studies have investigated the impetus and implications behind large-scale land acquisitions/deals at the global level; however, intranational factors within communities and societies have not received much attention from researchers. The Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions examines the economic, sociological, and environmental issues surrounding land transactions and the impact these deals may have on local households and communities. Focusing on international issues as well as domestic concerns, this publication is a useful reference for policymakers, academics, researchers, and advanced-level students in various disciplines.

Land is one of the world's most emotionally resonant resources, and control over it is fundamental to almost all human activity. From the local level to the global, we are often in conflict over the ground beneath our feet. But because human relationships to land are so complex, it can be difficult to think them through in a unified way. This path-breaking book aims to change that by combining insights from multiple disciplines to develop a framework for understanding the geopolitics of land today.Struggles over land, argues Derek Hall, relate to three basic principles: its role as territory, its status as property, and the ways in which its use is regulated. This timely introduction explores key dimensions of these themes, including inter-state wars over territory, the efforts of non-governmental organizations to protect property rights and environments in the global South, and the 'land grabs' attempted by contemporary corporations and governments. Drawing on a wide range of cases and examples - from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the Canadian Arctic, China's urban fringe to rural Honduras - the book provides new ways of thinking about the political dynamics of land in the 21st century.This richly detailed and authoritative guide will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in current affairs and contemporary geopolitics.

Reveals the impact of Tanzania's land law reforms and the ways in which women's rights to land ownership have been overridden in spite of law. Recent decades have seen a wave of land law reforms across Africa, in the context of a "land rush" and land-grabbing. But how has this been enacted on the ground and, in particular, how have women experienced this? This book seeksto re-orientate current debates on women's land rights towards a focus on the law in action. Drawing on the author's ethnographic research in the Arusha region of Tanzania, it explores how the country's land law reforms have impacted on women's legal claims to land. Centring on cases involving women litigants, the book considers the extent to which women are realising their interests in land through land courts and follows the progression of women's claims to land - from their social origins through processes of dispute resolution to judgment. Dancer's work explores three central issues. First, it considers the nature of women's claims to land in Tanzanian family contexts,the value of land in an era of land reform and the 'land rush' across Africa, and the extent to which the social issues raised are addressed by Tanzania's current laws and legal system. Secondly, it examines how agency and power relations between social and legal actors engaged in legal processes affect women's access to justice and the progression of claims. Thirdly, it explores Tanzanian concepts of justice and rights and how women's claims have been judged by land courts in practice. Helen Dancer is a lecturer in Law at the University of Brighton. She practised as a barrister in England specialising in family legal aid cases prior to training as a legal anthropologist. She is also a consultant for Future Agricultures at IDS, University of Sussex. Her areas of research interest include law and development, gender and land, and human rights and legal pluralism.

This study investigates how and why group ranch members in Kajiado District, Kenya, supported the subdivision of their collective landholdings into individual, titled units, and what outcomes resulted from this transition to individual rights. Viewed over a longer time scale, the author finds that politics is at the core of institutional change: land-owners increasingly seek exclusive rights in an effort to defend their land claims against threats of appropriation by the state, by Maasai elite, and by non-Maasai.

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis. The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty presents a new explanation, vision, and action plan based on the idea of commoning the land. The book argues that by commoning the land, rather than privatising it, we can develop the foundation for prosperity without destructive growth and address both local and global challenges. Making the land the most fundamental priority of all commons does not only give hope, it also opens the doors to a new world in which economy, environment, and society are decolonised and liberated.

This book is an examination of post-colonial land reforms across various African states. One of the decisive contradictions of colonialism in Africa was the distortion of use, access to and ownership of land. Land related issues and the need for land reform have consistently occupied a unique position in public discourse in Africa. The post-colonial African states have had to embark on concerted efforts at redressing historical grounded land policies and addressing the growing needs of land by the poor. However, agitations for land continue, while evidence of policy gaps abound. In many cases, policy change in terms of land use, distribution and ownership has reinforced inequalities and affected power and social relations in respective post-colonial African countries. Land has assumed major causes of structural violence and impediments to human and rural development in Africa; hence the need for holistic assessment of land reforms in post-colonial African states. The central objective of the text is to identify post-independence and current trends in land reform and to address the grievances in relation to land use, ownership and distribution. The book suggests practicable policy options towards addressing the land hunger and conflict, which could derail the 'moderate' socio-economic achievements and political stability recorded by post-colonial African nation-states. The book draws its strength and uniqueness from its adoption of country-specific case studies, which places the book in context, and utilizes field studies methodology which generate new knowledge on the continental land question. Taking a holistic approach to understanding Africa's land question, this book will be attractive to academicians and students interested in policy and development, African politics, post-colonial development and policy, and conflict studies as well as policy-makers working in relevant areas.

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.
The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.

In the late nineteenth century Britain was one of the most urbanised societies in the world, yet land reform remained an important element in its politics. This book explores this paradox through an examination of the Liberal Party's increasing interest in the English dimension of the land question. Most historians have dismissed this phenomenon as a product of romantic views about the English countryside and Liberalism's failure to engage with the problems of urban society. In contrast, the author argues that English land reform was important to Liberals because it both expressed their deeply-held hostility to landowners and functioned as a variety of strategies to win electoral support and deal with pressing political issues. Moreover, while Liberals did not always benefit from their association with the land question, it became a matter of crucial significance in 1909-14, when Lloyd George unlocked its potential as an election-winning asset and used it to form a bridge between traditional radicalism and the New Liberalism.Dr IAN PACKER teaches in the School of Modern History at the Queen's University, Belfast.

This book provides a socio-historical analysis of the 2002 massacre at Bellavista-Bojaya-Choco, Colombia. The author examines how the concepts of forced displacement and migration could be formulas for historical erasure. These concepts are used to name populations, such as the survivors of this massacre, and are limited in their ability to contribute to the demands for reparation of the affected populations. Instead, based on an ethnographic study of the pain and suffering generated in the survivors, the book proposes the concept of deracination as a tool to study land dispossession. It captures both the complex local specificities, the global linkages of this phenomenon and the strategies of resistance used by the people of this community to channel what seems as an impossible mourning.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the north-eastern borderlands of Bangladesh, this book focuses on the everyday struggles of indigenous farmers threatened with losing their land due to such state programmes as the realignment of the national border, ecotourism, social forestry and the establishment of a military cantonment. In implementing these programmes, state actors challenge farmers' right to land, instituting spaces of violence in which multiple forms of marginalisation overlap and are reinforced. Mapping how farmers react to these challenges emotionally and practically, the book argues that these land conflicts serve as a starting point for existentially charged disputes in which the survival efforts of farmers clash with the political imaginations and practices of the nation-state. The analysis shows that losing land represents more than being deprived of a material asset: it is nothing less than the extinction of ways of life.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

New waves of land grabbing are working to dispossess peasants in both the Global South and the Global North. But peasants are fighting back. They have come together to contest dispossession through place-based and transnational forms of activism. In so doing, they have articulated a demand for food sovereignty. They claim that a democratically organized food system in which smallholder producers produce their own food on their own territory can feed the world whilst cooling the planet. This book explores practices of peasant resistance. Its aim is to show how grass roots peasant activists have been able to demand transnational social and political change. In the process, the book examines the grassroots forms of activism that enable peasants to reclaim land upon which to work and from which to live. It explores how diverse grass roots movements have been able to connect and unite in order to contest transnational dynamics of oppression. Moreover, it discusses how practices of peasant activism transform how we think, and ought to think, about human rights and global democracy. By also highlighting the problems that peasants continue to face, the book indicates that the future of sustainable peasant livelihoods depends on the will of global organizations and transnational society to not just listen to the voices of peasant activists, but to respond to them too.

Neo-Socialist Property Rights: The Predicament of Housing Ownership in China examines how urban dwellers' practices of acquiring and defending property rights reshape state-property-family relationality in China. Ubiquitous housing ownership has emerged together with a pervasive yet particularized rights discourse and practice in the past two decades. Ho Cheuk-Yuet considers them to be a condensation and vindication of the principles of family values and emergent "neo-socialist" governance. However, there are manifested and latent contradictions between rights as interests and rights as a moral principle. This book concludes that private property rights are at once enabling and disabling when understood in the light of both the rigorous pursuit of well-being in a market economy and the contestation by those who resist forced eviction or the infringement of owners' rights. In this book, Ho provides rarely available ethnographic record of the encounters between evictees and evictors engaged in housing demolition and approaches the topic of urban housing ownership from the investing perspective in contrast to most anthropologists' consumption-focus analysis. Neo-Socialist Property Rights links property rights practice to the broader human rights discourse as both a working hypothesis and a historical question.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

First published in 1995. In this study, the author provides a lively and accessible account of the failure of the legal regime to protect the environment. Elizabeth Brubaker explores how legal reliance on property rights has been useful in opposing pollution of land and water. This title will be of interest to students of Environmental Studies, as well as to all those interest in a more secure future for the environment.

First-ever full index to people and place-names in Domesday in their original forms. Presented here is the first complete, all Latin index to the Domesday Book, comprising two Indices Personarum and one Index Locorum. The main Index Personarumcontains all references to people: named individuals, title-holders, and `institutions' (collections of persons functioning as individual landholders in the Domesday text); individuals are listed alphabetically under the initial letter of their forename, while `institutions' are entered under the place where they are located. The second, shorter Index Personarum lists all people alphabetically under their surname. In both indexes the exact Latin forms given in Domesday Book and all variant spellingshave been retained. The Index Locorumlists all place-names in Domesday, except where linked to an `institution': the names of administrative units have been incorporated alphabetically into this index with the appropriate term added after the name. Cross-references to other counties have also been included. Again, the Latin form in the Domesday text is given exactly. References are to the 1783 Farley and more recent Phillimore editions. Dr K.S.B. KEATS-ROHANis Director of the Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research; DAVID THORNTONis Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Bilkent University, Ankara.