Land and property rights in colonial contexts: An introduction (original) (raw)
Property Rights, Land and Territory in the European Overseas Empires
2015
The occupation of territories, the rule over land and the definition of property rights, were major concerns in the making and long-term development of the European overseas empires. They were also strongly interrelated with other key aspects of the empire-building process, including sovereignty claims, territorial expansion, settlement, taxation, power relations, social mobility, labour organisation, economic development, indigenous rights and the relationship between colonisers and colonised in its multiple dimensions. Although focusing mostly on the Portuguese empire, this book deals with other colonial settings too, covering a timespan that stretches from the 15th to the 21st century, thus including also some reflections on the post-colonial legacy of European imperial ventures around the world.
This paper discusses the transfer (migration) of European-based models of property rights in land to other parts of the world. More specifically, it focuses on the Portuguese colonial experience in the Indian Ocean, as it developed in India (Goa and the Northern Province), Sri Lanka and Mozambique during the early modern period. Although the Portuguese made use of some legal and customary templates of property rights they brought from home, those institutions were actually recreated overseas in different ways, intended to accommodate as much as possible to the native institutional frameworks already in place. Moreover, the institutional solutions implemented in each context were in turn re-appropriated and used by social actors differing in political status, social rank, race, ethnicity, and gender, who endeavoured to capture or modulate property and land rights according to their own interests, out of which evolved a variety of institutional, social and economic outcomes.
Property rights and social uses of land in Portuguese India: the Province of the North, 1534-1739
Property rights, land and territory in the European Overseas Empire. Org. J. V. Serrão, E. Rodrigues, B. Direito and S. Münch Miranda, Lisbon: CEHC-IUL, 2014
This paper examines the regulation of land rights in Bassein and Daman (India) during the two hundred years these territories were under Portuguese rule. Based on primary and secondary sources, I argue that local elites played a significant role in reshaping the legal and institutional framework that became known as the prazos system, a topic yet insufficiently explored by the literature. The paper starts by outlining the pre-existent land tenure system, which was largely based on the iqtāʿ, a wide-spread institution in the Islamic world. It then proceeds to examine how European and Portuguese legal institutions, namely the emphyteusis and the long-established practice of granting crown’s assets, were recreated in order to retain features of the iqtā, thus leading to the emergence of a hybrid legal system. The paper then focuses on the adaptations this legal framework underwent as a result of its ‘social appropriation’ by colonial elites and the responses of the colonial authorities. I conclude that the prazos system allowed accommodating both the goals of the Portuguese monarchy and of the colonial elites. While the Crown used the prazos to reward services, ensure territorial organization, military defence, and tax mediation, the local elites (both Portuguese and Asian) reshaped its institutional regulations to guarantee their social reproduction.
Ownership Regimes in the Iberian World (1500–1850), 2025
This chapter demonstrates how the Portuguese who settled on the West African coast were subjected to local African normative regimes related to land ownership and discusses its implications over other properties held by foreigners. The geography debated comprises the “Greater Senegambia”, extending from the south of present-day Mauritania to the north of Sierra Leone, during the 16th and 17th centuries. My argument builds on previous scholarship about the dynamics of reciprocity between African landlords and their guests, arguing that the so-called reciprocity is better understood as dependency, since the foreigners were fully dependent on the inclinations of local rulers. The investigation is based on oral and written sources. The former comes from African oral traditions, available at the National Center for Arts and Culture (The Gambia). The latter includes several textual genres produced by European traders and missionaries along with Portuguese descendants from Cape Verde. The conclusion points to the role of African local land ownership regimes and the full control over land (as a territory and as an economic resource) held by African rulers, which shaped the role played by Portuguese subjects on the West African coast.
‘Culturally Unsuited to Property Rights?’: Colonial Land Laws and African Societies
Journal of Law and Society, 2013
Hernando de Soto, advocate of central registers of land rights, raised the possibility of Africans being culturally unsuited to property rights. This article argues that sub-Saharan Africa's high proportion of tribal/ communal land (as distinguished from private and public/state land) results from a combination of geography, history, and population distribution. External colonial rule created a dual system of land tenure that restrained private property rights in the tribal/communal land areas. The research draws upon archival evidence from the colonial land tenure panel chaired by Lord Hailey (1945±50). The finding is not that Africans are inherently culturally unsuited to property ownership, but that colonialism reinforced pluralistic forms of property rights, which create particular challenges to land law reform. ARE AFRICANS CULTURALLY UNSUITED TO PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE RULE OF LAW?' This was the challenging question posed in the title of an essay by Hernando de Soto, the leading writer on property rights and legal empowerment of the poor. 1 De Soto cites the assertion that African societies are`steeped in traditional cultures and are unsuited to market-oriented development'. While his essay, drawing upon his work in Tanzania, goes on to reject the assertion, the question in the title is worth further exploration in its own right, because 403
Conquest, Occupation, Colonialism, and exclusion: land disputes in Angola
The occupation of territories, the rule over land and the definition of property rights, were major concerns in the making and long-term development of the European overseas empires. They were also strongly interrelated with other key aspects of the empire-building process, including sovereignty claims, territorial expansion, settlement, taxation, power relations, social mobility, labour organisation, economic development, indigenous rights and the relationship between colonisers and colonised in its multiple dimensions. Although focusing mostly on the Portuguese empire, this book deals with other colonial settings too, covering a timespan that stretches from the 15th to the 21st century, thus including also some reflections on the post-colonial legacy of European imperial ventures around the world.
Elites, Colonialism, and Property Rights in Historical Perspective
Political Power and Social Theory, 2024
This paper proposes a framework explaining the evolution of property rights in land, assuming two unequal groups of actors: elites possessing means of violence and nonelite land cultivators. It then shows that all intermediary groups – those acting between the chief violence holders (i.e., rulers) and cultivators – are in effect (greater or lesser rulers and cultivators). Using this framework, this paper explains most of the developments in the evolution of land rights in 19th century colonial Bengal. The proposed theoretical framework explains how different, hierarchically arrayed claims over land and the resulting allocation of rights was a function of asymmetries in power and information between three groups: rulers, direct cultivators, and intermediaries without their own coercive means. It explains inter alia why private property in land was not likely to emerge in this configuration, and that the (non-private) property rights of the other two groups wouldn’t attain stability as long as rulers perceived an information asymmetry. In such a situation, land rights would attain neither “private,” nor “public” character.