The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900

Jonathan Anuik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and
president of the HGSC at the University of Saskatchewan.

Individuals who study colonial contact are familiar with the authority
of Europeans to direct political, social, economic, and cultural change.
John C. Weaver presents the consequences of colonization for the New, or
colonial, World in terms of land appropriation. His monograph will
appeal to scholars involved in historical and contemporary debates
surrounding indigenous and non-indigenous land tenure and usage.

Weaver’s text identifies land ownership as the crucible for New World
exploration and contact. He proposes that the New World was a site for
conflict about land rights. Individuals struggled to preserve
pre-existing title to pre-contact land while newcomers brought with them
new methods to claim land. Throughout, Weaver maintains that land
negotiations were motivated by resource exploitation, and that land
cession agreements demonstrated a European ignorance of pre-existing
indigenous government structures and conservation measures.
Consequently, land negotiations were a deceptive meeting of two
unequally positioned societies. The outcome undermined the indigenous
peoples and led to the inception of new ideologies of land ownership
that survive to the present day.

Academics familiar with colonial contact history will find that
Weaver’s study parallels previous regional investigations. For
example, in Bounty and Benevolence: A History of Saskatchewan Treaties
(2000), Arthur Ray, J.R. Miller, and Frank Tough argue that the method
for cession of Aboriginal land in Central, Northwestern, and Pacific
Canada led to years of dissatisfaction among Aboriginals and has
resulted in litigation that continues into the present. Weaver
identifies land ownership as central to the making of the modern world
in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and North and Latin America.
Furthermore, he states that in this period of contact, larger concerns
of land distribution and ownership existed in the colonizer’s society.
Students of colonialism in many global contexts and time periods and
those interested in the idea of land ownership will be fascinated with
Weaver’s insight into the ongoing debates about conflict and
co-operation in the colonized world.