Читать книгу A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Taylor Spence

Any overview of colonial North American agriculture must take into account the sociopolitical context created by European colonialism and imperialism. These invasive and violent forms of extraction, including agricultural and human resources, should be considered “total social facts” of post-invasion life on the continent (Gosden 2004). The quite similar biomes of Western Europe and many parts of North America meant that agricultural practices transferred to the continent with colonization. However, the transfer of intercommoning, rotational field practices, manuring, and livestock to the Americas transformed European agricultural practices into the means of colonization. Thus, when one considers colonial North American agriculture, one must consider how European agricultural tradition became colonial American praxis.

Furthermore, colonial agriculture cannot be disentangled from European encounters with indigenous agricultural methods, both Native American and displaced African indigenous practices. Before the advent of Europeans, Indigenous North Americans developed unique cultigens such as corn, rice, and squash and the practices that maximized the yields of these crops. They husbanded game such as white-tail deer, beaver, and pigeons. These American crops were the product of intellect and experimentation, and contributed valuable nutrition to both Indigenous People and colonials. Any accounting of colonial agriculture must reckon with what colonials took from the people who were their neighbors.

Similarly, indigenous African knowledge and cultigens transferred with chattel slaves. The idea that Africans supplied the labor while white planters supplied the technical knowledge has long been disproven. Africans brought with them long grain rice cultivars and the knowledge to grow them, which included being able to identify locations where they could grow. Marijuana (Cannabis indica) and the knowledge to cultivate and use it transferred with slaves to the Caribbean and thence to North America (Duvall 2019). The two most important slave-labor agricultural commodities, sugar and cotton, were cultigens developed by indigenous non-Europeans from the Americas and Southeast Asia. European imperialism constituted more than just the taking of others’ homes, the extraction of natural resources, and the expropriation of human lives. It included forcibly taking knowledge from subaltern peoples (Norton 2017).

It is not possible at this point to write a wide-ranging historiographical entry cataloging all the monographs about these aspects of colonial North American agriculture, because that work is still in its infancy. Histories written with an awareness of the enmeshment of colonizer and colonized at both the level of bodies and intellect constitute the avant-garde of agricultural history, with scholars from outside the United States leading the way (Norton 2017; Camfield 2019). Therefore, this chapter traces the outlines of several important areas of future scholarly inquiry about colonial North American agriculture, highlighting the work of scholars who are working with an awareness of colonization and empire. Works that separate agricultural practices from these sociopolitical realities are not discussed, because they lack historical validity in light of current efforts towards decolonization and reparations. By shifting the conversation away from a colonial agricultural history denuded of the politics of empire and colonization, this chapter seeks to spur further research into how European agricultural methods transferred to North America, and were transformed into tools of violence and the means of conquest. The narrative part of the chapter offers a schematic sketch of how colonial land-use practices became the means of colonization, while the subsequent bibliographic chapter focuses on the forced knowledge transfers of indigenous and African agricultural technologies in the colonial era.

The concept of knowledge transfer is fundamental to understanding the violent nature of colonial agriculture in North America. Transfer of pathogens, cultivars, and people is well understood. Transfer of European customs and ways of thinking in terms of religion, politics, and culture has been well explored. Yet, the transfer of agricultural methods, traditions, and technology has been assumed to be a passive infiltration and thus largely overlooked. The practice of agriculture combines space, the environment, and culture. In a society based in the extraction of life from the biologic world, this agric-culture may have comprised the most widely practiced set of shared beliefs in the colonies. Understanding the transformation of these transplanted ways of using space and natural resources is a key step in comprehending the violence of colonial agriculture (Mt. Pleasant 2015).

A deeper understanding of agricultural knowledge transfers better explains the successes of European colonization. The emphasis of much of the work on colonial North America emphasizes the hardship and difficulty colonists experienced in their acts of settlement and producing food. In New France, New England, and New Spain, settlers struggled through extreme winters and blazing hot summers, as Karen Kupperman and others have noted, due to North America’s continental rather than oceanic climate. Extreme fluctuations in temperature occurred during the Little Ice Age (1300–1850), with the most extreme being between 1550–1700 (Kupperman 1982; Rockman 2010). Jamestown, settled in 1607, experienced an extreme drought at the time of settlement (Rockman 2010). The more extreme climate of North America played havoc with European colonists’ assumptions about what they could successfully cultivate. Nevertheless, climatic conditions were not so extremely different that many of the long-used methods of European agriculture could not be adapted. Western Europe and the eastern US are both part of the same temperate forest biome. This meant that many agricultural methods, including crop rotation, manuring, and intercommoning transferred to colonial locations, making the transition from metropole to periphery relatively easy.

Ultimately, colonies survived and prospered because of an array of factors, not least of which was European willingness to take the lives, lands, and ideas of Indigenous and African Peoples and use them for their own ends. The processes by which these takings took place were both active, as with enslavement, land, resource, and knowledge theft, and passive, as when colonizers relied on their agricultural techniques and practices to facilitate their taking and domination. The passive-aggressive character of colonial agriculture was the direct result of the change in context from imperial metropole to colonial periphery.

The notion of taking and sharing natural resources in local communities might be as close to a universal of the human experience as birth and death. All societies have utilized commons, where extracting resources directly from the earth (whether from agriculture or otherwise) was necessary for survival. This was because certain life-sustaining resources could neither be controlled nor, morally speaking, hoarded. Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom labeled resources that states cannot fully control but must negotiate to share “common pool resources” (CPRs; Ostrom 1990). The commons by their nature carry a moral and ethical valence because they are more or less basic to the survival of the community of humans (L. Taylor 1987). Examples today would include air, water, fisheries, and climate.

In precapitalist, preindustrial European societies, people needed many resources, field and forest, game and other forage, in order to survive. These resources were ones that the wealthy and powerful could (and in many cases did) easily monopolize. Over time, and with much struggle, people developed agricultural practices, legal statutes, and a moral and ethical code for regulating resource use and guaranteeing a subsistence. This was the basis of the old “common law.”

At the same time, humans over many generations developed forms of agriculture that maximized productivity, including mixed farming and husbandry, crop rotation, and foraging. These types of livelihood limited the amount of space any given number of people could use, and along with climate, terrain, and resource endowments, some degree of communal sharing and collective and cooperative effort was necessary for individuals to take. The people who enacted the majority of Europeans’ colonial visions in eastern North America hailed from what D.W. Meinig calls the “cultural hearth” of the “Anglo-French channel community:” the lands around the English Channel of southern England and northern France. The Spanish mainland also had a well-established commons tradition that transferred with settlers to Central America and the American Southwest (Meinig 1986; Greer 2012).

Two related areas of resource-use traditionally reflected constructed European space: an inner and an outer commons (Greer 2012). Inner commons began with the manor lord, who did not cultivate the land himself, but delegated the extraction of agricultural wealth to freeholders, tenants, and serfs, who claimed to a greater or lesser degree, both private and common lands. English peasants could access house-bote, hay-bote, fire-bote, and plow-bote, a “bote” being an old way of saying a right or something which was necessary. To build a dwelling from the manor’s forests (house-bote), cut enough hay to feed livestock from the manor’s fields (hay-bote), gather firewood (fire-bote), and cultivate a garden (plow-bote), were all necessities in the premodern agricultural world. Along with this bundle of rights, peasants on the manor often claimed the right of “pasture [and] turbary”—to pasture livestock and cut peat for fuel and fertilizer (Crump et al. 1867). Traditional CPRs in premodern agricultural economies were those necessary for shelter, food, fire, and forage.

Manure and the commons went together. Agricultural communities in England and France utilized folding and intercommoning, techniques that maximized pasture and manure distribution in an informal crop rotation method that replenished the soil. Peasants daily mingled their livestock on one pasture in order to feed them and allow their own fields to rest. In the evening, they herded their animals back to their individual fields, transporting in the process nutrient-rich manure to refresh the soil. This system was called vaine pâture in the provinces of Northern France, where farmers also utilized open-field farming, assolement, sharing a large field, marking their boundaries much like community gardens of today, and working their individual plots (Le Goff 1981). Some Breton farmers arranged their individual holdings around a village with small fields radiating outward from it, called bocage. While in England some manors shared an adjacent commons and allowed their livestock to mingle and graze in each other’s fields.

Towns formalized their commons through official surveys and maps, and in the case of Soham in England, villagers shared a common of approximately one hundred acres acknowledged and taxed in kind by the Crown. Crump writes that “common of pasture is the great right to which the most importance has ever been attached, and there is every reason to suppose that common is derived from communitate, as signifying the community or number of people who used common pasture [called ‘vicinage’]” (Crump et al. 1867; Moore-Colyer 1998; Donahue 2004; Cary 1788; Shannon 2012). Farmers in some locations such as Brittany, regarded turf as a commons. They cut it from shared wastes called lands, and then hauled it back to plough into their fields. Their repeated cutting of turf made the landscape look “barren and wretched” according to English agricultural reformer Arthur Young, who complained that their fields “consist[ed] of three-fourths or seven-eighths of turf, pared off from every hole and corner from commons and bad fields.” Nearer the seacoast, farmers extracted and used seaweed to fertilize their fields, a common practice in England and New England as well. (In 1661, a series of surveys of the environs of Beauvais (Picardy, Northern France) revealed the use of common fields, especially in Coudrey-Saint-Germer, where the commons accounted for 12 percent of all land in the parish; Goubert 1960; Le Goff 1981.)

This broad array of resource claims indicates that commoners carried a significant amount of authority to arrange their local extractions as they saw fit. The basis of that authority lay in their local knowledge, in their skills, and in their physical occupation and possession of the ground. Actual cultivators knew how to make the land productive, what James C. Scott calls “metis” (Scott 1998). These skills were a powerful asset, because they gave commoners leverage to force elites to uphold agreements about resource use. Elites used laws as the ex post facto mechanism to legitimize usurpation, but it does not follow that they could also easily annul the a priori norms, beliefs, usages, and practices of commoners. Laws such as Magna Carta (1215) and the Forest Charter (1217), known as the “Charters of Liberties,” as well as later elaborations such as the Statutes of Merton (1235), codified the commons but also tried to limit certain customary rights. According to E.P. Thompson, evidence of commons-customs exists at the “interface between law and agrarian practice” (Simpson 1986; Thompson 1991). The long historical trail of rebellions sparked by infringements of these rights, particularly against enclosure of the commons, demonstrated that people inherited and passed down these customary beliefs across generations (Maddison 2010; Clark and Page 2019).

The customs of the commons applied also to those who lived outside the manor or the village, and who claimed the right to extract from an “outer commons,” resources not explicitly claimed, or claimed by multiple different groups (Greer 2012). Long-standing custom dictated that farmers leave behind some ears of corn, wheat, or vegetables for the support of the poor. Gleaners took advantage of the corners of square fields left after circular plowing. The landless cottager might picket his milk cow, goat, oxen, or horse on the grassy verges of roads. He might let his geese or chickens forage freely, might extract fish, rushes, and eels from accessible stretches of streams and rivers. Rabbits and other wild game roamed across boundaries and into undefined areas of ownership. A community might deem a section of forest a commons to feed all community-members’ pigs (pannage). Or they might take “lops and tops”—fallen or pruned wood—from the forest. In some cases, rare resources such as sand, stone, and salt were also deemed common resources (Charter of the Forest 1225; Thompson 1991).

That the commons mapped seamlessly onto colonial North America testifies to the built-in borders with which Europeans envisioned empire. Allan Greer explains how the “inner” and “outer” commons transferred to New France and New England, and demonstrates how the grazing commons became the means of colonial expansion and the dispossession of Indigenous People. Colonizers took over indigenous settlements depopulated by disease, or built new ones, using traditional methods of agriculture and husbandry, including intercommoning. Settlers benefited from forest hunting and gathering, and they allowed their herds to freely roam outside settlements in order to take advantage of forage (Greer 2012). Colonials reversed the tradition that said that owners of livestock were responsible for any damage their animals did when getting loose, placing the onus on cultivators to fence their fields to protect them from roaming cattle, pigs, and sheep. The outer commons became a zone of conflict, where colonizers allowed their animals to overrun other colonial settlements, as well as indigenous corn, squash, and bean fields. Indigenous People retaliated by killing livestock, but disputes became the means of establishing dominion (V.D. Anderson 2004). A hybrid version of this obtains still in the western states of the United States which reflects the conflict and relative power of two forms of animal husbandry. Cattle ranchers impose on others the necessity of fencing their cattle off from adjacent property, or “commons” such as federal lands, but also impose on sheep ranchers the responsibility of fencing in herds of sheep.

In this version of the outer commons, animals became not just the means of expanding empires, but the carriers of imperial vision. As Greer says, colonizers claimed land through claiming livestock, even when they may not have been able to prove the animal was theirs. These land claims on the hoof demonstrate both the colonizer’s willful blindness towards indigenous homes and agricultural practices, as well as how their visionary claims imagined indigenous lands as their future commonwealth (Greer 2012; Preston 2012).

This zone of conflict, what Greer calls the “colonial commons,” was agriculture’s contribution to the creation of borders. Conflicts over livestock and resource-use inscribed a line that both colonizers and Indigenous Peoples could recognize, though that line signified something different for both parties. These borders always existed in European commons, but with colonization they took on new meanings. Groups in the borderland understood the line between inner and outer commons as the line between “us” and “them.” Colonizers enclosed their inner commons as a kind of embryonic national space, where their people and their customs presided. Racial and cultural identities, as opposed to localities, became new social markers regulating taking and sharing. Whereas before in Europe, both inner and outer commons had been relatively homogenous in terms of culture and race, now the outer commons was a place of potentially radical heterogeneity. In this abstract plain of commons claim-making, both inner and outer commons were in the minds of the colonists the colonial commons (Cronon 1983; Rusert 2015).

Colonial groups continued to mark the boundaries of their inner commons through both privatized and collective resource-use practices (Greer 2012). Most, but not all, habitants in New France lived along the St. Lawrence or one of its tributaries on a long-lot: a long, narrow strip of land, with one end on the water and the other end abutting up against a common. They used this “backyard” common for pasture, manure, and gathering, but this arrangement, different from the feudal manor or village, may have encouraged the transition to a “self-contained family farmstead” faster than in New England (Renton 1909; Dawson 1940; Lewis 1940; Greer 1993, 2012; Choquette 1997. “Norman law, particularly perhaps Norman land law, was based on concepts that were common to Latin Christendom—especially those parts of it that had once been part of the Carolingian empire” (Hagger 2010)). Nevertheless, common field agriculture continued in some New French settlements into the nineteenth-century, and these communities often utilized a village structure rather than a long lot. After the Revolution, the US Congress affirmed the long-standing commons in the villages of Cahokia, Vincennes, Cohos, and Prairie du Pont, in the Illinois country. Cahokia continued to use its common as late as the Civil War (McDermott 1949).

The Spanish colonized North America with a distinctive tradition of the commons already in place. Townsmen received grants of land for their individual use, as well as access to an extensive civic commons, the ejido, which extended far out into the countryside around the town. These Spanish outer commons were owned by the village or town and were regulated by explicit legislation that required they be extensive enough to support the livestock of the town’s settlers. This more formal and municipal approach to the outer commons thus carried with it the implicit approbation of colonial governmental apparatus (Greer 2012). Outside of the town, well-connected soldiers, governmental officials, and Franciscan missionaries received grants of indigenous homelands with the people who lived in them, in a legal vehicle known as the encomienda. The linked and complementary aims of these grants was profit and the saving of souls (Douglass and Graves 2017). The results of these approaches to colonization did not mean that the Spanish outer commons were less invasive or destructive to indigenous homes and livelihoods, for it made colonial property of both land and its inhabitants. But it did mean that the division between inner and outer commons did not carry the same exclusive and racialized qualities as with either the English or French outer commons. The implications of this for Indigenous Peoples was significant, and may account for the maintenance and longevity of agricultural traditions in indigenous communities colonized by the Spanish. As Phillip O. Leckman shows, while there was a profound disjuncture between Puebloan and Spanish understandings of land-use in New Mexico, communal space, and agriculture, there was enough similarity to allow Puebloan people to continue many of their traditional agricultural practices (Leckman 2017).

In New England and New York, intercommoning and folding continued up until the time of the Revolution, and in some places as late as the 1840s. The degree to which New English settlements utilized commons and freeholds correlated with the places and land tenure systems from which settlers had migrated (Cronon 1983). Sometimes local governments used commons to promote the economic welfare of the community. Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an ordinance that allowed farmers to pasture their sheep on any town commons to promote wool production (V.D. Anderson 2004). Regulated fishery commons were ubiquitous. The Town of Plymouth regulated alewives’ spawning over many decades so that “eich man” would have the herrings “due to them.” In Delaware a legislator argued that fish were God’s providence “for general use.” In 1675, New York’s governor forbade people “to cast dung, dirt or refuse of ye city, or anything to fill up ye harbor or among ye neighbors or neighboring shores, under penalty of forty shillings.” Plymouth colony did the same. Historical records suggest that the earliest official forest common was established in 1817, when James Madison set aside forests that “produce the live oak and red cedar,” in order to ensure an adequate supply of timber for the US navy (Town of Plymouth 1637 in Neimark and Mott 2017; Grettler 1992/1993 cited in Maddison 2010; Edmund Andros (1675) Quoted in Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, 1972, United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 86 (1973) P4236, n.d. in Sanger n.d.; Pollution in Plymouth Colony Harbor the Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth: Together with the Charter of the Council at Plymouth 1668; US Congress, Fourteenth Congress 1817 all in Neimark and Mott 2017). Nevertheless, unauthorized extractions from the outer forest commons certainly predated and continued after this official act.

While inner commons practices continued and evolved, settlers discovered new ways to extract resources from the colonial outer commons (Albany Argus n.d.; Godwise 1841; Allen 1981; Donahue 2004; Greer 2012). Ohio hog farmers drove their herds through a “hog commons” to Cincinnati’s slaughter houses through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Cattle ranchers on the open range allowed the mixing of herds on common pasturage which were separated at roundup time—a calf standing by a branded mother identified its owner. After the Civil War, cattle were driven, and fattened on the way, from Texas across “open range” to rail headings along the Union Pacific and then shipped to Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, and elsewhere. Ginseng foragers developed a “gathering commons” in the Appalachian highlands of Georgia and the Carolinas. Highland dwellers of the Southern Appalachians enhanced their diets with abundant chestnuts, and eventually developed a lucrative trade with urban centers, until a blight wiped them out. And Nuevo Mexicanos established and sustained “land-grant commons” before and after the establishment of the United States (Lutts 2004; Greer 2012; Manget 2012; Newfont 2012; Zallen 2014; see also Newfont 2012).

As traditional commons practices transplanted and evolved in colonial North America, so did commons culture (Griswold 1948). Raymond Williams writes that “a culture has two aspects: the known meanings … which its members are trained to; [and] the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested” (Williams 1973). Migrants to North America came “trained” in some manner or degree to the long-held customs of the commons. These “known meanings” and aspects probably conditioned settlers to see themselves as agents of the mandate found in the Book of Genesis (Williams emphasizes the perceived bounty of North America in the eighteenth century; Williams 1973). John Locke used this biblical hierarchy as the basis of his political economy. “God has given the Earth to the children of Men … given it to Mankind in common.” And he formulated his vision of the Earth’s commons with America in mind referring to the “wild common of nature” (Locke 1689). Settlers built on these “known meanings” and proceeded to “offer and test” new rationales for their resource takings. As contending groups, covetous of the common’s wealth, confronted each other, new boundaries and rules emerged reflecting the relative power of the contenders.

An expansive rather than a limited resource base brought to the fore new forms of taking. Local control and possession took on entirely new meanings when “taking” meant taking from Indigenous Peoples rather than the manor lord or one’s neighbors. Labor leading to the acquisition of property gained political significance in the settler nation when authority gave the nod of approval to settlers’ squatting, which garnered them the standing of property and national belonging (Evans 2019). The social welfare ethics of the right of remainder and judicious use receded. Locke’s charge that God’s gift of nature was “not for man to spoil and destroy” but to take “as much [of] as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils,” was rarely an ethical standard settlers took to heart (Locke 1689; Tully 1980; A. Taylor 1998). Indeed, the aspects of the commons tradition that facilitated sharing became less important than those that justified taking.

The most dramatic shift took place in the sociology of taking and sharing. As in Europe, the commons in North America denoted any shared resource over which a person felt entitled to exercise a right of extraction, based on custom. But the colonial context shifted the relationship between resources, individuals, and their communities, emphasizing the sociopolitical meaning of resources. Whereas in Europe resources reflected the class hierarchies of the manor, and later the wider emerging capitalist world, North American colonialism reflected the political identities of the claimants to resources in regions where original, non-Europeans also claimed resources. The degree to which individuals felt entitled to exercise their rights to extract resources was proportional to their identification with the larger group and its strength and ability to claim dominion over those resources.

In the case of settlers, this larger group was the nation-state. The traditional commons and the nation-state were systems for gaining access to the potential of wild nature. It was the terms for gaining access, the means used, the scope, and ultimately, the end-goal of extractions, which were different. With the commons, different classes of people locally negotiated access. The nation enabled mythologies of sameness, more easily enabling one group to take from another, and was inherently expansive. Local control and negotiation promoted mostly sustainable extraction, while expansive nationalism tended towards over-extraction. The commons tended to focus inwardly, with outer edges shifting. The nation focused outwardly, defining and then redefining its dominion and its borders. The commons aimed at gaining use-rights, while the nation guaranteed property rights. What had previously been manor insiders and outsiders, became citizens and others. Settler colonialism offered political elites new tools for unifying political constituencies into their service, such as racism, nationalism, and market relations. When mutual validation occurred between borderland dwellers and power centers, a sense of belonging and mandate became the justification for taking (Crump et al. 1867; Martin 1991).

The clearest sign of the growing relationship between settlers and the state in colonial agriculture was squatting. Squatting, of course, was a long-standing aspect of the commons. People appropriated space and natural resources by being present and through physical occupation. By extending the outer commons into an abstract “out there,” settler colonialism detached physical location from corporate political identity. Settlers crossed the boundary dividing actual and potential colonial space. They claimed lands outside of their polity, but they carried their political affiliation with them. Expansion and the acquisition of land was part of the ethic of settler colonialism, so the logical next step was for squatters to petition their political authority for its legal approbation of their taking, which allowed inheritance and sale. There was no published declaration of this agreement. Settlers in the United States appeared to have been the first colonial settlers to initiate such a quid pro quo. The US Congress receive memorials from squatters asking for preemption rights as early as 1785 from the western reaches of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. The practice spread throughout the British Empire, with Lower Canada being the nearest neighbor to the United States seeing widespread squatting with calls for preemption claims by the late 1830s (Whan 1996; Canada did not grant individual preemption rights until the 1870s; Loo 1994; Phillips, McMurtry, and Saywell 2008; Neimark and Mott 2017; Girard, Phillips, and Brown 2018).

Empire and colonialism pulled apart the commons’ historic ties between specific places, actual practices, and commoners’ beliefs about the land, their rights, and the presumed and neglected duties of the more powerful toward the less fortunate. It rejiggered these landed social relations into a new formation, where the outer commons carried much of the burden of fulfilling settler hopes and dreams. Colonizers’ visionary propensities created a political bridge between centers of power and peripheral locations. An ideological commons floated above the land, branching out into multiple directions (Dietz et al. 2002; Manzella 2010; Nelson 2016). Both those who went about the daily work of taking, occupying, and possessing land and those who governed, communed with a prosperous and improved future. The western reaches of colonial settlement became an experimental site, where settlers and their state began to work out the terms of white settler expropriation and dominion.

Of course, western lands were far from vacant. They were the homes of thousands of indigenous tribes, families, and traditions. But in another sense, the vacancy was real, in the settler nation’s vision. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1755 that “the Territory of North America” was “so vast that it will require many ages to settle it fully,” after acknowledging only a few lines before that “Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could be by hunters” (Franklin 1918). This blindness produced a fiction called the public domain, which was the actual acres the government planned to offer as grants or for purchase at its land offices, as well as the not-yet-owned spaces of the continent: the area which would eventually be the nation. In a dialog that began even before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Paris, and which echoed from the nation’s edges to its centers of power in the 1780s and 90s, settlers and their state began to establish the terms of how the public domain would expand, and with it the nation. After the American Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase, continentalism and the public domain went together as an expression of the present and future commonwealth of US citizens, still awaiting the overt adoption of Manifest Destiny. Far in advance of land cessions encompassing the continent, this vision encouraged settlers to take land (Hamilton 1790; US Congress, First Congress 1790, 1791; US Congress, Fourth Congress 1795; Dunbar 1804; Jefferson 1804; US Congress, Eighth Congress 1804a, 1804b, 1804c; US Congress, Eleventh Congress 1810; US Congress, Twelfth Congress 1813; Committee on the Public Lands, US Congress, Sixteenth Congress 1819).

It is important to acknowledge that no equivalency existed between indigenous land-use practices and European ones. Whether the numerous different indigenous cultures living in the space of the borderland used intercommoning techniques, shared natural resource commons, or sustained traditions of taking based on possession, labor or justified use, matters little to an understanding of how European agriculture served colonization. Colonizers hailed from a limited area, brought with them a fairly unified set of practices, and shared similar aims. Their history is generalizable. Indigenous cultures adapted their extractive methods over generations to very specific places and with diverse goals. Drawing comparisons between indigenous and settler commons, except at the broadest sociopolitical level, does these cultures an injustice and suggests false equivalencies and “both-sides-ism.” Labeling Indigenous Peoples “commoners all,” and exporting the Anglo-French channel community’s commons culture to a global analysis flies in the face of indigenous sovereignties (Linebaugh 2008). Grasping the historical meaning of the commons is challenging enough without obscuring its significance with false comparisons. What can be stated with assurance is that for Indigenous Peoples experiencing colonization, the outer commons was a place of exchange, learning, conflict, and loss.