Great Land Rush And The Making Of The Modern World 1650 1900

A critique of the greatest reallocation of resources in the history of the world and an analysis of its effects on indigenous peoples, the growth of property rights, and the evolution of ideas that make up the foundation of the modern world.

Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier

In the hundred years since British Columbia joined Confederation, Canada has negotiated only one treaty in the province. A decade after signing the Nisga'a treaty, and despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the BC Treaty Commission process had not finalized a single treaty. This impassioned book explains why. The long answer to the question, says author Tony Penikett, is rooted in colonial history: provincial resistance, federal indifference and judicial equivocation. The short answer is that Canadian governments have wanted treaties solely on their own terms. Drawing on three decades of experience as a negotiator and a politician, Penikett argues persuasively that successful treaty making requires not only principled mandates, imaginative negotiators and skilled mediators, but also the political will to redress First Nation grievances. The treaty process in BC is ailing, this book shows clearly, and Penikett has many practical remedies to offer.

Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networks could also limit and distort economic growth. The powerful appeal of ethnic identification often made trade and investment with racial 'outsiders' less appealing, thereby skewing economic activities toward communities perceived to be 'British'. By highlighting the importance of these networks to migration, finance and trade, this book contributes to debates about globalisation in the past and present. It reveals how the networks upon which the era of modern globalisation was built quickly turned in on themselves after 1918, converting racial, ethnic and class tensions into protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Avoiding such an outcome is a challenge faced today.

This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

This book explores the methodology of environmental history, with an emphasis on the field's interaction with other historiographies such as consumerism, borderlands, and gender. It examines the problem of environmental context, specifically the problem and perception of environmental determinism, by focusing on climate, disease, fauna, and regional environments. It also considers the changing understanding of scientific knowledge.

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.

'Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900' includes indigenous voices in the debate over European appropriation of overseas territories. It is concerned with European efforts to negotiate with indigenous peoples the cession of their sovereignty through treaties.