Comparative works that address several historical traditions are demanding undertakings, as they must summarize historiographic trends, synthesize the contents of small libraries, and remain nimble as they chase questions across space and time. Not only does Property and Dispossession achieve these objectives with verve, but it also offers a monumental synthesis and a superb model for the presentation of a comparative historical discussion across three centuries.

This erudite volume presents an interpretation of property formation across three colonial regions: New Spain, New England, and New France. Greer proposes an innovative approach: he argues that preconquest and colonial indigenous societies in the Americas possessed fluid and highly precise notions of property, and that these concepts were not replaced by European property formation in a linear or systematic fashion. The volume explores the intricacies of property formation in part 1, devoted to a careful comparison of New Spain, New England, and New France. These three chapters are the volume's center of gravity. As for New Spain, the volume is on solid ground in Greer's discussion of Nahua society regarding encomiendas, the tributary economy, and the transition to indigenous forms of local rulership, or cacicazgo. Greer introduces Nahua terminology for various forms of property and emphasizes the principle of inalienability that tied Nahua property to the altepetl (ethnic state) and its subdivisions, but also notes the expansion of settler lands at the expense of Natives and the formalization of land titles through composiciones.

In New France, Greer argues, two feudal property regimes predominated—property held en fief in a property chain leading back to the king, and censive tenure, for which beneficiaries paid a small annual sum. The payment of these sums made the land regime rely on contractual documents, and seigneurial demands, initially timid, grew with time. Indigenous nations such as the Wyandot (Huron) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) formalized their land rights in fief form. Finally, regarding New England, the book notes the legal fiction at the heart of royal land charters: territory was doled out as if it already were under the political control of the English ruler. Settler property formation responded to family needs, and townships profited from the dispossession of Native land, which was framed by epidemics, wars, and indigenous territorial disintegration.

Part 2 surveys how land became a colonial dominion. An initial chapter presents an agile comparative history of the creation of a colonial commons, where land, following John Locke, was subject to enclosure and commodification—but also to the “ungulate invasion” of cattle and the regulation of pasture lands. Greer then addresses the “cartographic revolution” that transformed colonial mapmaking and introduced novel measurement modes and technology, such as theodolites and chains, before turning to survey methods, which helpfully touch upon the Mexica mathematics of an early tributary census, the Codex Vergara. The volume concludes with a closely argued coda that demonstrates the relevance of Greer's comparisons for an understanding of the plethora of dispossessive forces that accursed indigenous societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: distinct territorial dynamics in Upper and Lower Canada, liberal land reforms in Mexico, and the US reservation system. In Lower Canada and Quebec, English law was enforced after the defeat of the French colonial project, in spite of pushback from First Nations. In the United States, the monetization of preemption rights led to a “property revolution” that hinged on dispossession and led to the genocide of indigenous communities. In New Spain, the ersatz emancipation of Indians as Mexican citizens proclaimed by liberals preceded the disenfranchisement of rural communities that followed Reforma Laws, paradoxically championed by a Zapotec president, Benito Juárez.

Only a few topics in this work call for a more sustained treatment. Chief among them is a greater emphasis on indigenous inheritance in New Spain, discussed only as it intersected with the reinvented tradition of títulos primordiales (primordial land charters). Hundreds of testaments in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and other languages showcased how testators stopped just short of treating land as freely alienable, for they allowed individuals to bequeath, barter, or sell land and property within the “republic of Indians,” although these transfers also occurred beyond it. Such dynamism allowed propertied Natives to raise capital, obtain loans, and even claim a stake in an incipient futures market based on valuable cultigens. Hence, the obsession for documenting land charters, while propelled by colonial courts, was firmly ensconced in indigenous societies by the late sixteenth century.

In the end, this lucid and deeply researched volume will inspire and inform comparative discussions about colonialism and land tenure, not only for undergraduate and graduate students in history courses, but also for audiences interested in indigenous studies, ethnohistory, anthropology, and early economics.