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B. Political Preemption of Land in Settler Societies
In the New World as well as the Old, too much comfort or independence on the part of the laboring classes could be a great
inconvenience to "the nation" or "the people" (which entities, presumably, did not include the helots who actually produced
the things consumed by "the nation" or "the people"). The response of the capitalist (with the power of the state "at his
back"), in the colonies as in the Old World, was (as Marx put it) "to clear out of his way by force, the modes of production
and appropriation, based on the independent labour of the producer."52
Settler societies have always had one disadvantage, from the point of view of the ruling classes: the widespread availability
of cheap land. Adam Smith observed that in the North American colonies, where affordable land was readily available, the price
of labor was very high because the average laborer preferred independence to employment: "neither the large wages nor the
easy subsistence which that country affords to artificers can bribe him rather to work for other people than for himself."53
E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colonization, wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class
in the colonies where self-employment with one's own property was readily available. Labor was scarce even at high wages.54
In colonies, labourers for hire are scarce. The scarcity of labourers for hire is the universal complaint of colonies.
It is the one cause, both of the high wages which put the colonial labourer at his ease, and of the exorbitant wages which
sometimes harass the capitalist.55
Where land is cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only
is labour very dear, as respects the labourers' share of the product, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any
price.
This environment also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few, even of those whose lives
are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth."56 As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother
country for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale,
there was an "urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers--for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate
terms, instead of being dictated to by them."57
Faced with this situation, the capitalist could resort to one of two expedients. One of them was the use of slave and convict
labor, which we will examine in greater detail in a section below. The other was preemption of ownership of the land by the
colonial regime. Political preemption of the land was accompanied by a denial of access to ordinary homesteaders--either by
pricing land out of their range, or by excluding them altogether. Wakefield suggested that, since "[i]n the very beginning
of a colony, all the land necessarily belongs to the government or is under its jurisdiction," the government could remedy
the shortage of cheap wage labor by controlling access to the land.58
At the same time that it excluded the laboring classes from virgin land, the state in settler societies granted large tracts
of land to the privileged classes: to land speculators, logging and mining companies, planters, railroads, etc. Land grants
in colonial America were on a scale comparable those of William after the Conquest. Cadwallader Colden, classifying the population
in his State of the Province of New York (1765), put "the Proprietors of the Large Tracts of Land" of 100,000
to above one million acres, at the apex of the social pyramid. According to James Truslow Adams, in Provincial Society,
1690-1763 (1927), Capt. John Evans, a favorite of Governor Fletcher of New York, was granted "an area of indeterminate
extent of between three hundred and fifty and six hundred thousand acres..." Although he was later offered £10,000 for
this land, his annual quitrent was only twenty shillings (i.e., £1). Governor Bellmont later claimed that almost three-quarters
of available land had been granted to thirty persons during Fletcher's term. Lord Courtney, governor from 1702-08, likewise
issued large grants often running into the hundreds of thousands of acres, but preferred giving them to companies of land
speculators. In New England, in contrast, Adams wrote that the early pattern of land grants to settlers for setting up townships
led to more egalitarian patterns of land ownership. Unfortunately, this pattern was later supplanted by large-scale grants
of land to speculators, for later sale to settlers, either as individuals or companies.59
Such land-grabbing was central to American history from the very beginning, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out: "....from
the time of the first colonial settlement to the present day, America has been regarded as a practically limitless field for
speculation in rental values.”60
If our geographical development had been determined in a natural way, by the demands of use instead of the demands of speculation
[that is, appropriated individually by labor, as Lockeans, Georgists and mutualists agree is just], our western frontier
would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River. Rhode Island is the most highly-populated member of the Union, yet one
may drive from one end of it to the other on one of its "through" highways, and see hardly a sign of human occupancy.61
One cause of the American Revolution was Britain's "attempt... to limit the exercise of the political means in respect
of rental-values" (namely, the 1763 prohibition of settlements west of the Atlantic watershed). This prevented preemption
of the land by land speculators in league with the state.62 The mainstream history books, of course, have portrayed
this as an offense mainly against the individual homesteader, rather than the big land companies. Many leading figures in
the late colonial and early republican period were prominent investors in these land companies: e.g., Washington in the Ohio,
Mississippi, and Potomac Companies; Patrick Henry in the Yazoo Company; Benjamin Franklin in the Vandalia Company, etc.63
Lest anyone draw the conclusion that the practice of limiting the working population's access to land was a practice only
in the periwigged British Empire of Warren Hastings or Lord North, we should bear in mind that it has been followed in the
"new" Empire as well:
The apprehension of the same truth [stated by Wakefield] has in more recent times led colonial administrators in
certain parts of Africa to reduce native tribal reserves and to impose taxation on natives who remain in the reserves, with
the object of maintaining a labour supply for the white employer.64
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