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The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 by John C. Weaver, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2003, illustrations, maps and tables, x+502 pp., cloth $55.00 (ISBN 0-7735-2527-0)
John Weaver is an historian who writes big books on important subjects often of interest to geographers. Readers of this journal will most likely know his collaboration with Michael J. Doucet, Housing the North American City (Montreal and Kingston, 1991) and his less voluminous study of Hamilton in the Canadian Cities series published by James Lorimer and the National Museum of Man in 1982. Here, he turns his attention away from the urban to wrestle, audaciously, with several important questions of global scope. This is, first, a book about the property rights regimes put in place in the British settlement colonies (and their successor states) of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is also, perforce, an account of the intimidation of, and violence towards, native peoples wrapped up in the processes of land-taking by colonisers. Third, this book offers an extended meditation on the power of words, especially 'improvement' and its surrogates, in shaping and justifying official policies and everyday attitudes towards both the land and the resources of the 'new world'. Although generally sympathetic to James C. Scott's arguments about the impress of centralised authority on local autonomy (in seeing Like A State..., New...