Book Review: Colonial Lives of Property. Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Edited By Brenna Bhandar,. Global and Insurgent Legalities Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 280 pp., $99.95 (Cloth).

Colonial Lives of Property. Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Edited By Brenna Bhandar. Global and Insurgent Legalities Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 280 pp., $99.95 (Cloth).

Colonial Lives of Property is organized around four chapters––Use, Propertied Abstractions, Improvement, and Status––each presenting a key topic shedding light on the book's key issue, the “property-identity nexus” (p. 30). This was “forged by a juridical apparatus that structured and justified [the] appropriation of indigenous land and the creation of reserves” (p. 151; also see pp. 149, 163, 185). The four chapters follow a detailed introduction on how, in three settler colonies (Australia, Canada and Israel/Palestine), ownership drew on racial regimes. It thus “excavates the juridical formation constituted by modern property law and the racial subject” (p. 6), where race forms a “variable amalgam of social, cultural, and biological markers” (p. 8). The four topics anchor an innovative analysis of land ownership as racial regime, in areas beyond the usual black-white dichotomy.

In her introduction Bhandar develops an innovative, substantial, and sometimes thick theory on property and property laws, seen as primarily a means for legitimizing the possession of land, the ultimate objective of colonial power (p. 3). She argues that private property law in early modern England cannot be understood without the analysis of land appropriation in its colonies and mandates, as “modern property laws emerge along with and through colonial modes of appropriation” (p. 3).

Chapter 1––Use traces the...