Land grabbing on the edge of empire: the longue durée of fee-simple forest lands and indigenous resistance in British Columbia

ABSTRACT

In 1873, on the edge of empire, over 800,000 hectares of land was reserved as payment for a future rail line on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This land was granted to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway Company in 1887, sold to industrial capital in the twentieth century, and then finance capital in the twenty-first century. Intensive logging has been the constant. Indigenous nations have never relented in their opposition to the rail deal. This article historicizes land grabbing through unpacking the rounds of political-economic and settler control of land that rest on the bedrock of the original colonial enclosure.

KEYWORDS:

• Land grabbing
• settler-colonialism
• indigenous resistance
• forest land
• private property

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the two anonymous referees who provided such generous and detailed reviews of this piece. I am also appreciative of Jun Borras’s and Jacqueline Morse’s work in supporting this piece through to publication. I was grateful for the invitation to present this piece at the School of Environmental Studies Research Colloquium at the University of Victoria and for all the thoughtful questions. Ryan Isakson kindly commented on an earlier version of this that helped me sharpen this piece. The research work of Talia Seidman-Wright, Thomas Saleh and Tian Lin has been invaluable along the way. Discussions with my collaborators, Estair Van Wagner, Sarah Morales and Robert Morales, along with Brenda Sayers and Judith Sayers who have made time for me, have made this paper what it is. All shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Canadian law, fee-simple title is a type of freehold estate that in everyday parlance is referred to as private property. Nicholas Blomley (2015: 70) explains that ‘the category of fee simple has a reassuring solidity to it within the common law world, connoting certainty, security, and fixity. It is the highest and purest form of property, it seems, central to the reassuring story that we tell ourselves, whereby certainty of title begets security, which ushers in improvement and investment … That fee simple appears simple, I suggest, must be thought of as a conditional achievement, dependent upon a hard-won and conditional bracketing of many of the messy relations that entangle it.’ In this article I look at fee-simple title as a ‘conditional achievement’ that co-exists with ‘the messy relations that entangle it.’

2 'Aboriginal title and rights' pre-date colonial settlement and continue to endure alongside ‘Crown’ (‘public’) land and private land. The Canadian Constitution and numerous key legal challenges led by Indigenous nations have resulted in the legal recognition of Aboriginal title and rights that are key in the context of resource sectors. See Manual (2015) for an accessible and political introduction, Borrows and Coyle (2017) for a legal reading and, as related to the broader research project that this piece is part of, see Morales et al. (2019). Even though the term ‘Aboriginal’ carries colonial meanings, ‘Aboriginal title and rights’ represents specific legal and political language through which Indigenous nations assert and practice claims to territory. I retain this language when referring to such rights and title in a legal register but otherwise use the term Indigenous.

3 There are too many important collections to list here but, in this publication, the Journal of Peasant Studies, see: the ‘Forum on Global Land Grabbing’ in Volume 38, Issue 2; the ‘Special Issue on New Frontiers of Land Control’ in Volume 38, Issue 4; a collection on the ‘new enclosures’ in Volume 39, Issue 3-4; and an issue dedicated to ‘Southeast Asian Perspectives on Agrarian-Environmental Transformations' in Volume 44, Issue 3. Also see the special issues on ‘Global Land Grabs’ in Third World Quarterly, Volume 34, Issue 9; the symposium on ‘Global Finance and the Agrifood Sector’ in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Volume 15, Issue 4; and the collection on ‘New Insights on Land Grabs in the BRICS and Global South’ in Globalizations, Volume 18, Issue 3.

4 The light theoretical touch of this piece, or the admittedly brief engagement with the literature, will not satisfy all readers, or worse, will be met with skepticism. However, this paper responds to an issue present within many accounts of land grabbing and other academic debates, and specifically the tendency to implore researchers to historize contemporary land enclosures (alongside a privileging of the abstract over the concrete) with little to no attempt to actually do so. I’ve been guilty of this myself and there are exceptions, but this paper self-consciously cuts in the opposite direction through doing the work of historizing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant.

Notes on contributors

Michael Ekers

Michael Ekers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His published work is situated at the intersection of the political economy of nature, agrarian change and critiques of settler-colonialism, refracted through British Columbia's forest politics. He is also interested on debates on socio-ecological fixes and Antonio Gramsci.