Title By Registration: instituting modern property law and creating racial value in the settler colony

Bhandar, Brenna

Abstract

The transformation in prevailing conceptualizations of property and the drive to render land as fungible as possible, the desire to commoditize land that had been pursued in earnest since the seventeenth century in England, was realized in the space of the settler colony decades before it would be implemented in the United Kingdom. The author explores how the commodity logic of abstraction that subtended new property logics during this time, reflected in the Torrens system of title by registration, was accompanied by a racial logic of abstraction that rendered the land of the Native, or Savage vacant and ripe for appropriation. By way of conclusion, the author speculates on the ways in which the imposition of English property law in the settler colony influenced the development of modern property law in England.

Citation

Bhandar, B. (2015). Title By Registration: instituting modern property law and creating racial value in the settler colony. Journal of Law and Society, 42(2), 253-282. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00707.x

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Feb 12, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 5, 2021
• Journal: Journal of Law and Society
• Print ISSN: 0263-323X
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-6478
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 253-282
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00707.x