The growing scholarship on settler colonialism and on race and capitalism within and beyond political theory has been especially crosscutting and methodologically versatile. Robert Nichols’s Theft Is Property! powerfully demonstrates the rich promises and remaining challenges of scholarship on these topics—and the potential role for critical theory therein.

At first pass, Theft Is Property! focuses on an apparent dilemma: that Indigenous claims regarding dispossession seem to commit Indigenous peoples to arguing for original possession even while simultaneously contending that the earth cannot be owned by anyone. Nichols seeks to dismantle the dilemma by parsing out a distinct temporality to Indigenous dispossession. This is largely addressed in the second half of chapter 1. He contends, “conceptually translating” (p. 12) from Indigenous critiques, that such dispossession is a recursive process whereby “new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation” (p. 8). In short, “the dispossessed come to ‘have’ something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another” (p. 8). Hence the inversion of Proudhon’s slogan that titles the book. As conceptual elucidation for diagnosing the extensions of legal rights to Native Americans in the long settler colonization of the United States—rights to land, Vine Deloria Jr. once wrote, that seem “the right only to sell” (p. 33)—Nichols’s work is compelling. Theft Is Property! should on this front become an indispensable reference for future work on Indigenous dispossession.

Yet on second pass, Theft Is Property! is about far more than dismantling this dilemma. Early in the introduction, Nichols avers that he also aims “to reconstruct dispossession as a category of critical theory” (p. 4). It is with this broader aim that Nichols discusses Indigenous dispossession alongside other scholarly debates about dispossession, in addition to offering an extended engagement with Indigenous theorists in the latter part of chapter 3. The first half of chapter 1, accordingly, provides a useful ground clearing of what distinguishes dispossession from cognate concepts like expropriation, confiscation, and eminent domain in the historical context of resistance against feudal tenure in Europe. Chapter 2, meanwhile, sees Nichols delve into the chronic controversy regarding primitive accumulation in Marxism. Nichols’s novel contributions here are conceptually disaggregating dispossession as a distinct component of primitive accumulation and advancing an expanded interpretation of “land” in Marx’s thought.

The first half of chapter 3 extends Nichols’s discussion of the Marxist tradition, drawing specifically on the concepts of “alienation” or “impersonal domination,” as well as “diremption” or “the domination of some by others” (p. 95). Dispossession, he contends, is a problem of both: a process beyond the intentions and actions of any individual, even as it helps give rise to “Indigenous peoples” as a distinct subject through the shared experiences of suffering and resisting dispossession. Chapter 4, finally, continues Nichols’s interest in subject formation by considering dispossession in the Black radical tradition and Black feminist thought. Engaging especially with Patricia Williams, Nichols finds that the dispossession of the Black body, self, or person parallels the dispossession of Indigenous land: Black Americans have historically only come to enjoy “self-ownership … under conditions that demand its simultaneous negation” (p. 141). Theft Is Property! concludes with a suggestive preview of how a deeper critique of dispossession might engender an alternative politics of property entirely, in part by reference to the recent recognition of key mountains and rivers in New Zealand as legal persons.

Insofar as Nichols designates the reconstruction of a category as exploring its mobilization within different contexts, this is a formidable collection of distinct insights, not least because of its rich engagement with multiple literatures. Nichols is deeply wary of “conceptual reification,” however, and often frames his interventions as historicizations. The insights of each section are typically attributed to situating concepts in their “divergent histories, intellectual contexts, and traditions of interpretation” (p. 5). Indeed, an overarching charge of this work is precisely that too much of critical theory is “presentist, ahistorical, and analytical” (p. 146). Theft Is Property! at this register exemplifies how some work on settler colonialism and race and capitalism continues to be done: as historical contributions or historiographical interventions within traditions focused on specific peoples or processes. As such, it can also reproduce the challenges of this scholarship when considered from the synoptic aspirations of critical theory; the book is at its thinnest in the seams between sections and chapters, often marking potential connections and intersections but rarely pressing them into systematic investigation.

If this is consistent with Nichols’s laudable care for context, it is in some tension with the additional aspiration toward synopticism that motivates Theft Is Property! Nichols is also interested in “more abstract theoretical considerations” that can aid in the “shared project of understanding and critiquing colonialism, capitalism, and modern property relations in their global context” (p. 9). As it is, the major insights of later sections appear the result less of reconstructing particularity and more of having foregrounded a temporal logic to dispossession that obtains across different contexts. At this higher register, the book’s brilliance lies in how Nichols’s “conceptual translation” of Indigenous critique gives further traction for critically parsing and seeking connections with various struggles under colonialism and capitalism. The claims that workers gain a propriety claim over their labor power in capitalism only through its alienation or that Black Americans only come to actualize self-proprietorship under conditions that demand its denial, as examples, point to different manifestations of contemporary domination both legitimated and occluded through recursivity. They point to a temporal logic to power as mediated through modern property claims and relationality tout court.

Critical theory’s difficulty in perceiving this recursivity seems not due to ahistoricity, per Nichols, however, but rather to what has historically counted as relevant for structural critique. The choice of critical theorists to relegate certain peoples or processes—Indigenous dispossession and Atlantic slavery, most obviously—as historically prior, peripheral, or immaterial is a shortcoming not of history, but of its own aspiration toward synopticism. This is why engaging and amplifying the critiques of those at the frontier of suffering and resisting processes such as dispossession remains a paramount task for critical theorists. Or as Nichols puts it in his discussion of Indigenous thought as an exemplar of “synoptic evaluation” (p. 87), what might appear the “particular” experiences and struggles of Indigenous peoples “nevertheless contains a dimension of concern to us in general” (p. 99). Theft Is Property! here does pressing and pivotal work: Nichols offers a compelling account not only of why Indigenous critiques should be taken more seriously by critical theorists, but also why such critiques may have distinctly discerned a temporal logic missed by critical theorists.

Diagnosing and critiquing settler colonialism and race and capitalism more fully will demand both further historicizing and theorizing across many conversations at multiple registers—as Nichols impressively showcases. But Theft Is Property! if sometimes in tension with Nichols’s own intentions, also points toward a unique contribution that critical theorizing can provide within this ongoing effort: historically grounded yet synoptic theorizing. Theft Is Property! is at its most impressive, in what is already an impressive work, when Nichols carefully considers not just what is "distinctive" (p. 10) in a relegated context, but also explores how that distinctiveness may speak to reiterating patterns and enduring structures that link struggles across time and space.