Properties of Empire examines contestations over power and policy in the Dawnland—the homelands of Wabanaki peoples on the Atlantic cusp of North America—that became a site of protracted struggle among Indigenous inhabitants, Anglo-American and French-Canadian colonizers, colonial and imperial government officials, and land companies. Focusing on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Saxine, an early American historian, assesses how and why distinct parties sought to maintain or transform systems of land-based power and rights. Over the course of eight chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, he examines the relationships that developed between Wabanaki leaders and “Bostoniak”—a Native term referencing Anglo-Americans, derived from the centrality of Boston, Massachusetts, as a locus for the British Empire’s regional presence (47).
Building on a growing body of scholarship attuned to Wabanaki-colonial dynamics, Saxine analyzes how Wabanaki polities strategically pushed back against English attempts to expand into and dispossess them of their homelands, employing a blend of diplomacy, armed conflict, alliance-building, and use of legal tools. Drawing on the beliefs and actions of prominent male Wabanaki leaders, such as Madockawando and Loron, Saxine underscores how adeptly Wabanaki communities managed a dizzying array of Anglo-American ideologies, policies, and practices related to land. The wider arc of Saxine’s argument follows Wabanaki efforts to enforce a “strategy of containment” (61), in which they permitted Anglo-American colonists to reoccupy former settlements but not to expand further. This approach soon devolved into complications, especially regarding Wabanaki understandings that land agreements could be renegotiated if circumstances or needs shifted.
Saxine emphasizes the close connection between periods of armed conflicts and subsequent escalations of settler colonial expansionism. Following the Treaty of Portsmouth (1713), Boston-based land speculators organized land companies and trained their sights on the potentially lucrative region to the northeast. The companies attempted to buy land claims abandoned by colonists who had recently retreated, anticipating that recolonization of the region could be extremely profitable. Entities such as the Pejepscot Proprietors and Muscongus Proprietors endeavored to manage their companies’ claims, but the absentee proprietors soon clashed with colonists and their families who physically moved to the region. A core theme of Saxine’s analysis is the struggle between relatively wealthy, politically well-connected absentee proprietors, and the much less economically prosperous colonists who actually moved onto these northern tracts. Proprietors tussled with colonists who sold off timber without overt proprietors’ permission, and debated whether physical improvement of the land (e.g., by building a house or plowing the land) was necessary to asserting landownership. These struggles did not unfold strictly among colonists, however. Saxine stresses how deeply they implicated Wabanaki assertions of rights and legality, prompting proprietors to articulate a system of landed property that relied on Indigenous agreements.
Saxine delineates how competing claimants mobilized not only paper documentation but also a blend of oral testimonies, gift exchanges, and participation in diplomatic processes that entailed many actions, consultations, and translations. To trace the evolution of these relationships, the chapters delve into pivotal agreements such as Dummer’s Treaty (1727), which the author situates as “bridging the divide between different cultures of ownership” (79). The author also contextualizes the protracted interpersonal negotiations that gave rise to these treaties, exploring consequential discrepancies between what was orally discussed and what ultimately was written down. The book devotes considerable attention to Massachusetts Governor Jonathan Belcher, characterized as a leader who “hoped to combine fairness toward the Indians with a profitable, orderly expansion of the British Empire into the Dawnland” (132). He contrasts Belcher with figures like Samuel Waldo, a Muscongus Proprietor who acted largely without support of the Massachusetts government; and with Belcher’s successor as governor, William Shirley, a member of the Muscongus Company who was highly personally invested in land speculation. Following the Seven Years’ War, the Wabanaki containment strategy “collapsed” as a flood of colonists entered the Dawnland, Saxine argues (190). A brief conclusion gestures at the ways that these contestations have reverberated into the present day, shaping the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act (1980) and ongoing Wabanaki involvement in matters of jurisdiction in their homelands and waterways.
Properties of Empire is a fine-grained cross-cultural study of trying “to bring order to a turbulent world.” The process, as Saxine conceptualizes it, was a multifaceted “conversation frequently marked by misunderstanding, deception, and even violence” (196–197). The book’s framework takes Wabanaki actors seriously as coproducers of legal and property regimes, rather than situating them as more passive respondents to colonial forces and ideologies; and it productively complicates what the “colonial” dimension entailed, highlighting dissonances within Anglo-American society and power structures.
