The State of Nature and Colonialism: Empty vs Waste Land at Home and Abroad

Barbara Arneil

The ‘state of nature’ has many meanings.  In previous research, I have analyzed how John Locke’s understanding of the state of nature is central to his colonial justifications of settlers’ right to property in ‘waste’ lands of America via his agrarian labour theory of property.  While land and agrarian labour have been central to the process of colonization back to its earliest etymological origins in the Latin word ‘colonia’, in this paper I examine how the positing of land in its natural state as ‘empty’ or ‘waste’ in the modern British colonial imagination has shaped domestic and settler colonial policies from the 17th to 19th centuries; manifested in the practices of enclosure in Britain, dispossession in America and mass resettlement/removal of ‘idle’ and/or ‘irrational’ people(s) both at home and abroad.