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Chapter 1 / Use
Contemporary struggles over property in urban areas often revolve around
the concept of use. If p eople can use empty residential buildings for shelter,
particularly when there are severe housing shortages in many major cities,
shouldn’t their interests in property prevail over that of a genuinely absentee owner?1 The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (pah), to take
one salient example, base their struggle for social housing on the idea that
the social uses of property (residential housing stock in particular) should
have greater weight in defining property interests than property’s function
as an instrument of financial investment and expropriation. In the face of a
massive number of foreclosures and evictions in Spain in the aftermath of
the 2008 financial crisis, pah has sought to reinvigorate the provisions in
the Spanish Constitution that explicitly protect the right to housing, and to
challenge the primacy of the ideology of ownership itself.2
The relationship between the uses of property and property ownership
has a complex history, which persists into the present. The question of
whether the use of a t hing gives rise (or o ught to give rise) to an ownership
interest has long been a m
atter of g reat contestation and revolves around
the social, political, and economic value attributed to the particular form
of use at issue. For instance, the Franciscans famously distinguished their
use of property for the fulfillment of the necessities of life from the a ctual
ownership of that same property in view of their order’s prohibition on
accumulation.3 The question of w
hether Franciscan monks o ught to be
allowed to use property without being ensnared within legal relations of
ownership or, indeed, whether their use de facto constituted an ownership
interest was continuously posed by powerful clergymen and the pope during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.4 Ultimately, while the Franciscans’ use of property was juridically defined as being above and beyond the
legal domain, Thomas Frank argues that the undertaking to live in poverty
was understood as reaping a spiritual dividend. There was a “high degree of
exchangeability between material goods and spiritual performances,” with
the Franciscans’ use of property dependent on the license freely given to
them by the legal owners, the Roman Catholic Church.5
The separation of interests between those who use property or benefit
from its use and t hose who are the legal owners also lies at the basis of the
modern law of trusts. The modern trust is a legal device that has evolved
over time in order to split beneficial (or equitable) ownership from legal title
to property, which has its origins in the Roman law concept of “the use.”
Translated into the Norman idiom of the medieval period, the cestui que use
denoted one who was the beneficiary of property legally held by another.6
With the modern trust, the use of property for the good of beneficiaries covers a very wide spectrum indeed, encompassing both charities on one end
and private trusts used to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, while often
avoiding various liabilities, on the other.7 Precisely because of the contested
nature of use and its relationship to legal ownership—the question of how
property can and ought to be used, by whom and for whose benefit—this
conjuncture remains a potentially fruitful arena for reshaping prevailing
property norms.
Despite the flexible and variable nature of the relationship between use
and ownership, the physical occupation and use of land as a basis for owner
ship has been defined quite narrowly by an ideology of improvement in settler colonial contexts. Despite the widespread adoption in Canada, many
states in the United States, and Australia, among other places, of a system
of title by registration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(explored in chapter 2), the concept of use retains its place at the heart
of indigenous struggles for land. The social use of property (i.e., use that
is not solely defined by economic productivity and profit), and the use of
34 / Chapter 1
property to meet the basic necessities of life, such as shelter, form a part of
contemporary struggles to redefine relations of ownership in urban spaces.8
However, it is clear that historically speaking, in common-law jurisdictions,
use that would justify an ownership right was defined by cultivation, and
cultivation was understood within the relatively narrow parameters of En
glish agrarian capitalism. In settler colonies, early modern property logics
that posit cultivation as the basis of an ownership right shape the criteria
for establishing indigenous rights to land, which, in the context of a land
market where contemporary ownership is governed by a system of registration, produce anachronistic legal tests and legal subjectivities in the domain
of aboriginal title.
It is instructive, in considering how use remains a central characteristic
of aboriginal title in the Canadian context, as elsewhere, to consider the
ideology of improvement that came to shape property law from the seventeenth century. The logics of quantification and measurement that subtend
the ideology of improvement required new mechanisms for creating and
attributing value to people and the land to which they w
ere connected. We
see in the work of early political economists such as William Petty the formulation of a scientific approach to the measurement of the value of land
and p eople. The convergence of medical scientific understandings of the
human body, and anatomy specifically, with a method of evaluation based
on mathematics produced new forms of valuing land, produce, and people,
and in turn justified new and emergent forms of colonial governance.
The imperative to quantify and measure value created an ideological
juggernaut that defined p eople and land as unproductive in relation to
agricultural production and deemed them to be waste and in need of improvement.9 The creation of an epistemological framework where people
came to be valued as economic units set the ground for a fusing together
of ownership and subjectivity in a way that had devastating consequences
for entire populations who did not cultivate their lands for the purposes
of commercial trade and marketized exchange. Th
ese populations w
ere by
definition uncivilized and could be disposed of, cast out of the borders of
political citizenship. The brutal displacement and dispossession of thousands of Irish that preceded the displacement of First Nations from their
lands, based on the political arithmetic of Petty and those influenced by
his work, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, is testament to the violence
Use
/ 35
engendered by methods of measurement and quantification, and conceptualizations of value defined primarily by economic productivity.
In this chapter, I argue that in the settler colony, use remains at the core
of prevailing definitions of aboriginal title. Governed by an ideology of improvement, the manner in which First Nations have historically used their
land and whether it conforms to an idea of cultivation and settlement that
emerged during the transition to agrarian capitalism in E
ngland has formed
a primary criterion in adjudicating aboriginal title claims in the Canadian
context, and as we will explore in chapter 3, in the Israeli/Palestinian context as well. Indigenous ways of using and owning land that don’t conform
to this ideal of settlement have been relegated to a prehistory of modern
law.10 This ideology of improvement is one that binds together land and its
populations; land that was not cultivated for the purposes of contributing to
a burgeoning agrarian capitalist economy by industrious laborers was, from
the early seventeenth century onward, deemed to be waste.11 Whereas wasteland was free for appropriation, those who maintained subsistence modes
of cultivation, for instance, were cast as in need of improvement through
assimilation into a civilized (read English) population and ways of living. In
this chapter, the racial regime of ownership that articulates both land and its
people as in need of improvement reappears across many colonial jurisdictions
at different historical junctures, each with their own specificities.
In seventeenth-century colonial Ireland, the value of land and populations was assessed on the basis of their productivity, the former measured
according to agricultural output and the latter by their capacity to cultivate.
In Petty’s writings we see the beginnings of what could be termed an early
labor theory of value, rendering the value of both land and human life as
equivalences based on the cultivation of land. The subsequent evaluation of
both uncultivated land and the people associated with subsistence modes of
life as waste is distinct, however, from the concept of a surplus population,
as elaborated by Marx. The colonial compulsion to improve the native was
not conditioned by the need to create a reserve army of labor. Rather, what
is evident is a desire to expel or criminalize populations who are not settled
on the land and who do not engage in marketized forms of cultivation. The
lack of fixity or the nomadic character of populations has long been a basis
for their criminalization and expulsion from the body politic. Foucault points
to the first economic analyses of delinquency in eighteenth-century France,
36
/ Chapter 1
which identified the vagabond as a criminal element in society who deserved
to be stripped of civil status: “[E]ntry into the world of vagabondage is the
main thing to be punished; entry into the world of delinquency is the fact
of travelling around, of not being settled on an estate, of not being defined
by a job. Crime begins when one has no civil status, that is to say geo
graphical location within a definite community, when one is ‘disreputable
(sans aveu).’ ”12 The eighteenth century witnesses both the criminalization
of groups of people not tethered or fixed geographically to regular work, as
well as the rise in statistical forms of knowledge aimed at the governance of
these (and other) populations. While Foucault does not address the colonial context, the criminalization of mobile groups of p eople found its legal
expression, in the colonial context as elsewhere, in the crime of trespass. First
Nations who, prior to the arrival of settlers, engaged in mobile and seasonal
forms of cultivation and labor were rendered as inherently inferior, demonstrably lacking the norms of propriety required for full civil status. The Irish
were viewed, from the beginnings of colonial settlement in the seventeenth
century, as somewhat less than human on account of the lack of permanence
that characterized the dwellings of laborers. In the nineteenth century, the
racial difference of First Nations, based on the nature of their land use, is
cast by the surveyor Trutch in British Columbia in civilizational terms; and
finally in the twenty-first century, race appears primarily as a discourse of
cultural difference in the case of the Tsilhqot’in land claims. The figure of the
seminomad, recuperated and rehabilitated in recent indigenous rights litigation, bears the mark of this globalized history of exclusion.
This chapter proceeds in three parts. In the first part, I trace the history of the
ideology of improvement through the work of William Petty. While Baconian influences on his thought are undoubtedly relevant, I focus here on the
way in which Petty conceives of wealth and value in the Political Anatomy and
Political Arithmetick. The fusing together of the value of land with the value
of p eople emerges in the context of colonial Ireland, where early attempts
to measure land with the use of a cadastral survey coincided with the desire
to measure the value of the population on the basis of their consumption
and productive labor. In the work of Locke and Blackstone, the attributions
of savagery and underdevelopment to populations not engaged in waged
Use
/
37
labor or capitalist agrarian production as set forth by Petty are historicized
and spatialized. The Indians of North America, lacking the laws of private
property, inhabit a premodern space, a time and place before the advent of
civilization.
In the second part of the chapter, I examine colonial settlement in British Columbia, and the widespread use of preemption and homesteading as
the primary legislative devices used to settle unceded aboriginal lands. An
examination of the attitudes and actions of colonial administrators, notably
Joseph Trutch, reveal how First Nations’ land was surveyed and remapped
in the service of consolidating colonial sovereign control over it. We glean
insight into how both the land and First Nations w
ere viewed by colonists
such as Trutch, who was motivated as much by individual greed for personal profit as g rand civilizational and imperial objectives. Possession and
the acquisition of aboriginal land, the necessary precondition for the development of agriculture, industry, and the accumulation of wealth by individuals as well as the colonial states they represented, s haped land law in
colonial British Columbia, as elsewhere. What is of interest h
ere is the major
role that the ideology of improvement played in this process, and the way
in which it enfolded the valuation of land and indigenous populations into
one juridical formation, governing colonial spaces through a racial regime of
ownership predicated on cultivation and racial hierarchies determined by
this form of land use.
By way of conclusion, I examine the aboriginal title case of Tsilhqot’in v.
British Columbia (2014). I analyze key judgments of the Supreme Court
of Canada relating to section 35 jurisprudence on aboriginal title, and consider the Supreme Court’s redefinition of the concept of aboriginal title to
include the practices, forms of land use, and worldview of seminomadic
peoples. In augmenting the concept of aboriginal title in this way, I argue
that the Supreme Court has taken a significant step forward in taking into
account aboriginal perspectives within the parameters of a colonial legal
paradigm and yet remains tethered to an anthropological schema that
can only recognize indigenous difference in terms of the language of nomadism. This theme is then explored in relation to the dispossession of the
Bedouin in southern Israel in chapter 3.
The concept of improvement as the defining criterion for establishing
a legitimate right to property finds its clearest expression in the work of
38 / Chapter 1
Locke. However, the fusing together of the value of land and p eople, and
the conceptualization of value according to specific ideas of improvement,
emerges in the work of William Petty, whose Political Anatomy of Ireland
and Political Arithmetick forged a new way of conceiving of and valuing
wealth (and, significantly for my purposes, its constituent components including land and populations) in the space of the colony of Ireland. As I
argue below, the ideology of improvement came to be governed by a logic
of calculation and measurement. The approach taken by Petty reflects the
influence of Baconian natural history on his thought; emerging ideas about
taxonomy and classification, the use of mathematics to compile statistical
knowledge of the human body and populations, coalesce with the desire to
increase individual and national wealth. What emerges, as we see below, are
new ways of quantifying both land and p eople, binding the value of one to
the other. One of the first devices of measurement utilized to change the
fabric of Irish society and economy was the land survey.
the pol itic al anatomy of colonization
abour is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother.
L
—William Petty, Economic Writings
William Petty was an inventor, an entrepreneur, a physician, and a progenitor
of modern political economy. It was his appointment as physician-general to
the army in Ireland, and to General Ireton, the commander in chief in 1651
that first took him to Ireland.13 This appointment marks the beginning of a
long period of time in which Petty would have a profound influence on the
appropriation of Irish lands and the displacement and dispossession of countless communities. The use of the survey as a technology for quantifying the
value of land was refined by Petty in the Irish context, and deployed in many
different colonial contexts thereafter.
By the mid-seventeenth c entury, Ireland lay, in the eyes of the English
colonial power, a conquered and defeated territory. What remained as a
prime concern to the English, however, was how to render the Irish into
a complete state of submission; as conflict raged between Protestants and
Catholics all over the European continent, there was fear of ongoing conflict with the Irish. The mass displacement and transportation of the Irish
Use
/ 39
to England was viewed as a potential solution to war, but one that carried
its own risks: “ ‘The unsettling of a nation,’ they [the colonial council]
pointed out, ‘is an easy work; the settling is not,’ and the transplantation
could have but one result—the permanent mutual alienation of the English
and the Irish, and the division of the latter between a large discontented
garrison beyond the Shannon and scattered bands of pillaging Tories on
this side of the river.”14
By 1687 Petty would have devised a plan that involved forcibly transporting up to a million Irish from their native lands. His plan was based not solely
on the fear of religious foment, however, but on a calculation. The value of
the Irish was quantified according to their potential labor value, a calculation based on the idea that mathematical rules could provide a neutral, objective means of producing knowledge, useful for creating and measuring
wealth.15 Viewing the Irish population as an amalgam of economic units
was bound to his valuation of the land, which began with the Civil Survey.
Petty’s partitioning and parcellization of Ireland began when he was appointed in 1654 to undertake a survey. The urgent need to survey and value
the land was driven by the debt owed by the British Crown to the army,
and the “private adventurers” who had defeated the Irish in the war of 1648.
Approximately one-eighth of all of Ireland was set aside to pay those who
had privately invested in the bloody suppression of the Irish in exchange
for land. In order to pay the arrears in property, there was a need to survey, map, and value all of the appropriated land. Petty proposed a survey of
Ireland, to be followed by a mapping exercise. This initial survey then was
quite unrelated to the mapping exercise; Fitzmaurice notes that it was called
a “Civil Survey” as it involved the making of lists of descriptions of existing estates and territory, their acreage and value. Fitzmaurice notes that “the
Civil Survey was simply a specification of lands, recorded in lists, with brief
descriptive notes as to acreage and value, and partook of the character of
what in modern days is called a valuation list or register. There were no maps
attached to it, and the scheme of the general map, though present to the
minds of the authors of the ‘Grosse Survey,’ had hitherto never been effectually carried out, though commenced here and t here.”16
Petty was at the forefront of the Downs Survey, commenced in 1655, which
was a large-scale mapping exercise based on a cadastral survey of the land. As
Linebaugh and Rediker have noted, “the Downs Survey facilitated a massive
40 / Chapter 1
land transfer to private adventurers, soldiers, who were part of an ‘immigrant
landlord class.’”17 Like other colonial surveyors of subsequent generations
such as Joseph Trutch, Petty used his position as surveyor to amass a personal
fortune. By 1688, he had been granted 160,000 acres in the county of Kerry.18
He exploited Irish forests in the three baronies he had gained possession of,
Iveragh, Glanaroughty, and Dunkerron, in order to make a quick profit.19
While the ironworks he started were not as successful financially as he had
initially hoped, they still yielded a profit for the enterprising colonist.20
In addition to appropriating Irish lands as payment to the English adventurers, Petty’s assiduousness in pursuing the general survey of Ireland was a part
of his larger objective of devising a means of calculating national wealth. A key
component in assessing national wealth, in Petty’s view, meant accounting for
rent. Rent from lands formed a major plank in his method of calculation of national wealth, because it was a source of revenue through taxation, and because
it reflected the size and productivity of the population.21 As noted above, the
size of the population was also a determining f actor in the capacity of a nation
to generate wealth. Poverty, as defined by Petty, was “fewness of p eople.”22
The excision of “a sixth part of the rent of the w
hole, which is about the
proportion, that the Adventurers and Souldiers [sic] in Ireland retribute to
the King as Quit Rents” was in Petty’s view the most secure way of generating
the “publick charge.”23 Petty’s ruminations on the most expedient form of tax
collection involve a discussion of taxation on agricultural yield and, relatedly,
the differential profits generated by a farmer as opposed to a landowner who
rents his land to a tenant farmer. Who bears a greater taxation burden, the
landowner who expends nothing on labor and yields no profit from the agricultural production of his tenant, but who collects a rent from a tenant, or the
landowner-farmer who “with his own hands plants a certain scope of Land”
with crops?24 In this context we see one aspect of what is a major contribution
to political economy, an early labor theory of value. What allows Petty to assess and evaluate these differences is not the price paid for agricultural yield
or rent in gold or silver coins, but the “two natural Denominations . . . Land
and Labour.”25 Land and labor ought to be the measures for the value of rent,
and for the price of land itself. “[T]hat is, we ought to say, a Ship or garment
is worth such a measure of Land, with such another measure of Labour; forasmuch as both Ships and Garments were the creatures of Lands and mens [sic]
Labours thereupon: This being true, we should be glad to fine out a natural Par
Use
/ 41
between Land and L
abour, so as we might express the value by either of them
alone as well or better than by both, and reduce one into the other as easily and
certainly as we reduce pence into pounds.”26
Land and the labor of men o ught to be conceptual equivalents; they are
inextricably bound to one another. The improvement of one requires the improvement of the other. If men are not industrious and productive workers of
the land, the land w
ill be, like them, worth less, perhaps even worthless. Petty
writes with unconcealed contempt of the “poor” Irish who farm and labor in
sufficient quantities for subsistence but seemingly aspire to nothing more
than that. Describing their existence as nothing short of brutish, Petty
writes that the “Bulk of the Irish . . . are wretched Cabin-mens, slavishly
bred.”27 The “nasty Cabbins . . . by reason of the Soot and Smoaks . . . and
the Narrowness and Nastiness of the Place . . . cannot be kept Clean nor Safe
from Beasts and Vermin, nor from Damps and Musty Stenches.” They lived
in a backward condition that required improvement if Ireland were ever to
develop its natural fitness for trade.28
Land and the men who labored upon it were inextricably bound to one
another in Petty’s new method of valuation of wealth. The measures of
wealth were land and p eople, and both w
ere reduced to economic units.
Another example of how land and the lives of men w
ere reduced to economic equivalents of each other can be seen in Petty’s method of valuing the
fee simple title to a piece of land. He relates the value of land and the value of
people through time, measured by the life span of men as workers. He takes
three generations of men—grandfather, father, and son—and reasons that
the land value is equal to the number of years its owners will be able to use
and improve it (based on an estimation of the number of years that all three
generations who are in a continual line of descent will coexist as producers).
Here is where the rudimentary statistical information garnered in the Bills
of Mortality generates the beginnings of data collection for the purposes of
political economy and population control.29
In The Political Anatomy of Ireland the treatment of men, women, and
children (or families) as economic units is honed to a crude science. Having
accounted for the number of people based on religious belief, the number
of families, and the relative wealth of families based on the type of dwelling
(and the number of chimneys of each dwelling), Petty values the population according to their labor and the cost of reproducing the lives of la42 / Chapter 1
borers. In the Verbum Sapienti, the second chapter, titled “The Value of
the People,” reads like a slightly delirious set of calculations. Estimating the
value of people’s productive output, the cost of their labor, and the value of
stock (“wealth”) of the nation, Petty concludes that “6 Millions of P
eople
[are] worth 417 millions of pounds Sterling” and that accordingly, each one
of them is worth “691 [pounds].”30 This leads him to make concrete suggestions about how the cost of reproducing labor could be reduced (by, for instance, limiting the number and duration of meals laboring men normally
consume) in order to increase wealth. The ideology of improvement tied the
industriousness of individuals and national interests together, reflected in
the metaphor of the beehive inscribed in Petty’s coat of arms.31
This reductively economistic view of human life that was directly related
to the value of land was at the same time racial and gendered in its conceptualization. Although Petty did not seem to attribute Irish laziness to
the state of their bodily constitution, he did see Irish and English difference
as somehow inherently biological.32 His solution for quelling Irish rebellion involved the intermarriage of English women and Irish men, and Irish
women to English men, who would raise their c hildren to be English speaking, and the “whole Oeconomy [sic] of the F
amily” would be English.33 The
deficiencies of the Irish could be ameliorated by mixing their blood with
that of the Eng lish. This appears as a precursor to the full-blown blood
quantum racism in Australia in the nineteenth century, where the prevailing
policy for several decades was to assimilate aboriginal communities starting
with mixed-race children, who were perceived as closer to being white on
account of their parentage. Petty’s suggestion of mixing Irish and English
blood through reproduction, in order to produce a more industrious and
disciplined population, is akin to the method an agricultural scientist might
utilize in the interbreeding of plant species to improve yield.
Intermarriage with the English was just one means of improving the Irish.
In the report issued in 1676 from the Council of Trade in Ireland to the lord
lieutenant and council, authored by Petty, he renders a list of “considerations
relating to the Improvement of Ireland.” Th
ese recommendations include
the improvement of household dwellings, the planting of gardens (as stipulated by the Statute for Hemp and Flax), and the protection of “industriousness,” among other things. Generally, Petty proposed that economic growth
in Ireland depended on the settling and anglicizing of the Irish population.34
Use
/ 43
While modern biological racism had yet to emerge, conceptions of racial
difference and, crucially, European superiority were conditioned at this time
by the concept of land use described above. While Petty saw the Irish as
capable of improvement, Jews were cast outside this paradigm altogether
on account, at least in part, of their tenuous relationship to the land. In his
Treatise of Taxes, he distinguishes Jews not only on the basis of communal
and religious difference, but on the basis of their chosen livelihoods, which
in his view rendered them justifiably liable to higher taxes in well-populated
countries: “As for Jews, they may well bear somewhat extraordinary, b ecause
they seldom eat and drink with Christians, hold it no disparagement to
live frugally, and even sordidly among themselves, by which way alone they
become able to under-sell any other Traders, to elude the Excize, which bears
but according to mean expenses; as also other Duties, by dealing so much
in Bills of Exchange, Jewels, and Money, and by practising of several frauds
with more impunity then o thers; for by their being at home e very where,
and yet no where they become responsible almost for nothing.”35
The anti-Semitic trope of the wandering Jew that was all too familiar by
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colors Petty’s assessment of Jews
in Europe. Avoiding tax by not participating in the general economy, with
no attachment to the land, Jews w
ere cast outside the bounds of legibility
within the primary economy of landowners and laborers. Much like the
Jewish characters in paradigmatic eighteenth-century novels such as Waverley and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, the figure of the Jew is rendered, in
ways reminiscent of Foucault’s vagabond, as one who deserves to be stripped
of civil status and political rights due to an apparent lack of geographical
fixity. It is also this form of anti-Semitism that arguably informs the Zionist
emphasis on laboring on the land as key to the redemption of the Jewish
people in Palestine, explored in chapter 3.
Petty’s political arithmetic was influenced by the revolution in scientific
method heralded by Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. As is widely recognized, Petty (along with many other of his contemporaries) was inspired by
Bacon’s intellectual agenda, which emphasized the importance of an empirical method and the centrality of experimentation to the study of natural history.36 Bacon lamented the sedimentation of ideas whose presuppositions
were merely taken for granted on the basis of their age, and the repetition of
44
/ Chapter 1
syllogisms based on abstract logic rather than observation and induction.37
Bacon set out to devise a scientific method that would “equip the h
uman
understanding to set out on the ocean”; presumably Bacon meant the ocean
of knowledge, but recognizing the influence of his method on colonial
explorers and collectors of exotic specimens of plants and animals would
foreshadow a much more literal application of his method throughout the
colonial world.38
The influence of Baconian empiricism on Petty’s work can be seen in the
construction of mathematical data based on a keen observation of the Irish
peasantry. The approach taken in the Political Anatomy of Ireland reflects
his training as a physician; he observes the land and its inhabitants, collects whatever data w
ere available about the p eople as a population, gives
a diagnosis of the factors preventing improvement in Ireland, and gives a
prescription for amelioration. In conceiving of the anatomy of the Irish
economy, Petty’s work focuses on the constituent parts of this body politic
and also considers it as a whole. Individual habits of consumption, hours
of labor and rest, and ways of living are analyzed in conjunction with economic categories and political interests. The peculiar mixture of mathematical accounting and scientific method that reduced h
uman life to economic
units was, in part, what marked the ingenuity of Petty’s method.
The economic context in which Petty was writing was one to which
the colonies had become quite central. Colonial trade in the seventeenth
century not only was understood to increase consumption and the presence
of consumer goods for an increasingly affluent class, but became a central
pillar in Petty’s calculations of English national wealth.39 This was not, however, only a m
atter of inclusion in emergent methods of calculation; both
the voyages of discovery and colonial spaces were central figures in both the
scientific and economic imaginaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bacon was of the view that voyages of d
