Savagery, civilization, and property V: Colonial development and Neo-Malthusian conservationism

In the last post in this series we saw how Enlightenment-era stadial thought was passed on to modern commons theory through the aboriginal property rights debate among twentieth-century ecologists. Today I'll discuss what I believe two more lines of influence. (The full article is here.)

The first was by way of the work of anthropologists and scientists associated with British colonial development efforts under the aegis of colonial administrator Malcolm Hailey. Lord Hailey, after a career in the Indian Civil Service, was tapped to run the African Survey in the 1930s and the Colonial Research Committee in the 1940s, and was an advocate of multidisciplinary social science research, particularly anthropological, in the colonies.

The staff of Hailey’s African Survey seem to have created something of a nexus for stadial thought in the context of colonial development. London School of Economics anthropologist Lucy Mair’s chapter on land made heavy use of the stadial framework for considering “the evolution of the most suitable form of land tenure”:

Lucy Mair

In some areas land custom is changing rapidly under the influence of new conditions, such as the increase of the pressure of population or the spread of a market economy. These changes will eventually involve official intervention . . . ; the need must, for example, be envisaged for the definition and recording of title . . .

There is nothing peculiar to Africa in the general direction which the evolution of land custom is taking; its adjustment in response to economic changes is a natural process which would occur independently of any action taken by the administration. 

In Mair’s analysis, traditional, communal forms of African land tenure needed to progress to more private rights in order to encourage development:

All discussions on the subject agree as to the value of giving security to the occupier of land, and the further advantage of what is generally termed the individualization of tenures. It has been urged on different occasions that the extended system of rights, vested in the family or group, has proved in Africa to be an obstacle to improved agriculture.

Strikingly, Mair also reported on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, avant la lettre, herdsman and all:

Those who have had to deal with East African conditions have added the . . . argument that there is little incentive to natives to reduce their live-stock in order to prevent the wastage of pasture and consequent erosion, since nothing done by the individual will avail unless his neighbours take corresponding action . . . 

Moreover, in a remarkable anticipation of later legal scholarship that highlighted potential “comedies of the commons” and “tragedies” of its disappearance,  she also warned of the advantages of common property in some situations: “The question of rights over grazing commonages presents its own difficulties; the partition of grazing grounds into small units would be a bar to the adoption of that rotational use of pasture which many hold to be the best preventive of erosion in East African conditions.”

Savagery, civilization, and property IV: The aboriginal property rights debate

In the last post in this series we saw how modern commons theory tracked many of the features of stadial theory. In this post I begin trying to uncover the routes by which the early modern theory reached modern thinkers on property.

The modern commons theorists discussed in the last post did not explicitly refer to the Enlightenment or Romantic thinkers whose theories may have influenced them. Yet the striking similarities between these two groups of theories, separated though they were by two centuries, seem to provide evidence of influence. It is likely that thinking in terms of civilizational stages was simply so deeply entrenched in the intellectual baggage of educated Westerners, whether through study of the classics, of Blackstone, or of Gibbon, that modern commons theorists replicated its patterns as a matter of course. Nevertheless, I suggest we can also trace more concrete lines of influence through the intertwined disciplines of anthropology and human ecology, as well as through the worlds of international development and conservationism.

Eleanor Leacock

An important branch of the field of anthropology’s research agenda was largely set in the mid-nineteenth century by stadial theory, and thereafter developed to a significant degree in dialogue with it. Anthropological works that clearly influenced modern commons thought, in particular those cited by Demsetz in his important 1967 article, were very much part of this dialogue, thereby infusing his work and that of others writing in the economic tradition with a large dose of stadial thinking.

The Victorian-era thinkers who strongly influenced anthropology in its founding era — Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels — were themselves influenced by the stadial theories of the late eighteenth century, and saw societies as evolving through modes of subsistence or production, viewed largely through the lens of property. But while Maine saw the transition from common to private property as a sign of civilization, Morgan, and, following him, Marx and Engels, saw this transition as a form of injustice and source of inequality (though perhaps a necessary one). 

Morgan, based on his knowledge of American Indians and reading of classical sources, argued that property was a key factor in the evolution of society as it progressed from a state of savagery (based on hunting) to barbarism (based on herding and farming) to one of civilization:

The idea of property was slowly formed in the human mind, remaining nascent and feeble through immense periods of time. Springing into life in savagery, it required all the experience of this period and of the subsequent period of barbarism to develop the germ, and to prepare the human brain for the acceptance of its controlling influence. Its dominance as a passion over all other passions marks the commencement of civilization. It not only led mankind to overcome the obstacles which delayed civilization, but to establish political society on the basis of territory and of property. A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.

As twentieth century anthropology developed the tool of ethnographic fieldwork, the work of many anthropologists, particularly in North America, revolved around supporting or disproving Morgan’s evolutionary account, with one arena of contention concerning the question of whether “primitive” hunting societies had private property or not.

The commons imaginary

I recently came across what seems to me a really important article, John Wagner's "Water and the Commons Imaginary", published in 2012 in Current Anthropology (along with a series of responses by other social scientists of the commons, including Elinor Ostrom, in what must have been one of her last writings). The abstract really doesn't do justice to the article's central argument, so I'll bring some excerpts here (citations omitted):

The term “commons” has been appropriated over recent decades by individuals, corporations, and interest groups seeking to benefit from the positive emotional responses that the term seems to evoke. In some cases—shopping commons, for instance—use of the term appears to be mainly a marketing strategy, but in other cases the term carries a definite political argument, most typically an argument against commodification, privatization, or enclosure and in favor of egalitarian, grassroots approaches to resource management. It is at this point that a clear break occurs between commons as a particular kind of institutional arrangement and commons-as-social-imaginary.

In applying the term “social imaginary” to the commons, I rely especially on the work of Benedict Anderson on imagined communities and of Appadurai on imagination and globalization. Commons constitute a very different kind of imagined community than a nation-state, but much of Anderson’s analysis is applicable nevertheless.... 

The commons imaginary can... be understood as a response to... fundamental changes in our social, economic, and political lives, particularly those associated with economic globalization, the accelerated pace of erasure of place-based communities and social identities, and global environmental and economic crises. The commons imaginary, like the nation-state, is also dependent for its construction on print and electronic media. The recent proliferation of the use of the term “commons”... clearly attests to the manner in which it is being constructed.

Moral and environmental pollution

Front cover for a booklet advertising tablets for coughs and colds brought on by smog (1913) (Wellcome Library)

Not long ago the occasion of the Jewish new year gave me cause to write on the connection between moral and environmental catastrophe. Brett Beasley recently came at the topic from another historical angle in the Public Domain Review, in "Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880)". Beasley writes that Hay's book "imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls 'the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed' at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942." He goes on:

Before we canonize Hay as an environmentalist and his story as An Inconvenient Truth in Victorian garb, we have to look at the story’s other features. Readers of The Doom of the Great City unfailingly notice that the story does not fit easily with other science fiction narratives, but seems to belong also to another class of tales, which Brian Stableford has called “ringing accounts of richly deserved punishment”. This is because Hay’s narrator seems to slide back and forth between material and moral explanations for pollution. While he talks of how “In those latter days there had been past years of terribly bad weather, destroying harvests”, he adds in the same paragraph, “prostitution flourished rampantly, while Chastity laid down her head and died! Evil! — one seemed to see it everywhere!”