Deeds, Titles, and Changing Concepts of Land Rights: Colonial Innovations and Their Impact on Social Thought

This book explores the history of public land tenure records, which first began in colonial Massachusetts as English settlers and Native Americans tried to resolve differing ideas about rights to land in the seventeenth century. In South Australia, a similar method of state certification of land ownership arose in the nineteenth century, through Torrens system title registration – a process that would be widely adopted in British and American colonies as a particularly effective way of guaranteeing absolute ('fee simple') ownership over indigenous peoples’ land. This book explores the similarities between these two record systems, highlighting how similar settlement patterns and religious beliefs in both places focused attention on recording land tenure, and illustrating how these record systems encouraged new ways of thinking about rights to and on land. 

David Ress is an honorary research associate at the University of New England, Australia. He is the author of Municipal Accountability in the American Age of Reform (2018), and The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America (2019), both published by Palgrave Macmillan.