Thursday, December 7 at 12:30 PM PT
Buchanan Tower, Room 997
“Techniques of Time in Settler Colonial Utopia: Property-Owning Democracy and R.R. Torrens’ Archive” by CES Visiting Scholar Ari Finnsson
The concept of a “property-owning democracy,” coined by British Conservative MP Noel Skelton in 1923, exercised a powerful hold over a number of twentieth century political movements and thinkers, from John Rawls to Margaret Thatcher. Despite its influence on policy and theory, there are strikingly few historical analyses of the concept. In this talk, I trace a direct context for the development of Skelton’s thought by linking 1920s Britain to a central legal experiment in its colonial empire: the Torrens system of property registration. Instituted in 1858, Robert Richard Torrens’ system linked the simplification of transactions in land to Indigenous dispossession and visions of a property-owning democracy. These colonial legal reforms served as a model for a similar transformation of English property law in the 1920s under Skelton’s government. I argue, then, that the property-democracy dyad has a crucial moment of crystallization in the conditions of the settler colonial state and market construction.
Bio:
Ari Finnsson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research interests are in imperial intellectual history, including liberal political philosophy, law, biopolitics, political economy, and social and historical theory. His dissertation focusses on property-owning democracy and the entanglements between property, democracy, colonialism, and law in the French and British empires.