Native
Peoples - At the time of the first Europeans arrived
at what we call Manhattan, the Lenape peoples organized their
society through kinship structures that were matrilineal. Families
were grouped in clans that traced their descent to a single common
female ancestor. Several clans were organized into “phratries;”
phratries into a people or tribe. Through this system, particular
clans were allowed to hunt, fish, gather and plant within an assigned
territory. The Lenapes moved in seasonal patterns that allowed
them to make efficient use of natural resources. This made the
boundaries of territories more fluid and the accumulation of objects
less common - traveling light being the standard. Lenape peoples
did not “own” territories in the modern sense of the
word; rather they held use rights. On occasion, those rights could
be shared through an exchange of gifts, a process that had far
ranging legal, social, diplomatic and spiritual ramifications
for the Lenape. The idea that such an exchange meant the permanent
loss of the use of a particular territory and indeed a forced
removal from it was unlikely to have been part of any consensual
agreement. Herein lies the crux of the dispute over the legitimacy
of the purchase of Manhattan.
Dutch - 1626-1664
- Dutch colonists brought Holland’s Roman-Dutch legal tradition
to the New World. This tradition was different in some keys way
from the English common law system. The Dutch used arbitrators
and referees rather than juries to settle disputes. Women could
own property, do business, and did not take their husbands names.
Roman-Dutch mutual or joint wills kept common property intact
after the death of either spouse, and inheritance was distributed
equally to all children, male and female, regardless of birth
order. This equality of inheritance frequently led to family farms
being divided into smaller and smaller plots. Slavery of Africans
and the indentured servitude of European commoners likely existed
from the first moment of European colonization.
English
- 1664-1783 - The Articles of Capitulation agreed to
by the Dutch when the English took possession of New Amsterdam
honored the property rights and legal traditions of Dutch individuals,
although the English model eventually supplanted those traditions.
One of the most notable changes was the economic disempowerment
of women, who were barred from doing business and took their husband’s
names. This nominal loss of identity signaled the relinquishing
of their own property and personal rights to their husbands (although
the husband could not sell his wife’s real property without
her signing off in a release of dower). Inheritance was limited
to a “dower’s right” of 1/3 of a husband’s
property (including property brought to the marriage by the wife).
The English model was designed to maintain vast heritable estates
that changed hands from father to eldest son, creating a system
of an apparently “natural” aristocracy of power and
wealth. This legal commitment to the accumulation of wealth in
the hands of a few took the
Dutch capitalists one step further, effectively projecting accumulations
across time and generations. This accumulation was aided by an
ongoing theft of labor, most notably those of slavery and wage
slavery.
United States - 1783-2002
- Modifications to property rights continue. The legal ownership
of human beings ended in 1863 after a massive civil war. Political
disenfranchisement via property ownership restrictions has ended
only slowly. Most property-less working class white males didn’t
gain full voting rights until the 1820s - fifty years after the
Declaration of Independence. African-American men had to wait
for the 14th Amendment in the 1860s and then lost ground for the
next hundred years. Women, still the property of their husbands,
were forced to wait till 1919. Other changes to property rights
include the arrival of copyright laws (designed to encourage innovation
by granting time-limited monopoly privileges to creative people,
including artists). Growing out of those laws and spurred by rapid
cultural and technological change, notions of intellectual property
are also in flux. Amazon.com’s ownership of a one-click
internet sale “business process” and Disney’s
attempt to rewrite U.S. copyright laws to maintain franchise of
a cartoon character whose creator is long dead are examples. Patent
ownership of genes and other biological tissues and processes
brings us back to the problem of the ownership of the human body
for purposes of financial gain.
