Despotic Dominion

John McLaren is Lansdowne Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. A.R. Buck is Senior Lecturer in Law and Editor of the Australian Journal of Legal History at Macquarie University. Nancy E. Wright is Director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Property Rights at the University of Newcastle.

• Acknowledgments1 Property Rights in the Colonial Imagination and Experience / John McLaren, A.R. Buck and Nancy E. Wright2 Encountering the Spirit in the Land: "Property" in a Kinship-based Legal Order / Richard Overstall3 Paper Empires: The Legal Basis of French and English Ventures in North America / Brian Slattery4 Concepts of Economic Improvement and the Social Construction of Property Rights: Highlights from the English-speaking World / John C. Weaver5 Warm Reception in a Cold Climate: English Property Law and the Suppression of the Canadian Legal Identity / Bruce Ziff6 Land Law, Liberalism, and the Agrarian Ideal: British North America, 1750-1920 / Philip Girard7 When Private Rights Become Public Wrongs: Property and the State in Prince Edward Island in the 1830s / Rusty Bitterman and Margaret McCallum8 "This Remnant of Feudalism": Primogeniture and Political Culture in Colonial New South Wales, with Some Canadian Comparisons / A.R. Buck9 "The Lady Vanishes": Women and Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century New South Wales / Nancy E. Wright10 The Establishment and Preservation of Hutterite Communalism in North America: 1870-1925 / Alvin J. Esau11 The Failed Experiments: The Demise of Doukhobor Systems of Communal Property Land Holding in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, 1899-1999 / John McLaren12 Co-existence and Colonization on Pastoral Leaseholds in South Australia, 1851-99 / Robert Foster13 Indian Reserves, Aboriginal Fisheries, and the Public Right to Fish in British Columbia, 1876-82 / Douglas HarrisAfterword / John McLaren, A.R. Buck, and Nancy E. WrightIndex