Review Essay: Agrarian Labor, Property, and Locke: Fashioning a Transnational Political Theory of Colonization

• Author: Siddhant Issar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128980
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 262 –270

© The Author(s) 2022

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Book Review

Book Review

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to

imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks

backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not

reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field

nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly

virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge

production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it,

reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to

late night conversations and confabulations.

Agrarian Labor, Property, and Locke: Fashioning a Transnational

Political Theory of Colonization

John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, by Barbara Arneil.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 240 pp.

Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony, by Barbara Arneil. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2017. 296 pp.

Reviewed by: Siddhant Issar, Department of Political Science, University of Louisville,

KY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128980

In the summer of 2020, mass mobilizations in the name of Black Lives

Matter forcefully brought attention to the deadly effects of white suprem-

acy and anti-Black racism. Protestors and anti-racist organizations high-

lighted the continuing legacies of African enslavement and Indigenous

genocide unleashed by the European colonization of the Americas.1 As stat-

ues celebrating the Confederacy were pulled down across the United States,

1. The Movement for Black Lives, “The Preamble: Vision for Black Lives,” M4BL,

2020, https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/the-preamble/.

1128980PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128980Political TheoryBook Review

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