THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 63
deed, the holocaust” of Native peoples,
he turns again and again to the accounts
of white settlers, soldiers, and journal-
ists, and only once cites a Native scholar
across more than thirty pages. This
shortcoming is characteristic of main-
stream popular history, where correc-
tive scholarship has only just begun to
complicate the timeworn tradition of
aggrandizing colonial narratives.
Even as Winchester dutifully rec-
ognizes the “shameful” and “repellent”
treatment of America’s Indigenous pop-
ulation, he tosses up odd quips and
cheeky asides, declaring, for example,
that Spanish conquistadores were a
“dishonorable exception” among the
European colonizers. He goes on to
offer a rosy depiction of the friendships
that settlers like Henry Hudson and
Francis Drake cultivated with local Na-
tives, overselling brief and oft-mythol-
ogized preludes to what became long
campaigns of subjugation and exter-
mination. Winchester’s account is fur-
ther undermined by a failure to cap-
ture the ongoing nature of many of his
chosen histories. Of the dispossessed
tribes in Oklahoma, for example, he
contends that “such anger as they might
justly feel has long ago ebbed, and it
just simmers in the far background.”
This will come as news to those who
converged at Standing Rock to oppose
the Dakota Access Pipeline—a mass
protest that, as chronicled in Nick Es-
tes’s “Our History Is the Future,” was
informed by an unbroken legacy of re-
sistance and has grown to become the
largest Indigenous movement of the
twenty-first century. It even reaches
into the Sonoran Desert, where O’od-
ham water and land defenders have
climbed into the buckets of bulldozers
to block the expansion of Trump’s bor-
der wall across their ancestral lands,
cleaved ever since the Gadsden Pur-
chase sketched a frontier across their
dryland farms and sacred springs.
Expulsion and dispossession is, to be
sure, a perennial tactic in the accumu-
lation of land. Centuries before Britain
began building its empire, powerful pri-
vate and state interests set about appro-
priating land long held in common by
English villagers, through a variety of
legal and parliamentary maneuvers, in
a process known as enclosure. These
appropriations were bolstered by a bur-
geoning top-down philosophy of indi-
vidualism, consolidation, and, ultimately,
privatization. Many villagers, after being
forcibly evicted from land they had
coöperatively tilled and managed since
time immemorial, joined resistance
movements, such as the Levellers and
the Diggers, while others moved to
growing towns and cities, swept into a
state-engineered demographic shift that
would help produce the urbanized labor
force required to run the newfangled
machines and factories of the emerg-
ing Industrial Revolution.
“Land” vividly depicts the brutal en-
closures that took place in Scotland at
the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury. During these Highland Clear-
ances, as they came to be known, thou-
sands of crofters were violently forced
from their homes in order to convert
entire farms and villages into pasture-
land for sheep. These clearances have
often been associated with a single vil-
lainous couple, the Duke and Duchess
of Sutherland, but Winchester relates
that they were in fact carried out by a
number of regional élites—a “punctil-
ious” lawyer, a diligent agricultural spe-
cialist, and a team of enforcers willing
to set fire to houses and churches. Inthe following chapter, he turns his at-
tention to today’s biggest landowners,
such as the Australian mining heiress
Gina Rinehart, the American media
magnates Ted Turner and John Ma-
lone, and the fracking billionaires Dan
and Farris Wilks, all of whom possess
country-size properties.
As Winchester gallops back and
forth through history, he too often
seems content to assemble an eccen-
tric cast of characters without saying
much about the systems that have em-
powered them. Even as he reports that
America’s top hundred landowners now
control an area as large as the state of
Florida, and that their accumulation
of property has increased by fifty per
cent since 2007, he does little to ground
us in the political and economic dy-
namics behind the historical events he
has laid out.
Enclosure is a subject that, Win-
chester observes, “invites the electro-
magnetism of the doctrinaire.” It’s true
that Karl Marx pointed to the enclo-
sures as a transformational stage in
European and world history, the be-
ginning of a centuries-long process of
“primitive accumulation,” in which
communal property and relations were