Perhaps one of the earliest observations about the meaning of and relation between territory and property is that by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which opens the second part of his discourse on inequality:
Thefirst man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought of himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his
fellows:‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ (1986, p. 84) This is a very interesting observation. When people do not regard the earth as a property, it is simply a commons from which they take what is needed to survive. This is how most, and probably all, indigenous peoples
“used”the earth and they still do so; to them the earth is not a property that can be bought and sold.
Rousseau’s observation points to a commodification of the earth, and this happened when people shifted from nomadic to sedentary life, thus well before they started recording their activities. From Rousseau’s remark we can infer that territorialization is a social act, for it is established in interaction between people. Second, it also suggests that people living in sedentary communities with a population size larger than what can be effectively monitored on a kinship and friendship basis will operate upon, atfirst, an implicit, later an explicit system of social stratification (Massey, 2007). After all, no one objected to that one individual claiming a piece of land as his property, and we assume this is because he was considered superior in some respect.
The most commonly used definition of territoriality is that by Robert Sack:
“the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” (Sack, 1986, p. 19) We find a comparable emphasis on
“control” in the definition by Alan Buchanan and Margaret Moore: “. . . territory refers to the area or domain of jurisdictional authority of a ruler (in monarchical systems) or of the people who are conceived as sovereign (in democratic systems).”(2003, p. 328) The latter definition emphasizes that territory is not to be regarded as private property for two reasons. First, territory is the land where a community of people lives and since that territory is constitutive of that people’s identity it cannot be treated as a commodity; that is, the community does not“own”the territory. In a way this is reminiscent of how indigenous people view the earth as a commons. Second, private property can be acquired within a system of rules that is established by those in power, while territory circumscribes the area where those rules apply. Both these reasons apply to the sale or purchase of a territory. It is a somewhat different matter when territory is inherited; that is, when jurisdictional territory could be passed from one monarchical ruler to another or could be combined with other territories as in the case of dynastic marriage. To be sure, though, a ruler was not at liberty to simply cede territory (Buchanan and Moore, 2003, p. 330).
That too underlines how territory cannot be treated as private property.
Territory is an important resource in the struggle for power and status and is therefore open to political manipulation. It also buttresses claims of authority, and the higher population density is, the more that existing patterns of authority will be reinforced (Merelman, 1988, pp. 579–582).
Richard Merelman argues that authority is constrained by community, implicitly suggesting that authority travels top-down and is associated with the state while community functions bottom-up as it embodies localities (p. 586). Indeed, states compete with substate groups, communities, and individuals who seek some degree of control over land and resources (Peluso, 2005, p. 2), and they do so especially when local claims predate state claims (Wadley, 2003). States and their governments formally map territory, but these can be met with countermapping, which is when locals map village territories as they did in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. These countermaps became maps of power when authorized and used by regional and district authorities (Peluso, 2005, p. 12; for the importance of maps for defining territory, see Anderson, 2006).
In many places in the world formal jurisdictions represent a mix of state and local maps and practices, tying state and localities together.
Once the rights to resources are territorialized and mapped or docu- mented by the state, the state gains a certain power over those resources and the people claiming them. The state then manages the territory as eminent owner, superimposing its rights and power over the rights of locals. Henri Lefebvre suggests that centralizing state power results in neglect of the peripheries, the margins, the regions, the villages, and local communities. Hisautogestion or self-government denotes popular demo- cratic control over spatial areas or jurisdictions (as discussed in Brenner and Elden, 2009, pp. 360–361). In a recent study the anthropologist James Scott argued how the great majority of humankind operated for millennia on the basis of self-governance. Zomia (from zo = remote and mi = people) was the name he gave to the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia that included parts of India, Burma, China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Until the mid-twentieth century the local communities in these remote mountains were able to resist the encompassing and invasive power of the state, removing themselves from the effective control of the state. Thanks to technologies that pretty much demolished geographic distance (rail, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, and information technology), ever-larger parts of the globe have come in the state’s sphere of influence. By the second part of the twentieth century even the remotest territories were effectively incorporated in and by the state.
We mentioned previously that territory is an important source of power and status, so we must ask why rulers territorialize. Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso provide three motives. First, rulers are interested in protect- ing access to people and income from taxes and natural resources, espe- cially in a world where only territorial claims are regarded as legitimate.
Second, territorialization allowed for improved efficiency in the collection of taxes, both in terms of volume as well as regularity. Third, at the same time, territorialization is only possible when there is a sufficient level of commercialization and increased ability to extract taxes on a regular basis, in order to pay a regular salary for the officials administering the territory through their bureaucracies (1995, p. 390).
A pattern of territorialization can be discerned, from small to larger territories, and this involves a variety of tendencies (the following based on Sack, 1986, pp. 32–34). First and foremost is that territoriality classifies a specific area or a location in space. The boundary is, second, often easy to communicate by means of markers or signs. Third, it is the most efficient way that rulers can exercise and enforce control. Fourth, given that territory is a source of power, it is a means to reify power. At the same time and when possible, rulers do not like to be seen as those who forbid, so territoriality,fifth, moves attention away from the interaction between ruler and ruled and directs it to“the law of the land.”Sixth, it also makes relations impersonal, clarifying who “belongs” where in the imagined communities of the past and today. Seventh, territoriality is also a neutral means to define place and make it permanent through property rights.
An eighth feature is that it contains or shapes spatial properties of events, such as when a specific subnational unit receives national help in times of emergency. Ninth, territoriality also helps define empty space, such as an area without any socially or economically valuable features (e.g., a vacant lot in town). Finally, tenth, territoriality may help establish more territories.
The major historical trend is that the total number of territorial units has declined enormously since prehistory. Edward Deevey (1960; as refer- enced in Sack, 1986, p. 52) estimated that there may have been about 3 million people on the globe in the Upper Paleolithic (between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago) divided among some 100,000 or more independent, small units. After 10000 BCE the size of autonomous units increased, while at the same time each of these autonomous units became increasingly subdivided and fragmented into various types of territorial subunits. We shall see in Section 4 that territorial subunits became important from about 3000 BCE on.