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Pre-emption is a legal doctrine that was used throughout the United States and Canada during the 19th and early 20th centuries to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land, and to create markets in privately-held property for settlers. In this presentation, I trace some of the origins of pre-emption, to illustrate how colonial assertions of sovereignty and the legitimacy of individual settler claims to private property were dependent upon one other for their realisation. Practices of pre-emption reveal how the state relied on the extralegal violence of settlers to solidify control over vast Indigenous territories, blurring the boundary between public and private forms of power. Moreover, the racial regime of ownership enacted by pre-emption presupposed forms of affinity between colonial officials and ‘desirable’ settlers that can be conceptualised as a kind of racial kinship – one that continues to inform struggles over land, property and public space today.

Brenna Bhandar is Associate Professor at Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. Prior to joining UBC, she was Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London. She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (DUP: 2018), and co-editor (with Rafeef Ziadah) of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso: 2020) and (with Alberto Toscano) of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso: 2022).