In the so-called “New World,” monarchs of several nations legitimized settler claims to Indigenous territory by resting their authority on a Christian-inflected cosmology of land that asserted a monarch’s divinely-ordained right to rule, even over lands very far from their original dominion. In the British Empire, this right to rule was most powerfully “landed” in the idea of “Crown tenure,” a legal fiction—or creation story—that held that all lands belonged, in a sense both spiritual and temporal, to the monarch. At this Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop, I examined what many scholars have pointed to as the tricky metaphysical grounding of monarchical claims to land in colonial modernity (which is, arguably, all modernity).
“Crown Land and the Spiritual Jurisdiction of Colonial Property”, Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, March 29.