Introduction: Mr. Rowle Tries to Secure His Land

Uncertain of their right to land in what had been promised as a terra nullius, settlers in seventeenth century Massachusetts and nineteenth century South Australia pioneered official systems to publicly declare their places on the land. The impulse to do so arose from the shared circumstances of the two colonies—dismay on discovering land was already occupied by indigenous peoples and a desire for ordered settlement. The results—deed recordation at the local courthouse in Massachusetts, state certification of title through a government land registry in South Australia—would become standard in settler societies and in colonies where traditional land tenure did not easily accommodate plantation agriculture, commercial timber harvest, and mining. Both systems would reinforce the coalescing of a fairly wide range of early modern age notions about land rights into a simpler concept that land was most naturally occupied and used via fee simple (absolute ownership) tenure.