Registration: Erasing Indigenous Land Rights

Land title registration on Torrens’ model spread quickly, not only to other settler colonies in Australia, New Zealand, and western Canada, but also to colonies where indigenous peoples’ land tenure ideas and practices did not accommodate plantation agriculture, commercial timber operations, or mining. Registration in the Philippines and Malaysia, both of which adopted Torrens’ system, erased those traditional land rights concepts, while the system in Fiji (in addition to incompletely understanding traditional tenure approaches) became a way of isolated indigenous people from a plantation system. The African experience suggests registration became a tool used by an elite with access to the mechanisms of state power to maintain traditional control over rural populations.