(Published at Left Eye On Books on September 27, 2011.)
The best part of “Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism,” the second and final entry in Globalization Studies professor Anthony Hall’s “The Bowl with One Spoon” project, is his willingness to experiment with the telling of history. Much like its predecessor, “American Empire and the Fourth World,” this book rejects narrowly focused ways of studying history and takes a generalist approach that weaves back and forth across five centuries. Hall describes his orientation as “Aboriginal history,” where the use of the word “Aboriginal” does not necessarily reflect a focus on indigenous peoples but rather an emphasis on the importance of points at which new dynamics and new patterns are introduced into history. In North America, of course, the colonial dynamics set in motion by contact between indigenous peoples and European empires are a key example of such a point, and…
Read the rest at Left Eye On Books.
