Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) emerged into a world with no British Empire, at least not in the sense that this collection of essays probably conjures up for most readers. As James Knapp put it, England had an “empire nowhere” in the early modern period. Nevertheless, when James I combined the kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1603, he, like monarchs before him, claimed to rule an “empire.” His cartographer, John Speed, faithfully records this assertion in his atlas, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1612). But England – unlike Portugal and Spain – had no successful New World colonies at the time, much less in Asia or Africa; its holdings in France were long lost, Ireland was doubtful, and even its trade network was modest compared to that of the Dutch. Speed’s volume included maps of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and “the iles adjoining” only. The “British Empire,” in the modern sense of an expansive network of distant settler and extractive colonies, did not yet exist, though nineteenth-century colonial propagandists tendentiously backdated their own assumptions to the Renaissance (see Reference Armitage and CannyArmitage).

What did exist, though, was what James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) later described as “domestic” empire. “Empire,” for Harrington, resulted from relations of dependency, predicated on uneven control over land, wherever it occurs. Speed’s volume, with its detailed maps and accounts of each British shire, “with her cities and earls described,” illustrates this state of affairs emphatically. When land is held overwhelmingly by the Crown, aristocracy, and urban corporations, dependency ensues. “He who wanteth bread, is his servant that will feed him,” Harrington observed, a relationship that he attributed to lack of access to land (4).¹ Writing during the Interregnum, his main concern is casting doubt on domestic empire, which, he argues, makes the freeholders’ commonwealth he longed for impossible; he thus proposes distributing private property in land among a large enough number of citizen-owners to obviate monarchy and aristocracy. Intriguingly, “foreign” empire, too, was undesirable in his view, not least because he (presciently) worried it would lead in time to rebellion.

The key immediate point, though, is that his understanding of “empire,” whether domestic or foreign, is materialist: based on control over land. Marx later decries unequal landholding as well when he lays out the long process of dispossession of land, specifically, as necessary to producing the “capital relation” in both Europe and the colonies in the Primitive Accumulation chapters of Capital; unlike Harington, however, Marx proposes abolition of private property altogether as the antidote – as do More’s Utopians. Though their assessments are different, More, Harington, and Marx all recognize that the dependency required by colonialism and capitalism alike was well underway domestically in England by the sixteenth century because of unequal control of land.

But what do Utopia – and utopia – have to do with what Harrington calls “foreign” empire? A great deal according to many critics (including Knapp) who have dedicated themselves to “decolonizing” utopia, sometimes by exploring the “utopian” production of non-Western peoples, but more often by denouncing the damage that “utopia” has purportedly done in supporting European colonization.² Karl Reference HardyHardy, for example, asserts that “without a doubt, More’s Utopia, much of the ensuing modern utopian literary tradition, and the utopianism of settler societies are substantial contributors to the naturalization of settler societies” (133). Earlier, John Mohawk, himself a Seneca, traced a “history of conquest and oppression in the Western World,” which he describes as a “utopian legacy.” Defining utopia as a vision of a “perfect society,” he claims that though such visions can be found in all cultures, the insidiousness of “Western” utopia is its collapsing with what he, following Isaiah Berlin, calls “pursuit of the ideal,” a tendency to package up brutal self-interest as “utopia.” Similarly, Sylvia Reference WynterWynter devastatingly observes that “White Utopia was the Black inferno” (210). All this sounds damning indeed for utopia, and yet I want to pose some dialectical “doubt” where Hardy sees none, because his claim is only part of the story. At the same time as Wynter excoriates “White” utopia, she also uses “utopian” affirmatively to describe resistance to dehumanizing treatment of the enslaved in, for example, song and dance. And, while Reference MohawkMohawk denounces a “utopian legacy,” he does not include Utopia itself as part of that project, instead describing it as a “reaction to the wretched conditions of poverty and injustice being produced in England” by enclosure (144). It would be more accurate, then, to view “utopia” as a site of struggle from the sixteenth century onward rather than dismissing it tout court as a thoroughly contaminated colonialist project.³

One problem for Hardy’s contention about Utopia, at least, is that early English references to Utopia in print – including in colonial propaganda – are ambivalent, skeptical, or forthrightly hostile, far more likely to distance themselves from utopia than to embrace it.⁴ Particularly disturbing to early English commentators is Utopia’s refusal of private property, which they saw as threatening to social stability at home and retrograde to advancing trade and empire abroad. Such responses raise the question of whether a social order that eschews private property can be “colonialist” at all, given that not only Marxists, but Indigenous studies, as I will discuss shortly, view the imposition of private property in land as an irreducible aspect of capitalist colonization.

Many early English readers, in any case, viewed Utopia as worrisomely hostile to private property from the start. In his influential The Governor (1531), Thomas Elyot, one of More’s closest associates, explicitly denies that “Commonwealth” means that “every thing should be to all men in common without discrepance of any estate or condition,” declaring not only that this is a misuse of the word, but also – reversing Hythloday’s charge in Utopia that private property is an insidious conspiracy of the rich – that persons who advocate for such a commonwealth are “moved more by sensuality than by any good reason or inclination to humanity” (A[1]r). David Weil Reference BakerBaker observes that with this move Elyot is attempting to “dispel the notion that The Governor will be an English Utopia” (Reference Elyot92). A century later, Robert Reference BurtonBurton’s “poetical commonwealth,” in the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), still finds it necessary to assert the sanctity of inequality and private property against what he calls “Utopian parity.” “That which is common, and every mans,” he complains, “is no man’s”; it “takes away all splendor and magnificence” (57–8). Gerard Malynes (Reference Malynes1622), likewise rejects Utopia’s “all things … common” because “the same was never used in any age, nor by the Word of God commanded, when from the beginning he willed man to subdue the earth and rule over the fish” (Lex Mercatoria 186). Earlier (Reference Malynes1603), Malynes had protested that all countries that are “decent and of estimation” value gold and gems, while the “Indian and Blackamoor” do not, before launching into an extended paraphrase of Utopia, whose invented citizens he associates with actual “Indian[s] and Blackamoor[s]” in their (perverse, to him) devaluation of gold (View 98–103). He then attempts to refute Utopia’s “strange” account further, adding: “with great reason therefore hath gold his due estimation above other things,” at least in places where people live “in the most civil manner above other nations which live barbarously” (105–6). So far is he from seeing Utopia as a how-to manual for colonization, Malynes associates it with the lifeways and attitudes of peoples ripe for it. Apparently, utopia had to be made useful to colonialism if Utopia is to be associated positively with actual colonial projects.

And it was. Early English colonies were retrospectively described as “utopia” after they were well established, as when Cotton Mather observes in his 1693 Wonders of the Invisible World that readers “who mistook Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, for a Country really existent … might now have certainly found a Truth in their Mistake; New-England was a true Utopia” (Reference Mather10). Much later, ignoring the withering judgment on the present of Cotton’s past tense, Ronald Reagan deployed John Winthrop’s New England “City on a Hill” as if it described not only an actually-existing utopia (it did not) but also the twentieth-century United States.⁵ English colonization demonstrably becomes entangled with “utopian” tropes. But questions remain: Does this entanglement completely suppress other work that “utopia” might perform? And: What is the significance of the struggle over utopia that ensues in the gap between the time of More and Mather, given that English writers in the first century following Utopia’s publication generated a fervent “rhetoric of reaction” in response to it, rejecting not only objectionable (to them) aspects of More’s book, but often utopianism tout court, associating utopia with the false, the suspect, and the seditious.⁶

In the face of this rhetoric, ideological effort was required by organic intellectuals of colonization for it to cohabit cozily with utopia. Of particular interest in making utopia safe for colonization is A Letter Sent by I. B. (1572) that unfolds in a fictional dialogue a plan for “peopling and replenishing [Ireland] with the English nation,” despite “doubts and exceptions” circulating in England against such projects. This pamphlet has recently been described as deploying “eutopia” in a positive sense in relation to colonization (Reference HoganHogan, 97–104), which it does do, but only, I would underscore, by positioning itself against Utopia. Although this dialogue was published anonymously, it depicts the plan it unfolds as originating with Thomas Smith, the yeoman’s son who, weathering a series of preferments and setbacks, had managed to rise from “beggarly scholar” to Secretary of State in 1572 (ODNB). Smith had been granted land in Ireland by Elizabeth in 1571, so had a personal stake in its colonization. By the 1570s, he also had a lot of practical political experience and was well known as a political theorist, having first written Discourse of the Commonweal in the 1540s and De Republica Anglorum in the 1560s, both of which explicitly reject Utopia as a prominent example of “feigned commonwealths such as never was nor never shall be, vain imaginations, phantasies of Philosophers to occupy the time” (118). The Letter is canny about entering a rhetorical milieu in which such views are the norm. Smith is confident that his project is no “vain imagining,” not only because it is overtly speculative but also because he takes it to be based on human nature: “man is more moved by particular gain than of respect they have to common profit,” he avers, an understanding of human motivation pointedly contrary to that embraced by More’s Utopians (Reference SmithSmith D1r). Like a later (Adam) Smith, Thomas insists that the economy should direct the (putatively) inherent selfishness of individuals to serve its ends, a view that would become a conservative commonplace. He advocates rewarding soldiers sent to Ireland with private property in land, which will give them an enduring material incentive to suppress rebellions by dispossessed Irish peoples. Having laid out this plan, the narrator gleefully declares: “have I not set forth to you another Eutopia?” (Reference SmithSmith E1r, emphasis mine). The meaning of “eutopia” here, it should be emphasized, is purposefully distant from that of More’s Utopians, whose views had already been rejected by Smith. “Another” and the shift in spelling signal as much. The latter implies – as Smith had already observed in his dismissal of it – Utopia is merely nowhere (ou-topos), a “vain imagining,” while Smith’s own proposal is “good” (eu-topos), not only as theory but because it is practical and amendable to empire, while Utopia was not.⁷

Why, then, do so many critics since the 1970s declare Utopia to be “colonialist”? The claim seems to have originated with D. B. Reference QuinnQuinn, who observed that Utopia puts an “emphasis on the legitimacy of colonization” and “hint[s] … [that] to colonize can … even [be] good” (75). This now widespread view – often inflating “hint” to full-blown advocacy – took hold at a time when Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians, as I noted earlier, were tendentiously touting American exceptionalism by way of “City on a Hill,” which they erroneously took to be a “utopian” assessment, rather than the warning that it was. Rightly rejecting such rhetoric, decolonizers conflate Utopia (and utopia) with a specifically conservative use of it. Still, given the weight and implications of the charge, it is important to look closely at the passage from Utopia that is inevitably cited as proof of the book’s colonialist inclinations.

When the population of Utopian towns exceed the “due number,” they “build up a town [coloniam] under their own laws in the next land where the inhabitants have much waste and unoccupied ground, receiving also of the same country people to them, if they will join and dwell with them.” Hythloday adds:

Indicting this passage, decolonizing critics typically note that “excess” population is a frequent preoccupation of early European colonial propaganda, as is the deployment of “improvement” and just war ideologies they see in it. Slavery and Utopus’s “conquest” also have an odor of imperialism about them, and More’s Latin text even uses “coloniam,” they underscore.⁸ One might counter, as David Armitage does, that modern colonialism is not implied by “coloniam,” and, in any case, Ralph Robinson’s sixteenth-century translation, cited earlier, does not use the word at all (Reference Armitage and CannyArmitage 109). Furthermore, Utopia describes migration as motivated by balancing humans and habitat – a not incidental consideration in our times of impending eco-disaster – rather than manifest destiny, a civilizing mission, or profit. But even assuming the worst, the more important issue is: What is lost when we focus on these “colonial” parts of the text in isolation, if we agree that Utopia demands to be read dialectically, as Louis Maran and Fredric Jameson insist?

To assess Utopia’s relation to empire properly, then, I think we need to add at least two things to the discussion: Utopia’s form and Stephen Reference GreenblattGreenblatt’s still salient observation that More addressed questions that many others ignore, not just in utopias but in politics more generally: “who slaughters the meat? Who disposes of the filth?” (39). Greenblatt’s immediate point is that (entirely justified) consternation with Utopian slavery cannot stop at denunciation, but also must address the problems it raises: How should societies deal with behavior they deem unacceptable? How are undesirable jobs to be filled? We do not have to advocate either slavery or the prison industrial complex to recognize that some mechanism for allocating unattractive tasks would need to be devised in any social order and that individuals might engage in infelicitous behavior, even during the struggle for a good society, especially in the period before it is fully realized when it is surrounded by enemies keen to see it fail.

In short: The pressures imposed by a “wrong” totality cannot be ignored without feeding into well-established conservative anti-utopian tropes. Elsewhere I have discussed the dilemma of “communism in one country,”⁹ and pointed out that failure of revolutions to achieve full liberation is very poorly understood when attributed – as conservatives would have it – solely to internal corruption and the impossibility (indeed catastrophic danger) of attempting to enact utopian aspirations at all. The daunting difficulty of enacting liberatory hopes in what Adorno called a “wrong” world demands attention to constraints at every scale. Such a view by no means excuses the problems and excesses of actually existing communisms and other liberatory projects, but it does cast them in a rather different light than the manifestly ideological localizing determinism of Karl Popper and colleagues, who insist that even attempting to create an equal and just world is inherently bound to end in disaster, a view that Raymond Reference WilliamsWilliams took to task long ago, for its role in justifying the sufferings imposed by capitalism, which are at least as “tragic” as any imposed by the usual conservative targets (66). How might actually existing communism have fared without Cold War pressures? Or, for that matter, what might Haiti have become if crippling reparations had not been imposed on it after the revolution? We can’t know. But such questions should give us pause when considering both past and current world historical dynamics and make it possible to distinguish at least some current land seizures by peasants, or border breaches by migrants, in order to live, from corporate and state annexations to enhance the profit and power of elites.

Minimally, critics who argue that Utopia is “colonialist” need to indicate appreciation of the pressures of “wrong” totality and propose a better approach to human ecological pressure on localities, the book’s rationale for human migration. In any case, Utopia should be judged by the questions it raises rather than its “solutions,” since the latter are undermined at every turn. As Marin shows, More encodes the text with contradiction – not only via the “More” character’s direct refutation of some of Hythloday’s views (including of private property), but also in its formal ambiguity and tension: place and character names that undermine themselves, litotes, irony, and humor. According to Marin and Jameson, this self-questioning form indicates that utopia is a provocation not a blueprint. It is worth underscoring, then, that virtually none of the other early English texts identified as “utopias” today resemble it in this respect: They are emphatically anti-Utopian in form as they aspire to recode what “utopia” will be and mean in a direction more favorable to primitive accumulation and empire, domestic and foreign.¹⁰

Marin emphatically draws attention to the peculiarities of Utopia’s form. Not only does it bear the traces of contradictions inherent to the society in which it emerged (all texts do), but it refuses to “resolve” them, presenting detailed plans for cities that, as described, are unmappable (and therefore unbuildable), social orders that couldn’t function, systems of exchange that don’t add up. Unlike critics of utopianism (whether conservative, liberal, or “radical”) that leap on such anomalies as evidence that utopian texts give readers dangerously false hope in unrealizable dreams – an argument that relies on treating utopian content as “positive” – Marin argues that such assertions misread Utopia’s “negative” form. The dissonance of More’s text renders it a “utopic practice” or “ideological critique of the dominant ideology” – a negative gesture in relation to history (Reference MarinMarin xiv). That is, because of the way its content undermines itself, Utopia bears a critical relation to the historical situation from which it emerges, along the lines of its oxymoronic titular pun (u/topia: ou = no; eu = good), or, Anyder, its river “without water.” For Reference MarinMarin, utopia (as a form) provokes: It is a dynamic opening to “limitless contradiction” rather than being prescriptive (7). As Reference JamesonJameson elaborates, utopias figure social contradictions as troubling antinomies rather than attempting to settle them in the reassuring imaginary resolution of myth (5). Myth (and ideology) attempt to close down and contain questioning of the status quo, and are thus formally anti-utopian. Against myth, including its own (irreducible) ideological aspects, Utopia’s form negates itself as a blueprint to redirect pursuit of the “common … to all” in questioning, flexible, collective praxis.

This need not have been fully intentional. More himself – along with other elites at the time – seems to have been horrified by the power of utopian form, especially after Utopian communism became linked to Anabaptist sedition. He claims he would rather see his own books burned than for them to be so used and tries to deflect the association with sedition from Utopia to Protestantism.¹¹ This effort did not succeed. When Joseph Hall parodies Utopia, his land of “Moronia” – a jab at More less playful than Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium – is populated with Anabaptists among other sectaries and trouble-makers. Widespread association of Utopia with domestic sedition as well as distant “savagery” demonstrates how thoroughly it was viewed as infelicitous to the emergence of capitalism, including colonial projects. Thus, other early English “utopias” are typically earnest un-writings of More (such as Lupton’s Siuqila), or pointed mockery, as Hall’s Alter Mundus: anti-Utopias that reject Utopia’s content and form. “Another utopia,” as I. B. put it, that attempts to divert utopia onto paths favorable to private property and empire.

Examples of this struggle at work in early English colonial propaganda abound. True Declaration (1610) explicitly distinguishes itself from “utopian and legendary fables” (Anon. 33) with one hand, while cherry-picking tropes from Utopia with the other, thereby transforming them. It claims, for example, that Virginian colonists work only six hours a day – like Reference MoreMore’s Utopians, though the tract doesn’t admit this – a preposterous assertion, inserted to allay fears of potential colonists that “the sap of their bodies should be spent for other men’s profit” (Anon. 49). Another colonial pamphlet from that year makes the even more Utopian suggestion that colonists in times of crisis should practice “natural and primary community” (Anon. (2) 11). That is, they should embrace common (“community”) property instead of seeking individual private gain under catastrophic conditions.

And yet an actual practice of common property by shipwrecked Virginia-bound English colonists in Bermuda is pointedly omitted from much early English colonial propaganda. William Strachey’s “True Reportory” didn’t appear in print until 1625 in Samuel Purchas Pilgrims, but circulated in manuscript from 1610. It details “diverse mutinies” that ensued among the shipwrecked in Bermuda when, in the absence of private property and repressive apparatuses, dissidents claim that “all … were freed from the government of any man” and resist going on to Virginia, where they anticipated not only privation but servitude, “their whole life to serve the turns of the adventurers with their travails and labors” – an accusation that the True Declaration, as we have seen, takes care to address (1744). Though it, too, describes the shipwreck in Bermuda, it omits mentioning dissent there because one of its main arguments about the failure of early plantations in Virginia is lack of proper leadership, given that the bulk of the spiritual and secular authorities ended up in Bermuda, with the upshot that in Virginia “every man overvaluing his own worth would be a commander. Every man underprizing others value denied to be commanded,” a state of affairs that led to a “tempest of dissension” (Anon. 34). A “tempest,” however, also arose on Bermuda, despite the presence of numerous traditional authority figures, who, in the absence of repressive apparatuses and unequal property, had no local means of enforcing hierarchy, except by rhetoric and threats of company and state retaliation down the line. These threats ultimately prevailed, given global conditions in which the imperialist state and corporation could send reinforcements at any moment, but not without a struggle. Shakespeare’s Tempest and other early modern texts identified as “utopian” are inflected by – and participate in – this struggle.

What Are the Stakes?

When capitalism was emergent in England, property relations necessary to it were produced through dispossession (foreign and domestic), in the first instance of land, the fundamental means of production, a process that becomes bound up with an ideological imperative for humans to “master” nonhuman “nature,” encouraged by the success of Baconian “new knowledge” and the rationalizations to which it gave rise in “improvement” campaigns. Thus, when Bermuda was officially colonized by England, it was immediately surveyed – and garrisoned – to avoid a repeat of the earlier “tempest.” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that Enlightenment develops such practices of “mastery” over most humans as well as “Nature” because it unfolds in a “bourgeois” form in which unequal control over private property enabled elite interests to prevail – a view that is hard to see as celebrating “Eurocentric” norms.¹² The “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Enlightenment’s promise of freedom, while – in its capitalist form – delivering the opposite for most people and the nonhuman world, was an effect of particular material struggles in which private property and colonialism triumph.

Failing to link Baconian “mastery” to these struggles has made it possible for some critics to read New Atlantis as anticolonial despite its explicit advocacy of “enlarging the bounds of human Empire” – an “empire” in which all peoples are by no means considered equal participants or beneficiaries (see Reference WelburnWelburn for an overview). Not only does Bensalem have private property and commerce, but Bacon envisions a society in which knowledge is controlled by “Fellows” who take an “oath of secrecy” that instantiates inequality both domestically and in relation to other nations, from whom Fellows collect knowledge while hiding their own, thereby defining the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants (human and nonhuman) as objects of knowledge rather than direct participants in its “empire” (Reference BruceBruce 184). Horkheimer and Adorno underscore that this hierarchy and objectification would be impossible to maintain without disproportionate control over planetary “resources” by elites. That Utopia was widely viewed as antagonistic to such mastery in early modern England is precisely what gave rise to a (negative) “rhetoric of reaction” in relation to it and a positive (anti-Utopian) utopianism (including Bacon’s) – “another” utopia, more readily reconciled to elite interests. To fail to take this struggle over utopia into account not only gives a false picture of how primitive accumulation, ideology, and utopia work (and therefore how to undo them) but also of how best to approach cultural forms, resulting in readings that can all too readily dovetail with right-wing anti-Marxist anti-utopianism, even when they come from the left (see Reference JacobyJacoby).

Thus, while James Holstun’s linking of Utopia to the “mastery” side of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was a provocative intervention in the context of “utopian” American exceptionalism promulgated by Reagan and other elites, reading Reference Horkheimer and AdornoHorkheimer and Adorno via Foucault has the unfortunate consequence of limiting his view of utopian form problematically. Defining early modern utopia as a disciplinary apparatus – “a literary form, political rhetoric, and social practice that envisions the displaced populations of early modern Europe and North America as the raw materials for an act of millennial poieis” comes at the cost of obviating the struggle over utopia I am foregrounding (Reference HolstunHolstun 3). Not only Utopia, but the communist Diggers, the (proto-liberal) New Model Army, and Harrington, as well as John Eliot’s colonial “praying towns,” are flattened in their repressive “utopianism” for him. In his later work, Holstun corrects his view of the Diggers, who he sees – rightly – as offering an alternative to capitalist “improvement” rather than an instantiation of it, given that their communes are both egalitarian and revolutionary in their refusal of private property. He never, however, revises his view of Utopia; thus, the significance of its “colonialism” without private property never appears to him as a contradiction, like its river without water, and therefore as potentially revolutionary.

This contradiction should give us pause, however, because “bourgeois” colonial practices – whether domestic or foreign – all share a predication on mastery and dispossession to install private property regimes. Indigenous ways of life – as Malynes and many others recognized early on – resisted this. Aileen Reference Moreton-RobinsonMoreton-Robinson argues that “indigenous ontological relations to land are incommensurate with those developed through capitalism, and they continue to unsettle … white possession and power configured through the logic of capitalism and profound individual attachment” (xxi). One does not have to assume that all native peoples are alike, or that native peoples were a model for Utopia (à la Morgan) to see that the Utopian way of life shares more in common with many native practices than emergent English propertarian ones. All Utopians consider their relation to the land to be – as Robinson’s English translation puts it – “good husbands rather than owners,” which, Hythloday comments, is what keeps them from “enlarging the bounds” of their settlements, and propels them to establish “colonies” on “unused” land beyond Utopia if its human population disrupts local ecological balance – not elite property hierarchies. Denouncers of Utopian “colonialism” must, then, confront the questions that Utopia is asking by raising migration concerns: What are the right relations of humans to the nonhuman world and to each other as part of that world, not its masters? Leanne Reference SimpsonSimpson has underscored Indigenous rejection of ownership in pursuit of right relations: “The opposite of dispossession,” she explains “is not possession, it is deep, reciprocal, consensual attachment. Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to the land through connection – generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping and nonlinear relationship” (43). Malynes was perhaps right to compare Utopians with Indigenous peoples, then, despite his repellently racist agenda.

Holstun’s insightful but underdeveloped observation in the conclusion of Ehud’s Dagger of a family resemblance between Digger struggle and Indigenous resistance to capitalism thus demands elaboration. From the point of view of either “traditional” community or emergent absolute property, the Diggers were suspect “strangers” making claims on already settled localities. “As a society gathered together from all parts of the nation,” the agrarian handbook writer Walter Blith observed in 1653, the Diggers could not “claim a right to any particular common,” since common “rights” were determined by local tenancy and custom (Reference BlithC3r). In this way, Blith was hoping to divert local prejudices against outsiders among commoners into support for his capitalist improvement agenda, just as landowners did in their campaigns of terror against the Digger communes, and as elites still do today in anti-migrant campaigns and in promoting private property and state sovereignty as absolute.

Alternatively, Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger leader and pamphleteer, not only emphatically rejected primogeniture, which made an accident of birth into a rationale for rendering the rest of the “sons” dependent on a landowning firstborn, but also rejected land ownership and, effectively, state borders, period, declaring the Earth to be a site of collective responsibility and cohabitation. Neither natality nor conquest nor purchase can confer any absolute privilege of possession; right relations have to continuously be worked out for the good of all inhabitants, human and nonhuman, and not only locally. Indeed, it is crucial to recognize that, although the Diggers have been appropriated in some representations solely to the causes of narrowly English and male liberalism, both their pamphlets and program explicitly promote human – and even creaturely – mutuality far beyond England, addressed as they are not only to the “Powers of England,” but to “all the Powers of the World” (Complete Works II: 1) and directed as they are to “restoring the whole Creation” (Complete Works I: 472). The Diggers might have been starting from a tiny network of communes in one nation, but they appeared to understand that communism in one locale – whatever the scale – was doomed from the get-go if hostile, propertarian forces surround them – something that I argued earlier that Utopia recognizes also. Only right relations – relations that nurture and protect the Earth rather than attempt to “master” it and fellow humans – can lead to thriving for all: another overlap of Diggers with Indigenous anti-propertarian perspectives.

But how can “right relations” be enacted in a world of inequalities, oppressions, and depredations established and maintained through a global capitalism that gathers all localities – unevenly – into an insidious totality? Jodi Byrd notes that, in such a world, a “cacophony” of conflicting claims necessarily emerge. In North America these include Indigenous demands for “sovereignty” and the struggles of the formerly enslaved (unwilling “settlers”); we might add migrants from the Global South, fleeing localities undermined by globalization and disproportionate effects of ecological crises, which they have not caused, as well as the claims of nonhumans to habitat. None of these claims (nor that of queers, crips, or other groups seeking redress) can be peremptorily dismissed in the struggle for right relations to land today. It is worth underscoring, then, that although “cacophonous” claims are not fully reconcilable with each other, they do meet in one respect: Transformation of land into capitalist property underwrites all oppression in the final instance; as Reference ByrdByrd laments, expropriation of “our lands became the grounds for others’ oppressions” (“Weather” 213). For this very reason, we might also note that “our land” – though one understands the strategic importance of such claims in a world dominated by private property and ongoing suppression of native sovereignty – seems to contradict Simpson’s insistence on native rejection of “ownership or possession,” a predicament that Robert Nichols has thoughtfully engaged, pointing out that Indigenous originary owner arguments rely on the very property claims that they also deny. This dilemma is not the fault of native peoples, he underscores, but, to the contrary, of the systemic triumph of capitalist colonial relations, which is what must be undone.

This point enjoins us to grapple with the very real problems of all “occupation” in settler colonies that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have influentially brought to the fore. Even struggles for social justice, like the “Occupy” movement, take place on already “stolen” land, such that “occupation” can repeat, rather than undo, oppression. While attending to their devastating critique of the numerous techniques that settlers deploy to render themselves innocent, however, it is also crucial not to homogenize native peoples in a universally virtuous abstraction, which, like the abstraction of “decolonization” itself, can obviate the hard work of forging solidarities. As Reference Tuck and YangTuck and Yang point out, unequivocally insisting on the “incommensurability” of “native sovereignty” with other struggles for social justice “won’t get anyone off the hook of the hard, unsettling work of decolonization” (4). Given that, as Nick Estes observes, “many Indigenous nations actively participate in resource extraction and capitalist economies,” the “repatriation” that Reference Tuck and YangTuck and Wang call for cannot succeed in a decolonization that would undermine property and capitalism unless all native peoples, too, were decapitalized – that is, if the world is no longer organized in a capitalist way (Reference EstesEstes 22). De-propertization is not an automatic effect of repatriation of “native” land, which also, as Robin Reference KelleyKelley has argued in response to Patrick Wolfe, can participate in a fantasy of “life before and beyond invasion,” a process so complicated by intersectional differences – especially, but not only, race – that it cannot be sustained without creating political problems of its own (274). The complexities of how to describe the relation of revolutionary slaves in Haiti, for example, to land that had been inhabited by the Taino – themselves migrants – for centuries, simply does not accede to any easy answers.

Sensitive to this dilemma, Kim Reference TallbearTallBear has taken a different approach to exclusive sovereignty arguments, provocatively wondering recently “how things might have been different had more newcomers respected long-established ways of relating [to land] already in place” (38) in the encounter of Europeans and native peoples – ways of relating that eschewed private property and emphasized reciprocity and mutual care for the Earth. Perhaps “the two parties [might have] gradually and easily merge[d] together and absorb[ed] the same way of life and the same customs, much to the great advantage of both peoples” (Reference MoreMore 137); this quotation is not from TallBear – though it is, arguably, her sentiment. It’s drawn from the ostensibly “colonialist” paragraph of Utopia. With her counterfactual experiment, TallBear recognizes, as many theorists do today, that “migration” and “sovereignty” demand reassessment in ever-changing conditions that global capital has deformed, not least ecologically, and that the totality of existing relations must be taken into account (see Reference SharmaSharma).

How can those of us committed to global social justice at every scale support peoples disproportionately deprivileged by “dispossession,” as well as the always fragile communities established by attempting to live alternatively to oppressive norms and borders (whether Diggers, or Black Panther Oakland, or insurgencies by Indigenous and other dispossessed peoples and migrants today), while also refusing propertarian and exclusionary logics wherever they manifest? If Palestinians got back “their” land and proceeded to simply turn the tables on all non-Palestinians, or tribal nations use their “sovereignty” to allocate mining concessions to global conglomerates, has planetary justice been served? And who decides? One essay – one person – cannot solve this dilemma. I am simply suggesting that given the complex politics of human (and nonhuman) settlement and migration, and its deformation by the propertization of land, Utopia’s questions deserve more nuanced consideration than they have been getting from critics who would “decolonize” it. I’m not calling, then, for a “positive” (in any sense) reading of Utopian “colonization,” but rather insisting that answers to its questions have to be worked out, as Marin and Jameson suggest, in collective praxis, while recognizing, relentlessly, what Byrd calls “cacophony.” Via Campesina’s solidarities of peasants and Indigenous peoples against agribusiness offer an example of the hard and fraught work of forging such solidarities in struggles for land (see Reference WiebeWiebe). This is what utopia as a site of struggle means, I would suggest. Rather than rejecting Utopia as “colonialist” then, a more productive response would be what Reference JamesonJameson calls anti-anti-utopianism (Archaeologies, 14). The latter requires us not only to read utopia dialectically and negatively, but also to struggle collectively for liberatory alternatives to the empire of private property, a struggle that utopia and Marxism both provoke, but whose ends toward a thriving planet for all neither can fully prescribe.