Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840
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Authors
Borsk, Michael
Date
2024-11-20
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Property , State Formation , Legal history , Canada , United States , Indigenous history , Science and Technology Studies , Land Surveying
Alternative Title
Abstract
Between the end of the America Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century, surveyors materialized landed property and settler states in the Great Lakes region. At the end of the eighteenth century, British and American officials faced a similar dilemma: both aimed to transform Indigenous homelands across the region into property for settlers. Yet neither initially possessed either the capacity or legitimacy to achieve this end. This dissertation is the first in-depth study of the two offices that eventually fulfilled this objective: the Surveyor General’s Office for the colony of Upper Canada and the Surveyor General’s Office responsible for the American Territory of Michigan.
Contests over boundaries materialized by surveyors’ fieldwork and paperwork not only stressed the material foundations of state and property formation but complicate understandings of property as an abstract bundle of rights. Crown officials for Upper Canada and their federal counterparts for the Territory of Michigan recognized that the security of property and the authority of the state hinged on the certainty of survey boundaries. It required a standard that mathematics could not supply. Efforts to provide that certainty thus required each state to pass regulations that determined how surveyors measured land and how each office organized its documentary archive. It also required surveyors to solicit support from local elites, ordinary settlers, and even Indigenous nations, a dynamic most visible when surveyors adjusted disputed boundaries through collective agreement.
This dissertation argues that the shape of the state and the nature of property turned on the spatial order generated surveyors’ during this period. It finds striking parallels between the federal and Upper Canadian states’ reliance on surveys to territorialize jurisdiction, administer land markets, and ensure public order, especially amidst major demographic shifts after the War of 1812. By the late 1830s, after Michigan had become a state and rebellion rocked Upper Canada, the authority of Crown and federal surveyors in this process began to diminish. Courts increasingly came to settle boundary disputes, a shift that made it possible to see property as increasingly untethered from surveyors’ infrastructure of maps and markers. Surveyors changed the Great Lakes region, only to change in turn.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
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Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.