Empire of Property: The U.S. Ordinance Grid and the Expansion of the Settler Colonial State

In 1785, the newly established United States of America undertook one of the most audacious spatial projects in human history: the Land Ordinance Act. The Act stipulated that every county in newly acquired territories would be divided into a grid of townships, with each township measuring 36 square miles. Each of these 36 squares could then be subdivided into sections, half-sections, quarter-sections, and so on. This would eventually compass some three quarters of the continental United States within a national regime of property delineation.

Advocates of this new property regime believed that it would bring order, rationality, and coherence to the terra incognita of the transcontinental west. The price of this new order, of course, was unfathomable violence, the forced displacement of millions of people, and the thoroughgoing destruction of entire lifeworlds. In a word: epistemicide. Native peoples had spent millennia shaping the landscapes in which they foraged, hunted, and dwelt. They carried with them varied ways of conceiving territory, forging confederations, sharing and protecting resources, dwelling on the land, loving and hating each other, and relating to the natural world.

This paper examines the development, extension, and legacies of the Ordinance Grid. It places the Grid within a long durée, where it reflects European conceptions of land forged over centuries, and at the same time a radically new hallucinatory projection of Enlightenment ideals onto transcontinental space. On the one hand, the Ordinance Grid is an extension of European enclosure, where “unproductive” lands were confiscated and redistributed in the form of titled property, displacing long-term tenancies. On the other hand, it served to partially democratize the process of land distribution, acquisition, and ownership for white settler colonialists who could participate in market transactions or homesteading, thoroughly embedding property in a racial regime of ownership.