Horticultural Titles. Seeds, Gardens, and English Law in seventeenth-century Virginia Plantations

The essay examines the production of English colonial legal spaces in North America in the seventeenth century. Particularly in Virginia, their production revolved around the concept of ‘plantation’, thus pointing to the acts of planting seeds, improving the land, and civilising non-Western environments. The legal geography of these settlements was made up of gardening, agriculture, and fences. Colonisers transplanted new plants and seeds (and new legal regimes) into American soil, outlawing the previous vegetation, populace, and native legal titles. From the perspective of the colonisers, these changes were functional to maximising the profits of the colonial enterprise and reinforcing colonial legal geographies, based on exotic legal imaginaries and landscapes.