Horticultural titles. Seeds, gardens, and English law in seventeenth-century Virginia plantations

The article examines the production of English colonial legal spaces in seventeenth-century North America. Particularly in Virginia, their production revolved around the concept of ‘plantation’, which points to several legal- horticultural acts, such as planting seeds, improving the land, and civilizing non-Western environments. Made up of gardening, agriculture, and fences, the legal geography of these settlements was built at the expense of the landscape previously created (and inhabited) by Indians. Colonizers transplanted new plants, seeds, and new legal regimes into American soil, which meant dispossessing the Natives, outlawing their titles to the land, completely reshuffling the landscape. The article focuses on how the colonizers introduced such changes so as to make the landscape reflect their own cultural and legal imaginaries. This was achieved through a legal-horticultural title, the creation of which was part of a broader process of politico-legal invention, also based on exotic legal imaginaries and landscapes. The English socio-cultural capital brought to America was reinvented so as to maximize the profits of the colonial enterprise and reinforce colonial legal geographies.