John Locke

What Locke Actually Wrote

In the Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke set out an argument for how private property arises from a state of nature in which land and resources were originally held in common. A person acquires a rightful property in a thing, he argued, by “mixing” their labor with it — clearing, cultivating, or otherwise improving what nature provided. Locke coupled this labor theory of property with an argument about the productivity of enclosed, cultivated land: land left “waste” or uncultivated, in his account, contributed little to human subsistence and stood outside the strongest property claims that labor could generate. Locke illustrated the point with a comparison to the Americas, writing that “in the beginning all the world was America” — land held in common, without the enclosed, improved agriculture that in his framework grounded exclusive ownership.

Locke had direct personal ties to English colonial ventures: he served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and held investments connected to colonial trade. His property theory was developed in this milieu, though the Second Treatise itself is a general work of political philosophy and does not present itself as a colonial policy document.

Later Interpretation and Use

Locke’s “waste land” and labor-mixing arguments were taken up, over the following two centuries, by colonial administrators, settlers, and courts seeking to justify the appropriation of Indigenous land in North America and elsewhere. Reasoning that Indigenous peoples had not “improved” land through settled agriculture in the manner Locke described was used to characterize their land use as insufficient to ground property rights, clearing the way for European claims. This reasoning ran alongside — and in American courts eventually merged with — the older Doctrine of Discovery, a framework rooted in fifteenth-century papal bulls that had granted European Christian powers claims over lands newly “discovered.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) drew on both strands, holding that discovery gave European nations, and later the United States, title to Indigenous land subject only to Indigenous rights of occupancy.

Disputed Scholarly Interpretation

Historians and political theorists disagree about how directly Locke’s own text was designed to serve colonial dispossession versus how much it was retroactively conscripted for that purpose. Barbara Arneil has argued, based on Locke’s administrative career and his editorial work on Carolina’s colonial constitution, that his property theory was substantially shaped by, and intended to legitimate, English colonization of America. Other scholars, including James Tully, read the Second Treatise as a more general natural-law argument whose application to colonial land seizure — while real and consequential — was an extension made by later interpreters rather than Locke’s central purpose. There is broader agreement that whatever Locke’s intent, his framework provided vocabulary that colonial actors found usable, and that the Doctrine of Discovery’s legal architecture had independent origins predating Locke by roughly two centuries.

Sources