"Locke could hardly have been unaware that his theory provided a justification for an ongoing process disappropriating European commoners and indigenous peoples alike or that that process amounted to redistribution without compensation from poor to rich. This observation raises serious doubts that the principles contemporary propertarians have inherited from him reflect some deeper commitment to nonaggression or noninterference.
Lockeanism eventually revolutionized the world's conception of what property was by portraying full liberal ownership as if it were something natural that had always existed, even though it was only then being established by enclosure and colonialization. Lockean and propertarian *stories* might have been more important than their *theories* in that effort. The "original appropriator" in Locke's story resembles European colonialists rather than prehistoric indigenous North Americans who first farmed the continent. Locke's appropriator establishes the fee-simple rights that colonial governments (building a global cash economy) tend to establish rather than the complex, overlapping rights indigenous farmers in stateless societies tend to establish."
"The intent of Blackstone, Locke, Grotius, and other early modern property theorists was not to describe what property actually was or even what kind of institutions most people wanted at the time. Instead, it was "a common strategy of claiming the ground of property so as to preempt serious consideration of alternatives like common property" [Olsen,E. J. 2019, "The Early Modern 'Creation' of Property and its Enduring influence," European Journal of Political Theory, Online Early, 1 23]. In that way, private property theory furnished propaganda for the enclosure and colonial movements that forcibly established that institution around the world."
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