Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, and Belonging in Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia

Draining the Fens and colonizing the Chesapeake were not separate endeavors.

We usually treat the seventeenth-century enclosure of the English Fens and the colonial invasion of Indigenous homelands in the Chesapeake as two distinct histories. Draining English wetlands is typically told as a domestic story of agricultural modernization and capital investment, while the English settlement of Virginia is framed as an Atlantic story of corporate expansion and plantation growth. In reality, they were deeply entangled applications of the exact same governing project.

In 1606 and 1609, King James I issued royal charters granting the Virginia Company vast territories in North America. The legal premise of these grants was deceptively simple: English lawyers defined Virginia as land “not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or People.” By erasing the sovereignty and complex environmental stewardship of the Powhatan, Monacan, and neighboring nations, the Crown treated an inhabited world as an unowned slate. To convert that claim into private wealth, the Virginia Company deployed legal mechanisms like the headright system, granting fifty acres of land per transported person, which tied territorial expansion directly to capital, property lines, and the forced labor of indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

Simultaneously, across the Atlantic, the exact same ruling class was executing a parallel campaign in eastern England. In the low-lying Fenlands of Lincolnshire, aristocratic investors known as "projectors" sought to drain tens of thousands of acres of wetland commons. For centuries, fenland commoners had lived in rhythm with seasonal floods, exercising ancient, customary rights to graze cattle, cut reed, dig peat, and fish riverways. To override these customary rights, which were recognized under English common law as held “time out of mind,” projectors used royal patents and packed local commissions to declare the wetlands “drowned, wasted, and in need of improvement.”

The same aristocratic families, legal techniques, and financial cartels moved between both frontiers. Individuals sat on the Council of the Virginia Company while simultaneously serving on fenland drainage commissions, secured royal patents, and sat as judges over their own speculative ventures. Whether in the muddy ditches of Lincolnshire or along the tidal stretches of the James and Rappahannock Rivers, their tactics shared a similar logic: rebrand working, lived ecosystems as unproductive “waste” in order to dismantle customary access, enclose common ground, and reassign it as private property.

Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds places these two landscapes side by side to show that our modern legal concept of property did not emerge through neutral economic progress, but was constructed through a transatlantic technology of dispossession. Crucially, recognizing this shared legal logic does not mean equating these two histories. While English fenland commoners faced economic disenfranchisement and the erosion of customary rights within their own legal system, Indigenous nations in the Chesapeake faced an existential, racialized campaign of territorial invasion, warfare, and forced displacement aimed at erasing their sovereign worlds. Understanding how legal property was built upon these twin fronts allows us to trace how seventeenth-century choices established enduring patterns of ecological vulnerability and land loss that continue to reverberate today.

Ongoing thread. More from Stacey C. LeClair to follow.