Mother Earth: Land Grants in Virginia, 1607-1699

This is the definitive account of how Virginia's land grant system shaped the American colonial experience. Walter Stitt Robinson traces the legal and economic instruments developed by the London Company before its dissolution in 1624, including stock-based grants, adventurer dividends, treasury rights, and most importantly, the headright system that would define land ownership in Virginia for a century. The headright, which granted fifty acres to anyone who paid for a colonist's passage, became the principal method of land distribution despite its notorious vulnerability to fraud and abuse. Robinson excavates the moral and legal contradictions at the heart of colonization: the colonists' claimed right to land previously inhabited by Indigenous peoples, the legal fictions that justified dispossession, and the tensions between imperial policy and frontier reality. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins of American property law and the colonial foundations of land ownership.