“The only case in which something even remotely resembling Lockean individual homesteading actually occurred was in settler societies like the United States. Settlers in European colonies were able to act out the ahistorical fantasies of Locke in real life for the first time. But they were able to do so only through the fiction that the lands they homesteaded were empty, or terrae nullius — i.e., through ethnic cleansing and genocide of the existing population. This fiction was aided by Locke’s claim that foraging established no genuine property rights because it failed to improve the land. It was also aided by European dismissals of Native property rights in the land, even in cases where agriculture was practiced (as in the southeastern part of what is now the United States), “because native farmers failed to put up hedgerows or fences to mark their territory.””
— Kevin Carson, Capitalist Nursery Fables: The Tragedy of Private Property, and the Farce of Its Defense
