Utopian colonization and land-use policy

Utopian colonization and land-use policy treats population, cultivation, and territorial control as parts of one system. When the island’s population grows beyond its capacity, inhabitants establish colonies on neighboring land judged insufficiently cultivated; local people may join the newcomers’ society, but refusal can bring expulsion and armed force. The policy presents productive use and subsistence as grounds for settlement, while the history of Utopia’s own conquest shows how readily that rationale can accompany coercion.

Origins in conquest and separation

The policy’s territorial logic has a founding precedent in Utopus’s conquest of the land first called Abraxa. After subduing its inhabitants, he ordered a channel fifteen miles long to be dug, turning the former part of a continent into an island. The work was imposed not only on the local people but also on Utopus’s soldiers; the account emphasizes that the ruler completed it quickly despite neighboring observers’ initial disbelief. Utopus is credited with bringing the conquered population under a better government, and the island retains his name.

This origin makes the separation of land both a practical feat and an act of political power. The surrounding sea and dangerous, locally known approach help protect the island, while Utopus’s conquest and the forced labor used to reshape its geography establish that its political order began through subjection as well as reform. Later colonization extends this founding pattern outward: the community’s ability to organize land and people is presented as a public good, but it also depends on a claim to determine who may occupy territory and under what rules.

Population and settlement rules

The island’s population is regulated before colonization becomes necessary. Families are kept within a prescribed range of ten to sixteen people, with children moved between households when one family has more than another. Cities are likewise limited to six thousand families, and population is redistributed among them when their rates of growth differ. These rules make settlement policy part of a larger system for preventing both overcrowding and the decline of particular communities.

When the population of the whole island increases beyond its capacity, citizens are sent to the neighboring continent to establish a colony. Their settlement is conditional on finding more land than its inhabitants can cultivate adequately. If the local people are willing to live alongside the newcomers, they are admitted into their society; the account says that they soon adopt its way of life and rules. The colony is then represented as benefiting both populations, since the land is said to yield enough under this system to support both, even where it had seemed too narrow and barren to sustain either people alone.

The movement of people can also be reversed. If plague reduces a city’s population so severely that other cities cannot replenish it without being weakened themselves, settlers are recalled from the colonies to restore the island community. The account says this had happened only twice since the people first formed a society, on both occasions after plague carried off large numbers. Colonies are therefore treated as extensions of the island’s population system, but not as more important than the security of its towns at home.

Consent, force, and the claim to unused land

Settlement is not always consensual. If local inhabitants refuse to conform to the colonists’ laws, they are driven out of the territory marked for settlement; if they resist, force is used. The account calls it a just cause of war when one nation prevents another from occupying land that the first leaves idle and uncultivated. It grounds this claim in a natural right to the waste portion of the earth necessary for subsistence.

That justification sets a clear limit on local sovereignty: the inhabitants’ refusal does not defeat the colonists’ claim if their land is judged underused. The policy thus joins an offer of incorporation to the threat of removal, with the settlers deciding both what counts as adequate cultivation and which laws must govern the territory. Its language of shared prosperity and subsistence coexists with a coercive power to displace those who reject the proposed order.

Land use and the contrast with England

The account’s defense of cultivated settlement gains force against its description of land enclosure in England. There, the expansion of pasture for valuable wool is blamed for the destruction of houses and towns and the eviction of rural families. Dispossessed people sell their belongings for little, lose access to the agricultural work for which they were trained, and may be driven to begging or theft; meanwhile, one shepherd can tend land that would have employed many people in ploughing and harvest. The comparison makes land use a question not only of output but also of who can live and work on the land.

The contrast is pointed but not complete. The English enclosure critique condemns landlords for converting inhabited and cultivated places into pasture while creating poverty and idleness. Colonization is instead presented as a response to population pressure and supposedly unused land, with incorporation offered where local people accept the newcomers’ rules. Yet the power to define land as idle, to mark out a settlement, and to expel resisting inhabitants belongs to the colonists. The policy therefore couples an ideal of ordered provision with a consequential tension: a community that organizes land for the common good also authorizes itself to impose its judgment on other people’s land and political choices.