Running with the land: legal-historical imagination and the spaces of modernity

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, rural upstate New York was the site of a series of sometimes violent tenant uprisings known as the «Anti-rent Wars». The objective of tenants was to dismantle massive landholdings, some of which, such as the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, dated from the 1620s. Though tenant opposition took many forms, one crucial component was litigation and the practice of legal argument. This paper uses ideas of the production of space associated with Henri Lefebvre in presenting a reinterpretation of these events. After giving a brief account of the genealogy of Rensselaerwyck as a legal space, the historical arguments expressed in and made possible by legal discourse in a series of legal cases are analysed. One of the central issues in these cases was whether Rensselaerwyck represented an illegitimate survival of feudal spatiality in New York or whether the legal foundation of social space here could be assimilated to more modern legal forms. Legal argument in these cases is a social practice by which partisans attempt to produce (or reproduce) social space through the strategic interpretation of lines of continuity (or discontinuity) of the legal meaning of space encoded in rival conceptions of property.